FUTURE HISTORY

(REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN HISTORY)

A Newly Revised 2190 Version of the

2160 A.D. Edition

Dr. Hugo Gottfried

Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

Copyright 2011 by Hugo Gottfried

Copy-edited by David Dodd

Cover Design by David Dodd

LICENSE NOTES

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And hark what discord follows. Each thing

in mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters

should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

and make a sop of all this solid globe;

strength shall be lord of imbecility,

and the rude son should strike his father dead;

force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,

(between whose endless jar justice resides)

should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything include itself in power,

power into will, will into appetite,

and appetite, a universal wolf

(so doubly seconded with will and power)

must make perforce a universal prey,

And at last eat up himself.

-William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida,

Act 1, scene iii

If all things are Caesar's, what then is God's?

-Tertullian

CONTENTS

Introduction by Jeffrey Sackett

Preface to the 2190 edition, by Bartholomew Wickhampton

I  Interpreting American History: the Problem of Terminology

II  The Collapse of Moral Standards

Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoid 1

III   The Corruption of the American Political System

Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoidia

IV  The End of American Education

Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoidides

V  The Collapse of the American Political System

Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoid 2

VI  The Second Great Depression and the Third World War

Interlude: Presidential Rankings

VII  Leviathan

INTRODUCTION

A common fantasy among historians is the coming into possession of a history book from the future. It is precisely this that you will begin reading in a few moments.

An old friend of mine, Carlos Renzi, contacted me recently from Brazil with a remarkable claim: his great-great-great grandson will be a physicist two hundred years from now, and he will discover a means of transporting materials backwards in time by doing something called inverse resequencing with something called tachyons. I am a scientific illiterate, and thus have no idea what this means; but the book my old friend sent me seems to be exactly what he claimed, a history book from the future.

From the book's internal testimony, it seems that the author, Hugo Gottfried, will write and will privately publish this book in the year 2160 A.D. He will be arrested by the State and almost all copies of his work will be destroyed. Then, soon after Gottfried's death thirty years later, a man named Bartholomew Wickhampton will recover, edit, and republish the book. It is this edition, the 2190 A.D. edition, which you, dear reader, now possess.

The future the author describes is, if we take the American experiment in self-government seriously, one of unthinkable tragedy. I was startled and angered when I first read this work, and for that reason I am making this attempt to present it to the general public. We are still, at this point, able to redirect our political, social, and economic life, and we must, we simply must, take action while we still can. I hope the reader agrees.

Jeffrey Sackett

PREFACE TO THE 2190 EDITION

The recent death of Hugo Gottfried (2085-2185 A.D.)[1] impressed upon his admirers the necessity of publishing a new edition of his privately circulated work, Reflections on American History. Though we mourn his passing, it is at least gratifying that the prohibition against his works was automatically lifted when he died, because the Dissemination of Information Act is notoriously lax regarding posthumous censorship of works written since 2030. We believe that his essays will be instructive, cautionary, and thought-provoking. "The past is immutable," Dr. Gottfried often said, "but the future is malleable stone awaiting the sculptor's hands."

Hugo Melanchthon Gottfried was born in a small pine cabin in the woods of what was once called central New York State on December 16, 2085. He once quipped that sharing a birthday with Beethoven doubtless engendered in him a sense of universal harmony, and sharing a date with the Boston Tea Party predestined him to a contrarian life.[2] His parents were self-described Thoreauniks, which was a term used in the middle of the last century to describe contrarian groups who chose to withdraw from the regimented conformity of what had come to be called Patriotic Democratic Centralism, and to live what were admittedly eccentric lives in acetic circumstances. His parents and their associates adopted an arcane ancient eastern religion called Zen Buddhism, in stark contrast to the atheism and agnosticism common in their generation. Gottfried's later adoption of Christianity cannot thus be attributed to his upbringing. It was a conscious decision derived, he maintained, from an existential intellectual process. (See the two dialogues with Tryphoid below.)

He lost both parents at an early age. His mother Lucretia developed breast cancer when Gottfried was five years old, but was denied medical care because, as a Thoreaunik, she was deemed non-contributory to society and thus ineligible for public medical assistance, which was the only kind of medical assistance in existence. His father Emerson died in a hunting incident the next year. He was hunting in the forest when a member of the Deer Protection Society killed him.

Gottfried was then taken into protective custody by the Federal Child Services Bureau, sent to a re-education center for two years, and then placed in a Young Patriots Labor Camp. He injured his left leg when a mine shaft partially collapsed on him, rendering him unfit for physical labor. He had a quick and supple mind, however, and a sinecure was soon found for him. His parents had taught him how to read (he became a voracious reader), and so he was placed on the team of the ongoing program of organizing (i.e., purging) the archives of the huge research library on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It took but a short time for him to become acquainted with the technology required for cataloging purposes, and he was able to purchase his Ph.D. in 2113, largely on the basis of his work. (It should be noted that the degree of Doctor of Philosophy was not earned, but purchased, after the educational "reforms" of the late 21st century.) But in the process of his labors in the subterranean labyrinthine stacks of books in the nether recesses of the Library, his eyes were opened to something that neither he, nor anyone else at the time, suspected even existed: the truth about the past.

Gottfried explains the causes and the process of the end of effective education in the United States in one of the essays that follow. Suffice it to say for our purposes here that by around 2100 A.D. education (i.e., the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, as well as the mental disciplines and skills needed to comprehend, utilize and expand it) had ceased to exist. All historical study had been so polluted by propaganda, and all expected retention of facts on any level in any field had become so scant, that no real understanding of the past was any longer possible. (In other fields, such as science and technology, advancement had also ceased in the U.S. and Europe. Were it not for India, China, and especially Brazil, it might very well have ended globally.) But Gottfried's work in the Library enabled him to open a window on a heritage long suppressed, lost, and by his day unimaginable.

The original nature of American government, traditional morality, economies based upon the free exchange of goods and services, the concept of the family, the idea of God, the rule of law, Western Civilization itself, all of this knowledge had been either hidden, forgotten,  or so perverted as to be unrecognizable, until Gottfried rediscovered it. Of course, the redefinition of words and the infusion of propaganda into all written sources prevented the "literate public" (and the term is used advisedly) from realizing that the past was not like the present. To provide two simple examples, all of American History was not merely prologue to the triumphalist presidency of the third Roosevelt, nor was all scientific inquiry aimed at proving that nothing exists except matter in motion.

Gottfried was fond of saying that, "I, like Champollion before me, have illumed a lost world." The reference is unclear, but a lost world is certainly what he illumed. In 2160, after a lifetime of obscure and anonymous research, he was able to circulate the original manuscript of this book. Needless to say, he was unable to avail himself of the conventional means of electronic publication. He and a few trusted friends wrote out copies of the book by hand, and then distributed them to other trusted friends and associates. Startled and impressed by what they read, these people in turn wrote and distributed copies, and the results was as the ever-spreading ripple of the stone tossed into the lake. The editor is proud to be able to say that his mother was one of the original copyists.

This undertaking could not long escape the notice of the authorities. The F.B.I. confiscated as many copies of the manuscript as they could find, and arrested Gottfried in 2162. He remained in custody until his death in 2185.  No cause of death was announced, and foul play was suspected by his admirers, but this is doubtful. The authorities regarded him as an annoying eccentric, not a threat, and it is unlikely they would have bothered to kill him. Besides, he lived to be 100! Murdered? Not likely.

Nevertheless, as already noted, his death makes possible this formal electronic publication. We are confident that too few people in positions of power will read it until, we pray, it is too late to prevent the contents from becoming common knowledge.[3] Despite official efforts at eradication, four complete and nine partial manuscripts survive, and the text presented here is reconstructed from them, with variant readings noted in the footnotes. It is impossible at this late date to discern Gottfried's variant readings from glosses by other copyists. Inasmuch as all of the manuscripts were literally "manuscripts," i.e., hand-written, Gottfried apparently revised his text continuously as he copied it. Under such circumstances, the editors can only record the variant readings without commenting on their origins. All footnotes are additions by the editors, who are solely responsible for them.

I wish to thank Jasmine Jones of the cafeteria staff at the Library for her editorial assistance.

Bartholomew Wickhampton, head custodian,

The Library of Congress Museum,

Roosevelt-Kennedy, D.C.

I – INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY:

THE PROBLEM OF TERMINOLOGY

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

- from 1984

Words are like people. They have life spans. They emerge, they flourish, and then either they morph into something else, they live on in a truncated form, or they just fade away and die. On occasion, they are intentionally perverted.

The morph can be one of form or of meaning. Take the morph of form. Most of us eat asparagus (if we have to) without knowing that it was originally called "sparrow grass," until people started mispronouncing it; we know men named Ned without knowing it is short for "mine Edward," women named Nell without knowing it is short for "mine Ellen," and that Ned and Nell may call each other "sweetheart" without knowing that it was originally "sweet tart." (The confectionary, of course, not the lady of easy virtue.)

Take the morph of meaning. Four hundred years ago, "gay" mean colorful. Then it came to mean cheerful, and by the end of the 20th century it meant homosexual. When King James II (whose father, King James I, by the way, was homosexual) first saw architect Christopher Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, he described it as "awful, amusing, and artificial," which today would be absolute insults, but which in the 17th century meant awe-inspiring, a cause of pleasure, and displaying artistic skill.

Take a word's truncated life. Sometimes words survive in exclusively negative forms. We still use the term "disheveled" to describe a person who is somewhat unkempt, but we do not describe a well-groomed person as "sheveled." (Nor, for that matter, do we call him "kempt.") One can be inept, but not ept, nonchalant, but not chalant, ruthless, but not ruthful, indignant, but not dignant, incorrigible, but not corrigible, et cetera. One can be disillusioned; but can one be illusioned? Certainly, as the past two centuries can attest, but such phraseology is never used.

Sometimes, as noted, words just fade away and die. We used to have the word "ugsome," to describe a thoroughly distasteful person. (Can a person be tasteful, by the way?) We also used to have the word "slubberdegullion," to describe a lazy slob. What a fine word. Don't we all know at least one person like this, at least one slubberdegullion? What about the demonstrative pronoun "yon?" If something, a chair, for instance, is close by, we say, "this chair." If it is in the general area but not right at hand, we say, "that chair." But we also used to be able to refer to a distant chair as "yon chair." Useful word. Dead as a doornail, though it survives somewhat in the infrequently used word "yonder."

The point is that human vocabulary is always in a state of flux. In the past, the evolution of language was a naturally occurring process, reflecting social and cultural changes and external influences, not to mention lingual and linguistic sloppiness. But the past two centuries have seen a different form of evolution, an ultimately sinister and cynical morphing of language, namely the intentional manipulation of meaning to affect the nature of thought and, consequently, perceptions of reality. Political, legal, educational, diplomatic, and cultural verbal expression has been twisted to obscure rather than to illuminate, to obfuscate rather than clarify. This process, when first noticed in the past, was referred to as the Orwellian Shift.

To make our examination of certain topics in the history of the United States over the past two centuries useful and productive, it is necessary first to examine and then to replace the old terms, still in use among so-called academics, "left" and "right," and the subsequent related terms "liberal" and "conservative."

The first two terms originated in Europe in the late 18th century, and were byproducts of the French Revolution, referring to the seating pattern in the national legislature, with those desiring radical change seating themselves together on the left of the chamber, and those attached to either the old order or a moderate impulse toward change seating themselves on the right. As the ideas of the Revolution spread by fits and starts through the 19th century, the terms liberal and conservative came to be used to refer to the left and the right respectively. But it is important to understand what the terms meant in their original European usages, because they are not really applicable to American political history. The continued use of these terms in America made possible a distortion of meaning.

In the 19th century, European Liberalism meant a  belief in constitutional government which could be either a limited monarchy or a republic, a representative legislature (with control of the budget) chosen by a narrow electoral base, government run by a ministry responsible to that legislature, free trade and laissez-faire capitalism.

In the 19th century, European Conservatism meant a belief in monarchy, either limited or absolute, a ministry responsible to the monarch, either a national legislature with very limited influence, elected by a narrow electoral base, or a council of the kingdom based upon the traditional division of noble, clergy, and commons, and the maintenance of tariffs and other forms of regulated economic life.

Obviously, neither of these definitions is applicable to political positions common in the United States during our recent past (nor, for that matter, do they apply anymore in what was once Europe either), and our adoption of them in the early 20th century was somewhat haphazard and inconsistent. American politics in the late 18th century spoke of Federalists and Anti-Federalists (in a debate over the ratification of the Constitution), Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans (in a debate over the interpretation of that Constitution),  in the 19th century, Democrats and Whigs (who hates Andrew Jackson? who loves Andrew Jackson? and what about the Erie Canal and that National Road?), then Democrats (slavery is okay, let's let it spread) and Republicans (no it isn't, and let's not), and then, after the Civil War, will the Democrats or the Republicans help themselves to the national treasury for the next few years. After the War such political distinctions as existed were trivial. (High tariff or low, how far to expand the civil service, that sort of thing.) At the end of the 19th century new economic problems led to a series of "reform" movements known as populism (rural) and progressivism (urban). The terms have continued to be used ever since, the former (populist) usually as a pejorative reference to the cynical manipulation of the emotions of  frightened voters, the latter (progressive)  as an idealized self-praise by the advocates of centralization of power. It was not until the 20th century that the European political terms became widespread. The term "liberal" was introduced to the American political vocabulary much earlier than the term "conservative," but both meanings were at first somewhat fluid.

In the presidential election of 1932, for example, both President Herbert Hoover and Governor Franklin Roosevelt claimed to be the truly "liberal" candidate, meaning that he believed in free markets, balanced budgets, and low taxes.[5] Obviously, "liberalism" under Roosevelt soon morphed into something completely different. At its most consistently defined, "liberalism" in America involved a pathetic faith in the power of the State and a dependence upon the State to solve all problems, which of course required a massive concentration of power and money in the hands of those people controlling the State.

Similarly, the use of the term "conservative" was inchoate until the 1950's. Prior to that it was a term of opprobrium used by "liberals" to denounce and ridicule anyone who opposed the expansion of State[6] power and the corruption of the judicial process. But then in the hands of a small group of intellectuals it became a well-reasoned philosophy resisting the irrational and destructive changes that attended the centralization of State power by  megalomaniacal politicians, and then, for a while, an effective political movement that sought to reverse the process. Eventually Conservatism was overwhelmed by social forces beyond any strategic control. At its most consistently defined, "conservatism" reflected a basic mistrust of both the power of the State and of human nature (remembering that the "State" is not an abstraction; all governments are composed of human beings), and a respect for traditions and institutions long established, something referred to as the "venerable sanction."

To put it simply, the liberal worshipped State power, especially if he were in control of it. The conservative mistrusted State power even if he were in control of it. The liberal believed that human beings are perfectible and that he himself, if not yet truly perfect, is nonetheless morally and intellectually superior to those who disagree with him. Consequently, if people resist being perfected, they should be forced to be perfect. The  conservative believed that all human beings are at least potentially corrupt and corruptible, even himself; and that, consequently, all political power must be severely limited and localized, and that anyone who desires power must be immediately mistrusted.

But in both cases, the actual political philosophies to which the terms referred ceased to have any connection to the terms themselves. Thus the manipulation of meaning and the distortion of usage were facilitated by the fluidity of the words themselves. Liberals were particularly adept at this. They habitually manipulated popular emotions with incendiary propaganda. They regularly equated the term "conservative" with the older, at that point largely meaningless term, "fascist," and to a mindless, ignorant, almost Neanderthal stupidity. (It must be kept in mind that the very idea of intelligent people of good will honestly and legitimately disagreeing with each other was incomprehensible to the liberal mentality.) They did this manipulation of meaning to so effective a degree that conservatives found themselves on the constant defensive against the calumny rather than vindicating the principles for which they stood. At the same time, aware of the fact that the public quite correctly associated liberalism with usurious taxes, massive deficits, ubiquitous intrusion of State power into people's lives, contempt for religion and morality, a staggering national debt, an effective abandonment of both our allies and our own national security, and an intentional subversion of both federalism and constitutionalism, liberals resurrected the older term "progressive" to deflect attention from what they actually believed and did. (Who, after all, can object to progress? Fascist Neanderthals, perhaps.) Their effort was sufficiently effective to influence voting patterns, to the general detriment of human freedom.

Similarly, other terms such as "communist," "socialist," "fascist," etc. had been used and abused, applied and misapplied, defined, redefined, misdefined, and undefined so frequently that they too eventually lost all descriptive value.[7] We shall therefore in this series of reflective essays abandon all such obsolete and obscurant terminologies. The core debate in politics over the past two hundred years … indeed, over the past two thousand five hundred years, since the days of the ancient Greeks … has revolved around two very simple questions: what is the proper role of the State, and to what degree should its powers be limited? (The proper nature of the structure of government is a separate issue.) There are two answers to the question, the Liberal Statist answer and the Libertarian Conservative answer.

A word is appropriate at this point about the two dominant political parties in the United States while the two party system still existed. Both had their origins in the 19th century and had undergone significant permutations over the years. The Democrats emerged after the Era of Good Feelings, coalescing around Andrew Jackson, the first "popular" president, in the 1820's. At first they reflected what was once called the "rise of the common man," but later came to be identified, perhaps unfairly, with slavery and secession. Such principles as the Democrats stood for after the First Civil War ended (if they stood for anything) were low tariffs and racial segregation. The Republicans came into existence in the 1850's in opposition to the spread of slavery and became, under Abraham Lincoln, the party of the Union (even though most northern Democrats were not secessionists either.) Such principles as the Republicans stood for after the War (if they stood for anything) were high tariffs and imperialism. Ideology actually began to reshape both parties in the 20th century, and eventually the Democratic Party had become increasingly identified with liberalism, and the Republican Party had become increasing identified with conservatism. But, as noted, both terms had been bent and reshaped so many times that their initial meanings had been hopelessly compromised.

Liberal Statist is preferable to "liberal" and "leftist" (see above) because it is descriptive of the true nature of the political position. The word "liberal" derived from the Latin words liber, which means "free," and liberalis, which means "pertaining to a free man." But liberalism as it developed in the United States had nothing to do with freedom, and was indeed antithetical to it. The "Liberal," or Liberal Statist, venerates the power of the State, and believes, wittingly or not, in the ever expanding power of the central authority until it eventually controls all significant aspects of human life. And of course, as Lord Acton warned centuries ago, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As the Liberal Statist vision of the all-powerful State was realized in the recent past, the level of the corruption of the people in control approached its apogee as well. These people, consisting of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy and an entrenched class of ambitious career politicians, can be aptly described as the ruling class. These rulers may seriously believe that they are working for the common good, and their motives may even be pure. This is irrelevant. The best and most noble human being will eventually be corrupted by power. (In the end, after all, even Frodo desired to possess the Ring.)[8]

"Libertarian Conservative" is preferable to "conservative" for two reasons. One, the word "libertarian" also derives from the Latin liber, but in this case is indeed truly concerned with the preservation of freedom, not with its extinguishment, so the etymological connection is valid. Two, the word "conservative," derived from the Latin verb conservo, meaning "I preserve," (alternate theory of derivation: the conjunction con or com, meaning "with", and servus, meaning work, i.e., to work with what you have) retains some conceptual validity, and it does encapsulate a belief system founded upon a Calvinist view of human nature and a Hobbesian view of human society.[9] Human nature is inherently corrupt, and we require government to protect us from the outside world and from each other. Without government, Hobbes observed, human life in a state of nature is poor, brutal, solitary, nasty, and short. But the Calvinist insight is that the people who run the government are no more virtuous or immune to corruption than anyone else. Government is necessary, to be sure, but it is a necessary evil, which, if left unchecked, will assuredly destroy human freedom. Government must therefore be limited in its nature and scope, doing for the people only that which they want done but cannot conceivably do for themselves. As Thomas Jefferson famously if rhetorically asked,  "Have we then found angels to rule over us?" The answer, of course, was no.

It is in this contradistinction that the true nature of the Liberal Statist view versus the Libertarian Conservative view can be seen clearly. In the American political tradition, government power was exercised on three levels, local, state (lower case "s"), and federal. In the Libertarian Conservative view, nothing should be done by the federal government that can conceivably be done by the state government, and nothing should be done by the state government that can conceivably be done by the local government. And if the state or local governments choose not to pursue a certain course of action, they should not be compelled to do so against their wills, except in accordance with narrowly construed constitutional obligations. The intent of Libertarian Conservatism is thus the prevention of the centralization of power in the hands of dangerous, ambitious men.

To the Liberal Statist this is heretical nonsense. To accomplish its goals, the State (i.e., in this instance, the federal government) must accumulate as much power as possible; state and local governments, if they are tolerated at all, are merely functional appendages to the central authority, existing only to facilitate State desires (and, of course, to serve as sources of power and wealth for the rulers.) Needless to say, if the state, the local government, or the people per se do not agree with or support the desires and ambitions of the rulers, they must be compelled to conform anyway. The compulsion can take many forms … legislative, economic, social, psychological, physical … but it is compulsion to conformity nonetheless. The intent of Liberal Statism is thus the very centralization of power the Libertarian Conservative opposed, at the hands of the dangerous, ambitious men they feared.

We shall thus in the pages that follow abandon outmoded terms such as liberal and conservative, left and right, and limit our references instead to the Liberal Statist and the Libertarian Conservative. We shall limit our exploration to those developments and events in America's third and fourth centuries which may provide some insights into what has led us to the present deplorable situation. And we shall not attempt to delve into peoples' minds so as to explore their reasoning or assess their motives, except insofar as is necessary and unavoidable. Such an attempt would be impossible, generally speaking, and also irrelevant. The road to hell is always paved with good intentions.

II – THE COLLAPSE OF MORAL STANDARDS

That which is good, is good, even if done by none.

That which is evil, is evil, even if done by all.

- St. Augustine

The topics of our consideration are so deeply interrelated and intertwined that the order in which we shall examine them is of necessity arbitrary. Did the collapse of moral standards lead to the disappearance of the family, or vice versa? Did militant atheism fatally secularize American society, or was secularization what made the spread of militant atheism possible? Did the failure of the national education systems precipitate the perversion of the political system, or was it instead a byproduct of that perversion? When faced with the old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?," either answer is equally defensible.[10] We shall therefore arbitrarily begin with the moral issue.

Most moral questions involve the interaction of people; most choices that can be deemed moral choices are those that have an effect upon someone else. If we examine the seven deadly sins, for example, five of them directly or indirectly involve our relationships with others (wrath, envy, lust, greed, and pride), as do five of the seven cardinal virtues (chastity, charity, patience, kindness, and humility.) Only the vices gluttony and sloth (and the corresponding virtues of temperance and diligence) are non-social. The collapse of moral standards, which led to the decline of the family as traditionally understood, can be explained very simply: many of the traditional vices came be redefined as virtues, and many of the traditional virtues came to be seen as foolish, irrelevant, and obstructive of the immediate gratification of self-indulgent impulses.

The point of origin for this decay can be traced to a particular generation of Americans, the self-styled "60's Generation," also called "Baby-boomers."  The reference is to the demographic of births between roughly 1945 and 1955, though demographers in the past disagreed as to the precise years. Members of this generation were the children of the (also self-styled) "Greatest Generation," who had survived both the First Great Depression and the Second World War. (Of course, any generation who survived the Depression and won the War can be excused for a bit of inflated hyperbolical self-esteem.)

The Greatest Generation had sacrificed much and suffered much. Many of them experienced poverty and dislocation during childhood, and then found their lives overwhelmed by duty and struggle in the massive national effort of the War. Marriage and family were put on hold for many people, as the young men went off to fight in foreign lands and the young women kept the domestic economy in general and the munitions factories in particular running. When the war ended and the young men came home to the young women, they made up for lost time. The "baby boom" was just that, a demographic explosion of unparalleled proportions, as peopled married and procreated at a frenzied rate.

Members of the Greatest Generation, acutely aware of the privations they had endured, were determined to spare their offspring a similar experience. The desire to "give my children what I never had," while laudable in its intent, was deleterious in its effect; for it produced a generation of privilege and self-absorption, a spoiled, egotistical generation unencumbered by respect for tradition, morality, patriotism, or the conventional standards of civilized behavior. Of course no generation is all of one kind; self-sacrifice, moral and ethical behavior, love of country survived; but the irresponsible and self-indulgent element became emblematic of the whole, and infused society with its decadent standards. "Baby-Boomers," "60's Generation," "Woodstock Nation," etc., are all inadequate appellatives. More appropriate is the ancient Biblical phrase, Generation of Vipers.[11]

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when the decay began, but it was probably when the concept of the "teenager" became generally accepted. Psychologists had spoken of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, but these were clinical designations without sociological significance. People traditionally divided life into two well-defined periods: childhood, during which adults would teach children how to be adults; and adulthood, when the now grown children assume the role of husband and father, wife and mother, provider and nurturer, etc. There was in the popular mind and experience no intermediary period when young people could spend time free of childhood limitations but not yet burdened by the responsibilities of adulthood. This period, the "teenage years," was discovered by the entertainment industry, which found to its delight that a huge group of potential consumers existed, an untapped market of boundless potential, funded by indulgent parents, without the normal constraints provided both by maturity and by adult obligations.

The entertainment industry bears much of the responsibility for the decay that ensued. In any market economy[12], which the United States used to have, any demand, rational or irrational, will engender a supply, legal or illegal. The "teenager" was driven by hormonal, libidinous, and sensory drives, all of which are developmentally normal but which hitherto were controlled, sublimated, diverted by familial and social constraints. Such traditional constraints were powerless to resist the mass marketing of self-indulgence, physical pleasure, sexual perversion, and obscenity as commodities.

The process whereby moral standards were destroyed involved a number of contributory processes which were simultaneous and incremental, not sequential and instantaneous. Inasmuch as it is easier to describe them individually than collectively, what follows is, again, arbitrary.

One: The cult of celebrity elevated to revered status popular entertainers, many of whom had no consistent notion of what moral behavior was. Very, very few of them had any substantial level of education, some were functionally illiterate, many had lived their early lives in the dark and seamy nether reaches of society, and their words and actions bespoke vulgarity and abuse; but their every pronouncement and opinion on any conceivable subject was broadcast by the media as if it were received, revealed wisdom. And, human nature being what it is, these "celebrities," their egos perpetually stroked by adoring devotees, became increasingly open and arrogant about their aberrant behaviors and criminal activities, including the habitual use of  psychotropic and narcotic drugs, all of which came to be seen as normative, even admirable. The "teenager," in awe of the glamour of these people, in awe of their wealth, status, and erotic energy, was easily corrupted.

Two: The so-called "sexual revolution" began with the wide-spread availability of an oral contraceptive popularly known as "the pill." Up until that time, the most effective deterrent to sexual immorality was unwanted pregnancy, and the shame attendant thereunto. But with pregnancy and sexual activity effectively separated from each other, the major impediment had been eliminated. The diseases that sexual activity could transmit, the fatal ones in particular, were either ignored or as yet unknown. Syphilis and gonorrhea were known and medically treatable; but it would be two decades before Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was identified, five decades before the Calcium Degenerative virus was identified, and a full three quarters of a century before the fluid-born hybrid of Sickle Cell Anemia and Tay-Sachs Disease made its appearance. By that time the older moral (and self-protective) attitude toward sexual behavior had been virtually forgotten.

Three: Repeated judicial perversions of the 1st Amendment[13] allowed the growth of another pernicious industry: pornography. Nudity had a long and respectable place in western art from the days of ancient Greece, and frescos depicting sexual activities as the harbinger of the life-force were very common in temples in India. But the intent of appealing to prurient interests was absent in these artistic traditions. The idea of creating visual images for no purpose other than the effecting sexual arousal was inconceivable, and would have been regarded as, at best, bizarre, at worst, criminal. As noted, however, the unregulated and undisciplined entertainment industry had reduced every consideration to one of supplying a market for profit, and the market for sexual entertainment was limitless. The debasement, coarsening, and vulgarization of society proceeded apace, and by the late 20th century the public was viewing, for the purposes of diversion, entertainment, and stimulation, people engaging in activities that a few decades earlier would have resulted either in criminal prosecution and imprisonment or confinement in a mental institution. But by this time almost no connection remained between sexual behavior and morality; all standards were relative, right and wrong were matters of opinion, and it was intolerant to denounce almost anything.[14] There was no sex act so perverse, depraved, degrading, and heinous that it could not find an audience and a willing provider in the entertainment industry. Only two sexual acts were still regarded as morally wrong: child molestation and forcible rape. (Unless, of course, the raping pederast was a celebrity. Then the issue became murky.)

The cult of celebrity, the sexual revolution, and the pornography industry established the groundwork for what came to be the effective destruction of the family. More precisely, the decline of moral standards, the general acceptance of sexual deviance, and the advocacy of both by celebrities, made possible successive redefinitions of appropriate and acceptable human behavior until at last the family, the fundamental social unit of society, had been morphed out of all recognition.

The first step in this process was the legalization of marriage between homosexuals. Despite intensive research over the past few centuries, the causes of homosexuality remain obscure. Some maintain that it is an inherent characteristic like race or gender; others maintain that it is a product of environmental factors; others that it is a psychological disorder; others that is a cultural phenomenon that varies from culture to culture; still others maintain that a subtle interplay of some or all of these explanations yields the best understanding. Decade after decade, studies came to final, definitive conclusions, only to be contradicted by subsequent studies.

The arguments back and forth flew fast and furious. One side would assert that homosexual inclinations are normal for homosexuals; the other side would point out that all inclinations, regardless of what they are, are normal for the people who experience them.  One side, that homosexuality was natural, an inherent component of some people's personalities, and that which is natural is right; the other, given that human nature is corrupt, much of that which is natural is evil. (For example, one has to teach children to share. The urge to steal is natural, and wrong. One must teach a boy not to grope a girl against her will. The unwelcomed grope is natural, and wrong.)  One side, that no one has the right to interfere with anyone else's life or to obstruct someone else's desire to marry; the other, that society is the common possession of all its members, and everyone has the right to become involved in a debate over the definition of society's basic social unit. One side, that any refusal to approve of sexual deviance is "intolerant" and "homophobic"; the other, that toleration and approval are not the same thing, and that people who do not approve of homosexual behavior are not by definition afraid of homosexuals. Is someone who disapproves of murder a cideophobe? Is someone who disapproves of child molestation a pederastophobe? Is someone who disapproves of theft a kleptophobe? This is another example of the Orwellian Shift.[15]

(Only slightly off-topic is that fact that the obsession with "tolerance" rapidly became something of a fetish, to such an extreme that any criticism of anything about homosexual behavior was taboo. One example of the extremes to which 'toleration' of homosexuals went on the part of the Liberal Statist mentality was that when it was discovered that the live-in boyfriend of a homosexual member of Congress was operating a prostitution business in the congressman's apartment, it had no impact upon his career. Had, at that point in time, a congressman's live-in girlfriend been running a brothel in his home, his career would have been over. Not so in this instance. This character was elected and re-elected to Congress over and over again. How delightfully tolerant! And when in the late 20th and early 21st centuries the Roman Catholic Church was rocked by revelations that priests had molested children, the Liberal Statist press used the situation as an occasion for condemning Catholicism and clerical celibacy. Absent from almost all of the commentaries were references to the obvious: each and every incident of molestation involved a boy, and each and every priestly pederast was a homosexual; and, not unimportantly, the number of priests implicated amounted to less than one half of one percent of the Catholic clergy in the United States.)

