Journal of the Plague Year, Part 5

The Country Mouse

 

A Conversation With A Radical Contrarian

A note to the City Mouse: You know Manny Pope, who calls himself a contrarian. My expurgated interview with him is below. I’d much appreciate your comments.

Q: People have called you a conservative, a rightest Republican and so on, but you resist all these titles and consider yourself a radical small “r” republican. Why so modest?

MP: Modesty is the key to understanding. We stand under what we wish to understand, which means we look up modestly at the transcendent truth. The truth is always above us – like Melville’s “inscrutable blue sky,” like the stars in the firmament, like the God of our fathers.  Politicians, especially in a constitutional republic, are temporary nuisances. They come and go. They do not go quickly enough, a failing of modern politics, but eventually, through inattention, arrogant immodesty or old age, they disappear. A radical is one who goes to the root of things.

Q: Like President Donald Trump?

MP: He is not a radical, and Trump has now vacated the White House, disappointing the Associated Press, and Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, who had supposed he and his followers would be able to pull off an insurrectionary coup.

Q: What do you make of Trump's administration?

MP: There will in the future be historians who argue persuasively that he was a man more sinned against than sinning. No one in the left of center media will pay the slightest attention to them. Trump will be gone, but Trumpism? Presidents usually have some sort of honeymoon and after their administration ends, an afterglow. Trump had neither. Trump’s biggest mistake, I believe, was his unrelenting attempt to write his own way into history, alone and without assistance from the Associated Press.

But the immediate future now belongs to President-elect Joe Biden and a seriously compromised Democrat Party. So, enough about Trump.

Biden’s political program may be justly described as post Woodrow Wilson progressive. Modern progressivism, inspired by an outworn Marxism fetched by some third rate political thinkers from the wastebin of history, is not radical, because modern progressives have never been  interested in national roots. They are interested, like Marx, in refashioning a future on quite different foundations. And this cannot be done without uprooting constitutionalism and small "r" republican governance. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who now styles himself falsely as a “democratic socialist,” has left his imprint on both the Democrat Party platform and Biden’s plan to refashion Republican Party foreign and domestic policy. He is the leftwing egocentric socialist Trump of the Democrat Party, he and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the “Dick the Butcher” of the Democrat Party.

Q: But Biden has been described by most as a moderate Democrat.

MP: : Nothing he has offered so far looks moderate. Under a Biden administration, political power, campaign contributions, tax revenue and press accommodation will flow from municipalities – town or county governments – to state governments, and from state governments to a federal administrative apparatus not answerable to voters. The Coronavirus pandemic, part of which has been politically manufactured, has hastened the process of a "rule by experts." In the post-modern world, power is not merely one of the chits on the political game board – it is the whole game board. And in a governing structure in which power is everything, reason, that seductress, must be nothing, and contrary opinion must be suppressed as insurrectionary whenever it does not serve a propagandistic and supportive purpose. All means must be subordinated to one end, and reason is but one among many means of depriving people of their liberties.

Q: This administrative governing apparatus is what Trump calls “the swamp.”

MP: Yes, he got that right. The shift from representative government to government by bureaucracy has been underway for a long while. It has succeeded because opposition to it has come from a disorganized and bewildered public. There is not a single editorial board in the nation that does not believe that an enlightened national polity can best be effected by enlightened newspaper editors. Bill Buckley used to say he’d rather be governed by the first hundred people picked at random from the phonebook than the Harvard Law faculty. Rule by the experts is profoundly anti-republican and anti-democratic. An administrative monarchy is no less offensive to small “r” republican government than the monarchy rejected by the founders of our constitutional government.

Q: What else did Trump get right?

MP: If I may satirically borrow a phrase from Sanders, Trump spoke softly to “European Socialist” Vladimir Putin of Russia, Fascist dictator of China Xi Jinping, and celestial ruler of North Korea Kim Jong-un – but he carried a big stick in the form of a beefed up U.S. military.

The President under whom Biden served as Vice President, Barack Obama, considerably reduced the U.S. military stick, sent planeloads of cash to the mullahs of Iran, sent his campaign operatives into Israel to aid Benjamin Netanyahu’s political opponent, and favored a "lead from behind" posture in a war theatre that resulted in the takeover by ISIS of parts of Syria, northern Iran and the horn of Africa – by any measure, a failed foreign policy. Trump sent defensive missiles to Ukraine, following Putin’s successful annexation of Crimea, moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, slapped damaging trade restrictions on Iran, Putin’s Mideast client state, induced important Arab states to recognize Israel, the only democracy in the region, frustrated Putin’s ambition to become the chief oil producer to Europe and the Middle East, made the US a net independent energy supplier, and successfully rebuffed the unrelenting efforts of a previous administration to demonstrate that Trump had – improbably (see above) – colluded with Putin in a traitorous deal to deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Assuming everything said by Democrats about Putin is true, does it make any sense to aid Putin by systemically destroying the independent energy industry in the United States? In any case, Trump is gone. His legacy rests now with his enemies among a) the Obama-Biden-Clinton administration, b) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and c) tendentious members of what Trump used to call contemptuously “the fake media.”

Q: And how will that work out?

MP: In the short or long term?

Q: Both.

MP: In the short term, Trump’s legacy, defined always in the most tendentious terms, will be – please forgive the Medieval hyperbole – drawn and quartered by the legacy media he had so imprudently defamed, and Republicans who had not denounced him before the recent riotous activity at the national Capitol will suffer the same fate. Trump now belongs to history. In the long term, historians will try, some successfully, others not, to put some real flesh on the dry bones of the media’s first, sometimes partisan and  tendentious, snapshot of history.