Thread: Buchanan: When Democracy Fails To Deliver “Those who make peaceful revolution impos

Buchanan: When Democracy Fails To Deliver



“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible... make violent revolution inevitable...”

Tue, 01/22/2019 - 13:05
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Authored by Patrick Buchanan via The Unz Review,

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible... make violent revolution inevitable,” said John F. Kennedy.

In 2016, the U.S. and Britain were both witness to peaceful revolutions.

The British voted 52-48 to sever ties to the European Union, restore their full sovereignty, declare independence and go their own way in the world. Trade and immigration policy would henceforth be decided by a parliament elected by the people, not by bureaucrats in Brussels.
“Brexit” it was called. And British defiance stunned global elites.
Two and a half years later, Britain is still inside the EU, and no one seems to know when or whether the divorce will take place — a victory of London and European elites over the expressed will of the British people.
Appalled by the Brexit vote, these elites played a waiting game, broadcasting warnings of what could happen, to panic the British public into reconsidering and reversing its democratic decision.
Losing candidates and losing parties accept defeat and yield power.
Establishments have agendas they do not regard as subject to electoral repudiation or repeal. Defeated, they use their non-electoral powers to prevent unwanted policies from ever being implemented.
Call it limited democracy.




In 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected president when a spirit of rebellion against America’s failed elites roiled both parties. Both the Trump campaign and the Ted Cruz campaign, which ran second in the Republican race, offered anti-establishment ideas. So, too, did the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic primaries.
Trump’s defining agenda was basically this:

He would build a wall across the Mexican border to halt the flood of illegal migrants. He would extricate us from the half dozen Middle East wars into which Bush II and Obama had plunged us.
He would abrogate the trade deals that had seen imports from NAFTA nations, China, the EU and Japan replace goods made in the USA. He would halt the shuttering of tens of thousands of U.S. factories and the hemorrhaging of millions of manufacturing jobs.
He would call off the new cold war with Russia.

Halfway through this presidential term, where are we?
Part of the U.S. government has been shut down for a month. The wall has not been built and may never be. President Trump’s decision to pull 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria has met massive resistance from our foreign policy establishment. Trump is being pushed to confront Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to trash the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev.
And we are being pushed toward a new Mideast war with Iran.
This was the establishment’s agenda, not Trump’s.
We have lately learned that after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a cabal inside the FBI initiated a counterintelligence investigation to discover if Trump was a conscious agent of a Kremlin conspiracy.
Who made this call? Who approved it? Did the FBI discover that Trump is a patriot, or another Alger Hiss? We have not been told by the FBI after two years of investigation. Why not?
We do know that the dirt-diving arm of the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, hired a British former spy with KGB connections to cook up a “dirty dossier” that was used to persuade the secret FISA court to approve the surveillance of the Trump campaign.
Yet there seems a massive media disinterest in a conspiracy that might portray Trump as the victim of dirty campaign tricks.
Which brings us back to the larger question: While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.
In the 1975 book “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed,” this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.
Foremost among these was “the New Journalism.”

“The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others,” this writer wrote.
“The press determines what ‘people will talk and think about’ because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington.”

Among the reasons for Trump’s political success, such as it is, is that today’s conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.
Yet still, the left’s power over America’s character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.
What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.
In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.
The “yellow vest” protests in Paris show us that.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...-fails-deliver