In any event, it does seem clear from a purely evolutionary perspective that any species which develops inherent congenital sexual behaviors that preclude reproduction would face extinction very quickly. The counter-argument, that genetically determined homosexuality serves as a natural limitation on population growth, assumes that overpopulation was a problem during the Paleolithic Era when our species emerged. The argument is not worth refuting.

None of this is really relevant. The causes of homosexuality are unrelated to the effect the homosexual rights movement had upon American society. The persecution of homosexuals that characterized western civilization (indeed, almost all civilizations) in the past cannot be defended, for it was in essence the violent criminalization of small groups of generally harmless, unfortunate, defenseless people.[16] But the increasingly widespread acceptance of the idea that homosexuals should be tolerated quickly gave way to the idea that they should be accepted, and then that their behavior should be approved by validation in law.

For that, after all, is what marriage is (or, at least, was): the legal public validation of a sexual relationship.[17] As the basic social unit, the purpose of marriage is the procreation and rearing of children and the maintenance of social continuity; it is most certainly not in essence an expression of emotional need or the desire for social approbation. But this is exactly what it became.

When left to the voting public in referenda[18], proposals to legalize homosexual marriage were almost uniformly rejected. Homosexual activists then took their cause to the courts. This approach had become by the second half of the 20th century an effective alternative to legislation in particular and the democratic process in general, for it provided a method whereby laws could be imposed upon the country by one of the aristocratic elements of the federal government while completely bypassing both the democratic element and the Constitution itself.[19] As was very commonplace in the erosion of American freedom, this practice had its roots in a perfectly legitimate and justifiable event, namely the use of the federal judiciary to redress the grievance of racial discrimination which had been instituted by some states and had previously been ruled constitutional. (Plessey v. Ferguson, 1896.) But in the 1954 decision Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.[20] In this instance, the Court's action was correct and constitutionally valid, for the denial of equal access to tax-supported public institutions, in this case public schools, is a clear equal rights violation; but it also established the horrendous precedent that if any half-way reasonable constitutional argument can be made for it, judicial action can replace legislative action. In other words, if any group's legislative agenda were not adopted by a legislature, the judiciary could impose it by fiat. This precedent, once ignorantly and irresponsibly accepted by American society, rendered the constitutional principle of the separation of powers effectively meaningless.

Various state judiciaries had already by 2020 ruled that any laws prohibiting homosexual marriage were violations of equal protection. Up to that point the Supreme Court had refused to hear arguments about the issue on the basis that marriage law was strictly a state matter and that the federal government had no jurisdiction. But successive Liberal Statist presidents nominated successive Liberal Statist judges to the federal courts at all levels, and the nominations were confirmed by successive Liberal Statist-majority Senates, so that eventually there remained so few Libertarian Conservatives on the bench that the question of jurisdiction ceased to be asked.

Thus it was that in 2030 the case of Lockhill v. The State of Montana worked its way up the judicial ladder until it reached the Supreme Court. It was a simple and straightforward argument: marriage is a civil right and any prohibition of marriage between people of the same gender is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court accepted the argument, and by a vote of 8 to 1 overturned all state laws barring homosexual marriage.

The aftermath of the ruling was exactly what opponents of homosexual marriage had feared it would be: lawsuits regarding marriage forms and other sexual matters proliferated, and the Liberal Statist courts, seeing these suits as opportunities further to erode state and local power, uniformly ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In 2031, the Court's ruling in Abumusallem v. The State of Connecticut compelled the recognition of the validity of polygynous marriages;[21] the subsequent case of Zimmerperson v. The State of Illinois in 2032 upheld polyandrous marriages; and in 2045, in McConnell and McConnell v. The State of Texas, the Court upheld marital incest as a civil right. A modicum of sanity was evidenced in the Court's 2050 refusal to overturn the state court's decision in Jackson v. The State of Oregon, in which the plaintiff unsuccessfully asserted the right to marry a sheep. Indicative of the mentality of the era, however, is the fact that the Court's decision was predicated upon the idea that because the sheep (Patti) lacked the mens rea (mental capacity) to enter into a voluntary marriage, bestiality constituted cruelty to animals.

That left two behaviors yet to be subjected to judicial scrutiny: pederasty and rape.

The definition of child molestation depended upon the definition of the word "child." State law on the age of consent (i.e., the age at which an individual has the mental capacity to consent to sexual intercourse) varied from state to state, though the average seemed to have been 17 for females and 18 for males, though 16 and 17 were not uncommon, and 15 and 16 even exited in some states for marital purposes with parental permission. But the very fact that there were variations was itself used as an argument that any statutory age of consent, which is to say the legal distinction between child and adult, was arbitrary. (Example: in some states one could drive a tractor at 14, marry at 15, but could not vote until 18, could not purchase tobacco until 19, and could not drink alcohol until 21.)

This notion was the basis of the plaintiff's argument in NACALA v. The State of New York. NACALA (the North American Child-Adult Love Association) had for decades been unsuccessfully attempting to have laws against child molestation repealed. Their line of reasoning went as follows: statutory ages of consent were varied and arbitrary, and thus legally and logically unsupportable; inasmuch as marriage is a civil right, the federal judiciary has jurisdiction over the issue of ages of consent; and the only scientific distinction between an adult and a child was the ability to procreate, i.e., of the boy to ejaculate sperm-laden semen and of the girl to ovulate. No reliable records existed as to the age of first ejaculation in males, but female menarche had been recorded in girls as young as 11. Thus the age of consent for females should be lowered to 11; and, to avoid a 14th Amendment sexist discrimination equal protection violation, so should the age of consent for boys.

In 2055, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of NACALA, thus overturning all state age of consent statutes and decreeing that persons age 11 were capable of consenting to sexual relations. For obscure cultural reasons, California chose to establish 10 as the age of consent, and NACALA marked the occasion by its president, Kevin Smith, marrying a ten year old boy in San Francisco. Attempts were still made on the state level to halt the stampede toward social chaos, but it became clear that the effort was futile when, in 2056, a forty year old man in San Francisco, already married to a thirty-five year old woman, married his ten year old niece and his two eleven year old twin nephews. This adulterous, incestuous, polygamous, bisexual marriage was perfectly legal by virtue of judicial decree.[22]

What then of children younger than 11 (10 in California)? Sexual relations with them were still prohibited by state laws, but the lowering of the age of consent led to a review of these laws as well. In the past, sexual relations with an eleven year old was a clear case of statutory rape and child molestation; but if sex with an 11 year old (a 10 year old in California) was legal, then the penalty for sex with a 10 year old (a 9 year old in California) could not be too severe. (What difference does one day make? the argument went. Is someone 10 years and 364 days old a child, but is then an adult the next day? This argument could be made regarding any statutory age of consent, which was precisely the point.) Everything regarding the issue was rethought and debated in what was left of the state legislatures, who were finding themselves with increasingly little else to do. At last molesting children younger than 11 (10 in California) but over the age of 6 (5 in California), though remaining de jure criminal behavior, was generally lowered from a felony to a misdemeanor, and usually was dealt with, after conviction, by psychological counseling for a first offense, more counseling and a fine for a second offense, and yet more counseling and brief imprisonment for a third offense. Inasmuch as the molestation of very, very young children, children under the age of 6 (5 in California) was very rare, or at least rarely reported, these developments constituted a de facto decriminalization of pederasty.

Only one moral barrier of a sexual nature separating civilization from barbarism remained, namely forcible rape. The laws prohibiting sexual assault would seem on the surface to by unassailable, because the ethos of the age glorified individual desire, and any undesired sexual activity violated that glorification. But by the middle of the last century social conditions had undergone a fundamental change, as a result of everything hitherto discussed in this essay. In the 2060 census it was reported that the average age of first intercourse, including all forms of intercourse, was 12.[23] One reason for this was that the complete disconnect between any sexual activity and any moral consideration was so complete that sexual relations of any and all sorts were regarded as a trivial commonplace. Another reason was that the entertainment industry, as usual, assumed that all young people would at all times and in all places behave like rutting goats, an assumption that constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more frequently children were exposed to sexually explicit entertainment (and they were, all the time, everywhere,) the more likely they were to imitate what they saw.

Under such circumstances, what possible motive could one have to refuse sexual intimacy? Only one: an intense dislike for the person suggesting the intimacy. In other words, refusing a sexual advance, in the absence of any other demonstrable justification, was a hate crime. If a man refuses to have sex with a man, for example, he has committed the hate crime of Homophobia (here capitalized because it became statutory in 2037.) If a woman of one race refuses intimacy with a man of a different race, she has committed the hate crime of Racism. If a person of either gender refuses intimacy with a person of either gender because he or she finds the other person physically unattractive, that is the hate crime of Looksism, or Sizeism, or Ageism, or Weightism, or Complexionism, or some other ism.

The upshot of this line of reasoning was that people began to submit to sexual activities against their wills to avoid arrest. Forcible rape remained a crime, of course; but for criminal prosecution to ensue, there needed to be physical evidence of force (e.g., broken bones, abrasions, dental damage, concussion, etc.) or a reliable third party eye-witness to the assault, which was, of course, extremely rare. (Rape is rarely a public act.) Otherwise the victim was obligated to prove that his or her refusal to accept the sexual advance was justified, and the presumption of innocence favored the rapist. In an era when sexual activity was ubiquitous and unrestrained, being raped became preferable to being prosecuted as a hate criminal.

One is tempted to ask what response was offered to all of this by religious institutions and leaders. The simple answer is that they were busily engaged in fighting losing battles on all sides against a rising tide of secularism so ubiquitous that it eventually infected many of the religious bodies themselves. Some religious groups attempted to maintain the older, traditional moral codes derived from the biblical tradition (e.g., the Old Roman Catholic Church after the American Catholic schism of 2051, the Lutherans of the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods, the Southern Baptist Convention, the General Association of Regular Baptists,  and some other Baptists and conservative Protestants, many, but not all, Eastern Orthodox Churches, Orthodox Anglicans, Orthodox Calvinists, Orthodox Jews,  the traditional Latter Day Saints, etc.), but they were soon outnumbered by groups that, to put it simply, redefined vice as virtue. The American Catholic Church, what remained of the Episcopalians, the rest of the Lutherans, Reform Jews, and most other mainstream Protestant religious groups, made their peace with the collapse of moral standards. They twisted and distorted the words of the Bible to change their meanings, in much the same way as the Liberal Statists twisted and distorted the words of the Constitution to make it say whatever they wanted it to say. What these two documents actually said, what they actually meant, had become irrelevant.

In addition to this, the organized, aggressive, vicious bigotry of militant atheism mounted an effective assault not only upon religious institutions, but upon people of faith in general. In keeping with the arrogant egotism of the secular mentality and the hedonistic self-indulgence of the Generation of Vipers, they regarded those who did not agree with them on any one of their favorite issues as ignorant idiots deserving scorn and contempt. They did not merely disagree with people of faith; they ridiculed them, despised them, and hated them. It was unacceptable (indeed, illegal) to hurl racial, sexual, or ethnic insults, and it remained dangerous to say anything unfavorable about Muslims, but religious insults directed at traditional Christians or observant Jews were acceptable and were not regarded as expressions of intolerance.[24]

As could be expected, the entertainment industry contributed to the growing secularization of society by discovering a market for anti-religious themes on stage, screen, and television. In addition to ubiquitous pornography, anti-Christian films proliferated, popular music insulting religious tradition and lauding bizarre and perverse pseudo-religions became commonplace, and popular personalities publicly expressed their contempt for religion. One comedienne, to give just one example, when accepting an entertainment award, needlessly and for no apparent reason other than a gratuitous desire to be vulgar and rude, invited the Lord Jesus Christ to engage in an act of oral sodomy. Such a remark, which would have ended her career a scant few years earlier, merely elicited a laugh, so far had standards of common decency deteriorated. (Similarly, though not an expression of atheism, when a television personality made an obscene joke about the rape of the child of a Conservative Libertarian political figure, there were no consequences other than a forced and presumably insincere apology.)

As a direct result of all this, by the last quarter of the 21st century, the family as traditionally understood (mother, father, children) had all but vanished. The Liberal Statist philosophy of Patriotic Democratic Centralism had taken child-rearing out of parental hands to so great a degree that the family seemed to serve no purpose. Responsibility for housing, income, education, all had been assumed by State authorities. Inasmuch as everyone had an obligation to be gainfully employed (either by the State or by the few remaining State-controlled private enterprises), the old notion of one parent as provider and the other parent as nurturer was an anachronism.  Very few heterosexual people even bothered entering into marriage at all, because, lacking religious scruples, they saw no point in doing so, and those few people who swam against the social current and actually entered into monogamous, life-long relationships were regarded as eccentrics.[25]

The Liberal Statistical records tell the dismal story. The occurrence of illegitimate births[26] had been growing steadily ever since the welfare system that began in the 1930's provided incomes to women with children and no husbands, thus reducing the need or inclination for fathers to be present in the family. The developments discussed above turned a trend into an avalanche, as the following table indicates, and the occasional half-hearted attempts at reforms were as effective as Cnut's sword against the waves.[27] Reference to the number of births does not necessarily reflect actual pregnancies, because the use of abortion as a birth control method (especially self-administered abortion medications at home) make it impossible to compile accurate pregnancy and abortion statistics. The number of births, for whatever reason, began to decline by around 2010.  (Figures are rounded off to thousands, and derive from The Liberal Statistical Abstract of the United States, published annually until 2121.)

It is thus obvious that by the middle of the 21st century, the traditional nuclear family had disappeared, and with it a fundamental component of social cohesion. This was not unwelcome by the Liberal Statists who dominated American society, for the absence of the family led to an ever-increasing view of the State as the true basic community unit, the true family.

Though the "baby-boomers" were all dead by the time this situation came into existence, this outcome was the logical result of their lives and attitudes. Nothing mattered except pleasure of whatever type, and any attempt to thwart that desire was the height of intolerant bigotry. Their parents were fools, anyone who disagreed with them were idiots, and they saw no contradiction in their simultaneous worship of the State and of their own egos, for they viewed the State as an extension of themselves, thus deluding themselves into thinking that what was in fact totalitarianism was in reality democracy. By the time they died off, their pernicious, ignorant, irresponsible, self-centered depravity had become normative for American society. Indeed, the Generation of Vipers had become American society.

DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHOID (1)

(Editor's note: Hugo Gottfried inserted a series of "dialogues" into the body of his Reflections. These dialogues appear to be intentionally imitative of an ancient work that Gottfried chanced upon in his researches, namely the Socratic dialogues written by a Greek named Plato some two and a half millennia ago. The dialogue structure presents a conversation between the speaker, Socrates, and an "interlocutor," who serves as a foil for the presentation of the speaker's ideas. Gottfried's format diverges from the so-called Socratic method in that Socrates asked provocative questions in order to elicit certain conclusions. Gottfried's dialogues are more conventionally conversational. The name of this interlocutor, Tryphoid, is a play on the name Trypho. In the early 2nd century A.D., a Christian apologist named St. Justin, also known as Justin Martyr, constructed such a dialogue with a man he named Trypho as a way of presenting and defending Christian ideas. The subject of this dialogue is faith vs. atheism. The editors believe that Gottfried made 'Trypho' into 'Tryphoid' to be reminiscent of Justin and to make it sound similar to 'typhoid,' a pernicious, deadly disease, which is precisely what Gottfried thought atheism was. We do not know the identity, if there is one, of the hypothetical Tryphoid. If he really existed, he was apparently someone whom Gottfried knew and cherished as a dear friend, though they dwelt in alien intellectual universes. The dialogue was not intended by Gottfried to represent an actual conversation. In one extant copy of the manuscript, he notes somewhat wryly that the Socratic dialogue is not a game that two can play.)

(Location: The garden of the Jacques Marchand Museum of Tibetan Art, Staten Island, New York City)

TRYPHOID: There are many things about you that I don't understand, my dear Gottfried, but at the top of my list is the question of your adherence to superstition. Please do not be offended. You are one of my oldest and dearest friends, but …

GOTTRIED: I am incapable of being offended by a friend, my dear Tryphoid, and I trust that as we delve into this topic, you will not be offended in turn by anything I say. I assume from your statement that you are referring to my belief in the Christian religion.

TRYPHOID: Not even something that specific. I refer to your belief in God. I have always believed you to be a rational man, but this faith of yours is inexplicable. Even your parents, as … pardon me … as bizarre as they were, adhered to a reasonably, well, reasonable religious belief.

GOTTFRIED: You refer to the branch of Buddhism called Zen in Japan, Ch'an in China. A branch of the Mahayana tradition. Yes, they were Buddhists, and, yes, Buddhism does not claim to be a revealed religion, but rather one deriving from experience, if that is what you mean by reasonable …

TRYPHOID: That is exactly what I mean. I can respect the notion of constructing an experiential belief system based upon ideas derived from reason. But accepting as true something you claim to have been revealed from "on high" and preserved in some sort of "holy book" … well, it is beneath you, Gottfried.

GOTTFRIED: I thought we were discussing God's existence in general, not the Abrahamic God in particular.

TRYPHOID: The what?

GOTTFRIED: The God of Abraham. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God.

TRYPHOID: Well, yes, of course. We can save specifics for another occasion. But certainly you must admit that your belief in God does not derive from a rational, scientific, intellectual process.

GOTTFRIED: The question of God's existence …

TRYPHOID: Or lack thereof.

GOTTFRIED: Yes, or lack thereof, is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question involving, not physics, but metaphysics, and all metaphysical beliefs are in essence existential choices.

TRYPHOID: So you admit that your belief is irrational.

GOTTFRIED: I didn't say that. There are certainly lines of reasoning that lead to theism, but I doubt most people who believe in God arrived at their beliefs through research and analysis. Similarly, most atheists, if not actually raised to be atheists, at least grew up untouched by religious belief and practice. I have read that most people raised to be religious who then convert to atheism reject religion during adolescence, an age better known for raging hormones than for profound metaphysical inquiry. In both cases, such things are ancillary, not fundamental. After all, reason alone can neither prove nor disprove God's existence.

TRYPHOID: A cheap shot, Gottfried. One cannot disprove a negative.

GOTTFRIED: Of course one can, depending upon the negative. And besides, you are interjecting a well-worn cliché into the conversation. Shall I respond in kind, and say that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? Or shall we take our conversation seriously.

TRYPHOID: But it isn't a cliché. It's the truth.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid … !

TRYPHOID: Very well, very well. Go on, and get to the point. Leaving existential metaphysics aside, because they are by definition subjective, why do you believe in God? Strive to be empirical.

GOTTFRIED: I shall do my best. I know that despite the sorry condition of what passes for education today, you are an educated man. I know that in our long hours of work together in the Library you too have acquired knowledge, though we have come to different conclusions on many things.

TRYPHOID: Most things.

GOTTFRIED: Very well then. When contemplating God, the first question to be asked is whether materialism is true: that is to say, is matter in motion all that exists, or is there a nonmaterial reality as well? The atheist believes in materialism, that nothing exists besides matter, and that we are all nothing more than machines made of meat.

TRYPHOID: A crude caricature, Gottfried.

GOTTFRIED: Inaccurate?

TRYPHOID: No, but as with all caricatures, condescending.

GOTTFRIED: Inaccurate?

TRYPHOID: No.

GOTTFRIED: Very well. Phrased differently, the atheist rejects Cartesian dualism.

TRYPHOID: The phrase is familiar, but I can't quite place it.

GOTTFRIED: René Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher and mathematician. Maybe he was Swiss. I forget. But anyway, he posited the idea that there are two different kinds of existences, extended substances and thinking substances. Extended substances are material and therefore measurable. Thinking substances are immaterial and thus not measurable. They are perceptible only in their effects.

TRYPHOID: And he derived this idea from … ?

GOTTFRIED: From the fact that there are some things that obviously exist but cannot be measured. Emotions, aesthetic judgments, moral sensibilities, and, yes, God, the spirit, the soul itself …

TRYPHOID: Oh, Gottfried, you are making this too easy for me. Emotions, aesthetics, morals are in essence nothing more than genetically determined electro-chemical reactions in the brain, which are measurable. God, spirit, soul … worse than illusions. Delusions.

GOTTFRIED: Your response is the expected one. It is called reductionism, "nothing-but"-ism. Love is nothing but the reproductive urge to procreate, the yearning of the organs for each other. Music is nothing but a mathematical arrangement of sound waves resonating against a membrane in the ear. Literature is nothing but patterns of marks on pieces of paper. But Tryphoid, you can analyze flowers down to their subatomic components and still not understand the beauty of a rose.

TRYPHOID: But that understanding is itself a product of electro-chemical reactions in the brain.

GOTTFRIED: As is our conversation? Our friendship? The women we have loved? The dreams we have? Our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows? Even our disagreements and our beliefs?

TRYPHOID: You are engaging in a different kind of reductionism, a reducto ad absurdumism.

GOTTFRIED: Clever rejoinder. But it avoids the point. You can reduce anything to "nothing but" something else, without really comprehending what it actually is.

TRYPHOID: Irrelevant. You cannot directly prove the existence of anything that cannot be measured.

GOTTFRIED: Nor do I need to. Philosophy does not depend upon empirical proof, as if each belief requires the certainty of a geometric theorem. For a philosophical system to be valid, it must be consistent with its own assumptions. It does not need to be empirically verifiable.

TRYPHOID: No, I cannot let you get away with that. Knowledge must be empirically verifiable in order to worthy of reliance. It must be rationally adduced.

GOTTFRIED: No. The system cannot be verified by reason, but it can be tested by application, and its validity can thus be proven or disproven. For example, Marxism was a complex system of thought that was entirely consistent within its own assumptions. Only when it failed in application was it proven to be invalid.

TRYPHOID: No, no, no. Its application was corrupted by the people in charge, Stalin in particular. The rationality of the system remained, indeed remains, intact.

GOTTFRIED: Rationality. Would I be correct in assuming that you believe human reason to be infallible?

TRYPHOID: In theory, and if properly applied in specific and circumscribed conditions, yes.

GOTTFRIED: But you and I, both rational men, have come to hold diametrically opposed beliefs. How is that possible?

TRYPHOID: Your belief in God is not rational.

GOTTFRIED: So in other words, your reason is infallible, but mine is not.

TRYPHOID: In this instance, at least, yes.

GOTTFRIED: And you see no logical weakness in proclaiming as objective truth the subjective conviction of the infallibility of your own mind?

TRYPHOID: If two minds assert contradictory absolute ideas as true, one must be wrong.

GOTTFRIED: Or both may be wrong, or truth may rest somewhere in between, or may have nothing to do with either, without any reference to infallibility. But look at it from your own standpoint. How can reason, thought, something that you insist is nothing but electro-chemical reactions in the brain, be infallible? Our bodies have a destiny of death. Wherein can infallibility rest in meat destined to rot when the machine breaks down?

TRYPHOID: You digress.

GOTTFRIED: I do not. Four hundred years ago Immanuel Kant proved, to my satisfaction anyway, that human reason is most definitely not infallible. Beyond that, Werner Heisenberg proved two hundred years later that inasmuch as the act of observation alters the nature of that which is being observed, ultimate truth cannot be adduced by the human mind.

TRYPHOID: Come now, my dear Gottfried. I know very little about this Kant fellow, though I do recall the name, but I still remember my physics. Heisenberg proved nothing more than that an observer cannot simultaneous know an electron's position and its velocity.

GOTTFRIED: But don't you atheist materialists believe that everything that exists is nothing but matter, which is to say, atomic and subatomic particles, in motion? If so, and if Heisenberg was correct (which he was), then you cannot really know both where something is and what it is doing. How on earth can you reconcile this with the infallibility of reason?

TRYPHOID: A foolish comment, old fellow. Granted, we cannot discover what you call "ultimate truth" in physics, but your example concerns subatomic particles, not human lives being lived in human societies. For conventional purposes in conventional contexts, we can indeed discover what is, to all intents and purposes, truth.

GOTTFRIED: You admit to having forgotten your Kant. I fear you must also have forgotten your Aristotle. Reread his book on logic. In analyzing any phenomenon, it can be described either as A or as not-A. There is no such thing as to all intents and purposes A, or almost A, or it might as well be A, or it sure looks a hell of a lot like A to me.

TRYPHOID: This grows tiresome. I repeat: you cannot prove God's existence.

GOTTFRIED: The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth forth his handiwork.

TRYPHOID: Oh, Gottfried, Gottfried, please don't quote that idiotic book to me.

GOTTFRIED: Very well, allow me to make the same point in a different way. You are familiar, of course, with Albert Einstein.

TRYPHOID: Of course. And before you go on, let me remind you that he did not believe in God.

GOTTFRIED: Really! Are you familiar with his library metaphor?

TRYPHOID: Remind me of it.

GOTTFRIED: I shall paraphrase. When contemplating the mystery of the universe, he said, I feel like a little child who has wandered into a large library. He cannot read any of the books. Indeed, some are written in languages he would not understand if he heard them spoken. He does not know what they are for, or what the library itself is for. But he knows, even in his little child mind, that someone built the library! Someone wrote the books! Someone arranged them on the shelves! Whatever else may be said, it is obvious to the child, and to Einstein, that the library did not build itself.

TRYPHOID: I'll grant you the weak and pathetic slide of Einstein into some form of formless Deism, the cosmic clockmaker nonsense, but that is most certainly not "God" as you people use the term.

GOTTFRIED: Well, for one thing, you have no idea what "we people" believe God to be. I have found that in rejecting God, most atheists are in reality rejecting some childish "big old man with a long white beard on a great big chair in the clouds" nonsense, seriously thinking that people of faith actually believe things like that, an assumption that would be insulting were it not so silly and ignorant. But back to Einstein: he believed in an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, transcendent intelligence, a spiritual Being Who exists outside the time-space continuum that He Himself created. If that isn't God, I don't know what God is!

TRYPHOID: He didn't phrase it that way.

GOTTFRIED: I'm paraphrasing again, of course, but that is precisely what he meant. Time and space are inseparable; neither can exist without the other. Therefore if God created the universe, which is a synonym for the time-space continuum, He must therefore exist outside of time, and that means He is eternal. Remember, eternity doesn't mean infinity, or a long time, or endless time. Eternity has nothing to do with time! And inasmuch as he is not part of the physical universe that He created, He must be non-physical Himself, a Spirit, for lack of a better word. Beyond that, the very act of creation itself bespeaks omnipotence. And the trillions upon trillions of interactions that occur every nanosecond in the physical realm, all of which conform to natural laws, are products of what must be an omniscient Mind. And inasmuch as He preceded the universe He created, He is not part of His creation as the pantheists would assert; rather, He transcends it. And remember, Einstein was not given to figures of speech. When he was arguing with other physicists about quantum mechanics and he said, "God does not play dice with the universe," he meant exactly what he said, and said exactly what he meant.

TRYPHOID: Even if what you're saying is true, the God you're describing is a far cry from the so-called God of Abraham. I am quite certain that Einstein did not believe in a God human beings can pray to, a God who meddles in human affairs or intrudes into the physical processes of existence.

GOTTFRIED: Oh, correct. I agree that Einstein was a determinist who not only did not believe in a personal God, he also did not believe in free will either. But you are trying to begin a totally different conversation. I will be extremely happy to discuss with you God's attributes, if you will admit His existence.

TRYPHOID: Absolutely not. There is no need to posit God in order to explain the existence of the universe. There is the theory of the random quantum fluctuation, for example.

GOTTFRIED: Yes, yes, the nonexistent nothing that came from nowhere and became something and then blindly evolved into everything. I would as soon believe the old Norse creation myth of Yggdrasil the World Ash Tree. It would be just as rational, if I may borrow your vocabulary.

TRYPHOID: So you reject evolution?

GOTTFRIED: That isn't what I said. I am saying that, needing something to serve as the point of universal origin but rejecting out of hand the whole idea of a Creator, materialists make up all sorts of empirically improvable things that masquerade as science.

TRYPHOID: But you just spoke disparagingly of evolution. We both know that Christians fought Darwinism tooth and nail, a battle they fortunately lost.

GOTTFRIED: You are, as usual, misrepresenting historical fact. It is true that many Christians in the 19th century, and some in the 20th, rejected the ideas of Darwin on biblical grounds. It is also true that other Christians did not, and that Christianity has produced so vast a variety of exegetical approaches that to characterize any one as normative is, to put it mildly, preposterous. But I thought we were deferring religious specifics to another time.

TRYPHOID: Yes, yes, of course. You were saying that scientists posit explanations of the origins of the universe that cannot be proven. But you also just said that such beliefs needed no proof. You are contradicting yourself.

GOTTFRIED: Not at all. I said that a philosophy does not need to be proven in order to be accepted as a valid thought system, at least until it is tested in application. Philosophy is not science, and science is not philosophy. As it has been said, the purpose of science is to explain how things work. The purpose of philosophy is to explain why things are. Each is valid in its own realm, and invalid in the other's. If I need a missile guidance system repaired or a malfunctioning satellite set to right or a nuclear power plant inspected, I will call in an engineer, not a priest. If I need to explore the meaning of suffering or the nature of virtue or the purpose of life, I will call in a philosopher, not a biologist.

TRYPHOID: You are beginning to display a disturbing degree of wooliness in your thinking.

GOTTFRIED: My thinking is as crystal clear as is possible for the fallible reasoning of a being with a limited intellect. What I am attempting to convey to you, Tryphoid, is that our puny minds cannot even begin to fathom the mystery of existence, to plumb the dark depths of eternity. I am like Einstein's child in the library. Aware of my own profound intellectual limitations, all I can do in all honesty and good conscience is to stand, humbled and trembling, before the ineffable mystery and the awesome majesty of God.

TRYPHOID: Gottfried, my friend, you are an ignorant, superstitious ass.

