Motus Mentis

With the mid-term elections less than a week away, Angelo Codevilla surveys the social and political battlefield that the United States — now more disunited than at any time since our last Civil War — has become.

His essay begins:

Prior to the 2016 election I explained how America had already “stepped over the threshold of a revolution,’ that it was “difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate how it might end.’ Regardless of who won the election, its sentiments’ growing “volume and intensity’ would empower politicians on all sides sure to make us nostalgic for Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s moderation. Having begun, this revolution would follow its own logic.

What follows dissects that logic. It has unfolded faster than foreseen. Its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.’

The Democratic Party and the millions it represents having refused to accept 2016’s results; having used their positions of power in government and society to prevent the winners from exercising the powers earned by election; declaring in vehement words and violent deeds the illegitimacy, morbidity, even criminality, of persons and ideas contrary to themselves; bet that this “resistance’ would so energize their constituencies, and so depress their opponents’, that subsequent elections would prove 2016 to have been an anomaly and further confirm their primacy in America. The 2018 Congressional elections are that strategy’s first major test.

Toward the end of the article, Mr. Codevilla looks at an unlikely best-case scenario: the Republicans keep the House and Senate in 2018, and the presidency in 2020:

Were a conservative to win the 2020 presidential election, dealing with the Progressives’ renewed resistance would be his administration’s most pressing problem. But had the Left’s resistance failed utterly during the previous four years, it may be possible to convince it to switch from its present offensive mode to a defensive one. Were this to be the happy case, the conservative side of American life, operating from a dominant position, might be able to obtain agreement to some form of true federalism.

Unattainable, and gone forever, is the whole American Republic that had existed for some 200 years after 1776. The people and the habits of heart and mind that had made it possible are no longer a majority. Progressives made America a different nation by rejecting those habits and those traditions. As of today, they would use all their powers to prevent others from living in the manner of the Republic. But, perhaps, after their offensive resistance’s failure, they might be reconciled to govern themselves as they wish in states where they command a majority, while not interfering with other Americans governing themselves in their way in the states where they are a majority.

As best-case scenarios go, that’s a gloomy prognosis for the American nation I am old enough to remember. But we have seen this coming for a long time now.

The question that still wants answering, I think, is the one I raised in our recent discussion with Michael Anton about the Founding:

Was the Founding itself a wrong turn? Were the axioms and premises behind the architecture of the United States sufficiently flawed as to doom the whole enterprise ab ovo?

For the dominant faction of the contemporary American Right, the answer is simply No, and that’s that. We have strayed, and all of the nation’s contemporary ills are the result.

For the radical Left, the answer is a resounding Yes; indeed the mere fact that the nation was designed by white men, some of whom were slave-owners, is enough to taint the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption. It all has to go, root and branch.

The question is also an open one, though, for those of us to the right of the Right. Clearly we have strayed from the Founding, a very long way indeed, with many injurious consequences. But was this inevitable? Is it irreversible? What is the way forward? (What, exactly, do we want, anyway?) Look at the Declaration of Independence, which has been, up until my time at least, the American equivalent of Scripture. It is a stirring document, but it is also an article of revolutionary propaganda, arguably containing many testimonial falsehoods. More to the point, though, its preamble, which has reverberated throughout the history of the American nation, declares as “self-evident’ a set of propositions that a rational observer could not only call into question, but believe to be self-evidently false. Upon how solid a philosophical foundation, then, was the American nation actually erected? These questions give me little rest.

That earlier conversation (spread across several linked posts, starting here) arose from Mr. Anton’s review of a new book, The Political Theory of the American Founding, by Thomas G. West. I’ve since read the book, and should continue that series of posts in light of what I have learned from it.