Prescriptive Authority, the Power of Numbers, and Justice

In my last essay I offered my commentary, for what the commentary of a royalist, Tory, Canadian is worth, on what has been happening in the republic on our southern border in the ongoing electoral extravaganza that is this year's presidential election.   I opened with a paragraph, explaining, as I usually do when putting my two cents in about such matters, that I have no dog in this race and pointing out why the whole affair confirms my belief in our own institutions.   Specifically, I meant the monarchy, obviously.   When you  fill the office of head-of-state, the person who represents the country as a whole, by popular election, you run the risk of a scenario where factionalism has gotten so extreme that whoever wins, approximately half the country will resent the outcome and refuse to accept it.   That is what happened in the last American presidential election, 2016, leading to this year's fiasco.   That is one of many reasons to prefer a hereditary head-of-state.

Today I offer something of an addendum to the previous essay.   I have often stated in the past that I believe in and support Parliament the institution rather than democracy the ideal.   Parliament is a democratic institution, of course, but it is not merely democratic.   It is very old, if we include the history of the Westminster Parliament on which ours is modelled.   Its antecedents go back at least to the Great Council of the Norman kings and arguably to the Witenagemot of Alfred the Great.   These are the ancestors of both Parliament and the Privy Council and the former became recognizable as such shortly after the Magna Carta Libertatum.   It became more democratic over time, of course, but its authority, like that of the monarchy in whose name it legislates, is derived from ancient, established, and proven usage, or, to use Edmund Burke's word meaning the same, prescription.    I stress this, even though (or especially because) it places me at odds with most of our "Conservative" politicians, and more so the liberals and socialists, all of whom prattle on forever about our "democracy", because prescription confers a stable, secure, authority on a governing institution.   Democracy the ideal, can only confer power on a government, and a volatile, unstable, form of power at that.   Remember the distinction between authority and power.   Authority is the respected right to lead, power is the feared ability to coerce.   Authority needs a certain amount of power to back it up at times, but woe to those whose governors have only power and no real authority.

Democracy is specifically the power of numbers.   That the power conferred by having numbers behind you does not automatically translate into the just use of that power is an observation that was central to all of Plato and Aristotle's writings about governance.   More recently, although it was a couple of centuries back, Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on democracy as he had observed it in the American republic, coined the expression the "tyranny of the majority" to warn about the danger of the misuse of democratic power.   Those who put together the constitution of the American republic were aware of this problem, which is why they put in features such as the Electoral College, rather than adopting a more simple democracy.   In the twentieth century there were those who tried to re-think democratic theory so as to eliminate the problem.   One proposal was to replace "majority rules" with "what everyone agrees on rules."   How such people failed to see that the potential for totalitarianism, already present in the older Modern ideal of democracy (there is a reason Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both "the father of modern democracy" and "the father of totalitarianism"), is magnified, not lessened, by this substitution, is beyond me.   If democratic legitimacy is conferred by getting everybody to agree rather than a majority vote then those would claim democratic legitimacy for their agendas can tolerate no dissent.   Everybody must be forced to agree.   Is it not obvious how that has become the attitude of the present, "woke", Left?

Now, let us think about the last American presidential election and the current one.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency in the Electoral College.   His opponent, Hilary Clinton, had been expected to win.   A sizable percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump that year did so, not because they wanted Trump per se, but because they couldn't stand the thought of Hilary Clinton as president.   Or, as some wags put it, they figured she had had her two terms as president already and didn't need a third one.

The "woke" Left refused to accept this outcome.   Donald Trump, who before running for president was a television celebrity, became first an object of ridicule for progressives in the media, then an object of hatred.   Note, incidentally, how the behaviour of the media over the past four years clearly proves what liberals have, until fairly recently, tried to deny - that the mainstream media is overwhelming slanted to the Left.   Well over 90 percent of television newsreporting, somewhat less for the print media but still well over fifty percent, dedicated themselves to the destruction and demonization of Donald Trump, his positions, and his supporters.  Day in and day out, for four years, there was a constant bombardment from the newsmedia, and not just the American newsmedia, about what a horrible, racist, neo-nazi, bigot and white supremacist Donald Trump was.   The violent wing of the Left mobilized and took to rioting, vandalism, and outright assault on Trump supporters, and the media winked at it, if it did not expressly state its approval.