III – THE CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

- James Madison

The transformation of the United States government from the middle of the 19th century until the present day has been so fundamental and extreme that most people today really have no idea what the government was originally intended to be, nor how it originally functioned. Indeed, the simple historical fact that the Constitution reflected a specific political philosophy with roots in classical civilization is a notion so alien to even the most intelligent of contemporaries that any reference to it is deemed eccentric. But it is true. The men who wrote the Constitution (the "Framers") were for the most part highly educated people, and in the late 18th century that meant people educated in the Classics.[28] And in any discussion of "politics," the starting point must be the man who coined the term, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

"Politics" derives from the Greek word polis, meaning "city." The ancient Greeks lived in city-states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Ephesus, etc., and each city-state developed its own mode of self-governance, its own "political" system. Aristotle had studied most if not all of the governments of the one hundred and sixty-eight Greek cities, and based upon his observations and analyses he composed the first book of political philosophy, entitled simply Politics. Central to his concern (and this applies to other classical political thinkers as well) was the question of how best to balance liberty and security, how best to preserve and protect human freedom while also maintaining safety and order.

The problem of course, is that liberty and security are contradictions. In a society in which human freedom is unlimited, there cannot be security on any level. No force can compel obedience to law, and so therefore no state power can protect one person from another or the country from foreign foes. On the other hand, in a society in which there is complete security, total safety, absolute order, there can be no human freedom at all, because all people would be essentially the subjects of the State. These are, of course, extreme examples. The question considered by political philosophers was how, and to what degree, liberty and security must be limited or compromised in order to make possible the existence of both.

Aristotle's insight was that the most effective form of government for this purpose was one that mixed the three basic political alternatives: rule by one man, that is to say, monarchy; rule by a limited group of wealthy people, that is to say, aristocracy; and rule by a significant majority of the citizenry, that is to say, democracy. Each alternative is prone to corruption and the abuse of power, for monarchy can deteriorate into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into anarchy.[29] But a government that combines elements of all three provides a check on the corruption of all three.

This is what the Framers were thinking when they constructed the federal government. The monarchical element was the President, who was (and is) the ruler of the country, a real ruler, not a figure-head or a ceremonial official, as were the presidents in the 20th and early 21st centuries of Italy, Israel, India, and post-Second World War II Germany, to name a few examples. Alexander Hamilton put it quite simply when he said "Every four years we shall chuse (sic) a king." The aristocratic elements were the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Judiciary. The democratic elements were the House of Representatives and, to whatever degree of popular representation they chose for themselves, the state legislatures.

Let us examine the political structure of the United States as originally conceived from the bottom up. The nature of the electorate varied from state to state, with some (such as Pennsylvania) having at first a very large number of voting citizens while others (such as South Carolina) having a much smaller one. The size of the electorate increased rapidly after the Revolution, and by the middle of the 19th century there was effectively universal white manhood suffrage in every state. But regardless of the nature and extent of voting qualifications, it was from the local level that all power derived. The voters of each state elected the state legislature, and the state legislature chose both the state's senators and the state's electors in the Electoral College, who in turn elected the president. The voters were thus one step removed from the choosing the Senate and two steps removed from choosing the president. The president appointed all federal judges, subject to the consent of the Senate, so that the voters were at least three steps removed from choosing the judiciary, if they could fairly be said to have had anything to do with it at all.

It is for these reasons that it is reasonable in Aristotelian terms to describe the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Judiciary as the aristocratic elements. The people chosen by the state legislatures for these posts were universally part of the upper class of the states, the social and economic elite; and, for the judiciary at least, the appointment was for life. The Aristotelian paradigm is completed with the establishment of the House of Representatives, which was directly elected by the electorate, state by state, in proportion to their respective populations.

A good deal of Aristotle's political ideas were filtered through the writings of a French thinker, Baron de Montesquieu, with whom the Framers were familiar, and who added to the idea of mixed government the concept of mutual constraints derived from distinct functions.[30] This notion was derived logically from the purpose of mixed government, namely the prevention of the concentration, corruption, and abuse of power. For these reasons it is necessary for the creation of law, the enforcement of law, and the interpretation of law to be in separate and distinct hands.

As originally written, the Constitution is as important for what it omits as for what it contains: there is almost no reference to economic matters. In Article I, section 8, Congress is empowered to coin money, borrow money, levy taxes uniform throughout the country, and regulate interstate and foreign trade (though in section 9 internal tariffs are expressly forbidden), and any bill concerning finance must originate in the House. That is the extent of the document's economic content, because the economic system in place in 1787 was what was called capitalism, a system with which government, quite intentionally, had very little to do. Though unknown today and almost entirely forgotten, capitalism was as revolutionary as democracy.

The economic system common in the western world outside the Thirteen Colonies  at that time was mercantilism, a system dominated and directed by the State for the purpose of expanding the wealth (and thus the power) of the ruler and/or the ruling class. (In this regard it has a good deal in common with Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and other Liberal Statist systems.) Under Mercantilism the government created tax-yielding monopolies, imposed internal and external tariffs, manipulated currencies, and restricted the growth of colonial economies. France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, all imposed this system upon their home countries and their colonial empires. The British, however, lacked a well-organized imperial system prior to 1763. They had indeed passed mercantilist laws[31], but they made little effort to enforce them, and the North American colonies ignored them as well.

As the colonies emerged and grew, what they regarded as a natural economic system, i.e., capitalism, grew along with them. Capitalism derives its basic concepts from the Enlightenment idea (itself derived from ancient Greek thought via Augustine and mediaeval Catholic Scholasticism) of natural law.[32] The idea is as follows: natural laws exist and govern the worlds of both nature and society; these natural laws can be discovered and adhered to; in the realm of economics, natural law dictates that the free market of supply and demand, powered by the profit motive and regulated by competition, will generate wealth and raise the general standard of living. This, in a nutshell, is capitalism: and government has very little to do with it beyond insuring a stable currency and protecting the competitiveness of markets.

As noted, the capitalist economy of the British colonies developed with very little interference because British mercantilist laws were neither obeyed nor enforced. But after the 1763 British victory over France and Spain in the French and Indian War, the British began both to enforce these laws and to impose new ones. Many of our merchants found to their sincere surprise that they were actually, de jure, smugglers. It was the British attempt to intrude themselves simultaneously into our political life and economic activities that caused the American Revolution. With our victory and independence, Aristotelian government and capitalism were secured.

With only one questionable financial innovation (the creation of the Bank of the United States during the Washington administration) and one significant reform (the 12th Amendment during the Jefferson administration,)[33] the structure of this system remained intact and unchanged until 1913. During the crisis of the First Civil War, true, President Lincoln expanded executive power to extra-constitutional levels (suspending habeas corpus in Maryland, for example, a direct violation of the Constitution), violating the Constitution in order to save it, as it were.[34] This potentially dangerous precedent, a temporary and improvised response to potentially fatal emergency conditions, had very little effect upon post-war political practice. The structure of government thus remained unchanged, and the political process soon reverted to ante-bellum modes. But one highly significant conceptual change had occurred: in denying the right of states to secede from the Union, and by using military force to enforce that denial, the states had been definitively and irrevocably subordinated to the federal government. "The United States" had previously been a plural noun. (The United States are …) It had now become a singular noun. (The United States is …) This grammatical change is not trivial, it is not minor.  It presages a collectivist mentality.

It is possible in matters of politics (and life in general) to be right for the wrong reasons, and to be wrong for the right reasons. It was right for the Union government to destroy slavery, and it was wrong for the Confederacy to attempt to preserve it; but there was nothing in the Constitution that declared the Union perpetual and denied the right of states to secede, and the 10th Amendment explicitly denied to the federal government any power not specifically granted to it. It must thus be reluctantly conceded that while we certainly applaud the abolition of the detestable institution of chattel slavery, we must simultaneously admit that the Union's forceful prevention of Confederate secession was unconstitutional. At the same time the Confederate attempt to preserve the detestable institution was an absolute moral wrong, but their resistance to federal aggression was a constitutional right. A fundamental change in the nature of the country occurred with the Union victory. The federal government was no longer a creature of the state governments, and federal supremacy was established in fact if not in name.

To this conceptual change was added a structural change four decades later. The term "Progressive Era" was used to describe the time period, reflecting the Liberal Statist mentality that believes all increases in the centralized power of the State are good, and that when this happens, it is "progress."

A word is necessary at this point about "Progressivism" and the "Progressive Era," as Liberal Statist historians affectionately called it. The United States underwent a traumatic social and economic change after the First Civil War, as the American Industrial Revolution led to a rapid and unsettling process of urbanization. Hitherto 90% of Americans lived on farms or in small towns in rural areas, but industrialization, coupled with a massive influx of job-seeking immigrants, led to a dramatic growth of American cities. In the mere thirty-five years between 1865 and 1900, for example, Chicago grew from 39,756 people to 1,698,575; Philadelphia from 155,876 to 1,293,697; Boston from 172,881 to 560,892: Detroit from 75,061 to 285,704; St. Louis from 99,860 to 575,238: and, most dramatically, New York City grew from 696,115 to 3,437,202. The results were not only a dramatic growth of American wealth and American power, but also the emergence of a multitude of new problems which gave the Liberal Statist mentality a golden opportunity to indulge itself in its favorite endeavor, the expansion of the power of the State at the expense of the people.

It is an historical commonplace that in time of economic distress otherwise rational people turn in desperation to irrational alternatives. All free market economies in democracies, if properly organized, are self-regulating and self-correcting.[35] But when new problems arise, causing fear and dislocation, radical ideas that promise immediate redress emerge along with them; and these proposals frequently violate the very principles upon which the entire system is based.

Such was the case with a movement called Populism, which was sometimes referred to as a precursor to Progressivism. Farmers saw crop prices rise dramatically during the First Civil War, and then plummet dramatically thereafter. Rather than recognize the true cause (overproduction because of the introduction of new farm machinery such as the reaper and the binder, bumper crops in Canada, Hungary, and the Ukraine, and a global drop in agricultural income generally), the rural "reformers," who called themselves Populists, found other villains to blame: the banks, who had the temerity to expect loans to be repaid and then to foreclose on farms when mortgages went into default; railroads, who had the audacity to expect to make a profit for transporting crops from farms to markets; the bullion theory of currency, which represented the bizarre idea that money should actually have concrete value; wealthy people, for having more money than farmers did; immigrants in general, and specifically, predictably, the Jews.

The proposed solution? Have the government get into the banking business by lending money to farmers (holding crops as collateral), nationalize the railroads, debase the currency by switching from a gold standard to a gold and silver standard, steal money from the rich, and stop the influx of immigrants to keep out any more Jews. The problem with the proposed solution? It not only had nothing to do with capitalism, it also violated some of its principle tenets.

The Populists (technically, the People's Party) ran a candidate in the 1892 presidential election, and received about one million votes (out of about twelve million), and 22 electoral votes (out of 444.) The Democrats adopted much of the Populist agenda in the elections of 1896 and 1900, especially the currency debasement, and were soundly defeated both times. But the fact that any sizeable number of voters supported these ideas at all was indicative of a dangerous trend that was to become increasingly serious with the passage of time, namely the growing disconnect between the American mentality and both the traditions and the underlying assumptions of American democracy.

Enter the Progressives. Their concentration was on urban problems, but their approach was the same. Problems are caused by villains, and can be solved by an increase in the power of the State so as to combat those villains. Their ideas were fueled by the writings of social critics collectively referred to as Muckrakers, a term which eventually became high praise, but was originally an insult.[36] Their themes were simple: all wealthy people are thieves, all businesses are replete with corruption, all businessmen are liars, all state and local governments are evil (but not the federal government), all religious institutions are tools of the rich, American society is inherently unfair, etc. Their solutions were stunning in their recklessness. Let us concede sincerity of motives, but we must remember what paves the road to hell.

A prime example of this was one of the pet Progressive causes, reforming the civil service by destroying the so-called "spoils system." Whenever an election resulted in a change in the party in power, the new administration fired as many civil servants as possible and filled the positions with its own supporters. ("To the victors belong the spoils.") This practice began in 1801, when the Jeffersonian Republicans replaced the Federalists, occurred again on a larger scale in 1829 when the Democrats replaced the National Republicans (later called the Whigs), and continued without interruption for the next few decades. Increasingly shrill calls for reform (usually voiced by the party that had just lost an election) seemed dramatically vindicated when in 1881 a mentally unstable  man who had supported the Republicans in the 1880 election, and was then not given a job, assassinated the president.[37] Public revulsion led in 1883 to the passage of the Pendleton Act, which created the Civil Service Commission and established the practice of administering civil service examinations. Scoring well on these tests was the means of access to civil service jobs, and the jobs remained in the hands of their holders permanently, regardless of election results. With every passing decade, more and more civil service positions on the federal, state, and local levels were filled in this manner. When the civil service system reached its final form, only the very highest positions (or the very lowest and least important) remained spoils to be handed out. For example, a new president appointed a new secretary of state and new assistant secretaries of state; but the staff of the State Department remained intact.

Applauded at the time as an absolute good, the civil service system had in the long run a horrific result: the creation of an entrenched and immoveable bureaucracy which, as hitherto mentioned, became part of the ruling class. It grew and spread until it reached into every corner of human life, and successive "reforms" over the centuries effectively meant little more than the establishment of yet another branch of the bureaucracy.[38]

The next "reform" targeted the constitutional structure of the government. The self-styled "Progressives," either unaware of or disinterested in the philosophy underlying the Constitution, were offended by the fact that the upper house of the Congress, the Senate, was chosen by the state legislatures and not elected directly by the people. (One of the shibboleths of the time was "fighting corruption," and this was applicable to the Senate issue because many of the state legislatures were corrupt. An even cursory examination of 19th and 20th century politics indicates that corruption was pervasive on all levels, in all branches, in all divisions, and would remain so for as long as the American political system survived, especially in Illinois, New Jersey, and Louisiana.)  Some of the Progressives actually objected to whole concept of a bicameral legislature and of any sort of representation not reflecting a direct enumeration of population;[39] but inasmuch as an amendment proposal sent to the states that would abolish the Senate would have required the permission of the Senate, which was obviously not going to happen, they settled instead for changing the way in which the Senate was chosen.

The consequent 16th Amendment retained the equality of the states in the upper house (two each, regardless of state population,) but provided instead that the electorate in each state elect the two senators directly, rather than having them chosen by the state legislatures. On the surface, this seems a minor, even a positive change, bringing the Senate closer to the people. But the Senate was not designed to be close to the people! It was designed to represent the state legislatures in a federal system!  Senators, hitherto by and large personally unimportant political non-entities (there were exceptions) who were representatives of the state legislatures (as opposed to members of the House, who, representing the people, were dominant figures), now became major political personages.[40] The first principle of Aristotelian government had been abandoned, in the name of "progress."

The presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) saw, again in the name of "progress," an expansion of the power of the federal government undreamed of until that point in history. The two men were quite different from one another. Roosevelt was inclined to executive activism by his mercurial personality and Wilson similarly inclined by ideological conviction (and they also detested each other,) but they shared one cardinal principle which became, in the words of a Libertarian Conservative journalist of the late 20th/early 21st centuries, "the source of much modern mischief"[41]: the president must not merely be the government's chief federal executive officer; he must be a visionary leader whose vision transforms the nation. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, even Jackson and Lincoln, would have been appalled by this notion. But the notion became accepted as tantamount to orthodoxy.

(The slide in the direction of Statism subtly preceded both the 16th Amendment and the often referred to "reign of Roosevelt" by two decades. In 1887, under pressure from state legislatures and populist agitators, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act which created the Interstate Commerce Commission. It was a weak agency designed to prevent secret agreements among railroad companies to fix prices and engage in other activities that interfered with competition. In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared illegal anything that operated "in restraint of trade," i.e., monopolies, trusts, etc.  Both of these laws had their hearts in the right place, and both had solid capitalist assumptions behind them; but they established the dangerous precedent that government can interfere in the way businesses conduct business.)

Roosevelt oversaw further expansions of federal power with willing support of "progressives" in Congress. For the first time the president intervened in a labor dispute, helping to settle a strike largely to the benefit of a labor union.[42] By two laws, the 1903 Elkins Act and the 1906 Hepburn Act, the railroads were effectively deprived of self-management. He mounted assaults upon corporations, supposedly because they were monopolies, but in reality because they were large, wealthy, and powerful. The Roosevelt administration saw 125 million acres of land set aside as a nature preserve. (A noble goal, and the beginning of the conservation movement, but without constitutional warrant.)

It is interesting to note that during this period the "progressives" in many state legislatures adopted some of the old Populist ideas of initiative, referendum, and recall. Initiative refers to the process whereby signed petitions can compel the legislature to vote on a bill that it had not itself introduced; referendum, to the process whereby the voters themselves can pass or defeat a bill; and recall, to the process whereby then voters can undo the result of a previous election. Again, all this seems positive, an expansion of democracy. In reality, it provided a method for well-organized special interest groups to manipulate popular emotions so as to bypass the constitutional process of legislation and election.

After Roosevelt (with a brief Taft interlude) came Wilson, during whose administration the power of the State assumed a larger, ultimately more sinister character. As usual for the "progressives," his goals were laudable; as usual, the methods were questionable; as usual, the results were ultimately destructive.

Under Wilson's leadership, Congress adopted the Populist idea of the government becoming involved in the banking industry via the Warehouse Act of 1916, which authorized loans to farmers using stable crops as collateral. The government became involved in the insurance industry via the Workmen's Compensation Act, with coverage limited to federal employees, but soon extended by state law to state employees and eventually to all employees. The government moved from regulation of interstate commerce to the oversight and investigation of interstate commerce with the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. And the creation of the Federal Reserve System created a federal agency with the power to regulate the money supply in a variety of ways, most importantly the right to print it. The printed money was at first backed by gold, then later by silver, and eventually by nothing at all.

To these congressional and executive actions must be added a fatal error made by the people through their state legislatures, albeit at the behest of Congress. During the First Civil War the federal government had raised much of the money needed to fund the conflict by levying an income tax, a practice which ended when the War did. When a few decades later Congress attempted to reintroduce an income tax, the Judiciary overturned the law because the Constitution specifically prohibited any taxes not proportional to population. In 1909 Congress proposed, and in 1913 the states ratified, the 17th Amendment, which authorized Congress to tax incomes without regard to enumeration. The foolish willingness of the people to accept the income tax was predicated upon the belief that very few of them would actually pay it. As first implemented the income tax was very, very limited, a mere $10 per $4000 earned to a maximum rate of .025%. In other words, in an age when the average worker earned less than $1000 per year, only the extremely wealthy would pay income taxes, and even they would be only lightly touched.

Subsequent events should have been expected, but was not because the people consistently refused to be forewarned that any government promise of fiscal responsibility or limited cost is always at best a self-delusional error, and at worst (which was most common) a bald-faced lie. Within thirty-five years of the ratification of the 16th Amendment, almost every working American was paying income tax. And to make certain that it would be difficult to avoid paying the tax, the government obligated employers to withhold a certain amount of money from each paycheck and send it directly to the federal bureaucracy. The people had thus, through their state legislatures, authorized Congress to plait a noose with which to hang them, and then supinely offered the government their necks.

These dramatic extensions of the power of the State were justified by the claim of "progress," and it is obvious that much of the intent was benevolent. But this fact is irrelevant. The elastic clause would have to be stretched to the breaking point to justify any of this constitutionally; but in the heady, fervid atmosphere of Progressivism, the question was rarely posed and usually ignored. The other extensions of State power, however, were even more dangerous, because they were justified by war.

On Good Friday, 1917, at Wilson's behest, Congress declared war on Germany. The declaration was entirely justified, a response to the German policy of attacking our merchant vessels on the high seas.

But popular reaction to the declaration of war was not overwhelmingly positive. Our immigrant population, first, second, and third generation, included many German-Americans and Irish-Americans, neither of whom were sympathetic to the Allies; our isolationist tradition, going all the way back to Washington in goal and to Monroe in practice, inclined us a "plague on both your houses" mentality relative to European conflicts; there was partisan bickering; and not least importantly, other than vindicating the idea of freedom of the seas, there was uncertainty about what exactly we were hoping to accomplish with victory. To this Wilson responded with the creation of the Committee on Public Information, the purpose of which was in essence to manipulate the emotions of the population so it would support the war effort. In an avowed dictatorship this would have been called a Propaganda Ministry.

Next, Wilson sought to "organize," "coordinate," "restructure" the country to advance the war effort by creating executive agencies with broad powers. The Food Administration coordinated and allocated agricultural resources; the War Industries Board coordinated industrial production for military purposes; the War Finance Board found credit sources to facilitate the conversion of factories to munitions production; and the National War Labor Board kept the workers working and prevented strikes.

Next, Wilson took steps to hobble the opposition. In May of 1917 the Selective Service Act began the process which led to millions of men being pressed into military service, a process that was, needless to say, quite unpopular. The next month the Espionage Act made it illegal to oppose the draft, interfere with it, or "encourage disloyalty." Violators were threatened with 20 years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine. One year later the Sedition Act provided grounds for the prosecution of pacifists and socialists (many socialists were internationalists) and for the censorship of the press. In 1919, in the case of Schenck v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act, citing the "clear and present danger" idea for justifying the violation of human rights. Of course, this precedent allowed the State to decide when it is in danger, as well as the degree to which rights can be violated. This idea was to have fatal consequences a century later.

True, the coming of peace saw the dismantling of the war agencies and a partial return to isolationist policies, but after a relatively tranquil decade (1919-1929), the First Great Depression and the Second World War saw Liberal Statism return with a vengeance, and there was from that point on no turning back.

It should be noted that there was always vocal and serious opposition to these developments, and the struggle of the Liberal Statists for the consolidation of power was condemned by Libertarian Conservatives at every step along the way. But by the early 21st century the cause of freedom was fatally undermined by an intellectual deterioration as profound as the concomitant moral deterioration; and that brings us to our next reflection.

DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHOIDIA

(Location: The Esplanade, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York City)

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoidia my dear! Your uncle Tryphoid told me you would be here today. How pleasant to see you again. There is something I wish to discuss with you.

TRYPHOIDIA: Don't call me "my dear," Gottfried. It objectifies and demeans me. Don't force me to have you arrested as a hate criminal.

GOTTFRIED: Apparently you haven't changed. Still spitting at men who hold the door open for you?

TRYPHOIDIA: And don't caricature me either. I never did that.

GOTTFRIED: Oh, that's right, I was thinking of someone else. But when a man offered you his seat on the public transport, you did punch him and break his nose, didn't you? You were arrested, as I recall.

TRYPHOIDIA: And released, and he was fined by the court.

GOTTFRIED: I didn't know that. Fined for what?

TRYPHOIDIA: Objectifying and demeaning me. Because I am female, he made the presumption that I am a weakling in need of care and deference.

GOTTFRIED: He thought you were pregnant.

TRYPHOIDIA: So what? I wasn't pregnant. I just used to be chubby. And besides, that doesn't excuse demeaning objectification.

GOTTFRIED: Whatever. If you have a few minutes, I'd like to hear your thoughts about something which has been much on my mind. May I buy you a cup of coffee?

TRYPHOIDIA: Don't be condescending. I can buy my own coffee if I want some, which I don't.

GOTTFRIED: Of course, of course. I was wondering if I could ask you about the European-American Deng Society. You have just been appointed regional chairwoman, correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: Chairperson. Why do you insist upon using antiquated, sexist, hateful, exclusionary language? It is very offensive.

GOTTFRIED: Well, because I am offended by language patterns that are designed to diminish precision of meaning. Words should as precise and as explanatory as possible, and I find the ongoing Sinization of English to be a deplorable development.

TRYPHOIDIA: Sinization?

GOTTFRIED: Adoption of Chinese speech concepts.

TRYPHOIDIA: But why? Mandarin Chinese is wonderfully inclusionary. For example, there is only one word for the third person pronoun of either gender or number, the word ta. It means he, she, it, they, him, her, them ...

GOTTFRIED: And that is a deficiency of the Chinese language. The purpose of speech is the expression of thought. Anything that diminishes precision of meaning diminishes the ability to think. The Ministry of Propaganda in the Third Reich was quite adept at this, though the Agitprop ministry in the old Soviet Union was pretty good at it as well. Of course, none of this is comprehendible to anyone, such as you, educated in the contemporary manner.

TRYPHOIDIA: I have no idea what you are talking about.

GOTTFRIED: My point precisely.

TRYPHOIDIA: Gottfried, what do you want?

GOTTFRIED: To discuss the Deng Society with you. Named after Deng Xiaoping, deputy premier of China after the death of Chairman Mao, correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: If you say so.

GOTTFRIED: The purpose of the Deng society is control of population growth, is it not?

TRYPHOIDIA: Among other things. But yes, the rate of population growth globally is approaching crisis proportions. Reproduction must be reigned in for the good of all the other inhabitants of the planet.

GOTTFRIED: All the … what … ?

TRYPHOIDIA: We human beings are not the only inhabitants of the planet, Gottfried, but we are consuming Mother Earth's bounty at an obscene rate, in an obscene manner.

GOTTFRIED: Now I have no idea what you are talking about.

TRYPHOIDIA: Our ancestors enslaved the other animals on the planet, exploited them, slaughtered them, actually ate them. Even now, when very few people are still carnivorous, we are still depleting their numbers by our greedy consumption of what the earth produces.

GOTTFRIED: We are digressing. May we discuss the Deng Society?

TRYPHOIDIA: We are discussing the Deng Society. We must reduce the number of people on this planet in order to make the world safe for the other animals.

GOTTFRIED: The "other animals." Sigh. For the sake of argument, and because I don't want to argue about it, I'll just concede that all animals are created equal. But overpopulation isn't a problem in North America or Europe. Our natural growth rate is .01 percent, every European country except Greece has a negative growth rate, and beyond that whatever population increase occurs in either region is a result of immigration. The population problem is really what used to be called a Third World problem, isn't it?

TRYPHOIDIA: Third World?

GOTTFRIED: Old World, Europe; New World, the Americas; Third World, Asia and Africa. Have you never heard the phrase?

TRYPHOIDIA: No. Stupid phrase.

GOTTFRIED: Perhaps. But my point is that discouraging people in America and Europe from having babies will impact global population increase not one bit. We are already at effectively zero population growth, and the Europeans are going extinct. My goodness, Russia once had a population of almost two hundred million. They're down to sixty!

TRYPHOIDIA: Good. And anyway, I am indifferent to Europe's problems. Maybe it would be better for the whole world if they did go extinct, with all the damage Europe did. Political imperialism, gender oppression, racial inequality, capitalist selfishness, aggressive war …

GOTTFRIED: You can't be serious!

TRYPHOIDIA: I'm dead serious. Can you name one thing the Europeans ever did for the rest of the world, anything they ever contributed to civilization?

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoidia my dear, I do not know how even to begin to respond to that question.

TRYPHOIDIA: I'm warning you, Gottfried, call me "my dear" one more time …

GOTTFRIED: Sorry, sorry. Slip of the tongue. May I redirect our conversation to the topic of my interest? I really did want to discuss something with you, to try to understand your way of thinking.

TRYPHOIDIA: Certainly. I shall strive to enlighten you.

GOTTFRIED: I recall reading that some two hundred years ago the Chinese government sought to limit population growth by inflicting compulsory abortions, forcing women to allow their children to be killed in the womb. Correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: Do you mean involuntary termination of redundant pregnancy?

GOTTFRIED: Phrase it as you will. Am I correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: If you say so.

GOTTFRIED: I do. The Deng Society has advocated compulsory abortion as well. Correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: Do you mean … ?

GOTTFRIED: Yes, yes, yes, the involuntary termination of redundant pregnancy. Am I correct?

TRYPHOIDIA: Yes.

GOTTFRIED: Well. I am curious to know if you have any concept of the moral ramifications of this idea.

TRYPHOIDIA: Of course I do! Producing more human beings than the earth can sustain, at the expense of the other inhabitants of this planet, is the height of immorality!

GOTTFRIED: That isn't what I mean. The privatization of abortion, killing unborn children at home with a pill, has blunted the impact of the act, has it not?

TRYPHOIDIA: What on earth are you talking about?

GOTTFRIED: There was a time when an abortion was more complicated than it is now. A woman had to go physically to a clinic or a hospital and have a surgical procedure. It took time and involved other people. The father or the grandparents might even know about it in advance. It required thought and allowed the opportunity for reflection upon the seriousness of the act. Now it's like taking an aspirin and then forgetting about the headache.

TRYPHOIDIA: My uncle was right, Gottfried. You are a fanatic.

GOTTFRIED: A fanatic! How so?

TRYPHOIDIA: There is nothing serious about terminating a redundant pregnancy, involuntarily or not. It is no different from having an impacted wisdom tooth extracted. It is the business of no one but the person with the impacted tooth, and there is no moral issue involved at all.

GOTTFRIED: So you do not believe that the unborn are human beings?

TRYPHOIDIA: No.

GOTTFRIED: And you do not believe that an abortion constitutes taking a human life?

TRYPHOIDIA: No.

GOTTFRIED: Very well. When, then, does human life begin?

TRYPHOIDIA: Oh, that old argument. Let me give you the old answer: "That's above my pay grade."

GOTTFRIED: Yes, yes, I recall reading the remark. A century and a half ago, wasn't it? A presidential candidate avoiding a direct question? It was an example of political cynicism conjoining moral cowardice. But Tryphoidia, if the possibility exists that life does begin at conception, should we not be careful not to run the risk of committing murder? Should we not say that, to avoid killing innocent people, we should not terminate pregnancies except under extraordinary circumstances?

TRYPHOIDIA: Extraordinary circumstances? Such as … ?

GOTTFRIED: Well, self-defense, for example. Everyone has the right to kill in self-defense. If a woman has reason to believe that she may die in childbirth, she has to right to kill the child in order to save her own life. The law has also always recognized the right to kill in defense of others. Say a woman has six babies in the womb, and her doctors warn her that if all of them are allowed to develop to term, they all may die; but if three are aborted, three others may survive. That would justify an abortion.

TRYPHOIDIA: Listen, Gottfried, I'm not going to argue this with you, because you insist upon missing the point. You have your right to your opinion about this, as I do mine. But you do not have the right to impose your values on me, or on anyone else. I may not have the intricate knowledge of the past that you and my uncle have … and he doesn't think you have any idea what you are talking about, buy the way … but I know the history of the reproductive rights movement. You have heard the phrase, "pro-choice?"

GOTTFRIED: Oh, of course I have.

TRYPHOIDIA: And the right to privacy?

GOTTFRIED: Ditto.

TRYPHOIDIA: What?