Ted Malloch: Populist Rebellion: Then & Now

by Jim Hoft January 23, 2019 48 Comments

Guest post by Ted Malloch author of The Plot to Destroy Trump

The motif of the era we are living through has emerged as one of rebellion against the establishment and the oligarchy that perpetuates it, Davos globalists and the deep state.
It is evident everywhere — from Brexit to Trump to Italy to Brazil to the Yellow Vests.
The larger question is whether some politically amorphous dissident army can upend the status quo.
The establishment’s horror at the prospect of a successful rebellion belies the history of a nation, i.e., America that was actually itself founded in such rebellion.
Remember 1776 and the “shot heard round the world..
The ghost of rebellion that haunted the English psyche for centuries and that they were determined to crush in 1776 was named one — Jack Cade.
Have you ever heard of him?
You see, in 1450, Cade led a makeshift rebel army against the forces of the English, King Henry VI.
He was almost certainly a peasant, but other than that, very little is known about him, which enabled him to shape shift like a specter of discontent.
According to some, Cade was plotting with Richard of York under the name “John Mortimer.”
According to others, he was Dr. Alymere, son-in-law of a Surrey squire, and still others believed he was a practitioner of witchcraft.
Jack Cade’s real name is unknown to this day, as is his history prior to 1450.
He appeared, it seems, out of nowhere in the human form of Jack Cade, or whomever, to haunt the kingdom into chaos.
What is known about Jack Cade is that he led a threateningly large group of peasants, small land owners, some clergy and even some propertied men to the gates of London, mostly in rebellion against taxation from the Hundred Years’ War and pervasive government corruption.
This group of minor gentry and land laborers did not seek sweeping social change as much as basic government reform, mostly in the form of lower taxes.
Upon first hearing of the peasant rebellion, the King sent his troops to Sevenoaks; about 18 miles southeast of London, to strike down the ragtag reformers, and the king’s troops were promptly defeated.
Cade’s impromptu army marched to London where they were treated as victors; Londoners generally agreed that taxes and corruption were pressing problems.
Cade’s army became rather enamored with their success and proceeded to storm the Tower of London and behead a few government officials, including Sir James Fiennes, the king’s treasurer, and Sir James’ son-in-law, William Crowmer.
The bodiless heads of Fiennes and Crowmer were placed atop stakes and paraded through town kissing each other.
For good measure, Cade’s men also killed the Sheriff of Kent who, needless to say, had some intent to arrest Cade.
The king’s men regrouped and fought again but could gain no ground on Cade’s army of malcontents, at which point Cade presented his list of demands to royal officials who agreed to the demands and to granting pardons to the rebellion’s participants.
The demands can be summarized simply as “run a decent government.” With an agreement on the demands, the rebel army largely dispersed.
King Henry, though, had no intention of meeting the rebel army’s demands – either to run a decent government or pardon Cade and his men.
The new Sheriff of Kent chased Cade for forty miles until he finally arrested Cade with a fatal blow of a sword.
To further punctuate his rejection of the agreement he’d supposedly accepted, King Henry subjected Cade’s dead body to show trial, and, upon being found guilty, Cade’s corpse was hung, and then cut into pieces that were distributed throughout Kent as a cordial reminder of the king’s disposition on peasant rebellions.
Finally, Henry had Cade’s head staked on a pole on London Bridge, kissing no one.
The specter of Cade’s peasant rebellion has haunted English historians and poets ever since (“For our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes…” Henry VI, Part 2).
Peter Oliver, the loyalist Chief Justice of the Massachusetts court wrote in his 1781 Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion, “The Hydra was roused. Every factious Mouth vomited out Curses against Great Britain, & the Press rung its changes upon Slavery.
A Mr. Delany a principal Lawyer of Virginia, wrote the first Pamphlet of Note upon the Subject; which, as soon as it reached Boston young Mr. Otis, the then Jack Cade of the Rebellion… .”
More frightening to the oligarchs than the specter of Jack Cade was the idea of Jack Cade — with a printing press marshaling a literate rebellion.
Sending the Sheriff of Kent to arrest Cade with a blow of a sword would do no good, because as John Milton observed a century earlier, “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are.”
If knowledge had become untethered from a world of fixed relationships, and its value increasingly was not in the degree to which it supported and completed a stable and fixed edifice of knowledge, and if books were not dead things, then how was the Sheriff of Kent to respond?
He could hardly chase down an idea and put it to the sword.
Peter Oliver’s evocation of Jack Cade as “The Hydra” demonstrates that in the new media world of the 18th century, the press could create many-headed ideas incapable of being terminated by a Sheriff’s swift sword.
But the foundation of colonial education was in fact the Bible, and Oliver was undoubtedly referencing the Book of Revelations hydra and fully intended his readers to think of the Judgment Day beast.
Only an oligarch would apply the metaphor to the many printing presses fueling the media war and not to the Empire that wished to return to the days when rebellion could be quelled by putting a single man to death.
In the end, Oliver’s interpretation lost and the rebel’s version of the hydra was memorialized in the American founding document, namely: The Declaration of Independence (He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance).
The colonial oligarchs of the 1700s had feared the press would transform the specter of Jack Cade into an irresistible force of history. When the Prime Minister requested that King George charge Otis – the “Jack Cade of the Rebellion” – with treason (a crime only cured by execution), the King demurred.
It was too late.
Though the King still harbored hopes of regaining control of colonial Boston, easy access to the press had transformed Otis’ rebellion far beyond anything readily solvable with a sword.
In the end, Jack Cade vanquished the hydra with the consequential help of new media.
And if Otis had Twitter, the King’s hopes for regaining control may have been dashed well before 1776.
The distinction between the failure of Cade’s rebellion and the success of the American Revolution is before our very eyes today.
Trump however, is a leader of a different kind of populist rebellion – one that understands that in order to be effective the rebellion must leverage media to become a movement that lives in ideas rather than through any individual.
Ironically, this makes Trump not a dictator (where the power resides in the person) but rather a true child of the American Revolution (where the power resides in ideas promoted through the media).
Trump’s power is generated by his persistent refusal to come to agreements with the oligarchy and established elites because, unlike Jack Cade, Trump’s peasants won’t get fooled a second time.
That’s why populism today is not going to be vanquished anymore than Trump will be destroyed.
It is “We the People…”

Ted Malloch is the author of The Plot to Destroy Trump

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/201...lion-then-now/