Motus Mentis

Here we are. It’s been a long twelve months: from sailing along at the beginning of 2020 with a booming economy and gathering momentum for a second Trump administration, and for holding terminal decline at bay for a precious few more years, to COVID, St. George Floyd, a long hot summer of government-sanctioned rioting for BLM and brutal lockdowns for the rest of us, capricious and unconstitutional changes to election law, media blackouts and Big Tech censorship of negative stories about the Bidens, deplatforming of the Right on social media, an election clearly tainted by the most audacious chicanery, characterization of any call to investigate said chicanery as supporting a white-supremacist coup, a synchronized move from calling Trump supporters “deplorables” and “racists” to characterizing them as actual terrorists, continuous gaslighting by all media, and finally, just today, the inauguration of a corrupt, senile groper almost certainly compromised by Communist China — someone whom scores of millions of patriotic Americans believe to have been illegitimately elected — as our forty-sixth President. Meanwhile the “Gigaphone” saturates all media, telling us that if we think anything’s wrong with any of this, we’re just troublemakers who ought to be — and soon will be — dealt with. Everything’s fine now, nothing to see here, and now we can all just relax and enjoy the Unity.

Until now, I have never been what is called an “accelerationist” — someone who wants bad times to get worse as quickly as possible, in order to provoke a necessary counter-reaction. Those people — I know lots of them — wanted Biden to win. I, on the other hand, worried that those who still loved the traditional American nation were as yet ill-prepared to resist in any coherent fashion the relentless, entropic pressure of our new secular religion, and so I hoped for another four years for Trump, to buy some much-needed time to prepare some sort of “ark” that might ride out the gathering storm.

Alas, it was not to be. We lost — not only the Presidency, but control of the Senate as well. And after what we saw in the election and its aftermath, about half the nation has also lost its faith in fair elections, and in the Supreme Court as any sort of backstop. (That same Court may also soon be deformed, by adding seats, into a mere rubber-stamp for further incursions upon what remains of the Constitution.)

I see two possible futures. (The one in which we all come together, reach across the aisle, realize that “what the heck, deep down we’re all still Americans“, and just hug it out is not a possible future.)

One is a gradual “frog-boiling”, in which the great ratcheting away of liberty and the traditional order that moved so far in 2020 continues indefinitely, while the former American nation, drowsy, atomized and supine, turns increasingly toward the great bosom of the State for all support and guidance — as urban dysfunction, declining public safety, disintegration of civil society and public trust, and venomous squabbling amongst a hodge-podge of mutually resentful identity groups for pieces of an ever-dwindling pie become more and more normal. Technological surveillance and a Chinese-style “social credit” system will keep troublemakers in their place, while the great yeastlike masses turn ever more inward, distracted and pacified by drugs, alcohol, pornography, and virtual entertainment. This is, I fear, all too likely, because it’s so easy: all it will take, to quote Burke, is “for good men to do nothing” — until it’s too late.

The other is some sort of genuine awakening. The frog must somehow realize, at last, what’s happening to it, and leap from the pot — which will only happen if those now in charge make the mistake of heating the water too quickly. And in the exultation of their victory, their humiliating defeat of Donald Trump, their sudden ascension to the zenith of political power, and their lust for vengeance upon the rabble that dared to usurp their throne for four years, those now in charge seem primed to do exactly that.

So yes: I’m an accelerationist now. There is no longer any reason not to be. Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, Mr. Schumer, Ms. Pelosi, Ms. Tlaib, Ms. Pressley, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, and all the rest of you: bring on your Agenda!

Pack the Court. Fling open the borders. Add a few states. Savage our new-found energy-independence in the name of “saving the planet”. Jam your critical-race theory down our throats. Rezone our towns and villages. Tax and tax and tax us until we groan, so that we can entice the world to swamp our frontiers for “free” healthcare, education, and money. Raise the minimum wage — hell, why stop at a measly $15? Make it $50! — until millions more lose their jobs and have to go on the dole. Boot us off social media for our (formerly mainstream) opinions. Steal some more elections. Get cracking with that Green New Deal. Cozy back up to Iran. Make sure to remind us all the while that anybody who doesn’t like it (and all white people, just because) is a “hater” (or, now, a terrorist!) whose voice has no place in polite society. Make sure also, throughout, to have the media fawn over you just as much as they threw daggers at Donald Trump, and the American citizens who voted for him, for four long years. And come after our guns.

Let’s get on with it.