GOTTFRIED: I mean, yes, of course.

TRYPHOIDIA: Well, there you go. Believe whatever you want. Your beliefs are your problem. You have the right of privacy to choose what to believe and what not to believe. But don't try to impose your weird beliefs on other people, don't impose your stupid values on them. "Pro-choice" is the key idea here. Everyone has the right to choose in such matters, and everyone else has to mind their own business.

GOTTFRIED: As long as they choose abortion. If a pregnant woman wants to give birth to her baby, you Deng people want her to be forced to kill him.

TRYPHOIDIA: It, not him, not her. It. And we only would mandate it under certain circumstances. For example …

GOTTFRIED: I'm not interested in your examples. It's the whole concept that horrifies me.

TRYPHOIDIA: Fine. Then leave it at what I just said. Pro-choice is the correct position. And allow me to point out that this is a choice you will never have to make. This is a women's issue.

GOTTFRIED: No, it's a human rights issue. And don't think for one moment that the father is unaffected by the abortion of his child.

TRYPHOIDIA: Oh, and you know this from personal experience, do you?

GOTTFRIED: Yes.

TRYPHOIDIA: Oh … I didn't … know.

GOTTFRIED: When I was a very young man I was involved with a very young woman who became pregnant, presumably by me. She informed me that she was going to kill the child, and she did, with my thoughtless support. I was sufficiently young and unreflective at the time to be unaware of the ramifications of what had happened. But with the passage of time, the enormity of the incident began to torment me.

TRYPHOIDIA: Gottfried …

GOTTFRIED: I have been haunted ever since by the amorphous image of that little face, the face whose eyes never opened to see the world, whose lungs never breathed, whose feet never walked upon God's green earth. That child who never had the opportunity to grow to adulthood, to fall in love or think interesting thoughts or know all the joys and sorrows of life. That life that was never lived.

TRYPHOIDIA: Get over it Gottfried. It was the woman's choice, not yours. It was none of your business. Her choice.

GOTTFRIED: Her choice. Okay, let's look at it this way. It's 1850, and you and I are sitting on the porch of a plantation house outside Charleston, sipping mint juleps as my slaves are working in the cotton field. You're from the north. You say to me, "I think slavery is a disgusting institution. Buying and selling human beings, ripping families apart, not to mention slave owners raping their slaves, it's all unspeakably loathsome. But if you want to buy and sell human beings, if you want to own and abuse enslaved people … well, I don't want to impose my values on you. You see, I'm pro-choice on slavery." Does that make moral sense to you?

TRYPHOIDIA: What does this have to do with reproductive rights? Slavery was obviously a moral wrong, but you're trying to equate things that aren't equal.

GOTTFRIED: Very well, are you familiar with the expression, the Holocaust?

TRYPHOIDIA: Sure.

GOTTFRIED: Okay. Let's say you and I are having a beer in some beer hall in Munich in 1943. You're a Nazi and I'm not. I say to you, "I think this murder of the Jews is just monstrous. Saying that they're sub-humans, that they're vermin, Rassenfeinden, that it's right to exterminate them, I think it's all unspeakably horrible. But if you disagree with me, if you want to slaughter the Jews … well, I don't want to impose my values on you. You see, I'm pro-choice on the Holocaust."

TRYPHOIDIA: An idiotic analogy. For one thing, the Holocaust didn't happen.

GOTTFRIED: Oh, God!

TRYPHOIDIA: It didn't. The whole thing was made up by the Jews as part of a plot to steal land from the Arabs, and they suckered us and the Europeans into going along with the scheme. After Israel was destroyed the Algerians found lots of documentary evidence in Jerusalem that proves it.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoidia, stop. Just stop.

TRYPHOIDIA: And anyway, the analogy is invalid anyway. The Jews are human beings.

GOTTFRIED: So are the unborn.

TRYPHOIDIA: No they're not. And that goes to my point. If you want to believe that embryos are human beings, go ahead. Believe that pancakes are human beings if you want to, for all I care. Believe any half-assed nonsense you want. But mind your own business. Don't try to impose your nitwit values on other people.

GOTTFRIED: I believe that life is sacred. Is that a nitwit value?

TRYPHOIDIA: Of course not. I believe that life is sacred, all life, not just human. I just don't believe that embryos and fetuses are human lives.

GOTTFRIED: But aren't you an atheist like your uncle.

TRYPHOIDIA: Sure. So?

GOTTFRIED: So how can you believe that anything is sacred?

TRYPHOIDIA: Gottfried, you are such an ignorant bigot.

GOTTFRIED: No, Tryphoidia, I just know what words mean. I don't have an Orwellian bone in my body.

TRYPHOIDIA: An Or … what… ?

GOTTFRIED: Sacred. Sanctity. Sanctus. It means holy, and holiness is an attribute of God. That which is sacred partakes of the holiness of God. Life is sacred because it is God's gift, because God Himself is Life Itself. Aquinas explains it with unimpeachable succinctness in the Summa.

TRYPHOIDIA: Aqui … what … ?

GOTTFRIED: Everything that is alive, lives because of God, and thus all life is sacred.

TRYPHOIDIA: Hypocrite. You are not a vegan. Apparently you have no problem with the idea of killing animals.

GOTTFRIED: Killing an animal is not the same as killing a human being. All that lives has a spirit, but only man has a soul.

TRYPHOIDIA: Oh, and a woman doesn't, I suppose?

GOTTFRIED: That's not what I mean, and you know it. But I suppose I must apologize for my antiquated, non-inclusional language.

TRYPHOIDIA: Apology accepted. But your distinction between human life and animal life is irrational. Life is life.

GOTTFRIED: The creation story in Genesis …

TRYPHOIDIA: The creation myth in Genesis.

GOTTFRIED: Whatever. The creation account makes it clear that man … pardon, humanity is a special creation. You don't need to believe that the Genesis account is historically, scientifically, literally true to understand the transcendent truth it imparts. Everything in the universe was created by God's spoken command … let there be this, let there be that … but out of gross matter God brought forth the human race … which is what is meant by "God formed man from the dust of the ground" … and God infused our material bodies with His divine essence … "And God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

TRYPHOIDIA: Spare me your superstitions. Listen, Gottfried, I have to go. I've wasted enough time with you. You are an incorrigible fool, and any conversation with you is a waste of breath.

GOTTFRIED: Ah, yes, liberal tolerance on parade. Where do you have to go? The latest "save the newts" rally?

TRYPHOIDIA: Don't be any stupider than you have already been. I have to attend an anti-urinal meeting.

GOTTFRIED: An anti ... what?

TRYPHOIDIA: Anti-urinal. We're lobbying Congress to remove urinals from all public buildings.

GOTTFRIED: What on earth for?

TRYPHOIDIA: When men stand to urinate while women sit, it reinforces patriarchal prejudices. In the interest of defending human equality, everyone must be compelled to sit while urinating.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoidia, my dear, I fear that you have altogether too much time on your hands.

TRYPHOIDIA: That's one "my dear" too many. Gottfried, you are an ignorant sexist pig. I am going to have you arrested.

IV – THE END OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

Education is a tool whose effect depends upon who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

-Josef Stalin

After the fall of the Ramone Empire a spaniel named McClellan circumcised the earth with a 300 foot clipper.

- a high school sophomore, c. 1990

Before continuing to trace the decay of American democracy it is necessary to make a brief detour to an examination of education. It is obvious that the decay of morality and the corruption of government would have been, if not impossible, at least less likely if the American people had been aware of what was happening. But this would assume maintenance of the level of education that had been acquired by previous generations. "An educated populace," Jefferson once said, "is the surest defense against tyranny." The corollary is that an uneducated populace is the surest invitation to it. For the first three centuries of our colonial and national existence, the purpose of education was the creation of a pious, responsible, loyal population; the purpose of higher education was the perpetuation of the educated elite who would control and direct the political process, staff the universities, maintain the courts, and keep the pulpits full and functioning. In the middle of the 20th century, this all began to change.

As we have done previously in this series of reflections, we must begin with what was before, before examining what came after.

In the colonial period, and well into the early national period, education was largely informal and unorganized. In colonial Massachusetts, towns with over a modest population were obliged to provide elementary education (which is to say, the ability to read and write, and do simple arithmetic procedures.) This was a byproduct of the Calvinist mandate that all Christians be able to read the Bible, as well as the capitalist need to keep accurate financial records. Similarly, the Quaker influence in Philadelphia led to the inception of a rudimentary public school system. But in most of the colonies, and most of the states, education was intermittent, desultory, and rudimentary. The average school was the "little red schoolhouse" of nostalgic myth. The "school year" was whatever, whenever. The "pupils" were of all ages between five and ten. The "teacher" was a teenaged girl, marginally educated herself, who was serving this social function and earning her pittance salary until she married, to be then replaced by yet another teenaged girl. Attendance was spotty, records non-existent, curricula undreamed of; and this was quite reasonable, given the cultural realities. Most Americans were farmers, and most of those who weren't were merchants. One needed to be able to read and write and keep books. Only the elite, professionals, clergymen, and their children (and the unusually intelligent yeoman child exception) would study Latin and Greek and Mathematics, and then go on to Harvard, William and Mary, the University of Virginia and the others. Most people, even educated people, did not do this. A lawyer did not go to law school; he studied law under a lawyer. A physician may or may not have studied medicine in a college, and might well have been trained by another physician. A clergyman may earn a Th.D., or an M.Div., or not. In short, education above the level of basic literacy was woefully unorganized but also generally unnecessary. Nonetheless, disorder always elicits the desire for organization.

The first state government to address this situation was Massachusetts, the state which in the colonial era had in essence created the idea of public education in the first place. The state legislature created in 1837 the State Board of Education and appointed as its first secretary a remarkable fellow named Horace Mann, who lived from 1756 to 1859.[43] To Mann can be attributed the basic outlines of the American education system as it exists, at least in theory, until today. But of course it has long since ceased to serve its original purpose.

Mann believed in what used to called civic education, i.e., the creation of a body of responsible citizens who would be the bedrock of the Republic. To that end he proposed, and the state legislature implemented, the first comprehensive system of public education in human history, and it was in its inception a truly elegant thing. There was to be a school year of specifically delineated parameters, tied, of course, to the growing seasons. One of the reasons that pupils attended school sporadically was that they were needed on the farm, so Mann proposed a school year that exempted the entire summer and provided extra days off in the fall and spring, so that sowing and harvesting needs would be accommodated. There was to be a mandatory school age, incumbent upon all families, from age 6 to age 12, with an official who would enforce attendance (the "truant officer.") Most importantly, the teacher was to be an educated and licensed individual, not a girl waiting to get married. Mann proposed (and, again, the state legislature implemented) the idea of the "Normal School," which was essentially a two year college that would train teachers.[44] After two years of taking and successfully passing courses in civics, literature, mathematics, natural science, and art, the teacher would be granted a state license to teach. She (they were almost all women) would also receive a salary upon which she could actually support herself, as opposed to enough money to endow a hope chest.

Mann's system was soon adopted by the other states, and was thus able to provide structured education to the general public across the nation. Prior to the First World War the average American attended school until graduation from what came to be called elementary school. A much smaller number went on to high school, which was regarded as unnecessary unless the individual was planning a career requiring advanced skills (e.g., accountancy, stenography, nursing, etc.,) or planning to go on to college. As previously, very few people went to college. True, lawyers now had to go to college before law school and physicians to college before medical school, but college was largely a reserve of the wealthy elite.

Between the first two world wars, high school attendance increased but high school graduation still did not exceed 25 percent of the population. The Second World War, or rather the return to peace after it, changed all that, dramatically, irreversibly, and though unperceived at the time, subversively.

Hoping to cushion the return of sixteen million men from the armed forces to a workforce that could not possibly absorb all of them at once, Congress passed in 1946 the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly called the G.I. Bill. This law provided, among other veterans' benefits, federal subsidies to pay for college tuition. Designed as a way of allowing a slow and incremental reintegration of veterans into the economy, the G.I. Bill actually revolutionized American society by altering fundamentally the nature of American education. In the reciprocal nature of the market economy, a demand will create a supply, but a supply will also elicit a demand. In this instance, the sudden surge in availability of college tuition money caused colleges to sprout like mushrooms, and grown men whose fathers probably did not even attend high school now found themselves college freshmen. It was inevitable that as education spread, becoming part of a competitive market, its quality would decline.

This seems to contradict the basic capitalist assumption that competition improves the quality of the commodity being produced, but this is true only for material commodities that can be measured, subjectively or objectively, as successes or failures. Education is not such a commodity. For one thing, there really is no bottom line, as it were, because education is simultaneously a process and a result, and the result is measurable only in comparison with other similar results. As education began to decline in quality, schools (public, private, and parochial)[45] experienced the same deterioration of assessment: a high standard of achievement was expected, but a minimum achievement level was accepted, and that minimum eventually became the norm. That lowered norm necessitated a lower minimum, which then in turn became the norm. This process continued sporadically but relentlessly, until it became possible in some parts of the country to graduate from high school without being able to write a coherent series of paragraphs or read a serious book.

A few (rounded) numbers tell the story:

As can be seen from these figures, more and more people were being "educated," that is to say, attending high schools and colleges and graduating from them. The expectation that this dramatic increase in graduates would not diminish the level of educational achievement was derived from an article of faith, not from empirical analysis.  That article of faith was that, given the political fact of human equality, there must be equality of achievement across the board in school. Any examination which showed disparate results for any race or ethnicity, or for either gender, is obviously a flawed examination. Therefore, in order to assure equality of outcome, the methods of evaluation were increasingly broadened and cheapened to the point at which evaluations were functionally meaningless.

Any of the states of the Union, to use an old phrase, could serve as a paradigm for this deterioration; let us examine one state, New York, as a prime example.

By the middle of the 20th century New York had developed an admirable trifurcated public high school system. Uniform elementary education provided all students with the same basic curriculum in reading, writing, arithmetic, civics, general science, art, and music. By the time children reached 8th grade, however, their individual aptitudes and abilities had become manifest, and when they began high school they (or their parents, really) were offered three different types of education leading to three different types of diploma. The general diploma was designed for children whose future course was as yet unplanned. The curriculum for this diploma continued core general studies (English, history, some math, some science, art, music) with the addition of practical skill-developing activities such as woodworking, vehicle repair, draftsmanship, culinary skills, child care, home budget management,  and the like. (In general terms, "shop" was for boys and "home economics" was for girls.) The commercial diploma, for children who seemed destined for business careers on the less than managerial level, provided courses in stenography, bookkeeping, typing, etc., in addition to the same core general studies of the general diploma.

The college-bound high school student, always a minority in this trifurcated system, would undertake the more rigorous academic program, which led to what was called a Regents' diploma.[46] (The Board of Regents was the supervisory body of the public school system, though the Regents' diploma could also be earned in a private/parochial school.) The "Regent-level student" would take harder, more intensive courses in English (literature and composition), history (World and American), mathematics (Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Calculus), and science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, perhaps Geology or Meteorology), and at least one foreign language (the most popular being French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew, in that order.) Each course of study culminated in a Regents' Examination, and to earn the Regents' Diploma the student needed to pass a minimum of at least eight (one cumulative four-year exam in Literature and Composition, one in World History, one in U.S. History, one cumulative three-year exam in a foreign language, at least two in Science and at least two in Math.)

The system worked quite well, until some people began to question the elitist mentality they claimed was reflected in the sub-division of the student body, essentially creating an upper, middle, and lower class of students. The New York Board of Regents responded by creating another set of exams they entitled "State-Wide Exams," designed as required tests for the non-Regents level students, less intensive tests on history, composition, math and science, as well as new Regents' exams in stenography and accounting. This began to blur, perhaps rightly, the distinction between the academic and commercial programs. Concomitant with the rapid growth of colleges noted above, colleges also began to offer commercial programs leading to a bachelor's degree. Things seemed to be going well.

But the decay had already begun with, as usual, the noblest of intentions. Reluctant to bruise the self-esteem of children who were performing poorly, elementary schools began in the 1970's to engage in "social promotion," which meant promoting children from one grade to the next even if they had not mastered the skills and knowledge required for true promotion. The negative impact was cumulative. If, for example, a six year old had not reached the expected first grade reading and arithmetic level, he would be promoted to second grade anyway. The problem was that having not mastered first grade, he would be lost in second grade, but would then be promoted at years' end to third grade anyway. Eventually reality would catch up with make-believe, by which time the child might be both uneducated and uneducable. By the end of elementary school, an indeterminate but quite large percentage of children were incapable of doing high school level work, but found themselves in high school anyway. No high school would be willing to see half their students not graduate or drop out, so standards were further eroded, and the erosion was passed on to the colleges.

Education Departments and their professors in colleges, teachers' unions, and the omnipotent education bureaucracy, innocent of self-criticism, immune to public pressure, and unwilling to address root causes, thought that rearrangement of sequence would help solve the problem. Attention must be paid, they reasoned, to the different levels of ability at different ages. So elementary school, grades 1 through 8, was divided into grades 1 through 6, with grades 7 and 8 becoming junior high school. This did not help. The next shift was to make grades 7, 8, and 9 middle school (in some places still called junior high), with high school becoming grades 10, 11, and 12. Didn't help. Then high school was restored to grades 9-12 and middle school became grades 6-8. Didn't help.  This was, as the old saying went, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.[47] By the early 2000's the original cause of the problem, the practice of social promotion, was dying out, but an entire generation of children had been irreparably damaged by it.

Other corrosive factors were, of course, at work at the same time, in particular in the history curricula. The original purposes of studying history (preparing children for responsible citizenship, seeking lessons in the past to apply to the present, etc.) was replaced via the "self-esteem" movement by the goal of making children feel good about themselves, and that meant injecting ethnic, racial, and gender perspectives into the curriculum wherever possible. There being just so much information that any child can absorb, this meant removing other material that did not serve this purpose. (The acquisition of factual knowledge was soon to become irrelevant, as we shall see momentarily.) Students would be taught about Crispus Attucks and not Paul Revere, Abigail Adams and not Samuel Adams, Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass and not U.S. Grant, Amelia Earhart and not Charles Lindbergh. The emphasis was also upon the "politically correct" (i.e., Liberal Statist) heroes: W.E.B. DuBois and not Booker T. Washington, Betty Friedan and not Mother Theresa, etc.

The movement toward irrelevancy was not limited to history, of course. Science began to de-emphasize scientific theory and emphasize what was called "practical" science. We cannot explain what this meant, inasmuch as all science is practical, but the topical shift implies the change in purpose and perspective: How can we save the earth from the global warming for which the United States is largely responsible?[48] How can we keep AIDS from spreading without abstaining from sexual activity of any and all kinds? How can people be stupid enough to believe in God? In literature, required reading was redefined on racial and gender lines, with the irrelevant "dead white European men" (or DWEBs) being largely excluded. This meant effectively eliminating almost the entire western literary tradition.

In the late 1980's another of the many pressure groups insisting upon changes in keeping with their prejudices declared that almost all academic distinctions be done away with. If the schools are doing their jobs properly, every student should be able to pass Regents' exams because, of course, human equality presupposes equality of outcome, and no one dare challenge either the assumption or the conclusion. So a new system was developed and implemented in the 1990's.

The new system required for high school graduation passage of a specific number of Regents' exams. Only the developmentally disabled, the mentally retarded, the autistic, were exempted from the requirements. The change was introduced slowly. At first a new Regents' exam-style test, the Regents' Competency Test, was administered as an alternative to the Regents' examination, but this was temporary and was phased out within a decade. From that point on, all students wishing to earn a high school diploma had to take and pass Regents' exams in English, history, math, a foreign language, and science.

But, needless to say, if the goal is for everyone to pass Regents' examinations, the method is to create Regents' examinations that everyone can pass. A high grade on such an exam was still an achievement, but the grading procedure was so skewed in the direction of passage, and the amount of knowledge needed was so scant, that the tests were almost impossible to fail. By the second quarter of the 21st century, many people who were receiving high school diplomas were functionally illiterate and unfit for any productive endeavor; and, of course, they then went on to college.

We have concentrated on the New York experience, but similar experiences afflicted all other state education systems.[49] Occasional warnings and reforms had temporarily positive effects, but the general trend was downward, as the minimum became the norm and the new norm mandated a new minimum. The rot worked its way upward from level to level, until eventually even a college degree was not indicative of any true academic achievement. In most colleges, especially in the so-call Ivy League schools, grades lower than B- were rare. Some critics began to refer to the "Ivies" as the "almost impossible schools": almost impossible to get into, almost impossible to pay for, almost impossible to flunk out of. In most public colleges, a majority of students needed to take remedial courses before they qualified for actual college course work. Needless to say, the remedial courses, and the actual college course work, were almost impossible to fail.

While all of this was happening, what can only be described as special interest pressure groups began to buffet what was left of learning. In many of the major cities which served as magnets for immigrants, the polyglot[50] nature of the student body led to three developments, only one of which had positive results. That was the implementation of programs entitled "English as a Second Language (E.S.L.)," which sought through the immersion method to help immigrant children learn English. It was generally successful. But the other two innovations, Bi-Lingual Education and Non-English Testing, benevolent though they were in intent ("the road to hell, etc…), proved self-defeating in the first instance and prohibitively expensive in the second.

The idea behind Bi-Lingual Education was that a classroom of children speaking the same foreign language would be taught in that language while also developing English language skills. The reality was that, for example, a classroom of Urdu-speaking Pakistani children speaking Urdu and being taught by a teacher who spoke Urdu would, well, have a class conducted in Urdu; few English language skills were developed. It had long been known that learning the English language was the most important adaptive behavior in the process of assimilation into American society; Bi-Lingual Ed retarded and sometimes completely prevented that process. It was a particular problem for Spanish-speaking children, because the large urban population concentrations of their ethnicity and the proximity of their places of national origin reduced both the need and the desire to assimilate.

With similar motives, the education establishment succumbed to immigrant pressure to have testing done in the native language of the child, whatever that language happened to be. (It should be noted that immigrants, especially illegal aliens, were important supporters of the Democratic [Liberal Statist] Party, which controlled most large municipalities.)  As a result, states with standardized tests were obligated to prepare translations of each test into dozens of languages, and were also obligated to hire staff conversant with the languages to grade the tests. The absurdity of the situation (not to mention the onerous expense) reached its apogee in 2041 when, in Des Moines, Iowa, a woman named Cassandra Peterson (who was the local chapter chairwoman of the William Shatner Society) insisted that her daughter's 8th grade Earth Science test be administered in Esperanto.[51] It was.

And then began the lawsuits. The convergence of interests between trial lawyers and the civil rights industry had created a salutary alliance that soon degenerated into a national plague. Initially the civil rights movement, rooted in a sincere commitment to social justice, used every available weapon in the fight against racism in all of its forms, and lawyers played an important part in the process. But it soon dawned on the less than scrupulous participants in the movement that money could be made from their endeavors.

The process once perfected was very simple. A "civil rights leader" would establish a charitable advocacy organization which would then target a business or an industry that did not conform to predetermined racial or ethnic expectations, and file a lawsuit against it on 14th Amendment grounds (or on the basis of state law, if possible.) To avoid costly litigation the business would accede to the organization's demands, and, to demonstrate its commitment to social justice, would also make a generous monetary donation to the organization. The organization, of course, paid a salary to the "civil rights leader" who ran it, a rather generous salary generally speaking. Under any other circumstance this practice would be called by its rightful name: extortion, more popularly called the protection racket. But by the late 20th century it had become impossible to say anything negative about any prominent "civil rights leader," because to do so would immediately brand the speaker as a racist by the Liberal Statist mass media.

But racism as a volatile issue had been largely dissipated by the early 21st century for three unexpected reasons. One was the tremendous social, political, and economic progress made by black Americans. The obvious examples of this, of course, were the presence of black mayors, governors, representatives, senators, cabinet members, and in 2009 a black president. But beyond the obvious, black people were increasingly staffing hospitals and running law firms, holding professorships and owning businesses, producing films and publishing books and, needless to say, filling less exciting roles in the normal lives of middle class people. Under these circumstances, constant harping on white racism rang quite hollow.

The second reason was that responsible black leadership, while still misguidedly calling for expanded tax-based State programs, nonetheless insisted that blaming all of the remaining problems of black America upon white racism was not only incorrect, it was self-defeating. The biggest problems facing the still distressed segment of the black population were unmarried teenagers having babies, drug abuse, and leaving school without an education, none of which had anything to do with white racism.[52] Many responsible black leaders decried the inferior excuse for education inflicted upon children in urban areas, but the intransigence of the teachers' unions and the politicians dependent upon them obstructed any real effort at reform. Thus the collapse of morality leading to a plague of illegitimacy, the commitment of the Generation of Vipers to hedonist self-indulgence leading to a plague of recreational drug use, and the general collapse of education itself made it impossible to deal with the real problems confronting black America.

The third reason that racism was ceasing to have any significance in American society was the increase in what was once called "interracial marriage" (or, to be more precise, interracial procreation, since marriage was dying out.) This was once called "miscegenation," and was illegal in many of the states of the Union until the Supreme Court overturned laws barring it.[53] By the late 1990's interracial marriage/procreation was becoming more and more common, which led to an interesting and significant change in the census. Until 2000, when asked about their race on the census form respondents were given the choice of white, black, Asian, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, or "none." In 1990, 9,800,000 people declared themselves to have no race, which is of course absurd. Some people resented the question, some people took issue with the concept of race; but others were of mixed racial background and could not thus answer the question as posed. In the 2000 census, for the first time people were able to choose "two or more races," and 6,800,000 did so. In the census of 2010, the figure had risen to 12,300,000; in 2040, 25,000,000; in 2050, 43,000,000; in 2040, 58,000,000; and in 2050, the last census to be conducted gave a figure of 73,000,000 Americans who were of mixed racial background. The racial issue had been settled by eliminating race itself.

This discussion of race relations is not a digression, because though race had disappeared, the civil rights industry and its lawyers had not. Someone had to sue someone over something in order to fill the pockets of the trial lawyers; and state education departments, not to mention the Federal Department of Education, disposed of hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Thus it was that in 2063 the case of Raines v. the State of Connecticut came before the Supreme Court, having worked its way up from the lower state courts. It was a straightforward 14th Amendment argument, centering on the idea that to deny equal access to the benefits bestowed by education to any group was a violation of the equal protection clause. This idea had long been accepted as axiomatic. But the Raines case took the logic a step further: any required examination that tested factual knowledge was, in fact, discriminating against people with bad memories (and that by extension such people deserved financial compensation for the suffering they had endured.) By a narrow ruling, 5 to 4, the Court sided with the plaintiff. From that point on across the nation, state education departments, wishing to avoid costly lawsuits, committed themselves both to generous payments to aggrieved individuals and to academic testing that excluded any assessment of knowledge. For example, instead of asking on a Physics test, "What is the general theory of relativity?", the test would ask the student, "Look up and write down the general theory of relativity," which he would then look up in an available source and copy onto the test.

In 2085, another case, Pratt v. Wyoming, it was argued that mandating written answers to questions discriminated against people with deficient writings skills. From that point on all tests were multiple choice, expressed in quasi-sentences instead of what used to be standard scientific composition. On the 2088 doctoral exam in Physics from Princeton University, we find the following question:

Look up the answer to the following question:

Isaac Newton's law of gravity is:

A:  F equals G times m1 plus m2, with d2 under the m1 plus m2

B:  E equals mc squared

C:  a squared plus b squared equal c squared

D: What goes up must come down

By the end of the 21st century, education up to the graduate school level had been transformed into nothing more than knowing how to look things up on electronic media. If a student had forgotten how to do this, a facilitator would be assigned to assist him.

The impact of this ruling upon not only education but upon American society was nothing short of catastrophic. Within a generation, medical students seeking licensing could be tested on technical skills, but not on medical knowledge. Scientific research came to a grinding halt in the United States, as engineers ceased to know anything about physics or mathematics. Literary criticism, art history, music history, history itself, all already endangered, ceased to exist. But at least education was fair and everyone was equal.

Thus it was that when American liberty was destroyed and the Constitution perverted into a convenient tool for the rulers, the people did not notice. They did not understand what they were losing, because they no longer understood what they once had.

DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHOIDIDES[54]

(Location: Riker's Island City Jail, New York City)

TRYPHOIDIDES: Uncle Hugo? Hi. It's me.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoidides, my dear boy! I'm so happy to see you! Thank you for the visit. I'm glad you've come, even if I'm not exactly in a condition to entertain visitors.

TRYPHOIDIDES: I know. Jail is awful. I'm so sorry my cousin had you arrested.

GOTTFRIED: As am I. Tryphoidia is, to put it mildly, easily excitable. Still, I should have known better than to address her as "my dear." I should have been more cautious.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Cuz is a jerk.

GOTTFRIED: No, my boy, she is misguided, that's all. She means well.

TRYPHOIDIDES: You're too kind. I mean, really, not as a compliment, you're too kind. Dad tells me that you always say the path to mythic torment is paved with worthy but misguided motives.

GOTTFRIED: That's … close. Anyway, how are you?

TRYPHOIDIDES: Okay, I guess.

GOTTFRIED: Any news of Tryphoid?

TRYPHOIDIDES: Dad's in Lourdes, overseeing the demolition of the shrine. You know what he's like.

GOTTFRIED: Yes, sadly, I do. But, "Okay, I guess." What does that mean? What's the problem?

TRYPHOIDIDES: Oh, it's nothing.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphie …

TRYPHOIDIDES: Oh, it's my girlfriend D'Neetra. We argue all the time. It's very depressing.

GOTTFRIED: What do you argue about?

TRYPHOIDIDES: Race. She's such a racist. It's terrible.

GOTTFRIED: What is the nature of her racism?

TRYPHOIDIDES: She hates white and yellow monochromes.

GOTTFRIED: White and yellow monochromes?

TRYPHOIDIDES: People who aren't racially mixed, people who are only white or only yellow.

GOTTFRIED: Monochromes! That's a new one to me. Racism in the past was always one race hating other races, but hating people because they aren't of multi-racial ancestry … well, as I just said, that's a new one to me.

TRYPHOIDIDES: I just don't get this whole racism thing. D'Neetra says some really bizarre things, like that people who are only yellow are mean and sneaky, dishonest and arrogant. And that people who are only white are selfish and nasty, violent and conceited. She goes on and on about slavery and racial segregation, about China's hege … what's the word ..?

GOTTFRIED: Hegemony.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Yeah, hegemony. And she hates them all, really hates them. The things she calls them! Chinks and Japs, Honkies and Binoes, Slants and …[55]

GOTTFRIED: I know the words, my boy. No need for the entire list.

