If You Can Keep It By Adam T. Yoshida

Source: http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2008/11/if-you-can-keep.html

November 4, 2008

Certain friends (and, naturally, enemies as well) of mine are eager for the “fall of the American Empire.” They chortle with glee at the present economic troubles of the United States. They delight in the basically declinist views of Senator Obama and imagine an end to American exceptionalism – an America that “rejoins the world” after the Bush years. Well, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw, they may be about to learn that there are two tragedies in this life – one is not getting your heart’s desire, the other is getting it.

Yes, America is down. Yes, the United States has troubles. But what my friends fail to understand is that the present situation is not at all analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire. (Indeed, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire was not even the end of all of that – Byzantium endured for another thousand years). The very real prospect with which we are faced is not the fall of the American Empire but rather of the American Republic.

The world is an absolute mess. Everyone recognizes this. That we are headed towards some sort of cataclysm is the one thing that pretty much everyone believes. Among the nations of the West, there is only one nation with the resources – human and material – to survive the coming crisis intact. That nation is the United States of America. Europe is doomed by low birth rates that make the end of Western Civilization in its cradle inevitable. Australia and Canada are too small and too few to make it through on their own. This is what Mark Steyn was talking about when he titled his book “America Alone.” For those who love our civilization – our traditions of tolerance and liberty, our languages, our cultures, our heritage – the final choice is reduced to one between the United States and nothing. There is no new Rome to pick up for the Greeks. There is no vast and sheltered continent to nurture and preserve us through a Dark Age.

That is the choice. Either we hold the line here and defend ourselves or, bit by bit, we shall be swallowed by alien nations, tongues, and traditions. Perhaps some of you are willing to regard such an outcome with laissez faire insouciance, but I am not. I am the descendent of refugees. Those who came before me were Tories, Jacobites, Puritans, Huguenots, and soldiers of the Shogun. If you trace your own history, I’m sure you’ll find much the same. They, at least, all had someone to flee to when they lost – we have no such luxury. This is, as Ronald Reagan once reminded us, our “last stand on Earth.”

Let us then return to the choice of today. I am often asked why I am for Senator McCain and against Senator Obama. Needless to say, it is not a common opinion in these parts (and rarely so strongly held, either). I typically offer a light opinion in these situations simply because it is difficult to convey my full view of the world and its problems in a soundbite.

To put it simply – I believe that the American Republic is probably doomed. The warnings have stacked up. Ben Franklin told us that the framers of the Constitution had given Americans, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” De Tocqueville warned that the Republic would last only until the point where Congress realized that it could bribe the people with the people’s money. Most of all, I am partial to the warning of Edward Gibbon in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” who warned that “the powers of sovereignty will be first abused and then lost when committed to unwieldy multitudes.”

What has done in the American Republic (and, indeed, most of the West)? It’s fashionable to lay the blame upon the politicians. But, in truth, the fault rests with the people themselves. I advised Senator McCain to attack what I like to call the “Long Congress” – an institution filled with time-servers and self-dealers – but the plainer truth is that any reform of the Congress and other legislative institutions would be futile without first devising some means of dissolving the electorate and electing a replacement.

The reason for this state of affairs is obvious enough – no one ever really thought too much about the implications of universal suffrage. We pretty much stumbled into it piecemeal. Democracy, in the pure sense of the word, has never been defended by philosophers and thinkers as anything better than a least-worst choice of system. One needs only to look at the countless foolish decisions made by the Ancient Greeks – who punished successful Generals and embraced lunatic plans with regularity – to understand that anyone who believes that the people will always make the correct choice is an imbecile.

What is needed is change. But not, of course, the sort of change that Senator Obama promises.

How does anyone expect for bigger and more expensive government programs – universal health care, college as an entitlement, and so forth – to solve anything when one of the major long-term problems facing the whole of the Western world is the uneconomic nature of the entitlement programs that exist at the present?

I, for one, would appreciate it if someone could explain to me how Senator Obama’s economic proposals would solve anything at all.

What are the problems that face the American economy itself? Manufacturing jobs flowing overseas and the financial crisis would appear to top everyone’s list. What causes these things?

Well, we know what kills jobs. It’s what’s killing American automakers today – excessive levels of regulation, taxation, and, in particular unaffordable union contracts that make American cars uncompetitive in the marketplace. And what solution does Senator Obama offer to problem? He proposes to raise taxes, increase regulations, and to make the law even more union-friendly – even going so far away as doing away with the secret ballot in union certification elections (a move which is allegedly more “democratic” and “fair.” If this is so, I propose that we should adopt this reform on a wider scale and that during the next Presidential election I and some of my friends from Blackwater Worldwide should be allowed to go door to door in poor neighbourhoods asking voters to sign a card indicating their vote for the straight Republican ticket).

Some of the same problems, along with the demographic ones overseas that I spoke of earlier, played a major role in creating the present financial mess. Those who claim that the crisis was caused by inadequately regulation are operating under the delusion that it is possible to universally and comprehensively control human affairs in a non-totalitarian society (at least, I hope that’s what their delusion is). The problem is that when you over-regulate and over-tax core sectors of the economy (see the aforementioned auto industry) then you drive capital to riskier areas where less regulation and taxation promise better returns. This problem is compounded by the demographic factor as well – capital is something that is held by the old and invested in the young. The result is that places like Europe and Japan have more capital than they can effectively use at home because they don’t have the young people to innovate and create that they need and so they’re forced to pour it into the places that do – America and continental Asia – creating and inflating a series of massive bubbles (internet, commodities, real estate, to name a few from recent years) as investors chase the sort of returns that they will need to support themselves into lonely and childless old age.