TRYPHOIDIDES: And don't get her started on the Jews!

GOTTFRIED: I certainly won't.

TRYPHOIDIDES: She said to me this morning that at least I had some Native American blood, so I wasn't like a total Bino.

GOTTFRIED: How fortunate for you. Mohawk, isn't it?

TRYPHOIDIDES: Onondaga. One-sixteenth.

GOTTFRIED: That's amusing, my boy. One-sixteenth used to be the magic number.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Magic number?

GOTTFRIED: Yes, the magic number for racial definition.

TRYPHOIDIDES: I don't follow.

GOTTFRIED: Okay, let me begin the long story of race in America, if you have the time to listen.

TRYPHOIDIDES: The time? Gee, Uncle Hugo, we both have the time. I have nothing else to do, and you're in jail.

GOTTFRIED: Good point. Very well. In 1619, the same year the Virginians created the first representative legislature in the Western Hemisphere, they also began to import African slaves.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Why?

GOTTFRIED: Because they needed a reliable labor force for the expanding tobacco economy. Indentured servants, not to mention the very few free laborers, were only temporary expedients. When the Europeans took control of the Americas they attempted to reduce the Indians …

TRYPHOIDIDES: The who?

GOTTFRIED: Sorry. They attempted to reduce the Native Americans to some form of involuntary servitude. The closest they came was peonage in Spanish America …

TRYPHOIDIDES: Pee on what?

GOTTFRIED: Never mind. It isn't important. What is important is that Negroes began to be imported to North America as slaves.

TRYPHOIDIDES: What are Negroes?

GOTTFRIED: Sigh. Let's take a detour into Anthropology. Back in the 19th and 20th centuries scientists used to classify people in five distinct racial groups. Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid, Pygmoid, and Australoid, or, more commonly, Caucasians, Negroes, Mongolians, Pygmies, and Australian Aborigines. Caucasians, or whites, became dominant in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the Negroes in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Mongolians in Central Asia and East Asia. These three groups account for ninety-nine percent of the human race. The Pygmies of Central Africa and the Aborigines of Australia, both now extinct, were small, marginal groups.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Why did they become extinct?

GOTTFRIED: For the oldest reason in the world. In the competition for resources, they could not compete effectively. The whites in Australia and the blacks in Africa destroyed the ecosystems the marginal groups depended on, and eventually they just ceased to exist. Oh, there may be some genetic traces of them here and there in the world population today, but as distinct races, they are gone.

TRYPHOIDIDES: That's too bad.

GOTTFRIED: It is, because every culture has unique qualities that enrich our common human culture. But it is, unfortunately, a natural process, a form of natural selection, evolution, if you will. I'm getting off the topic. The important point here is that these races are distinguished from each other by soft tissue differences such as nose, lip, and eyelid shape, hair texture, and, of course, skin color. (And stature, in the case of the Pygmies.) None of these differences are essential qualities, none of them are relevant in any substantive way. Racists talk about bloodlines and such things, but if you needed a blood transfusion, you could use blood from anyone with the same blood type. There is no such thing as AB negative Negro blood, or type O Caucasian blood. If you needed an organ transplant, you could get the organ from an Icelander, a Korean, or a Zulu. No difference. A human being is a human being is a human being.

TRYPHOIDIDES: So what you're really saying is that race is unimportant?

GOTTFRIED: I'm saying that in every way other than simple aesthetics, race doesn't exist at all. But racists of all complexions focus in on the irrelevant trivia and construct racist system on them. So when slavery was brought to Virginia it was inflicted only upon black Africans. They looked different, so they must be different, and presumably inferior. Your girlfriend is perpetuating this kind of idiocy, in a new and bizarre direction. Purity of so-called bloodline used to be the cardinal principle of racism. To D'Neetra, inferiority is connected to a lack of this quality.

TRYPHOIDIDES: What does this have to do with the one-sixteenth thing?

GOTTFRIED: Oh, yes. In the American South after the First Civil War a system of racial segregation was established that lasted well into the third quarter of the 20th century. But to segregate the races, you have to define them precisely in law, and so laws were passed declaring anyone with one Negro great-grandparent, that is to say one sixteenth of ancestry, to be legally a Negro:.

TRYPHOIDIDES: That's crazy!

GOTTFRIED: No, it's ignorant. All racism is ignorant. And racism not only poisoned a good deal of American history, it infected all the races. Slavery and segregation, white racism, created a racist backlash among blacks. And black racism, directed at everyone who wasn't black, targeted not only whites, but also East Asians. Koreans who owned businesses in black neighborhoods, Chinese and Japanese who did better in school and in scholarship competition than blacks did, and so forth.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Were East Asians racists? You said it infected all races. What about them?

GOTTFRIED: Yes, in a more subtle way. The traditions of Confucianism, ethical traditions, not religious ones, created a work ethic and a family cohesion that was very fragile among blacks and was dying out among whites. This enabled the East Asians to excel in every field of endeavor, and group success usually breeds a sense of superiority. So by the 21st century we had white people oblivious to racism that was staring them in the face, black people who saw racism everywhere even when it didn't exist, and yellow people looking down at everyone else.

TRYPHOIDIDES: So how did we end up with this anti-Monochromes stuff?

GOTTFRIED: I don't know, my boy. The general trend in America has been the intermixing of the races, and I had assumed that our society had eliminated racial problems by eliminating race itself. Apparently I was wrong, but I think I understand why.

TRYPHOIDIDES: Why?

GOTTFRIED: Because human nature is fundamentally corrupt and easily corruptible. Just when the blight of racism seemed to be on the verge of extinction, it has resurfaced in a different form. We can always count on mankind to live down to its lowest potential.

TRYPHOIDIDES: You sound pessimistic.

GOTTFRIED: No, Tryphoidides, I am a realist. One of the great tragedies of our history, probably the greatest tragedy, is that we have forgotten that our fathers created a political system predicated upon the assumption of human depravity. They were realists too. They knew that government is extremely dangerous, so they created what they hoped would be a government of limited power and internal constraints. And what have we done with it? We have empowered it beyond any limits or controls. Given the opportunity to avoid justice or embrace evil, we will. This is the point St. Paul was making when he wrote that "the good that I would, I do not; the evil I would not, that I do."

TRYPHOIDIDES: Huh?

GOTTFRIED: He meant that he did the bad things he knew he shouldn't do, and did not do the good things he knew he should do. St. Peter explained it even more dramatically. "The dog returns to his own vomit, and the pig is washed, only to wallow in the mire."

TRYPHOIDIDES: That's disgusting.

GOTTFRIED: So at times is human behavior. We are so easily corrupted because we are predisposed to it, and therefore corrupt government is inevitable, because government is made up one hundred percent of human beings. "Power tends to corrupt," Lord Acton said, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

TRYPHOIDIDES: But don't people with power realize that it is corrupting them?

GOTTFRIED: Never. Never. The most corrupt, blood-stained Statist butchers … Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Aziz, Melendez … all thought of themselves as paragons of virtue. Shakespeare explained it with characteristic succinctness in Julius Caesar, act two, scene one: "The abuse of greatness is that it disjoins remorse and power."

TRYPHOIDIDES: Huh?

GOTTFRIED: Never mind, dear boy. Never mind.

V – THE COLLAPSE OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force.

Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearsome master.

-George Washington

The presidential election of 1932 was the turning point in America's political history. To the Liberal Statist mentality it was the first step in the victorious march of Progressivism in the direction of Utopia. To the Libertarian Conservative mentality, it was the preliminary stone precipitating a lethal landslide: the advent of the omnipotent State.

The First Great Depression (1929-1946) began as a recession, a normal part of the business cycle. This term refers to the periodic (and inevitable) fluctuations in the economy. In a free market, goods and services (the supply) are created in response to consumer desires (the demand.) These two components can never be coordinated, not even approximately, because they are the result of hundreds of millions of consumers and hundreds of millions of suppliers interacting in the marketplace. Inevitably, supply and demand will fall temporarily out of synch. This is what is called a recession, one of the three stages of the business cycle. The business cycle can be explained by beginning at any point (which is why it is called a cycle, of course,) so we shall choose "prosperity" as the arbitrary starting point.

During a period of prosperity, demand generally outstrips supply and the suppliers expand their production in an attempt to keep up with it. Thus, production is high, consumption is high, and unemployment is low. Eventually, however, supply will outstrip demand, and inventory will begin to expand. For hypothetical example, in a time of prosperity the manufacturer of widgets[56] will sell, say, a thousand widgets per month. So as not to lose sales by falling behind in production, he will manufacture twelve hundred widgets per month. The difference between what he produces and what he sells is called his inventory, i.e., unsold items he retains for future sale.

Eventually his inventory will grow so large that he will cut back on widget production. What that causes is a reduction of his work force. Widget workers become unemployed, and they no longer have disposable income for the purchasing of goods and services produced and provided by other industries. This causes those other industries to cut back on their production, which means a reduction of their work force, causing an increased reduction of consumption and thus more unemployment.  This, then, is a recession: decreasing production, decreasing consumption, rising unemployment.

Eventually the inventory will be depleted and the widget manufacturer will begin to increase widget production, which means, of course, hiring back widget workers. They now have incomes with which to purchase goods and services, and this has a positive effect upon other industries. This is a period of recovery, i.e., rising production, rising consumption, and declining unemployment. Eventually the recessive conditions disappear, and prosperity returns.

This is an oversimplified description of the business cycle, to be sure. It does not include the ramifications of the growth of the service sector as against the manufacturing sector, and does not describe the impact of international economic conditions upon this rudimentary description. But it is nonetheless basically accurate.

Part of what happened in 1929 was a normal downturn in the business cycle, but it was exacerbated by a number of other factors. Over-speculation in the stock market, facilitated by lax purchase and sale procedures, destabilized the market and led to its collapse in October of that year; commercial banking and investment banking were not separate, so that a crisis in one could easily cause a crisis in the other; and farms were mortgaged to the hilt. A mood of desperation descended upon the nation, and the administration of President Herbert Hoover was unable to engender optimism.

Hoover was a traditional man with a traditional perspective on politics and economics. He was well aware that there was unrest in the country, but he believed (correctly) that the self-correcting mechanism of the free market would in the long run restore order and stability. The oft-repeated huffy response of a contemporary crack-pot economist that "In the long run we are all dead," misses the point. The market is self-correcting, if it is left alone. No one can predict how long the self-correction will take at any point in time, people will experience distress, and it can be argued that government action to relieve that stress is acceptable. But temporary relief must not obstruct market forces. Hoover understood this. His successor did not.[57]

Franklin Roosevelt (president, 1933-1945) shared his fifth-cousin Theodore's charisma and lack of respect for the Constitution, but he did not share his intelligence or his commitment, albeit misguided, to principles. Theodore Roosevelt wrote dozens of books. It is unlikely that Franklin Roosevelt even read dozens of books. Theodore Roosevelt stood out among his aristocratic contemporaries by choosing a life of public service (New York State assemblyman, civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, volunteer soldier in the Spanish-American War, governor of New York, vice-president of the United States.) Franklin Roosevelt tried to follow in his cousin's footsteps (assemblyman, assistant secretary of the navy, unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate) and even tried to emulate Theodore's speech patterns. ("Bully! Deee-lighted!") It was one of the high points of Franklin's young life when, at his wedding to his cousin Eleanor, her uncle Theodore walked her down the aisle. (Franklin promptly committed adultery, which was still frowned upon in those days. This is another quality distinguishing Franklin from Theodore, a morally upright man of impeccable probity.) His brave struggle with polio must certainly elicit admiration and respect, but it must also not blind us to his vapidity and lack of knowledge. One observer described him as a "…pleasant young man who, for no apparent reason, wants to be president of the United States," and another observer commented that Franklin Roosevelt possessed a "first rate personality and a second rate intellect."

The rapid succession of "New Deal" policies which a compliant Congress passed at Roosevelt's behest perfectly embody a warning from Benjamin Franklin three and half centuries ago: "Once the people realize they can vote themselves money, the Republic is doomed."  The New Deal was a hodge-podge of programs without any central overriding ideological principle, but at root it was the first attempt in American History to redistribute wealth on a national scale. It was done ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, of course, and it did indeed relieve some personal suffering. But it was not the federal government's job to relieve personal suffering. Such actions should have been (or could have been, if they so wished) undertaken by the states. The chief result was the dramatic and permanent expansion of the power of the State.

It should also be noted that "redistribution of wealth" is a euphemism for theft. It is an idea near and dear to the heart of every Liberal Statist (be he called liberal, Democrat, leftist, Progressive, Socialist, Fascist, Communist, Nazi, etc.) that no one really has the right to own anything, and that whatever ownership is allowed to exist does so at the sufferance of the State. All of the national wealth is really State property for the State to use as it sees fit. In its initial stage of development in the United States, such an assertion would have never been publicly made for the obvious reason that it is in direct contradiction of our basic political and economic traditions.[58] Lip service was therefore paid to all manner of altruistic motives, but each and every redistributive action was another step in the direction of Leviathan.[59]

The checks and balances system began to malfunction as well, for the Congress was dominated by Roosevelt's party, and supinely did almost anything he asked. There was a slight ripple of opposition from the Supreme Court, however. The Agricultural Adjustment Act singled out a special group of people (mill operators) to pay a special tax. The proceeds from the tax would be used to pay farmers not to grow food, thus artificially inflating the price of crops.[60] Leaving aside the blatant violation of market principles, singling out a group for special taxation is clearly unconstitutional, and the Court so ruled. Additionally, the National Industrial Recovery Act effectively transferred legislative power to the executive branch, a blatant violation of separation of powers. The Court overturned this as well. Roosevelt's anger at this judicial opposition led him to attempt to expand the number of justices so that he could pack the court with his followers. This was too much even for the obsequious Congress, and his "court packing plan" was never passed; but the attempt cowed the Court into submission, and the entire incident demonstrated that Roosevelt was no respecter of constitutional scruples. Roosevelt either did not understand the concept of the separation of powers, or (more likely as a Statist) he did not care.

Executive and legislative actions during the subsequent Second World War further eroded the principles of freedom. In 1940, for the first time in American History, men were conscripted into military service in peace time. This was justified by the government on the grounds that wars had been raging in Europe since 1939 and in Asia since 1937, and therefore we had to be prepared in the event that we were dragged into them. It was, in other words, purely defensive and prophylactic, and this was, of course, nonsense. Roosevelt was already covertly and overtly taking steps that would lead us into war: in 1940, giving the British some US destroyers in exchange for some unimportant bases in the Caribbean and facilitating a massive loan to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek[61]; in 1941,  ordering the occupation of the Danish provinces of Iceland and Greenland after Germany occupied Denmark, freezing all Axis[62] assets in the United States, creating the Lend-Lease[63] program, first for Britain (which Roosevelt put into effect before Congress authorized it) and then for Russia (the premier Liberal Statist regime), and putting an embargo on exports of raw materials to Japan. At that point, long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we were de facto at war with the Axis. This war, the Second World War, was indeed "the good war," as its veterans called it, for Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan were monstrous examples of Statism, and destroying these regimes was an absolute good, despite the fact that the most egregiously vicious and brutal of all Statist regimes, i.e., our ally, Stalin's Russia, was central to the destruction. But Roosevelt's casual deceitfulness and disregard of constitutional scruple (again) was itself indicative of his Liberal Statist mentality.

It has been asserted repeatedly by some historians that Roosevelt's New Deal ended the Great Depression, while others maintain that it was ended by the War. In reality, it was ended by the end of the War. Some other western countries had recovered from the Depression before the War began (Britain, France, Canada) by applying traditional solutions, i.e., balancing the budget, insuring currency stability, etc.; but the recovery that the United States seemed to be experiencing, and which explains the Roosevelt re-election landslide in 1936, gave way to another recession in 1937. The coming of the War did not end the Depression; it merely ended the unemployment problem by drafting or admitting sixteen million men into the armed forces.[64] And the War itself did not end the "decreasing production" and "decreasing consumption" recession problems either; it merely replaced market driven production with military production driven by military necessity, and the expected consumption of munitions in war. (One cannot re-shoot a bullet, re-drop a bomb, re-fly a shot-down plane, or re-drive a blown-up tank.) Production for domestic consumption came to an abrupt halt in 1942, and rationing of even such basic goods as gasoline, coal, milk and bread was instituted as the government turned our economy into a war machine. The government funded all of this by borrowing money, i.e., spending more money than it had. Balancing the budget and running a small national debt had been common practice throughout our history, but after 1940 this was a thing of the past. Deficit spending became regular practice, and the federal government (and most state governments) began to float on a sea of borrowed money.

The Great Depression actually ended when the War did, because for the decade after 1945 the United States was the only industrial country that had remained physically intact for the simple reason that the War had been fought elsewhere. The rest of the industrial world had almost been destroyed. Germany and Japan were in ruins. The industrial cities of Britain and Italy, the industrial region of northeastern France, the cities of Eastern Europe, China, and the western USSR, had all been devastated by the War. (Not that the USSR had actually manufactured anything that anyone would want.) In other words, the entire world was our market, we had no competition, and it was this industrial hegemony and the explosion of exports it engendered that ended the Great Depression. Roosevelt and the New Deal had nothing to do with it.

But, as previously noted, Roosevelt was indeed responsible for the most dramatic increase in State power thus far experienced. The income tax for the highest incomes reached a staggering, confiscatory 94%, and the income tax reached ever downward among the people. In 1939, only 4 million people paid income taxes out of a population of 132 million, which translates into 3%; by 1945 it had risen to 50 million, or 38%. The income tax-paying population continued to grow after the war, until by the end of the 20th century everyone who had an income was having part of it confiscated by the federal government; and most state governments, seeing that the people were willing to put up with this, levied state income taxes as well. The tax system in its final form taxed, retaxed, and reretaxed with abandon. For example, a corporation would earn income, and the income would be taxed. When that income was distributed to the corporation's shareholders as dividends, that money (which had already been taxed!) was taxed. When what was left of that income (which had already been taxed twice!) was spent, sales taxes and excise taxes ate up even more. And lest the impression be had that this sort of thing only affected the rich, it must be remembered that the taxable wages paid to the employees of a corporation derive from the corporation's already taxed income. In addition, most pension funds had corporate investments made by the pension plan managers, and both the income from the investments and the pensions themselves were taxed. The idea of the State confiscating the peoples' wealth began somewhat modestly under Wilson, and became a massive intrusion under Roosevelt.

As the United States entered the Second World War, Roosevelt resurrected Wilson's war boards. The National War Labor Board prevented strikes, the Office of Price Administration imposed wage and price controls, thus actually suspending the free market, and new board called the Office of War Mobilization coordinated industrial production. The success of the Office was indeed impressive. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States manufactured 75,328 tanks, 102,729 armored cars, 251,873 airplanes, 653,926 artillery pieces, over 12 million tons of bombs, and over 275 million bullets. What must give us pause is contemplating the extent of the centralization of power that could actually accomplish this.

Unlike the end of the First World War, the end of the Second did not see a return to the domestic status quo ante bellum. Though Democrats and Republicans continued to compete for offices, they were all Liberal Statists now. True, the Republican conversion came more slowly and was never fully accepted by the rank and file, but this was irrelevant. With very few exceptions the only difference between the Republican and the Democrat was one of extent, not one of kind. The two parties periodically alternated control of the executive and legislative branches, which of course impacted the judicial branch, but the expansion of the government on all levels continued unrestrained regardless of the party in power.

Examples abound. Under the Democrat Truman (president 1945-1953) the government began building houses for low income people via the National Housing Act, executive order 9835 empowered the F.B.I. to investigate the loyalty of civil servants, and the Smith Act, passed by Congress in 1940 to repress any nascent fascism movement in the United States, was used to imprison communists. This act made it a crime to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government. Not to attempt it, mind you; just to conspire to advocate it. Eleven communists were arrested and convicted, and they naturally appealed the verdict. In 1948 the case (Dennis v. the United States) reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the government. The Smith Act was upheld as constitutional because, of course, the words of the defendants constituted a clear and present danger. In 1950 Congress passed the McCarren-Nixon Internal Security Act and in 1952 the McCarren-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, both of which were aimed at isolating communists at home and deporting suspicious immigrants.  The fact that an increasingly Liberal Statist Democratic executive branch enforced laws targeting Communists, who were of course Liberal Statists themselves, laws passed by an increasingly Liberal Statist Republican legislative branch, laws which were then upheld by an increasingly Liberal Statist court appointed over the years by both parties, was an irony unnoticed by all concerned.

Under the Republican Eisenhower (president 1953-1961), the size of the cabinet was expanded, rigid price supports for crops were replaced by flexible ones (as if that was a conservative change), and the government began to use the Social Security trust fund for purposes unrelated to its original purpose.

Under the Democrats Kennedy (1961-1963) and Johnson (1963-1969), the government declared war on poverty and proceeded thereupon to begin to impoverish the nation. The government's power expanded dramatically, creating the nucleus of a socialized medical system (Medicaid and Medicare), involving the federal government in the states' education systems (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act), founding the Job Corps, the Peace Corps, and VISTA, and beginning the food stamps program, as well as expanding the welfare system which had its roots in the "New Deal" (an expansion which further weakened the family unit, as noted previously.)[65]

Laudable goals? Admittedly. Any of the federal government's business? Absolutely not.

Then the Republicans Nixon and Ford (1969-1977): wage and price controls, devaluation of the dollar, an expanded food stamp program, and the first concerted and deliberate attempt to subvert the electoral process on the national level. (It would not be the last.) Nixon resigned the presidency one step ahead of impeachment, realizing that had he not, he would most certainly have been impeached and almost certainly convicted. This apparent example of constitutional rectitude should not blind us to the fact that partisan politics were involved on both sides. A revulsion against growing Liberal Statism was not involved. (See Clinton, below.)

The Democrat Carter (1977-1981): further expansion of the cabinet. His disastrous economic and foreign policies need not concern us here.

The Republican Reagan (1981-1989): regardless of conservative rhetoric (and both a salutary tax reduction and a renewed, effective opposition to the moribund Soviet Union), the national debt rose from $997,900,000 in 1981 to $2,602,300,000 in 1988, and another new cabinet position was created.

The Republican Bush I (1989-1993): little damage done. The Democrat Clinton (1993-2001): little damage done. The reason for this hiatus in the growth of the State seems to have been the division of government between the parties. During the entire presidency of the Republican Bush I, both houses of Congress were controlled by the Democrats, and during six of the eight years of the Democrat Clinton's presidency both houses of Congress were controlled by the Republicans. Even though both parties had by this time been perverted by the Liberal Statist mentality, mutual enmity and political infighting hobbled both agendums.[66]

This type of situation was not uncommon. Many presidents have had to deal with hostile (or at least oppositional) Congresses, and the degree to which cooperation was possible depended largely on the charisma and the skill of the president himself. Reagan never had an allied House, and only temporarily an allied Senate, and yet he was able to lead reasonably well. He was also one of the most charismatic presidents of the 20th century, along with Kennedy and both Roosevelts. (Charisma, by the way, is apparently not a hereditary trait. Neither the third President Roosevelt nor the second President Kennedy had any, while the third President Bush, unlike her two ancestors, had it in abundance. By that point in time, of course, the presidency had become hereditary.)

Clinton was the second president to be impeached and tried, and the second to be acquitted. Unlike Nixon, whose political corruption had merited conviction, and Andrew Johnson[67], who was actually guilty of not being Abraham Lincoln, Clinton's crime was lying under oath in an attempt to keep his wife, of whom he was deathly afraid, from finding out about a sexual relationship Clinton had with a young woman who worked with him in the White House. Again, opposition to Liberal Statism was of no concern.

The Republican Bush II (2001-2009): massive budget deficits and further intrusion of federal power into state affairs, in this case education. One of the most common ways the federal government imposed its will upon the states, and which not coincidentally led to an expansion of state and local taxes, was a practice called the unfunded mandate. The states had become dependent upon receiving a great deal of so-called "federal funds", which, if withheld, could cause great stress and damage.[68] Thus, the federal government would impose a mandate upon the state government without paying for it, threatening to withhold "federal funds" if the states did not implement the mandate. The law popularly called "no child left behind" was one such unfunded mandate. Each state was obligated to see that their children attain certain levels of achievement on standardized tests.[69] The federal government could not actually compel the states to obey, but, threatened with the loss of federal aid to education money, all states complied.

(It should be noted, of course, despite these failings, Bush II was president when the United States was attacked by an Islamic terrorist organization self-named Al-Qaeda, whose previous depredatory assaults had been largely ignored, or at least minimized, by the Clinton administration. Bush's response, though controversial, seems in the long run to have been the correct course of action to pursue. It was to all intents and purposes abandoned by his successor.)

But back to the errors. It was also during the Bush II administration that the federal takeover of private businesses, a typical Liberal Statist tactic, began. It continued and intensified during the subsequent Democratic Barack Obama administration (2009-2013.)

Obama was a man of great rhetorical skills and absolutely no achievements apart from managing to get elected to various offices, possessing a dogmatic hostility to an economic system he did not understand and an almost palpable messianic complex. He had been infected with contempt for the United States and everything it stood for (or at least had once stood for,) the sources of the infection being racist clergymen pretending to be Christians, Liberal Statist domestic terrorists pretending to be principled reformers, and Muslim radicals who pretended to believe in religious freedom only when they were a minority group.   His election in 2008 was more a reaction against an unpopular war and an unpopular president than a "mandate" for Liberal Statist change.[70] All Statist politicians claimed that their elections are "mandates," but most of them were aware of their own hypocrisy in so saying. Obama seems to have believed his own propaganda, much to the detriment of the country.[71]

Soon the banking industry and the automotive industry were owned by the federal government, and, after fits and starts, so was health care. Much ballyhoo was made in the Liberal Statist press whenever government ownership pretended to revert to private hands, without making note of the increased power of labor unions and Liberal Statist multi-millionaires, both of whom benefited from the pretense. As for healthcare, the term "socialized medicine" was used only by its opponents, but the system begun during the Obama years was so complicated and so prone to euphemism and misdirection that socialized medicine was eventually established essentially by stealth. The initial, innocent-sounding proposal (which took years to shove down the nation's throat) was to create a so-called "public option" in the health insurance system. This would provide healthy competition with private insurers, and that would, in good capitalist fashion, lower costs and improve quality. Many people actually believed this nonsense, or claimed to, ignoring the fact that private competition with government is impossible. Private industry must earn a profit; it cannot operate at a permanent loss. But government can do this, and always does. Profits are irrelevant. The so-called "health care reform" legislation emerged in stages over a decade; periodic reversals and repeals were followed by other periodic "reforms," in keeping with the old Leninist principle of "two steps forward, one step back."[72]  In short order private insurers were driven out of business, and socialism in this area was established in fact if not in name. This did not happen overnight, of course; it took decades. But it happened nonetheless.

A pattern had by this time emerged: a financial problem faced by an industry would be solved by a massive infusion of "federal funds" by which the government would acquire part ownership of the industry, which was effectively complete control.[73] This happened repeatedly, and by the middle of the 21st century the federal government, directly or indirectly, owned 68% of the economy.

Then the ongoing conflict over gun ownership precipitated a national crisis that resulted first in a drastic and fundamental change in the nature of the American government, and then in its destruction.

The meaning of the 2nd Amendment had been debated for over a century.[74] Opponents of gun control legislation maintained that the amendment expressly addressed the individual's right to own weapons, while proponents of gun control maintained that it referred only to people who belonged to the state militias (which in the 20th century had become the National Guard.) It should be noted that when the Bill of Rights was written, the standing army of the United States was miniscule, the state militias basically were the defense force, and every adult male was expected at some point or other to serve in them. Inasmuch as no distinction was possible between "the people" and "the militia," the argument had no 18th century provenance and would have been incomprehensible to the Framers. Nonetheless, in the 20th century the increasing divide between rural/suburban life and urban life initiated the argument, as urban violence came to be seen by some as a function of gun ownership, with the rural/suburban counter-argument being that gun ownership served to reduce crime. The arguments flew back and forth fast and furious. One side wanted to see all private weapon ownership outlawed, while the other side responded that if gun ownership were outlawed, only those people who obeyed the law would not have weapons; and they were the only people who could be trusted with them. National gun restriction laws were the only way to keep guns from one state ending up in another state. There should be no federal interstate gun ownership laws, save those preventing convicted felons and lunatics from owning guns. Anyone who wants to own a gun is a lunatic, and should be a felon. Anyone who wants to confiscate weapons has an ulterior motive.

The ulterior motive of the State was, of course, obvious. The private possession of means of self-defense could be used to defend against a criminal or against a criminal government. The Liberal Statist mentality of the Democratic Party led it to become committed to radical gun control very early on, a position which the Republican Party then opposed first on ideological grounds and then out of partisanship. Proponents of gun rights had nowhere to turn other than the Republicans, but Republican enthusiasm was waning in many parts of the country because in those regions public opinion was turning against gun ownership. It had long been recognized that visual images properly arranged and presented could affect dramatic emotional responses[75], and the anti-gun lobby exploited this practice with great effectiveness. Every act of violence committed with a firearm was broadcast as proof positive that people should not be permitted to own weapons. Every crying child, every wailing funeral procession, every shattered widow, argued against 2nd Amendment rights. Defenders of gun ownership rights were powerless to counter this, because it was impossible to broadcast images of crimes that were not committed, crimes that were prevented, criminal behavior that was not engaged in, property that was protected, lives that were saved, because people owned guns. In addition, the expanding Vegan movement caused a general disrespect to grow for hunters, even among people whose carnivorous proclivities were indulged by the food industry five or six steps removed from the slaughterhouse. Public opinion polls (which were, needless to say, manipulated by the government) indicated that by 2050 52% of the public was in favor of radical restriction of gun ownership, and 10% were willing to support general weapons confiscation.

This was obstructed by the Constitution. Even though the Liberal Statist judiciaries had allowed the Liberal Statist legislatures to hem ownership rights in on all sides with regulations, criteria, exceptions, and procedures, the clear words of the 2nd Amendment could not be totally disregarded. It became clear that if the State were to accomplish its goal of disarming the population, the Amendment needed to be repealed.

What followed was a bitter and heated debate. Congress passed an amendment resolution, which read as follows: "1. The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.  2. The private ownership of arms, including manufacture, sale, transportation, and possession, shall be regulated within the borders of the United States by the federal authority. 3. The law enforcement authorities of the states shall be subject to federal authority on all levels. State and local law enforcement officers shall be subject to conscription into the federal authority, or disbanded and disarmed, at the discretion of Congress.  4. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The reduction of state and local law enforcement agencies to the status of barely tolerated appendages of the State, to be co-opted, disarmed, or abolished at will, was the most egregiously self-aggrandizing and sinister element of the proposal. When in the early 21st century the federal government began to manipulate immigration policy to create an entire new class of dependent voters beholden to the Democratic Party, many state governments attempted to ensure their own physical security by enforcing the very federal laws that the federal government was ignoring. By the usual methods (judicial interposition, economic pressure, withholding of federal funds, a barrage of incessant propaganda), those state officials who were attempting to protect their own citizens were reduced in the popular mind to a collection of bigoted sheet-clad idiots.[76] Obviously neither they nor their police officers should be allowed to bear arms.

The amendment resolution passed by a vote of 290 to 145 in the House and 70 to 30 in the Senate, thus surpassing the 2/3 vote required. It was then sent to the state legislatures. Three quarters of the states (38 out of 50) were needed to pass the resolution in order for the amendment to be ratified, with each state having one vote regardless of population.

After more heated debates, repeated votes, and at least three violent outbursts in various legislative chambers, the states' votes became fixed as follows:

With the state legislatures being divided 34 to 16, the resolution failed of ratification by four votes. In the past when amendment resolutions favored by the established order failed of ratification, the time period allotted for ratification was extended to allow for the State's wishes to be honored. But this was a tactic uncertain of success … indeed, the last time it was attempted, for the so-called Equal Rights Amendment[77], it failed … so the incoming Kennedy administration and its congressional allies devised a new approach: amending the Constitution to create a new way of amending the Constitution.

The argument was made that the legislatures of other successful democracies were able to amend their constitutions without recourse to cumbersome state-by-state ratification. The Federal Republic of Germany, to cite a specific example, was indeed a "federal republic" (Bundesrepublik) just like the United States, with a written constitution (Grundgesetz), but the German states (Länder) did not have the power to amend it. That power rested with the Bundestag ("Council of the Union"), which corresponded to the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Bundesrat ("Federal Council"), which corresponded to the U.S. Senate. Indeed, many other successful democracies did not even have written constitutions at all (Great Britain, Israel, etc.) As shown by the defeat of the gun control amendment, it was argued, a small number of thinly populated states could thwart the desires of the nation as a whole. Of the states that refused ratification, only Texas qualified as a large state, and only three others (Georgia, Tennessee, and Arizona) had more than ten votes in the Electoral College. This was unfair, it was undemocratic.[78] It had to be changed. The power to amend the Constitution had to be shifted from the states to the Congress. Any objection from the smaller states that they would be rendered irrelevant because of their much smaller populations was answered by the argument that the Senate, which had always over-represented them anyway, would be as empowered by the change as the House.

An interesting point was made during the debate by an historian named Ernst Weyrauch, professor of history at the University of Tübingen. It was, he maintained, a major weakness of the German Weimar Republic that the subjection of the periphery to the center in 1933 that facilitated the establishment of Hitler's dictatorship. This may or not have been true. His point was, in any event, ignored.

The argument raged for two and a half decades, and the lines were drawn along the exact same line that separated the states in the 2050 debate over gun control. Without four additional states voting to amend, the new "Amendment amendment" resolution could not be ratified. But then in 2078, Hermione Fish, Speaker of the House, devised an ingenious plan. Many of the state governments … indeed, most of them … had sunk so deeply into debt and had already so taxed everything imaginable to the breaking point that many of them were on the verge of default. (Seven states had previously defaulted on their debts in the early 21st century.) A deal was struck: the federal government would assume responsibility for the debts of any state whose legislature ratified the resolution. This included those states which had already ratified the resolution, with the understanding that from that point on the federal government would also assume complete "power of the purse," to use the old Anglo-Saxon phrase. The states would escape their debts, but they would lose all control over finances within their borders.

On October 4, 2078, the resolution was ratified by Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, and Tennessee.

On October 5, 2078, Congress declared the resolution ratified, and the Constitution duly amended, by a vote of 38 states to 12. Fifteen minutes after this declaration, Congress repealed the 2nd Amendment. Five minutes later, by voice vote, both houses passed the Domestic Tranquility Act, which set out procedures for the confiscation of privately owned and state issued weapons.

On October 15, 2078, the legislature of South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed on October 16 by the legislatures of Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska. They in turn were followed between the 17th and the 24th by Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. On November 2, twenty northern California counties seceded from California. On November 7, thirty counties south of Chicago seceded from Illinois, and on December 2, twenty counties north of Westchester seceded from New York.

And the Second American Civil War began.

DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHOID 2

(Location: the basement of the Fifth Avenue Library, New York City.)

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid? Are you down here?

TRYPHOID: Yes, Gottfried, over here. I've stumbled upon some copies of Hermann Hesse's books.

GOTTFRIED: Really. An important writer?

TRYPHOID: Yes, quite. Have you never heard of him or his novels? Siddhartha? Der Steppenwolf? Narziss und Goldmund?

GOTTFRIED: I must confess my ignorance. You know I am not much drawn to fiction.

TRYPHOID: An odd comment, coming from a Christian.

GOTTFRIED: Very funny. But I can't get annoyed at you, not after you paid my fine. I really am deeply appreciative.

TRYPHOID: It was my niece who had you sent to jail. I felt obligated. But anyway, you would probably enjoy Narziss und Goldmund. It is, in its own way, quite spiritual.

GOTTFRIED: Christian?

TRYPHOID: No, not really. Hesse was typical of the enlightened mentality of the European intelligentsia of the early 20th century.

GOTTFRIED: Enlightened. Yes, of course, one of your favorite words. Because, of course, we who disagree with you are benighted.

TRYPHOID: Not precisely. You and I disagree about many things that do not affect my opinion of you. Religion just isn't one of them. I am perpetually flabbergasted by your belief in God, but your adherence to Christianity renders me stunned and speechless.

GOTTFRIED: How unfortunate for you, given the pleasure you derive from the sound of your own voice.

TRYPHOID: Ha.

GOTTFRIED: But I know what you mean. You and I have explored History together, and we both know what happened to our country over the past few centuries. The fact that you still maintain a pathetic faith in the State and the ambitious people who run it is inexplicable to me. If not stunned into speechlessness, I am at least flabbergasted.

TRYPHOID: And I am quite serious. How on earth can you believe that superstitious Christian nonsense?

GOTTFRIED: Well, let's begin with the simple matter of usefulness, the utilitarian argument that even Voltaire came to appreciate in his dotage. Though currently in eclipse, it has long been recognized that Christianity, or its Judaic parent, is a basic and necessary component of any free society.

TRYPHOID: I don't follow you.

GOTTFRIED: John Adams once wrote, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." And George Washington wrote, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. Whatever can be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of a particular structure, reason and experience forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

TRYPHOID: Memorized all that, did you?

GOTTFRIED: Yes. Among much else.

TRYPHOID: I'll grant you the opium of the masses argument …

GOTTFRIED: That isn't what I said.

TRYPHOID: …but you are not a Christian for utilitarian reasons. You actually believe this nonsense. Why?

GOTTFRIED: For both logical and historical reasons. In the first place, as Tertullian said, "Credo quod absurdum est."

TRYPHOID: "I believe because it is absurd," is itself absurd, and you know it.

GOTTFRIED: No, old fellow, it isn't. If you were to sit down and create a religion from scratch, Christianity would be the last thing you'd come up with. No one would invent a faith such as ours. Religions that people make up are always either cloyingly self-indulgent, ridiculously juvenile, or so mythologically contrived that they are untrue on their surfaces.

TRYPHOID: But that is a perfect description of Christianity.

GOTTFRIED: Quite to the contrary. The reliability of the Christian religion can be logically inferred from the evidence, even if its theology seems contrary to reason.

TRYPHOID: You are speaking nonsense. There is nothing less subject to logical inference than Christianity. There is absolutely no reason to believe it to be true.

GOTTFRIED: Oh, there is one excellent reason to believe it. Christ's empty tomb.

TRYPHOID: But …

GOTTFRIED: Let me anticipate your objection. There's no evidence. It is myth. It never happened. Superstitious nonsense born of fear.

TRYPHOID: Correct. And correct and correct and correct.

GOTTFRIED: The empty tomb is the last of my inferences, not the first. The beginning is the scriptural evidence.

TRYPHOID: Not the Bible again.

GOTTFRIED: Always. As well as the non-scriptural testimony.

TRYPHOID: There isn't any. And the Bible …

GOTTFRIED: I refer specifically to the New Testament.

TRYPHOID: Very well, the New Testament is a collection of spurious books of dubious origin. We don't know who wrote them, or when, or why.

GOTTFRIED: Of course we do. Two of the four gospels were written by eyewitnesses to the events they describe, one was written by an associate of an eyewitness, and the other was written by an educated Greek who researched everything and interviewed every witness he could find before he wrote it all down. He also wrote a record of the growth of the church during the two or three decades after the Resurrection. Then there are a series of letters, written mostly by St. Paul, but some by Sts. Peter, John, Jude, and James, concluding with an extended poetic allegory about the ultimate triumph of Christianity. The Resurrection occurred around 33 A.D., and the last book was written around 95 A.D., all within six decades of the events they describe.

TRYPHOID: Very well, let's examine your statements. The four so-called gospels are pseudopigraphous.[79] They may very well have been written decades, even centuries, after the supposed events they describe. And the letters … epistles, correct … ?

GOTTFRIED: Yes.

TRYPHOID: The epistles are also pseudopigraphous. Even "Christian scholarship," an oxymoron if there ever was one, admits as much for all but a few of the letters of Paul.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid, if you were going to forge a book under someone else's name, would you choose to use the name of, say, Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry the greengrocer who lives down the street from your grandma in Wichita?

TRYPHOID: What a silly question.

GOTTFRIED: Of course it is, in response to a silly point. Take the first two gospels, Matthew and Mark. Matthew was one of the twelve disciples, but a minor one, about whom we know nothing more than that his name is listed in the lists of the names of the twelve in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. If you wished to write a pseudopigraphous book and attribute it to a disciple, why on earth would you choose Matthew? Why not someone important, someone who established a Christian community, who developed a following? Why not Peter or Andrew? Why not James or Paul? It doesn't make sense. And as for Mark, why use his name at all? All we know about him that he is mentioned, as both Mark and John Mark, a few times in the Book of Acts, twice in letters by Paul, and once, I believe, in a letter of Peter. Though he was a follower of Peter, and though medieval legend says he founded one of the Christian communities in Italy, he was basically a nobody. Why attribute to him a pseudopigraphal Gospel?

TRYPHOID: This is not proof.

GOTTFRIED: No, it is inference. As for Luke and Acts, the writer was obviously an educated Greek who stated clearly that he had interviewed everyone he could find who had witnessed the events he was describing.

TRYPHOID: How can you prove that?

GOTTFRIED: Well, his opening sentences are written in an elevated, formal form of Greek, not the conversational koiné of the rest of the New Testament.

TRYPHOID: The conversational what?

GOTTFRIED: Koiné. Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, ever since the days of Alexander the Great. Everyone spoke it in addition to his own native language. Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, Phoenicians, everyone. As a common tongue in a polyglot world, it naturally became simplified and basic. But the opening words of both books are not koiné. They are, well, elevated and formal.

TRYPHOID: I'll concede the point, because it isn't important. You cannot prove that he interviewed eyewitnesses to a myth.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid, according to the scriptural record Luke was a scientist, a physician, and as a Greek scientist he, like all Greek scientists, must have been an empiricist. The Greeks invented empiricism. They also invented objective historical research …

TRYPHOID: Yes, yes, I know. Herodotus and Thucydides. But this is all irrelevant. You can draw whatever inferences you want. You still don't know when these things were written.

GOTTFRIED: As you just said, even skeptics accept that some of Paul's letters are authentic. 1st Corinthians, Philippians …

TRYPHOID: We're talking about the Gospels.

GOTTFRIED: Oh, right. Well then, allow me to infer that the first and second Gospels were written before the year 70 A.D.

TRYPHOID: How can you possibly infer that?

GOTTFRIED: Because Matthew and Mark were Jews. The most important, indeed the most traumatic event in Jewish history between the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C. and the expulsion from Spain in the 15th century A.D. was the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D. It would be unthinkable for neither Gospel to make any reference to that event, even obliquely, if they were written after the event. If we were to read a history of Virginia that ends in 1848 and makes no reference to the Civil War, it would be quite logical to infer that it was written before 1860. And regarding Luke's Gospel and its sequel, the Book of Acts, Acts ends with Paul alive in Rome. We know that Paul was killed in the Neronian persecution of, I believe, 66 A.D.[80] So the book must have been written before that date.

TRYPHOID: All inference, not empirical fact.

GOTTFRIED: What empirical facts would you need?

TRYPHOID: Well, the original manuscripts would help, and they don't exist.

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid, don't be silly. The oldest extant copy of Caesar's De Bello Gallica[81] only dates to the 17th century. Do you doubt that Caesar wrote the book? Of course not. We don't have the original manuscripts of any significant ancient or medieval work, nothing penned by Plato or Aristotle, by Homer or Virgil, by Cicero or Augustine, by Dante or Chaucer. Does that prove they didn't write the books attributed to them? Besides, we do indeed have some very, very old copies of the books of the New Testament, including a fragment of the Gospel of John that dates to within two decades of the composition of the book. Then there's the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus …

TRYPHOID: I'm sorry, Gottfried, but this is a ridiculous waste of time. Even if I concede that the Gospels were written soon after the death of Jesus, by the people to whom they are attributed, a concession I will not make, it remains that the narrative they present is preposterous. May I summarize the superstition?

GOTTFRIED: The religious truth, yes.

TRYPHOID: Whatever. Your belief is that the creator of the universe dropped in on his creation, took human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and subsequently was tortured to death to pay for the evil deeds of humanity because we are all such bad, bad people. The reason we are so bad is that a snake tricked Eve into eating an apple, which meant, of course, that we all deserve to burn in Hell for all eternity. But Jesus saved us from this by being tortured. Then he popped up out of his grave and floated off into the sky, where he is sitting on a great big chair up among the clouds, and some day we will all float up to the clouds and be with him forever, along with all of our dead relatives. Do I have it right?

GOTTFRIED: Only if you are an intellectually challenged child in a sub-standard Sunday School. Your description of Christianity would be only marginally recognizable by most Christians. You are innocent of Theology, old fellow. Do you honestly think that what you just described accurately represents the thought of Origen or Küng, Luther or Melanchthon, Erasmus or More, Augustine or Aquinas? Your words are a caricature, a parody, not a description of the Christian faith. And you know it.

TRYPHOID: Very well then. You describe Christianity.

GOTTFRIED: Also a waste of time. You know what we believe, and if you wish to continue discussing it, let's stop the foolish digressions and return to the central idea.

TRYPHOID: Which is?

GOTTFRIED: The resurrection of Christ. Our entire belief system stands or falls on that one event. "If Christ be not risen," St. Paul said, "our faith is in vain."

TRYPHOID: Your faith is in vain. The resurrection is the core idiocy of your superstition. People do not come back from the dead.

GOTTFRIED: But Christ's followers publicly insisted that they had seen Him, spoken with Him, eaten with Him, days after He was dead and buried.

TRYPHOID: You know as well as I do that myths develop around the memories of charismatic people. The resurrection of Christ is no more a fact than the Lady of the Lake giving Excalibur to King Arthur or Gilgamesh meeting a survivor of the great flood.

GOTTFRIED: It is true that the literature of the past is replete with examples of fact turning into legend, legend into saga, and saga into myth, but it takes centuries for this to happen. Take your own examples. Gilgamesh, the real Gilgamesh, the En[82] of Uruk, lived around 2600 B.C. The Gilgamesh Epic was finalized around 1400, twelve hundred years later. The real King Arthur died in 515 A.D. at the Battle of Camlann; the first people to write about him, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes, lived six hundred years later.

TRYPHOID: You're missing the point. People do not rise from the dead! It is a myth!

GOTTFRIED: Why then did the Apostles proclaim it?

TRYPHOID: Who knows? Who even knows that they did?

GOTTFRIED: We've established that they did, that the Gospels are near-contemporary documents.

TRYPHOID: I do not concede the point. But for the sake of argument, let us assume that these people did claim to have seen Jesus after his death. Mass hallucination.

GOTTFRIED: Not only is mass hallucination very, very rare, it doesn't work as you seem to be implying.

TRYPHOID: Indeed!

GOTTFRIED: Indeed. Here is an example of mass hallucination: Say that I am a charismatic fellow …

TRYPHOID: Really, Gottfried!

GOTTFRIED: Very well, very well, you are a charismatic fellow, and you tell some of your friends that you have seen the face of, say, Theodore Roosevelt in the craggy surface of a cliff. You show them the cliff, and they begin to see Roosevelt's face too, and then they tell other people, and they begin to see it too. Pretty soon throngs of people are seeing something that isn't there. This type of phenomenon explains many supposed apparitions, pious delusions, things like that. But not the Resurrection.

TRYPHOID: And the difference is … ?

GOTTFRIED: It is the difference between saying, "Do you see a face in this rock?", and saying, "Look! Sitting right here next to me, right now, eating some fried fish and saying hi to everybody, is the Guy who we all saw viciously murdered last week." That's the difference. That kind of "mass hallucination" does not happen. Never has. Never will. Can't.

TRYPHOID: Oh, for Pete's sake …

GOTTFRIED: For the sake of Saint Peter. A euphemism. For Christ's sake. A phrase I approve of, when used as a supplication, not an epithet.

TRYPHOID: Whatever.

GOTTFRIED: And the Gospels and epistle record indicates that He was seen, physically seen, by hundreds of people. I'm sorry, but the "mass hallucination" idea is just not possible.

TRYPHOID: Gottfried, there are so many, so many other explanations for whatever the hell happened two millennia ago, that none of the things you're saying are in any way relevant.

GOTTFRIED: Such as?

TRYPHOID: The disciples stole the body so they could point to an empty tomb.

GOTTFRIED: And then continued to proclaim what they knew to be a falsehood for the rest of their lives, until they were almost all tortured to death? Crucified, flayed to death, boiled in oil, thrown to wild beasts, beheaded …Why? What possible motive could they have had?

TRYPHOID: Desire for power or wealth, perhaps. They could claim to have inherited Christ's authority. In fact, the popes claimed precisely that.

GOTTFRIED: But we aren't talking about the Renaissance Papacy or the medieval Catholic Church. We're talking about a small, obscure group of poor people regarded as criminals and subject to vicious persecution. And if they knew that Christ was dead, executed as a common criminal, what possible authority could they have deluded themselves into thinking they could inherit? Desire for power or wealth? The notion is preposterous!

TRYPHOID: Well then, perhaps he wasn't dead. That's an old theory. When the Romans took Jesus down from the cross, he was unconscious, not dead, and he revived.

GOTTFRIED: You're really reaching now, old fellow. If the Roman army was good at anything, it was good at killing. They knew how to do it properly, and they did it all the time. Jesus was flogged by the Roman soldiers, and a Roman flogging ripped so much flesh and muscle from the back that sometimes the bones were exposed. He was then nailed to the cross with big spikes through His wrists and ankles and left hanging for hours. And just to make sure He was dead before they took him down, they stabbed Him with a spear. Not dead? Revived? Don't be ridiculous.

TRYPHOID: It's possible.

GOTTFRIED: No it isn't. But even if I were to grant the remote possibility that anyone could survive that torturous, murderous treatment, consider the condition He would have been in. Today He would be rushed to an emergency room and put into an intensive care unit. Can you imagine, two thousand years ago, the Apostles falling to their knees and worshipping the beaten, bruised, broken, battered, bloody body that staggered towards them?

TRYPHOID: You have always had an alliterative gift. How about this: he died, he was buried, and that was the end of it. There was no empty tomb. Everything "proclaimed" subsequently was rumor turning into superstition, and that is an evolution that does not take centuries.

GOTTFRIED: The one group with the strongest motive for refuting the claims of the Christians was the Jewish authorities of the time, and they maintained that the Apostles had stolen the body. If Jesus had just died and been buried, they could very easily have proven it by exposing the corpse. But they didn't, because the tomb was empty.

TRYPHOID: Listen, old friend, this is all beside the point. We don't even know if Jesus of Nazareth even lived at all. He might be a completely fictitious character. There are no contemporary references.

GOTTFRIED: Not true. Without repeating my argument that the Gospels are contemporary documents, there are others. In his book The Jewish War, Josephus mentions Him. That book was written soon after the 70 A.D. destruction of the temple. And a letter survives from an official named Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan asking what he should do about the Christians under his jurisdiction. He describes their worship practice and says they sang hymns to Christ as a god. Trajan became emperor in 69 A.D. How much more contemporary can you get?

TRYPHOID: You really do disappoint me. You try to bog the discussion down with trivia and obfuscation. The simple fact remains that people do not come back from the dead. Decomposition follows necrosis. It is the law of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be changed.

GOTTFRIED: Except by He who created the laws of nature.

TRYPHOID: Every time you defend your superstition, Gottfried, you give me a headache. Can you not admit, even tentatively, even reluctantly, that what you believe to be true might be false?

GOTTFRIED: Oh, of course I can! Belief is not knowledge. You atheist materialists don't understand that, because you confuse the two when referring to your own thought system, but we Christian spiritualists recognize the difference.

TRYPHOID: So you admit that you don't know these things to be true.

GOTTFRIED: Because I know that human reason is not infallible, I must admit the possibility of error, the possibility that I am wrong. Can you make the same admission?

TRYPHOID: I am not wrong.

GOTTFRIED: Because your reasoning is infallible?

TRYPHOID: Because my beliefs are true.

GOTTFRIED: Do I really have to point out that you are engaging in circular reasoning?

TRYPHOID: Do I really have to remind you what you just admitted?

GOTTFRIED: As I just said, belief is not knowledge. What I'm talking about is faith, Tryphoid, faith. St. Paul explained it quite succinctly: faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

TRYPHOID: In other words, self-delusion.

GOTTFRIED: Old friend, let us assume for a moment that I am wrong, that I believe a falsehood. I believe that when my life comes to an end I shall close my eyes in death and then awaken to a new, different, glorious reality. But if I am wrong, what of it? If you atheists are correct and we are all nothing but machines made of meat, and that when the machine breaks down the meat rots, what of it? I will still have lived my life secure in a set of beliefs that give me peace and hope, community and contentment, beliefs that cause me to love others, reflecting the love I feel that God has for me. If I am wrong, if when my eyes close in death I simply cease to exist, all it will mean will be that I lived well and died happy.

TRYPHOID: You know I don't like the "machines made of meat" remark. But death is the end of conscious existence.

GOTTFRIED: But what if you are wrong, Tryphoid? What if God does exist? What if this material world is not all there is? What if the tomb was empty, what if Christ did rise from the dead, what if His resurrection does open to us the door to immortality, what if there is an afterlife? If you are wrong in your beliefs and in your contemptuous hostility to Christ and to Christians, it means that when you close your eyes in death you will also awaken to a new and different reality, but not a glorious one. And then you will be in one hell of a lot of trouble, if you catch my drift.

TRYPHOID: Wait a minute now. Don't tell me that you believe in Hell!

GOTTFRIED: Of course I do. Heaven without Hell is inconceivable, like down without up, or left without right.

TRYPHOID: This is too much, old fellow, just too much. Heaven and Hell? Clouds and harps and angels, fire and brimstone and devils?

GOTTFRIED: Tryphoid, surely even a theological illiterate such as you can distinguish metaphor from description, image from fact.

TRYPHOID: Presume my ignorance and enlighten me.

GOTTFRIED: Flippancy is inappropriate for so weighty a topic.

TRYPHOID: Sorry.

GOTTFRIED: The word used in the New Testament for hell the Aramaic word Gehenna, derived from the Hebrew name ge-ben-hinnom, "the valley of the son of Hinnom." This was the site, so frequently referred to in the Old Testament, of the cult of the god Moloch. Human sacrifice, the burning of living children, was central to Moloch-worship. The priests rang bells and clashed cymbals to drown out the screams of the little ones as the flames consumed them. Later, after the cult was overthrown, Gehenna became a garbage dump where the carcasses of animals and the bodies of criminals were incinerated. It is a powerful metaphor for utter hopelessness and the total absence of God, which is what Hell is, and which is why Jesus used the term. Everyone listening to Him knew exactly what he meant when He said "Gehenna." And as for Heaven, well, it's obvious isn't it?

TRYPHOID: Obvious? Sure. And silly.

GOTTFRIED: It isn't silly at all. The metaphors and allegories the Scripture provides are all subject to elaboration., As our knowledge expands in scope, we reinterpret the images to bring them into conformity with what we know.

TRYPHPOID: I don't understand what you mean.

GOTTFRIED: Take Heaven as an example. The ancients in the Middle East, before the Greeks, believed that earth was flat and had a clear dome suspended over it. This dome was the "firmament" that is referred to in Genesis. Heaven was on the other side of the dome. When the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model replaced the ancient Semitic one …

TRYPHOID: Remind me of that model.

GOTTFRIED: A round earth surrounded by a series of concentric, rotating crystal spheres in which are placed the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, planets, stars, and so forth. And Heaven was beyond the last of the crystal spheres. In both models, it was reasonable to envision a Heaven that was "up there" beyond the clouds. As our astronomical knowledge grew, we reinterpreted the metaphor to conform to the new knowledge. Heaven isn't "up there," and Hell isn't "down there." They are states of being referring to relative proximity to God, not places whose location you can identify. Or at least that is how I understand it. Other Christians disagree. I won't know for certain until I die.

TRYPHOID: Gottfried, I always forget that trying to speak with you intelligently about your superstition is a waste of time and breath. It never ceases to amaze me that a man of your level of intelligence can be so stupid.

GOTTFRIED: Like all people who believe in God, who believe in Christ?

TRYPHOID: Yes.

GOTTFRIED: Well, then, I suppose there is nothing more to say.

TRYPHOID: I suppose not.

VI – THE SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE THIRD WORLD WAR

On principle it is very wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory that decides what we can observe.

-Albert Einstein

The Second American Civil War must, of course, engage our attention, leading as it did to both the disruption of the Union and the creation of Leviathan.[83] But the course of the War and its ultimate resolution were impacted by events involving the other nations of the earth, and we must first explore these events before returning our attention to the secession of the Constitutional Federal Union from the United States of America.

The first complication involves an unfortunate human trait which is manifested periodically at various times in various places. It is a psychological condition usually referred to as hysteria, which is a state of extreme and unstable emotion often engendering a state of panic among large numbers of people.

Examples of hysteria abound in American History. In 1692, for example, the small population of Salem Village in the English colony of Massachusetts became convinced that devil-worshipping witches were infesting their community. Eventually the hysteria died down, but not before nineteen people had been hanged and one other crushed to death beneath stones. The so-called "Red Scare" after the First World War, a hysterical reaction to the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October of 1917, greatly exaggerated the threat posed to the country by domestic communists, leading to arrests and deportations. Something similar happened after the Second World War, though the fear of communist infiltration of the federal government and the labor unions was not so much hysterical as merely exaggerated. In point of fact, Soviet espionage activities had indeed infiltrated high levels in the State Department and certain labor organizations, but in the course of congressional investigations many completely innocent people had their lives ruined by unjust accusations. (It was unsuspected at the time that the real threat to freedom in America was centered, not in Moscow, but in Washington.)

The hysteria that characterized the decades straddling the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was caused by environmentalist extremists. There has always been a tendency in the American personality to emphasize the negative, assume the worst, seek to make manifest irrational fears, and identify the perfidious enemy lurking in the shadows. The "paranoid style in American politics," as one prominent historian once described it[84], was usually employed by cynical populists as a tool to heat up political campaigns by exciting popular enthusiasms, and then dissipated soon thereafter; but in this instance the hysteria altered national policy and international relations, and became one of the three major factors that precipitated the Second Great Depression.

To understand what happened from around 2000 to 2050, we have to remind ourselves that the central, basic quality of the Liberal Statist mentality was an impregnable, arrogant dogmatism. The Liberal Statists always condemned the Libertarian Conservatives as intolerant, brain-dead bigots, but the reality was that Libertarian Conservatives encouraged and welcomed honest debate as the only reliable avenue to the apprehension of truth, while no dissent from Liberal Statist doctrines was permitted. Though it took over half a century to be formulated into its final form, the following tenets of Leftist Orthodoxy can be seen as fundamental to the Liberal Statist mentality:

1.      Inasmuch as Liberal Statism is entirely correct and dedicated to the common good of all humanity, and inasmuch as Libertarian Conservativeism represents selfishness and ignorance, everything proclaimed by Liberal Statists is true, and anything proclaimed by Libertarian Conservatives is false;

2.      The ultimate goal of all domestic political activity must be the establishment of State control over all aspects of human life for the purpose, of course, of the common good;

3.      All activities yielding profits that are not placed at the disposal of the State are criminal enterprises, because all private property not under State control is theft, and no one really has the right to own anything;

4.      Nothing is immoral other than opposition to the redistribution of wealth, opposition to the ambitions of the rulers, and any violence not committed by or sanctioned by the State;

5.      Therefore, freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press (unless exercised by Liberal Statists) are circumscribed by and subject to the needs of the State and the rulers, and no right to privacy exists under any circumstance other than sodomy or the murder of children in the womb;

6.      The primary results of industrial capitalism have been pollution, global warming, oppression of the poor in the Third World, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of greedy plutocrats;

7.      The people, who are basically stupid, are not capable of self-government, and must therefore be controlled by the rulers for their own good;

8.      Similarly, these stupid people are not capable of taking care of themselves, and therefore all decisions must be made for them by the rulers;

9.      There is nothing exceptional about the United States, which is just one evil western country among many (though of course, as Barack Obama once commented, every country thinks it is exceptional, just as all the children in Lake Wobegon were above average);[85]

10.  Therefore, the ultimate goal of all foreign policies must be the establishment of a world government which will address the criminal damage done by western civilization;

11.  Western civilization has a history drenched in the blood of innocents, and therefore all Europeans and European-Americans are de facto criminals who stand at birth condemned by the rest of the world, to which they owe incessant abject apologies;

12.  For this reason, it is a moral imperative that wealth be transferred from the northern half of the western hemisphere to the rest of the world.

These ideas can best be described as Dogma, which is to say a set body of beliefs that may not be questioned. An even cursory perusal of them may cause the reader a bit of confusion because there seems to be a great deal of internal contradiction. For example, if western civilization in general, and the United States in particular, is essentially evil, why then does the Liberal Statist politician desire to establish his own absolute power over it? Again, if foreign policies and domestic policies designed to punish those who generate wealth will lead to economic distress, why does the Liberal Statist politician (who desires to rule the State) support such policies?