Do I think that McCain is particularly stronger on domestic policy? Not really – especially since a President McCain would face a hostile Democratic Congress. But at least he can stop the Democrats in Congress from making things worse. The cures for the economy that the Democrats and Obama want are the equivalent of giving blood thinners to a patient with an aneurysm.

Abroad, of course, Senator Obama has no serious plan to deal with the actual problems of the world. The sort of weak and naïve people whom Obama would staff the Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security Departments would thwart necessary efforts to obstruct and prevent terrorism on legalistic and humanitarian grounds, just as they did when Bill Clinton was President during the 1990’s. The thought of ACLU-backed lawyers in the DOJ vetoing surveillance programs on the grounds that they violate the rights of terrorists is one that fills me with images of mushroom clouds.

Senator McCain has the experience and the temperament to stand up to foreign aggressors. Can you ever imagine Senator Obama having the guts to go toe-to-toe with the Iranians? Never mind the Russians or the Chinese. Putin is a smart man – he already has Obama’s measure. So, I’m sure, does Hu Jintao. Eager to please, interested in compromise, inward looking – those two veterans of the deadly internal politics of totalitarianism would take Obama for all he was worth and then some.

Most of all, I simply believe that McCain has the experience and the temperament to be President and that Obama doesn’t. Obama hasn’t run anything in his life. He’s never shown any indication of any great internal strength. He’s never even won a fair election (in his first campaign he had all of his opponents thrown off the ballot, in his Senate campaign he won because somehow someone convinced courts to unseal the divorce records of not one, but two of his opponents). He’s been hauled to this point by the slavish devotion of the media to his personality cult. His first book – doubtlessly the more honest of the two given that he wrote it before he was a politician – exposes him as a weak girly-man with what, for lack of a better word, I would describe as a definite emo streak within him. He’s a multicultural fashion statement – not a serious leader. He’s a man, to borrow from the Rt. Hon. Francis Urquhart, “with no background and no bottom.”

Take a close look at the man and his wife. Read what Michelle says. Study her. Senator Obama is, like so many others in this day and age, a weak man dominated by an acquisitive and vain woman. Hardly the stuff of which greatness is made.

Senator McCain, on the other hand, survived the destruction of four planes. One was his own error. Another lost an engine. A third was blasted out from under him when a rocket on another jet cooked off and hit it on the deck of the USS Forrestal. The fourth was shot down by the North Vietnamese. He survived them all. Most people don’t even survive the loss of one aircraft – let alone keep on flying afterwards. Then he spent half of a decade in captivity. And, through it all, he kept going – he never gave up, never surrendered. Whatever his ideological imperfections, whatever his personal failings – this is a man of proven courage and endurance.

Those are the qualities most necessary in a President. Choosing them by comparing their agendas and soundbytes is an exercise in absurdity. Out of most Presidential platforms at the most 10% is ever enacted. Obama’s alleged eloquence and rhetorical felicity is more a legend than an actuality – have you, or anyone else, ever heard anyone quote anything he ever said, except to parody it? (“Yes, we can.” “Oceans will turn back”, etc). His speeches are the fast food of politics – easily swallowed by the hungry, not particularly objectionable, well-presented from a distance, but, when examined several hours after the fact, they come out rather differently.

Simply electing Senator McCain will not save the Republic – though it may slow the bleeding. Electing Senator Obama could lose it. Because – and this something that all of you have to understand – one way or another, America isn’t going away. The American population is huge and, rumours and jokes aside, highly educated and motivated. America’s natural resources are tremendous. America’s latent power is actually far greater than its present effective power. The end of the American Republic – something which will be hastened if Obama gains office and further erodes America’s economic and global positions – wouldn’t mean the end of America. On the contrary.

The American people are fickle. That’s one of the problems with democracy. There’s no consistency. Do you really think if Obama wins and promptly responds to a crisis in an unpopular way (say, by appeasing a nuclear Iran) that the American people will hold firm? Do you think that “hope” will long be sustained in the face of a deeper economic crisis brought on by higher taxes, protectionism, and invasive regulation (the same factors, I should add, which turned the downturn of 1929-1930 into what we now call the “Great Depression”)?

The cycles of demonization and destruction that began when the media and Democrats broke every rule in the book to get Richard Nixon, who they hated so very much, will continue. A President Obama would be followed by a President Palin or a President Jindal or a perhaps someone else…

After all, as the time grows shorter and the nation’s foreign and domestic problems grow worse, recovery will require ever-stronger medicine. In another ten or twenty years, only the most extreme measures will recover the situation. And by “extreme”, my friends and readers know, I mean “extreme.” If America and the world require an Augustus, they will get one.

McCain is Cicero. He’s the old politician. A bit of a hack at times. A bit vain. But respected and, in the end, an honest and brave man. He can hold the line – and save enough that the situation might be recovered by minimally invasive measures. Or he may well be ignored by people chasing the delusion of “hope” who, in so doing, can only bring disaster on themselves.

There will always be an America. But there will only be an American Republic for so long as Americans choose to keep it.