The answer has three components. First, and least complicated, is the psychological syndrome called cognitive dissonance, i.e., the ability to hold as true two mutually contradictory beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is bizarre, inexplicable, and universally present in the human mind. The second is the lust for power. Even if the acquisition of power will engender a reduction in its scope, the acquisition itself is the goal. (Again, what would Frodo have done with the ring if Sam had allowed him to keep it? And what did the ring do to Gollum?)[86]

The third is the most important, and it goes back to the idea of orthodoxy and dogma. The American Left had its origins in the radical socialist traditions of Europe, which was carried to the United States almost as a bacillus by immigrants from eastern and southern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[87] Radical socialism's basic tenets, born of a European experience alien to the American experience … rigid class structures with a consequent lack of social mobility, vicious class warfare, latifundia[88], entrenched religious hierarchies, no legitimate access to a voice in the political process, limited economic opportunities, etc. … had created in Europe a suicidal social and political divide between right and left.[89] The bloody clash of ideologies, especially in the years from 1848 to 1945, led the Europeans to a post-World War Two compromise referred to (in Germany, for example) as the Social Market Economy or (in Britain, for example) as the Welfare State. A capitalist economic system was wedded to an extensive social welfare system. The compromise satisfied neither side in the ideological divide, though both learned grudgingly to live with it. Capitalism was hobbled, unemployment became a permanent reality, social services were inferior; but there were limited profits, there was a degree of private property, there were minimal old age pensions and inadequate if universal medical care, etc. None of it worked well. But at least the bloody class conflict had ended, and Europe (Western Europe, at least) had settled into what soon became a moribund if comfortable senility. Eastern Europe was a different matter, laboring as it had beneath the ultimate form of Liberal Statism, Soviet-style Communism. When in 1989 the Soviet empire began its precipitous collapse, free market democracies were established in most of Eastern Europe. They did not last long.

In the United States, in any event, the leftist mentality had infected the body politic long before the European compromise had been reluctantly reached. The American leftist, infected by European prejudices, nurtured and cultivated age-old hatreds which were alien to the New World, and in the process subverted and eventually destroyed the American Experiment.[90] And a crucial byproduct of this mentality was dogmatism. Received wisdom must not be questioned, for the erosion of one component of the orthodoxy imperiled the entire pseudo-intellectual edifice. Liberal Statists despised and held in contempt Christians who believed that a successful attack upon any element of Biblical literalism would lead to a collapse of Christian orthodoxy. They were incapable of realizing that they, amusingly and pathetically, shared the exact same mentality.

What then was the specific suicidal dogma? Global warming.

In the middle of the 20th century some scientists had begun to claim that anti-industrial statisticians had compiled data that indicated a slow rise in global temperature, and began to speculate that human activity was to some degree responsible for it. This possibility was reinforced by computer models that posited a novel theory: the atmospheric byproducts of industrialization included the creation of so-called "greenhouse gases," carbon dioxide in particular but including other gases such as methane, gases that trapped in the atmosphere heat that would otherwise have dissipated out into space. This "greenhouse effect" was responsible for the slow rise in the earth's temperature, which if left unchecked would have a catastrophic impact on the planet. Ocean levels would rise as glaciers melted, desertification would spread, extinction of species (a naturally occurring phenomenon) would accelerate, famine would occur in previously fertile regions, plagues would strike previously plague-free areas, and the cumulative effect of all this would be comparable to the effect of the Cretaceous meteor sixty-five million years ago. By the end of the century the possibility of global warming caused by human activity had become a certainty, the speculation had become leftist dogma, and as with all leftist dogmas there were villains (industrialists) and heroes (environmentalists.)

The problem with the global warming hysteria was that it was derived from faulty computer models and was contradicted by fact. Global temperature variations occur cyclically, ice ages come and go, and human activity has very little if anything to do with it. The hysterics pointed to glacial retreat in Greenland and Antarctica as proof of global warming, ignoring the evidence to the contrary provided by the Norwegian log study;[91] they pointed to the record of temperature increases in the 20th century, ignoring the fact that global temperature annual variations were minimal;[92]  they insisted that the broad consensus of scientific opinion supported their position, ignoring both the fact that scientists who dissented were ignored or silenced and that some "environmentalist" scientists were found to be manufacturing data to support the hysteria; and they insisted that the only measurable variable impacting climate was human activity, ignoring other factors such as solar activity, ocean currents, subtle shifts in the earth's axis and rotation, and so forth. As for the computer models themselves, an old saying is appropriate: garbage in, garbage out. Create a computer program predicated upon faulty assumptions and selective, incomplete data, and the conclusions will be unreliable. As any logician will attest, a conclusion is only as valid as the premise from which it derives.

This was all irrelevant to the hysterics. Once dogma is established and accepted, the Leftist is psychologically incapable of questioning it. Orthodoxy is more important than rationality. One of the heroes of the Liberal Statist left, Lenin[93], established the principle of "democratic centralism," an idea that infected all subsequent Liberal Statist thought. Discussion and debate are acceptable until the leadership decides what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what is virtuous and what is evil. Any subsequent dissent is heresy, and the heretic must be ignored, despised, silenced, excoriated, and, if need be, killed. In like manner, those public figures who led the hysterical attack upon industry were lionized, honored, praised, and virtually worshipped. In one of his more bizarre moments of self-adulation (and they were legion), Barack Obama[94] declared that his accession to the presidency marked "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." No one on the left evinced the slightest astonishment at the megalomaniacal, preposterous idiocy of the remark. And when Albert Gore Jr., who had been Vice President of the United States, became the international hero of the environmentalist left, no one bothered to question his motives. His hysterical propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth won an academy award[95], and he, like Obama subsequently, was for some reason awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Unnoticed and unmentioned was the fact that he had invested heavily in so-called "green industries" such as the manufacturing of geothermal turbines and "smart grid" technology, and made a fortune from government subsidies (paid to him largely by the Obama administration.) Interestingly, when enterprises he approved of and had invested in were given taxpayer money, he called this incentives to environmentally responsible organizations. Any subsidies given to enterprises he disapproved of he called payoffs to special interest lobbies.

In any event, global warming hysteria was one of the two direct causes of the Second Great Depression. Once established as orthodox dogma, the logic of global warming made it incumbent upon the United States to lead the industrialized world in the subversion of their industrial economies. Greenhouse gases were causing global warming; therefore, greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. The goal ultimately set by the hysterics was for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050, which would mean around one billion tons of greenhouse gases permitted per year. Much blather was expended on optimistic projections of energy replacement via wind, solar, and geothermal power, but it was all, of course, nonsense. The only alternate form of energy production that could conceivably reduce the need for fossil fuel was nuclear power, and that was anathema to the environmentalists. (Indeed, a bill introduced in 2036 by Senator Sarah Palin[96], Republican from Alaska, to fund research into nuclear fusion, which if successful would eliminate all reasonably objections to nuclear power development, was soundly defeated by the Democrats.)

In any event, the plan was unworkable as a simple matter of practicality. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 83% below the 2005 level would mean returning to the emission level of 1910! In 1910 the U.S. population was 92 million; by 2050 the population would reach 420 million. If measured in terms of gas emissions per capita, the goal was 2.4 tons per American in a population of 420 million, which would translate into a per capita emission last seen in 1875, when our population was a scant 45 million. Any attempt actually to implement this scheme would obviously be suicidal; but implement it we did, and the consequent disruption of the economy threw the nation into an economic collapse beside which the First Great Depression paled in comparison. By 2050, unemployment reached 48%, social welfare costs quadrupled, inflation reached 220%, the trade deficit quintupled, and industrial production (quite intentionally) fell by 62%. The Second Great Depression is rather poignantly dated as beginning in 2029, one hundred years after the First, but while we can say that the First ended in 1946[97], no date can be given for the end of the Second. With Leviathan's destruction of both capitalism and democracy, such things as business cycles, the value of currency, political competition in the arena of ideas, public sector vs. private sector, all became meaningless. To this tragedy must be added an element of farce: it had become quite clear that planetary temperature was relatively stable, and that such variations in temperature as did exist were unrelated to human activity.

Our reflections center on American History, not World History, so our comments on the rest of the world are perforce limited in scope to those developments that impacted the U.S. directly. The Third World War, which was the second cause of the Second Great Depression, falls into this category.

Certain developments with their origins in the 20th century had led by the middle of the 21st to an international crisis that was incapable of peaceful resolution. It is difficult, and perhaps presumptuous, to attempt to summarize a century of international relations in a few pages. It is necessary, however, to make the attempt, so as to understand the impact of the World War upon the Civil War. The following developments are of primary importance.

One: the proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially the neutron bomb[98], created a situation in which any confrontation between nations had the potential for catastrophe. The first generation of nuclear powers was limited to two, the United States and the Soviet Union. They were soon joined by France, Britain, and China, and then, years later, by Israel, Pakistan, and India. One quality common to the countries on this list was the awareness that a nuclear exchange could lead to the destruction of both combatants, and as such needed to be avoided at almost all costs. This realization, referred to by the startling acronym M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction), acted as a brake upon rash overreaction by regimes that, while combative, ideologically hostile to one another, and pursuing oppositional policies, were none the less not suicidal. That situation changed when Iran and North Korea acquired the weapons and Islamic radicals seized control of Pakistan.

The government of Iran (but not, 2050, the majority of its population) adhered to a perverse brand of radical Shi'ite Islam. The differences among the several Muslin sects need not concern us here, but it is important that Shi'ites believe in the "hidden imam," a messianic figure who has been in hiding for a thousand years and who would appear at the end of the world. This belief provided some people in the irrational religious leadership with a motive to end it.[99] This regime had been established in 1979 in a national anti-western upheaval, was overthrown and re-established twice, and became even more radical each time it was restored.

The government of North Korea, a hereditary Communist dictatorship, was unrestrained by anything even vaguely approaching rationality. It was a regime of lunatics ruling a population of impoverished, famine-ridden people whose minds had been numbed by incessant, ubiquitous propaganda. Repeated attempts on the part of the rest of the world at normalizing relations foundered on the abnormality of the regime. Its acquisition of nuclear weapons constituted an existential threat to peace.

This proliferation of nuclear weapons led to a new nuclear arms race. Iran's acquisition destabilized the Middle East, dramatically shifting the balance of power in the region, and in due time Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia became nuclear powers. So at the other end of Asia, and for the same reasons, did South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and, after heated, bitter debate, Japan.

Two: The effective end of Europe as a center of power, and indeed as a distinct civilization, contributed to the shift in the balance of power. The Europeans had been cowed by the environmentalist extremists in the same manner as had the United States, with the same resultant self-inflicted wounds. In addition, they (and we) had accepted the idea that the industrializing nations of the east and the south were exempt from greenhouse gas emission limitations, and were thus essentially bribed by the west to impose self-limitations. Brazil and Indonesia were paid huge amounts of money to reduce the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rain forest, Borneo, and Sumatra. China, India, and Brazil, by 2050 the dominant economic powers on the planet, continued to churn out the gases as their economies continued to churn out manufactured goods, which were then purchased  by us and the Europeans.

The vaunted European Union, which had once been touted as the next superpower, proved to be unworkable and unsustainable. A major reason for this was that the native Europeans in every country except Greece had negative population growth rates. They were, in effect, going extinct. Population increases were a result entirely of immigration from South Asia and North Africa, which meant that by 2050 Great Britain was 25% Muslim and 20% Hindu; France was 45% Muslim; Germany was 40% Muslim; and the Netherlands became the first European country with a Muslim majority of 57%. Though the "Europeans" still controlled most "European" governments, they had become hostages to their own enormous minority groups, and this crippled any attempt to formulate and pursue a coherent foreign policy. Thus it was that …

Three: When the Iranians attacked Israel in 2079 and the Egyptians and Turks (allies of Israel) intervened on Israel's side, leading Pakistan (an ally of Iran) to attack Turkey, India (an ally of Turkey) to attack Pakistan, and China (an ally of Pakistan) to attack India, Europe stood by in supine impotence, while the United States, convulsed by its own domestic troubles, proclaimed its steadfast support for Israel and then declared neutrality. The War very quickly escalated to full nuclear exchanges. The widespread use of the neutron bomb prevented a suffusion of radioactive fallout, but almost the entire population of the Middle East south of Ankara, north of Riyadh, east of Islamabad, and west of Tripoli, was exterminated. Deaths were estimated at just over two and a half billion.

China and India suffered tremendous losses as well, but their enormous populations allowed for enough survival to begin the task of replenishment. But China, needing to marshal its resources for the War and the years of recovery, ceased to purchase American securities. The infusion of Chinese money into the American economy was the only thing forestalling a depression since the early 21st century. Now the lack of that of borrowed money, coupled with the self-destructive environmental programs, destroyed the economy of the United States.

As for the question of who won the Third World War, the answer is obvious. The winner was Brazil, who found itself in 2080 in the exact same position the United States had occupied in 1945. The rest of the industrial world was either in ruins or in economic collapse, the world was Brazil's market, and it had no competition. The Brazilian century had begun.

INTERLUDE: PRESIDENTIAL RANKINGS

(Editor's note: This brief examination of the presidents was included in the 2160 edition of this collection of essays as an addendum. We are inserting it here because we feel this to be a more appropriate place in the sequence of essays.)

In 1962, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger polled the members of the Association of American Historians and asked them to rank the presidents of the United States in order of greatness, under the following categories: Great (1-5), Near Great (6-10), Above Average (11-15), Average (an indeterminate number), Below Average (the next to bottom five), and Poor (the bottom five.)  A newspaper called the Chicago Tribune repeated the polling in 1982 and 1992, and another newspaper called the Wall Street Journal repeated it yet again in 2003. The last poll, in 2020, was conducted by the New England Convention. The criteria Schlesinger proposed for the evaluation were:

1.      Ability to articulate a vision for America's future;

2.      Ability to mold public opinion;

3.      Skill in dealing with Congress;

4.      Coherence and effectiveness of domestic policy;

5.      Coherence and effectiveness of foreign policy;

6.      Judgment in judicial and cabinet appointments.

The criteria reflect the Liberal Statist mentality of which Schlesinger was an exemplar. The presidency as conceived by the Framers was not designed to articulate visions or mold public opinion. The other four criteria are valid, though prior to the first Roosevelt domestic policy was more likely to be formed by Congress than by the president. (Lincoln and, on occasion, Jackson were exceptions.) The Liberal Statist bias is also obvious in the way in which some of the presidents are evaluated.  Using the six criteria as proposed, Calvin Coolidge was a great president. Needless to say, as a believer in limited government and the free market, he was consistently ranked only average, below average, or poor.

In any event, the original 1962 ranking was as follows:

Neither Kennedy, the incumbent at the time, nor the first Harrison, who died one month into his presidency, nor Garfield, murdered before serving a full year, were included in the ranking.

Twenty years later the ranking (1982) was:

Some interesting changes occurred. W.H. Harrison, Garfield, and Kennedy were included in this ranking, though their ranks are peculiar. Harrison caught cold on inauguration day, the cold developed into pneumonia, and he died a few weeks later. Why he is ranked as the poorest president, when he had the opportunity neither to succeed nor fail, is inexplicable, as is the ranking of Garfield as the last of the below average presidents, when he served for less than a year before his assassination. (Given the Liberal Statist mentality prevalent among historians, this ranking may reflect nothing more than that the two men in question were not Democrats.) And Kennedy's truncated administration, distinguished by few successes and numerous failures, hardly qualifies him as above average. Wilson and the first Roosevelt have changed places, as have Washington and the second Roosevelt, and Eisenhower has gone from below average to near great. (In American political history, presidents frequently left office under a cloud of unpopularity, which the passage of time then redressed.)

The next ranking, in 1992, ranked the same thirty-eight men. It was decided to exclude the two most recent presidents, Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, on the quite reasonable grounds that proximity in time adversely affects objectivity of assessment. Very few changes occurred from 1982.

Washington and the second Roosevelt have again changed position, and the first Roosevelt has moved up a category. Other differences are trivial.

When the poll was repeated in 2003, the criteria remained the same but the subject list was different. Garfield and W.H. Harrison were (rightly) excluded, Reagan and G.H.W. Bush were included. G.W. Bush was excluded because he was the incumbent. The ranking was as follows:

The top three remain the top three in this ranking, though now Washington replaces Lincoln as number one. Reagan's presence in the "near great" column relegates Polk to "above average," and Nixon advanced from "poor" to "below average." The presence of Clinton and the first Bush in the "average" category is probably more a reflection of contemporary politics than anything else. The first Bush was confronted by a Congress controlled by the other party; it was he who had to deal as president with the reconfiguration of the international situation subsequent to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself; who organized a United Nations military action to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he committed the unforgivable sin (not unknown in American history) of not having been his predecessor.[100] Clinton, on the other hand, a charismatic man with great personal charm, came into office with a congressional majority of his own party, a majority he lost two years later. The major accomplishments of his administration … welfare reform, a balanced budget … were actually accomplishments of the Republican Congress with which he had no choice but to cooperate, and his failures … a preposterous Rube Goldbergian[101] health care proposal, a startling indifference to the emergence of Islamic terrorism … make it difficult to understand why he was ranked as average. True, US military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo were successful actions taken for moral reasons; they also, in keeping with the Democratic Party's attitude toward the use of force, were unrelated to American national interests. And his impeachment, an unpleasant by-product of his chronic immaturity, inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood or right and wrong, his lack of self-control, common decency, and common sense, was a national embarrassment. An average president? This assessment is difficult to justify.

A scant seven years later another poll was conducted by a minor university's research wing using criteria much more extensive to the point of a Byzantine complexity. The results, however, confirm the Liberal Statist bias of academia as demonstrated by the previous polls, as well as certain irrational elements that had by that point become normative. (The inclusion, and the consequent ranking, of W.H. Harrison and Garfield is difficult to justify, though of course both are explained by the partisan mentality in which Liberal Statism reveled. Harrison was a Whig, i.e., not a Democrat, and Garfield was a Republican, i.e, not a Democrat.) In addition, all previous polls had excluded incumbents on the perfectly reasonable grounds that objectivity would be difficult if not impossible achieve. This did not prevent the inclusion of Obama (above average?!) in the 2010 poll, even though it was conducted when he had been in office for less than two years. Of course, inasmuch as Obama was not only the darling of Liberal Statist academic mentality, but also largely the creation of the Liberal Statist press, his inclusion and his rank comes as no surprise.  The results were as follows:

The final exercise in presidential ranking was compiled in 2025. Again in the interest of objectivity, the incumbent and her predecessors for the preceding decade were excluded from the poll. The results were as follows:

This final poll provides evidence of the final absorption of academia and the media by the Liberal Statist mentality. Obama: a president who octupled the national debt, crippled the free market, embraced an almost Stalinist cult of personality, despised every quality that had made America exceptional (indeed, denied that America was exceptional), and accommodated alien regimes hostile to what was left of Western Civilization and dedicated to the destruction of the United States … near great?! Clinton, Carter, Lyndon Johnson, presidential failures of egregious proportions … above average?! The first Bush, who drove Iraq out of Kuwait and oversaw the end of the Cold War … below average? The second Bush, whose attempt to destroy the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was vitiated by Obama, who, after presiding over seven years of prosperity, had the misfortune (like Van Buren, Harding, and his father) to preside over a downturn in the business cycle and an insane culmination of congressionally mandated irresponsible lending[102] … our worst president?! Leftist prejudice radiates redolently from the page.[103]

As do the rankings generally. By the late 20th century academia and the media were so infected by the Liberal Statist mentality that the rankings reflected little more than their own distorted view of what the presidency, and the nation itself, were supposed to be.

At the risk of appearing arrogant, this writer proposes a different ranking of presidential greatness, using the following criteria for evaluation:

1. Understanding the true meaning of the Constitution;

2. Understanding, respecting, and defending the division of powers;

3. Understanding, respecting, and defending the separation of powers;[104]

4. Understanding, respecting, and defending the check and balance system:

5. Willingness to defend the nation and its interests;

6.  Skill in dealing with Congress;

7. Judgment in judicial and cabinet appointments.

On the basis of these criteria, the presidents can be ranked as follows:

Just one observer's opinion.

VII – LEVIATHAN

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned, yet they wily believe there not be many so wise as themselves.

-Thomas Hobbes

Every national crisis engenders an intensification of Liberal Statism.[105] As we have seen, the First Civil War, the First World War, the First Great Depression, the Second World War, all occasioned dramatic increases of the power of the State over the people, and a commensurate diminishing of personal liberty. The Second Civil War, the Second Great Depression, and the Third World War not only offered the Liberal Statists another opportunity to expand their authority, it allowed them to establish a form of government masquerading as a democracy, but which was in fact a form of totalitarianism. The American political system and the Constitution itself effectively ended in 2078. All the patriotic slogans and republican jargon remained, of course, and all the phrases of democratic rhetoric continued to be proclaimed with sententious solemnity. It was all irrelevant. By 2080, the United States of America was a one-party totalitarian State.

The secession of ten and a half states was quite obviously a crisis of great proportion, and the Liberal Statists did not waste it; but the Second Civil War differed from the First in a number of significant ways, despite some surface similarities.

The old Confederacy was, as noted previously, right for the wrong reasons. The southern states were right in opposing the federal assault upon self-government in the states of the Union, but wrong in doing so in an attempt to defend and preserve the detestable institution of human slavery. Conversely, the federal government was wrong for the right reasons, wrong to pervert the constitutional system established by the Framers, but right to pursue compliance with was certainly a "higher law," to use an old abolitionist phrase.[106] No such disconnect between morality and constitutional scruple existed in 2080. The weapons possession issue provided the federal government with an opportunity, an excuse, to abolish federalism outright by placing in its own hands the absolute power to remake the Constitution in any way it wished. Morality had nothing to do with it.

As was the case in 1861, secessionism did not find much support in the Northeast or Midwest. (The secession of counties in New York and Illinois were brief aberrations, very quickly suppressed.) But unlike 1861, the seceding states were not limited to the South, nor were they contiguous. Texas and Oklahoma formed one unit of the new country (which adopted the name The Constitutional Federal Union, or C.F.U.) Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah formed a second. Mississippi and Alabama formed a third. Alaska, of course, had always been geographically separate from the "lower forty-eight," but nonetheless now constituted a fourth. And North California constituted a fifth.

This fact of geographic discontiguity should have made this secessionist attempt relatively easy to deal with. After all, it is not necessary to divide and conquer that which is already divided. But two other factors complicated the problem, one with similarities to 1861 and the other so dissimilar that Americans of the 19th century would have found it incomprehensible.

The first is that, as in 1861, both the officer corps and the enlisted personnel of all branches of the service were made up disproportionately of southerners. True, the only states of the old Confederacy to secede in 2078 were Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, but these three states provided nearly 10% of the officers and 15% of the enlisted personnel. Even though the concept of the state as one's "country" had died at Appomattox,[107] the emotional pull of locality, family, tradition, sectionalism, etc., led to a disruption of the armed forces; not a fatal one, not an insurmountable one, not one anywhere near as serious as it had been in 1861, but one which severely delayed the ability of the federal government to react to secession.

But fatal and insurmountable indeed was the second factor: the general disinclination of the American population to fight to preserve the Union. In 1861, after the South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, men volunteered to serve in the Union forces (and, not unimportantly, in the Confederate forces) by the tens of thousands. It is true that military conscription[108] later swelled the northern ranks, but most of the 2,213,000 Union soldiers, and all of the 600,000 Confederate soldiers, were volunteers.[109]

But by 2080 the general decay in moral standards, previously examined, had created generation after generation of self-focused, self-indulgent, lazy, irresponsible people, one major result of which was the virtual disappearance of anything approaching patriotism or responsible citizenship (not to mention an understanding of the philosophy underlying federalism, separation of powers, constitutional government, and so forth.) Citizenship itself had, indeed, become an anachronism, as had any rational approach to national defense. In order to trace the evolution (or perhaps the devolution) of the United States from the destruction of the Constitution in 2080 to the rise of Leviathan, we must compartmentalize our examination into distinct and manageable topics.

ONE: The steady diminishing of respect for the armed forces. Americans had always had an ambivalent attitude toward the military. Suspicion borne of a reasonable mistrust of men with power was coupled with admiration for the martial virtues and the self-sacrifice and service rendered by our warriors in time of need. Our national tradition from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century assumed that a small standing armed force was the normal state of affairs. (Americans were usually oblivious to their good fortune, having Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, neither of whom presented a military threat. One may contrast this with 18th century Poland, which had the Germans and the Russians as neighbors, or 20th century Germany, between the Russians and the French, or, of course, Israel, surrounded on all sides by vicious, hateful, fanatical, bigoted enemies.) When in American history crisis loomed (civil war, world war,) a large armed force was raised, and then disbanded when the crisis passed. This occurred after the Revolution, after the First Civil War, and after the First World War. But the Second World War left us in a different situation, for the crisis that had necessitated the expansion of the armed forces did not really pass. When the Confederacy was crushed, the First Civil War was over. When the German Empire surrendered, the First World War was over. But when the danger posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ended, it was replaced by an even more sinister danger posed by the Soviet Union. Even though the foundations for our own Liberal Statist system had already been unwittingly laid by Wilson and the Roosevelts, real differences still existed between capitalist democracy and totalitarian socialism, and the U.S. government under President Truman[110] determined to use America's industrial predominance, unparalleled wealth, and military might to stop the further expansion of Soviet power. This policy, referred to as "containment," became the fundamental foreign policy of the U.S. for the next forty-five years, and the era of Soviet-American competition came to be referred to as the "Cold War."[111]

Americans reluctantly but with determination shouldered the burdens thus imposed, and honored and respected their sons (and daughters) who donned the uniform and went off to foreign lands. By 1960, American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen were stationed in Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand,  and, of course, North America itself. Never since the days of the Roman Empire under the Antonines or the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan had an imperial power (for that is what the United States had become) extended its power so far beyond its borderers.

And then came the War in Vietnam. This was a forty years' war, as the Vietnamese in pursuit of national independence fought first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and then each other. To the American mentality of the era, which saw all international situations within the context of the Cold War, it was a very simple example of Communism versus anti-Communism (if not quite democracy.) It seemed on the surface to be replay of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. In both cases, an Asian country was split in two, and the non-Communist regime in the south was defending itself against aggression by the Communist regime in the north. Four successive presidents, Eisenhower, the first Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all seemed to be convinced that the defense of South Vietnam was crucial to American national interests, and both the Democrat and Republican parties supported the commitment o the southern regime.

The problem was that our leadership had misconstrued the situation by its confusion of Vietnam with Korea, a confusion that any simple objective reading of history could have avoided.[112] In Korea, the northern Communist regime had been established by the military might of a foreign imperialist power (the Soviet Union, who received the right to occupy northern Korea as part of the World War Two allied agreements,) while the southern regime, with all of its faults (and they were legion) had been established by the Koreans themselves, albeit with American assistance. In Vietnam, the exact opposite situation existed. The Communist regime in the north had been created by Vietnamese, while the non-Communist regime in the south had been created by the French and was subsequently sustained by the Americans.

We were thus attempting to bolster a regime with limited support among its own people, a futile effort which should have cautionary but was not. Our goal, halting the spread of totalitarian socialism, was laudable, and our fighting men were brave and noble; but the task placed upon them was an impossible one. Again we have an example of being wrong for the right reasons.

And the impact was deleterious. Opponents to the war turned upon our soldiers with a viciousness that was venomous and virulent. It was an odd and convoluted combination of socialist propaganda, populist radicalism, misplaced idealism, and the self-absorption of the Generation of Vipers. To the socialists (among whom must be counted Soviet functionaries who managed to influence the American media), anything that impeded the advance of totalitarianism (i.e., "the power of the people", as in the "National Liberation Front" in Vietnam) was on the wrong side of historical inevitability; to the populists (among whom must be counted emotionally overheated and naïve entertainers, whose influence far exceeded both their numbers and their intellectual capacities), America as traditionally understood was essentially evil, and any action taken by the government that did not steal people's property (i.e., take money away from people who had earned it and give to people had had not) was an expression of America's selfishness and greed; to the idealists (exemplars of Lenin's old reference to useful fools), their catch phrases included "war is harmful to children and other living things," "make love, not war," "war is over if you want it," "flower power," "Beatle power is love for life," and, most bizarrely, "power to the people"! (Had "the people" been able to, they would probably have killed these idiots.) And as for the Generation of Vipers, what was generally perceived as an anti-war movement was in reality an anti-draft movement, a general disinclination on their parts to provide military service to the nation that had produced, protected, enriched, and nurtured them. It was not a coincidence that when President Nixon effectively ended the draft, three years before the war ended, the antiwar movement disappeared. Subsequent military actions, in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Indonesia, etc., while not regarded with the same disgust and personal distain that had afflicted the servicemen in the Vietnam period, were nonetheless the objects of leftist anger. Anything which diverted attention from the Liberal Statist desire to expand domestic power was anathema.[113]

Thus by the outbreak of the Second Civil War, so much animosity against the military had developed that when the State called for volunteers to serve against the rebellion, very few people responded; and when the draft was reinstates, draft evasion was so widespread that it effectively vitiated the law. The "Union" found itself struggling to have a military force adequate to the suppression of the rebellion.

TWO: Related to this was the effective end of the concept of citizenship. As originally conceived by the ancient Greeks and Romans, citizenship conferred both privileges and responsibilities upon the people who possessed it. Citizens in those civilizations had political rights (the right to participate in the political process, the right to hold office), legal rights (the right to a jury trial in Athens, the right to appeal a criminal conviction in Rome), as well as the obligation to provide military service. None of this should be confused with the concept of citizenship that emerged during the so-called Enlightenment and subsequent American and French Revolutions. Citizenship in the classical period was limited to men (affluent men in Athens) and there were distinctions among citizens of various degrees (patricians, equestrians, and plebeians in Rome.) But the distinction between citizen and non-citizen was stark and clearly delineated. Non-citizens in Athens or Sparta had no legal or political rights at all, and while the Romans created perforce two separate legal systems to govern their huge empire (the ius civilis, or the law of the city of Rome for citizens, and the ius gentium, or the law of the nations for everyone else,) the two systems had notable differences. For example, if sentenced to death in Rome a citizen would be beheaded, a messy but relatively painless way to die, or might even be allowed to open his veins; a non-citizen might be crucified, a horrific and agonizing death. The ancient Christian tradition tells us that in the Neronian persecution of Christians (64-68 A.D.), St. Paul, a Roman citizen, was beheaded, while St. Peter, who was not a citizen, was crucified.

Citizenship in the early United States conformed to much of the classical model. All citizens were originally men with some degree of property (or at least some ability to pay taxes.) One of the Framers, John Jay of New York, explained this old perspective by saying that "The people who own the country should rule it." The rights of the citizen consisted of the right to vote, the right to run for and to hold office, and the right to sit on juries. Unlike the ancients, however, non-citizens had the same legal rights in court and, for men at least, the same property rights. As the American Republic evolved, full citizenship (the basic component of which was suffrage) underwent constant expansion. By the eve of the First Civil War universal white male suffrage had been established in all the states; freed slaves were given citizenship by the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the right to vote by the 15th Amendment in 1870; women were first granted voting rights in the territory of Wyoming in 1869, and nationally by the 19th Amendment in 1920; the poll tax, a device routinely used in the South to obstruct black voting, was abolished by the 24th Amendment in 1964; and the voting age was lowered nationally to 18 in 1971 by the 26th Amendment.

Thus far the expansion of citizenship rights was meet and right, a just and proper evolution of applied freedom and political equality. The whole concept of citizenship began to be eroded, however, when the Democratic Party realized that it was possible to extend citizenship rights to non-citizens, i.e., illegal aliens, in state and local governments.[114] The goal of the Democrats was, of course, to establish in as many states as possible the right of non-citizens to vote and hold public office, because they would then, of course, vote for the Democrats. Some state constitutions expressly prohibited non-citizens from hold office, but it occurred to very few of them to prohibit non-citizens from voting. A slight change in state constitutional wording eliminated both impediments. By 2085 non-citizens were voting and being elected to office in most states, with only Texas, the deep South, and the mountain states resisting the urge. By and large the only difference remaining between citizens and non-citizens was the obligation of citizens to serve on juries, which is to say, no real difference at all. (A 21st century quip asked, "What is the definition of a jury? Answer: twelve people too stupid to avoid jury duty." The selfish irresponsibility of the era regarded jury duty as an annoyance, not a privilege.)

The impact of this change was fundamental. Because the border of the United States had become porous on all sides, illegal aliens had been flooding into the country for decades, and by 2085 constituted some 40% of the population (including their offspring, who were constitutionally entitled to citizenship if born in the U.S.) This was a large and powerful group, and politicians either shamelessly courted their support or shamefully feared offending them. And inasmuch as they were not really Americans and had no sense of loyalty or commitment to anything other than self-interest, they had no intention of risking their lives to bring Montana, for example, back into the Union. This, coupled with the distain in which the military was held, made it impossible to crush the rebellion by conventional means. It remained possible to crush the rebellion by unconventional means, which is what happened in 2085.

THREE: Even if the armed forces not been despised and the traditions of republican virtue not extinct, the Second Great Depression (whose causes and effects we have already discussed) rendered the government incapable of doing anything beyond asserting and maintaining such control as it still had over the forty-one and a half states that remained. It was the determination of the Liberal Statist rulers to make their remaining power impregnable that ended the American experiment in self-government.

We need not belabor the tragic tale with depressing details. In outline, what occurred was this:

1.      In 2080 Congress repealed the 1st Amendment and replaced it with the 29th Amendment, granting the Federal Government control over the media, the right to regulate expression and religious practice, and the right to permit or prohibit unofficial gatherings. The subsequent Dissemination of Information Act effectively ended political debate and the public proclamation of religious faith (other than atheism), and led both to a purge of the nation's libraries and records and to the end of the media as anything more than a propaganda arm of the State.

2.      In the same year, Congress repealed the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments[115], thereby effectively ending the rule of law as conventionally understood. The 30th Amendment established a new judicial system: in criminal court an indictment was a conviction, there were no juries, and punishments became secret and unrestricted in nature.

3.      In 2081 Congress repealed the 10th Amendment and passed the Defense of Freedom Act, which abolished the state government (indeed, the states themselves) and completed the process begun decades before by concentrating all power in the hands of the rulers in Washington.

4.      In 2082 Congress repealed Article I sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution[116], replacing them with the 31st Amendment, by which the term of office of the House of Representatives was extended from two years to ten, and that of the Senate from six years to twenty. The amendment explicitly guaranteed that all incumbent members would automatically qualify for the new system.

5.      At the end of the second term of President Quentin Roosevelt in 2088, at which time he would have been ineligible for re-election, Congress repealed Article II section 1, the 12th, 20th, 22nd and 25th Amendments[117], and then passed the 32nd Amendment by which the president remained in office for life.

6.      And when, in 2089, Roosevelt's son Kermit married Frances Rose Kennedy, Congress made the presidency a heredity office (33rd Amendment), while extending the House term to twenty years and the Senate term to life (34th Amendment.)

American political movements have traditionally been given titles (the first Roosevelt's Square Deal, Wilson's New Freedom, the second Roosevelt's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society, Nixon's New Federalism, the first Bush's Compassionate Conservatism, etc.) The title which attached itself early on to this decade-long subversion of America was Patriotic Democratic Centralism. "Patriotic" because the word stirred the people's emotions, "democratic" because it preserved the illusion of popular government, and "centralism" because that is exactly what it was. The political party system, never a constitutional component of the American political system anyway, was dispensed with without an amendment being necessary. The 34th Amendment had already made Congressional office to all intents and purposes a permanent possession, literally so for the Senate and effectively so for the House. Inasmuch as the Democratic Party, the premier Liberal Statist party, held large majorities in both houses as well as possessing the presidency by hereditary right, that made the national government permanent property of the Democrats. The Republicans, relegated to permanent minority status though as permanently entrenched as the Democrats were, ceased to be in any way an opposition party. (Indeed, in terms of the expansion of government power, the two parties in the late 20th into the 21st centuries had many more similarities than differences.) The Republicans were allowed to continue to exist so as to preserve the illusion of political freedom and political competition, but this was, of course, nonsense. The United States of America was by 2090 a one-party totalitarian state. The Liberal Statist Democratic Party was triumphant.

Thus Leviathan arose in the United States, not as an aberration in human history, but as just another example of the pathetic inclination of foolish men to trust the lies of those who desire power. One of the basic ideas of the American Revolution had been so long forgotten that when freedom in America died, or rather was murdered, most Americans did not truly understand what was happening. It all seemed natural and good.

Some dim memory of that long distant lesson persisted in Texas, Alaska, and the mountain states, but the end of the Second Civil War killed it there as well. Military planners pointed out to the rulers that the armed forces should not be wasted on suppressing the rebellion if there are other ways to do it, especially since the maintenance of domestic order would require the government's undivided attention. But historians (and there still were some) pointed out that the Union won the First Civil War only when the massive bloodshed of Grant's war of attrition against Lee (and of Sherman's murderous campaign in Georgia and against Johnston) exhausted the Confederacy's ability to fight. After internal debate, consensus was reached and, in keeping with Patriotic Democratic Centralism, no dissent was thereafter permitted.

On January 31, 2085, an ultimatum was issued by the government of the United States (it would be absurd to continue to refer to the "federal government") to the secessionist states: unconditional surrender within 48 hours, or face the consequences. The ultimatum was rejected. The secessionists were confident in their ability to resist, and it did not occur to them to think the unthinkable or imagine the unimaginable.

At 5:45 AM on February 4, 2085, the first series of neutron bombs exploded over Dallas and Fort Worth, followed at fifteen minute intervals by attacks on Houston, Austin, El Paso, San Antonio, Corpus Christie, and Lubbock. By 7:00 AM, 70% of the population of Texas was dead. By noon, the other secessionist states had surrendered, and within forty-eight hours, State forces began a military occupation. As of this date[118], the occupation has not ended.

The suppression of knowledge, the perversion of information, the end of education, and the ubiquity of propaganda … an induced hedonism that destroyed not only the family but also all morals worthy of the name … the omnipotence of the State and the attack upon any other object of veneration … a one party State with an heredity executive president and an entrenched, bloated, self-serving congressional aristocracy bolstered by a an entrenched, bloated, self-perpetuating bureaucracy … all this described the United States as of 2090 A.D. (The obvious historical comparison of the United States after 2090 with the Roman Empire after 31 B.C ignores two important differences: Rome was wealthy and powerful; America was poor and weak.) It may seem that it happened overnight, that the republican experiment in popular government was overturned with frightening immediacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The process may have begun in 1861 with the dramatic expansion of federal power during the First Civil War, but the expansion of federal power under Lincoln was an emergency expedient, however it may have redefined state-federal relations. The year the subversion began can be more convincingly said to have been 1913 with the beginning of the "progressive" abandonment of the Aristotelian principles of government; certainly the First World War occasioned, temporarily at least, a Leviathan-in-waiting, and the second Roosevelt created a Leviathan-in-embryo. After FDR, there was no turning back. The Republic was doomed. Everything that happened after 1933 was merely elaboration.

The game of "if history" is an interesting if pointless one, but it is impossible for students of history to avoid playing it. What would have happened "if" Carthage had won the Second Punic War? "If" Mecca had defeated Medina in 630 A.D.?  "If" Napoleon had won at Waterloo? "If" Germany had become a unified, democratic, constitutional monarchy in 1848? "If" the Confederacy had won the First Civil War, or Germany the Second World War, or the Guomindang the  civil war in China, and so forth and so forth.

So, what if the American people had realized that the redistribution of wealth was nothing but theft misnomered, and that politicians espousing it were appealing to their base, selfish instincts out of a cynical desire for power? What if the corruptive influence of power had not become an accepted partisan weapon as parties sought electoral advantage, rather than a generally recognized danger of governance reminding us that no one who wants power, no one, can be trusted? If we had not abandoned the idea that the words of the Constitution mean what they say and say what they mean, that we cannot pretend otherwise by parroting the absurdity that the Constitution is "a living document," i.e., its words are void of intrinsic meaning? That right and wrong are not relative terms, that absolute standards of morality do exist and are not negotiable, that truth and falsehood are not matters of opinion, that the purpose of education is to educate, and, most importantly, that the government that governs best, governs least?

If, if, if. If these things had occurred, the United States would still be the beacon of light it once had been, and the American people would still be free. Alas, it was not to be. Our nation, once a bastion of human rights, is today no different than any other absolutist state, even though it continues to be disguised with the verbal masque of liberty.

As it was said about the outbreak of the First World War, the tragic "ifs" accumulate. But history is history, and the past is immutable, and so it is that so many distant voices echo down the corridors of time to haunt our own day:

Napoleon Bonaparte noting that, "Among those who decry oppression are many who like to oppress."

Adolf Hitler observing, "How fortunate for governments that the people they rule do not think."

Benito Mussolini declaiming, "Nothing outside the State, nothing against the State, nothing except the State."

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin observing that "Lies told often enough become truth," and that "Liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed."

Josef Stalin saying, "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We do not allow our enemies to have guns. Why then should we let them have ideas?"

Saddest of all, however, are the words of Abraham Lincoln: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live for all time, or die by suicide."

Res ipsa loquitur.[119]

REFERENCES

1 We use the antiquated abbreviation A.D. (anno domini, "in the year of the Lord,") in keeping with Gottfried's custom, instead of the C.E. designation currently in use. The A.D. reference is to the number of years since the birth of Jesus Christ. The dates of Gottfried's birth and death are not errors in transcription. At death, Gottfried was two months shy of being 100 years old.

2 Ludwig van Beethoven was a 19th century German composer. The Boston Tea Party had something to do with the American Revolution, though there is no indication that founding father Crispus Attucks was involved.

3 It should be noted in passing that when the manuscripts were first being circulated Gottfried was contacted by an admirer in Brazil, Dr. Carlos Renzi of the University of São Paolo, who posed a novel suggestion: Renzi, a professor of Physics, asked Gottfried's permission to use his book in an experiment that he called "inverse tachyon resequencing." If successful, Renzi claimed, tachyon resequencing would transmit a copy of his book back into the past. Gottfried regarded the request as unworthy of a response. The editors have received a similar query from Renzi's grandson. We have followed Gottfried's example and have ignored it.

4 The reference appears to be to a British writer named George Orwell, whose dystopian novel 1984, quoted beneath the title of this essay, envisioned a future when government-directed limitations on vocabulary effected a severe reduction of the human ability to think.

5 Though Franklin Roosevelt (president 1933-1945) was generally regarded as one of the patriarchs of Liberalism as the term came to be used, he ran for president in 1932 on a platform which can only accurately be described as conservative, a position which he then abandoned. This was not an expression of dishonesty, though he was dishonest:  he simply seems to have had no fixed, serious beliefs.

6 As will become clear, Gottfried uses the capitalized word "State" to refer to central political authority, while "state" refers to what was once the "states" in our federal system. The reader must not confuse the two.

7 Communism (more properly Marxism-Leninism) was a 19th century materialist superstition predicated upon certain social and economic myths; Socialism, from which Marxism derived, differed from Communism only in its pace and the lip service it paid to democratic slogans; Fascism differed from Socialism and Communism only in its nationalist and racist components. Though the "left" succeeded in portraying Fascism as a rightist ideology, it was in fact functionally indistinguishable from the other "Liberal Statist" ideologies, to use Gottfried's preferred term.

8 The editors have no idea what Gottfried is referring to here.

9 The references are to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher, author of Leviathan; and John Calvin (1509-1564), a French/Swiss theologian, author of Institutes of the Christian Religion. Old copies of both books were found among Gottfried's effects after his death.

10 This is one of many cultural references made by Dr. Gottfried whose meaning has been lost with the passage of time. Inasmuch as birds evolved from reptiles, and reptiles are oviparous, obviously the egg came before the chicken. We cannot discern the point of this comment.

11 "Then he said to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" The Gospel of Luke, chapter 3, verse 7

12 The reference is to what used to be called "capitalism," an economic system in which the free market of supply and demand, fueled by the profit motive and regulated by competition, produced and distributed desired goods and services. Se Chapter III, "The Corruption of the American Political System," for details.

13 "Congress shall make no law … abridging freedom of speech, or of the press …" Repealed, 2078. Replaced by the Dissemination of Information Act.

14 One other manuscript contains the sentence, "Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that when he was studying Anthropology in college, `They were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may still be teaching that for all I know.' The relativist mentality Vonnegut is ridiculing here came to be generally accepted as true." Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American novelist.

15 "Homophobia" is a word derived apparently from two Greek words which together seem to mean "fear of things that are the same," or in this specific case "fear of same-sex sexuality."  The term makes no sense, inasmuch as irrational fear and reasoned disapproval are not the same thing, which is, of course, Gottfried's point.

16 One surviving manuscript of Reflections includes the sentences, "Homosexuals made constant reference to the supposed acceptance of homosexual behavior among the ancient Greeks, but an even cursory examination of the record indicates that this is misleading. There was a vogue among the effete and decadent Athenian upper class for a time for older men to be intimate with boys, but this, in addition to being anomalous, is best referred to as pederasty, not homosexuality per se."

17 Gottfried elsewhere discusses marriage as sacramental (Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) or as a rite of the Church (LutheranAnglican, Calvinist.)  We do not include these essays in this edition because, quite frankly, we do not understand them.

18 Gottfried is here being somewhat annoyingly pedantic and precise. Referenda is indeed the plural of the Latin neuter noun referendum, but "referendums" is what most people, right or wrong, would say.

19 See Chapter III for an explanation of these terms.

20 "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor  shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

21 Polygyny (many wives) and polyandry (many husbands) are collectively called polygamy (many spouses.)

22 One manuscript adds, "These developments, coupled with the general decriminalization of prostitution across the country, allowed the emergence of a new, public, perfectly legal prostitution industry involving children of both sexes as young as 11 (10 in California.)"

23 The census, originally just a count of the population for purposes of representation in Congress, had by the middle of the 20th century become an instrument of government intrusion into private life. This explains why questions such as the one to which Gottfried refers here were asked.

24 One manuscript adds, "This, the idea that bigotry was acceptable as long as it was directed at Christians, was consistent with the Liberal Statist mentality, which decreed that racism was acceptable as long as it was directed at whites and sexism was acceptable as long as it was directed at men."

25 Gottfried's parents fall into this category.

26 He is here reviving an older, pejorative term for unmarried women giving birth. The term was abandoned because it was deemed judgmental and intolerant. Gottfried apparently intended both meanings.

27 No idea.

28 In current parlance, "classic" means extremely popular, as in "the latest classic fashion." This is not what Gottfried means. The Classics were the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

29 One of the original manuscripts contains this parenthetical exposition: "It should be noted that the words democracy and tyranny had meanings to the ancient Greeks quite different from their current implications. To them, democracy meant mob rule, and a tyranny was formed when a man was granted extensive but temporary executive power during an emergency."

30 He is referring to what was traditionally called the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances.

31 The Acts of Trade and Navigation.

32 One manuscript contains the sentence, "The Enlightenment (roughly the 18th century) posited a good deal of dangerous nonsense, such as the infallibility of human reason and the perfectibility of man; but this should not blind us to some of its intelligent ideas."

33 As originally established, the recipient of the majority of the electoral college vote became president and the person who came in second became vice-president. The 12th Amendment changed this, so that the president and vice-president would be elected separately. As for the Bank, it was at the center of our first partisan constitutional disagreement, which led to our first two organized political parties, and did not long survive President Jackson's attack on it in the 1830's.

34 It is clear that Constitution in Article I section 9, gives the power to suspend habeas corpus in the event of invasion or rebellion to the Congress, not the president.

35 Two copies of the manuscript add in parentheses, "Of course, considerable suffering may attend the self-correcting process. If so, government efforts to ameliorate the suffering are appropriate, at the lowest level possible."

36 One manuscript includes this exposition: "Theodore Roosevelt first referred to these 'reformers' by this term. It refers to a character in an ancient book entitled Pilgrim's Progress. A crown of glory hangs just above his head; but he sees only the reflection of the crown in a mud puddle, and he keeps raking the mud in an attempt to find the crown, unaware that it is easily within his grasp. What Roosevelt meant was that so much grandeur, greatness, and goodness existed in America that the Muckrakers, concentrating on whatever ills existed, blinded them to, well, the glory."

37 The reference is to the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, who expected (for no apparent reason) to be made ambassador to France. Guiteau was subsequently hanged.

38 One manuscript contains this tidbit: "A prominent Liberal Statist politician of the early 21st century, calling for expansion of State power, quoted an old African proverb, `It takes a village to raise a child.' Of course, a traditional African village was basically a huge extended family, and certainly a child benefits from a plenitude of relatives. What the politician actually meant was that it takes an extensive and  ever-expanding  State bureaucracy to raise a child, which of course is untrue. That is, unfortunately, exactly what happened."

39 Two fragments of the manuscript add, "'Progressives' were also either unaware or indifferent to the brilliant compromise solution offered in 1787 by Sherman of Connecticut and Franklin of Pennsylvania that effectively ended the conflict between Patterson of New Jersey and Randolph of Virginia."

40 Another copy of the manuscript adds the words, "19th century political leaders were almost all at one time or other members of the House: Clay, Webster, Calhoun, J.Q. Adams, Lincoln, Stevens, Garfield, etc."

41 Yet another copy of the manuscript attributes the phrase to a man named George Will, whose writings did not survive the purge subsequent to the Dissemination of Information Act.

42 This refers, we believe, to a coal strike in Pennsylvania.

43 The editors have verified these dates, and they are accurate. In an era when the average life span was 50, Horace Mann lived to be 103. To all reports he also drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, and ate a good deal of fatty meat slathered in gravy.

44 In another manuscript: "This may have been the origin of the Associates Degree, or A.A., but of this we are not certain."

45 Until 2072, religious institutions were allowed to maintain school systems outside the public system.

46 In the records we have been able to locate, the word is Regents, not Regents'. Gottfriend is picking punctuational nits here.

47 No idea.

48 See Chapter Six for more on the global warming hysteria.

49 Gottfried's reason for using New York as paradigm is obvious. As a worker in the New York City research library on Fifth Avenue, he had extensive access to News York's records.

50 A word long dead. "Polyglot" means "characterized by many languages." Gottfried was an inveterate antiquarian.

51 William Shatner (1931-2023) was, of course, one of the towering dramatic personages of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We have been unable to find any explanation for the reference to Esperanto

52 One copy of the manuscript adds, "One Dr. William Cosby, a voice crying in the wilderness, was in the forefront of the attempt to address these problems." The reference remains obscure.

53 Two manuscripts add, "Of course 'informal miscegenation' during the slave era was quite common, meaning white masters raping female slaves."

54 The Greek suffix –ides means "son of."

55 Chinks = Chinese people; Japs, obviously, Japanese; Honkies = white people; Binoes, we think, is a form of "albino," people born without any melanin in their skin pigment, i.e., extremely white; Slants probably refers to the epicanthic fold which gives East Asians' eyes an almond shape appearance.

56 We have no reliable information about this term. It seems to mean "something or other." This is apparently yet another lost cultural reference.

57 Two copies of the manuscript add, "But even Hoover diverged from capitalist principles. He made the error of succumbing to protectionist sentiment by signing into law the destructive Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which helped internationalize the economic crisis by engendering a bevy of protectionist actions by the governments of other industrial countries."

58 One manuscript adds, "The Europeans, many of whose national experiences were colored by rigid class systems, violent internal conflicts, and only sporadic commitments to democracy, were more likely to express the Liberal Statist goals of the `left' more honestly and openly. Class envy and class hatred was an endemic weakness in countries that, unlike the United States, lacked true social mobility. In later years, of course, class envy and class hatred were staple tools of Liberal Statists in America as well."

59 A reference to Hobbes (see above.) "Leviathan" is a synonym for the omnipotent State.

60 The editors have tried unsuccessfully to locate Gottfried's source for this bizarre statement. We do not doubt his accuracy; but the very idea that the government would actually pay farmers not to grow food is so preposterous that it strains credulity.

61 In one manuscript adds: "Also popularly known by officials in the State Department as General Cash My-Check."

62 Germany, Japan, and Italy.

63 This program provided military aid in the form of money and war materials to any country whose defense was deemed vital to American security.

64 16 million out of a population (1940 census) of 132 million is 12% of the total. Assuming a male population (489%) of 59 million of whom 60% (35 million) were elderly or children, that means that 50% of the adult male population, who were the basic work force, was in the armed forces.

65 See chapter 2.

66 One manuscript contains a lengthy grammatical aside concerning agendum, agenda, and  agendums.

67 Andrew Johnson was Lincoln's running mate in 1864 on the Union ticket. Johnson was a Democrat, and became president upon Lincoln's assassination. The Republican Congress impeached him on a convenient violation of an unconstitutional law, and he was acquitted by one vote in the Senate.

68 Three extant manuscripts add, somewhat redundantly, "It should be remembered that the federal government does not have money; it takes people's money away from them, and also borrows money. There really is no such thing as federal funds."

69 As noted in chapter four, if the goal is to have all children pass exams, the method is to create tests that all children can pass.

70 Bush II's unpopularity seems to have had two causes: one, the Democrats were outraged by his election in 2000 because it was decided in accordance with the Constitution by the Electoral College and not the judiciary; and two, he was from Texas, the repository of every quality the Liberal Statist detested.

71 One fragment adds, "Comparisons with the Fascist dictators of the mid-20th century are compelling. Mussolini was too realistic to believe his own propaganda. Hitler was so delusional as actually to believe everything he said. Mussolini's fate is a case study of the effects of bad associations."

72 A reference to the so-called "New Economic Policy" implemented in the Soviet Union in 1921 when Lenin came to the unpleasant realization that Socialism does not work, while Capitalism does.

73 This pattern of federal control had as its ancestor the Bank of the United States created during the Washington administration. The Bank was capitalized by private investment, but the federal government was given 20% of the stock. As by far the largest stock holder, the government thus controlled the Bank.

74 "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

75 One mangled and incomplete manuscript makes reference to "Goeb..." and "Triumph des…" The editors have been unable to identify the fragmentary reference.

76 The "sheet-clad" reference is unclear. The editors speculate that it refers to people who, through sheer  ignorance or mental simplicity, did not dress in a conventional manner.

77 The ERA was "so-called," in Gottfried's words, because it was redundant. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, already was an equal rights amendment; and to the argument that another one would have had great symbolic significance to women, the answer was that if you want symbolism, you write poetry, you do not craft legislation.

78 Four manuscripts add, "It was also exactly what the Framers intended, as a check upon what Madison called the "tyranny of majorities."

79 i.e., written under the name of someone other than the actual author. This practice, once common in the ancient world, is no longer done.

80 In 64 A.D. the Roman Emperor Nero set fire to the city of Rome, intending to rebuild it as a new capital to be named Neronium. When the population rose up against him, he deflected their ire by blaming the fire on the small Christian community.  The eponymous persecution lasted for four years. Gottfried's reference to 66 A.D. in thus accurate, if incomplete.

81 "Concerning the Gallic War," an account written by Julius Caesar describing his invasion and conquest of Gaul, i.e., France.

82 The editors believe that En is a Sumerian word for "king." We are not certain. Uruk, which the Book of Genesis calls Erech, was in Mesopotamia.

83 The reference is of course to the aforementioned book by Thomas Hobbes. A "leviathan" is an all-powerful State.

84 The editors have been unable to locate the source of this quotation.

85 The editors have consulted many available cartographical sources, and can find no such location.

86 And again, the editors cannot decipher the reference.

87 Two extant manuscripts add, "The fact that some but by no means many of these immigrants were Jewish, and that some but by no means many of these Jews were radicals, was one of the causes of the disgraceful anti-Semitism that characterized Populism." See chapter III.

88 Latifundia were large rural estates with their origins in the medieval feudal order. In the time period Gottfried mentions they were particularly prevalent in southern Italy and in central and eastern Europe (the Hapsburg and Russian empires.)

89 See Chapter I for a discussion of these European terms.

90 Five extant manuscripts add, "The leftist mentality in the late 20th and early 21st century is reminiscent of Einstein's comment about the militant atheist bigots he encountered, that they are people who 'were freed from slavery long ago but still feel the weight of the chains.' There were leftists in the 21st century, for example, who still waxed angrily eloquent about the Paris Commune of 1870, and still argued about Trotsky versus Stalin. Such preposterous nonsense abounded among Liberal Statists, especially in college political science, sociology, and history departments."

91 The reference is to a study commissioned by the government of Norway in the early 21st century that studied the logs of Norwegian merchant vessels and whaling ships over the preceding 500 years. The logs indicate that glaciers are constantly melting and refreezing. Inasmuch as the record goes back to three centuries before the industrial revolution, it is difficult to connect this fact to human activity.

92 One manuscript adds specific data: "In 1950, for example, the average global temperature was 56.98 degrees Fahrenheit; in 2010, sixty years later, it was 57.88 degrees Fahrenheit, a rise of nine tenths of one degree. In fact, given the 1900 average global temperature of 56.58 degrees Fahrenheit, the "global warming" over a period of one hundred and ten years was 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit."

93 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924), pseudonym Lenin, has already been referred to. He was the creator of the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. As Gottfried implies, he was a leftist icon.

94 President, 2009-2013. Born 1961. For some impenetrable reason, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Died 2028 of lung cancer.

95 See chapter II for commentary about the slavish devotion of the entertainment industry to anything that condemned the traditions of the United States.

96 Sarah Palin (1964-2048) was governor of Alaska 2006- 2009, and senator 2029- 2041. Her political experience yielded the terms "palinization" and "to palinize," referring to the vicious and demeaning assault waged upon her by the media and the entertainment industry when she became Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2008.

97 See chapter V.

98 A neutron bomb, also called an enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), releases a larger portion of its energy as neutron radiation than as explosive energy. Because its lethality derives from radiation and not an explosion in the conventional sense, it does not create radioactive fallout. The neutron bomb, it was said, "… kills people but doesn't damage buildings."

99 Two extant manuscripts add, "The invidious comparison of this to the Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ ignores the fact Christians interpret this teaching in many different ways (literal, allegorical, metaphoric, anagogic, etc.), and that under no circumstance does any Christian feel he has a right, not to mention the ability, to precipitate it.

100 We believe that Gottfried is referring to the experience of John Adams, Martin Van Buren, and Andrew Johnson. The first two were elected because their predecessors, Washington and Jackson, chose not to run again, while the third, a Democrat succeeding the Republican Lincoln, succeeded to the office by assassination.

101 The editors have searched in vain for any reference to Rube Goldbergian, who, judging by his name, was a rural Armenian. We have found no information.

102 The reference is apparently to the Neighborhood Reinvestment Act, a law the Democratic Congress, courting the votes of racial minorities, passed in order to compel bankers to approve mortgages for people who could not conceivably pay for them. This was the precipitate cause of the recession of 2008.

103 The left was also incensed by the fact that Bush was elected by the Electoral College, as the Framers intended. Democratic attempts to use the Judiciary to violate the Constitution and void the election were unsuccessful. They, and the media, never forgave Bush for this.

104 Division of powers refers to federalism. Separation of powers refers to the legislative, executive, and judicial functions.

105 Two manuscripts add the words, "In fact, one prominent and corrupt 21st century political functionary said that no crisis should be wasted, by which he meant that every crisis offered the opportunity to increase the power of the rulers who run the State."

106 One manuscript adds, "Of course, the 'higher law' defense is fraught with potential for abuse. It can be used, and has been used, to justify any illegal action."

107 Appomattox Court House was the Virginia town where the southern Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to the northern Army of the Potomac in April of 1865.

108 Popularly called "the draft."

109 It should be noted that this almost 3,000,000 men came from a population of just over 30,000,000. If one subtracts women, children, and the elderly from the population total, the percentage of men who took up arms in the First Civil War approaches 50%.

110 Harry Truman, president 1945-1953, was a Liberal Statist of the populist variety.

111 Two extant manuscripts add, "On only one occasion, in 1962, did the competition threaten to become a confrontation. Otherwise, proxy wars were fought, or at least wars in which we and the Russians did fight each other directly."

112 Only one member of the Johnson cabinet, a man named George Ball (who was not even a senior cabinet member), opposed the escalation of U.S. involvement.

113 One manuscript adds, "This animosity was evidenced by the left regarding US military action in Kosovo or Serbia in the 1990's, however. Their attitude seems to have been that military action was justified only when it did not serve American national interests."

114 Three manuscripts add, "Democrats routinely referred to illegal aliens as 'undocumented immigrants,' a successful Orwellian attempt to obscure the criminality of their status."

115 Amendments 4, 5, and 6 detail the people's rights in the judicial process; Amendment 7 guarantees trial by jury; and Amendment 8 prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

116 These sections detail the qualifications and terms of office for Representatives and Senators.

117 In other words, every word in the Constitution regarding presidential qualification, election, and term of office.

118 A.D. 2160.

119 Latin judicial phrase: "The thing speaks for itself."

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