The media has now declared Biden the winner of this year's election.   In my opinion they have acted prematurely.   Biden's win has not been certified and is being challenged in the courts.   Even as the media was declaring for him, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered all of the late Pennsylvania ballots, that is, those received after the cutoff, separated from the others.   However, the point I am making does not depend upon who is ultimately and legally declared the winner,

More people turned out this year to vote for Donald Trump than in 2016.   More, not less.   In 2016 a sizeable section of Trump's votes were really votes against Clinton rather than votes for Trump.   That is not the case here.   Biden is not the kind of person to inspire either enthusiasm or hatred.   Those who came out to support Donald Trump this year - approximately half of the voters, whoever legitimately has the slight marginal lead - did so, because they love their president, in spite of the way he has been demonized for four years.   Interestingly, and this is something I will probably have more to say about at a future date, that includes record numbers of black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters.  (1) Conversely, apart from his own vote, assuming he remembered to cast one, and those of his immediate family, very few of the votes cast for Biden were cast for Biden per se.   I am not referring to all those who rose from the dead to vote, voted twice or more and in states other than their own, or those whose Trump votes may have been switched to Biden votes through some high-tech gizmo.   The legitimate votes for Biden were votes against Trump, by people who hate him.

"Love trumps hate", Hilary Clinton said in 2016.   The "woke" Left latched on to this as a slogan and have used it ever since, oblivious to the fact that hate better describes the vicious rage that energizes and motivates everything they do than it does the words and behaviour of Trump and his supporters.   Does "love", in the ordinary sense of the word, trump "hate" in the ordinary sense of the word?   If so, then Donald Trump, who has endured four years of bitter hatred directed against him, only to have a record number of people turn out and vote their love for him, is the moral victor, the person who deserves the victory, even if the number of those voting their hatred of him is slightly higher.

Which is yet another reason for preferring the authority which prescription vests in ancient institutions, whether our own monarchy and Parliament, or those of the 244 year old American republic, over the power of democratic numbers.

(1) This is something the pre-Trump Republicans were trying to achieve for about three decades.   Their method involved trying to divest themselves of their image as a "white" party by adopting a moderate version of the "rainbow coalition" policies of the progressive Democrats.  It failed.  Trump, by contrast, did pretty much the opposite of that.  He ran on a platform of stopping the export of jobs, controlling immigration, securing the borders, and supporting law and order, which obviously had a strong appeal to middle and working class, white Americans and which explicitly opposed the anti-white hostility that the Democrats' "rainbow coalition" had evolved into under Obama's presidency, but was not racialist in the way his demonizers absurdly claimed.   Lo and behold, it accomplished what the Bushes and Dole and Romney and McCain all failed to do. 

South of the Border

As you are aware, if you have been a reader for any period of time, I am not an American.   I was born a free subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the Dominion of Canada, have lived in said Commonwealth Realm all my life, and have no desire to change this.   Long time readers will also know that by political conviction I am a staunch, “Freedom Wears a Crown”, Tory, who believes firmly in the institution of hereditary, royal, monarchy and the Westminster Parliamentary constitution.   I have, in other words, no personal stake in this year’s American Presidential election any more than I had in that of 2016.     Indeed, I see both of these elections as demonstrations of the foolishness of having an elected head of state who is chosen in a popularity contest.    While factionalism is a problem in a parliamentary system as well as in a republican system, being an unavoidable element of an elected legislative assembly, it is much worse when the person who is supposed to represent the country as a whole – as a side note to all of my fellow Canucks out there this is not the role of the Prime Minister – is chosen by election.   Far better for the office to be above the process of partisan politics and grounded instead on hereditary right, tradition, prescription, and sacred oath.

 

None of this means, of course, that I have not been following the campaign, nor does it mean that I do not have a strong preference for one of the candidates.   The Second Greatest Commandment, Our Lord said, was “To love thy neighbour as thyself” and, for all of their misguided, small-r republicanism, the Americans are our southern neighbours, and it would be a major violation of the Second Greatest Commandment to wish Kamala Harris upon them as their president.   Let us not deceive ourselves as to who the true Democrat candidate has been this year.

 

When Donald Trump first sought the Republican nomination for the election of four years ago, like everyone else, I knew him mostly as a very rich real-estate developer who had been very famous simply for his wealth back in the 1980s, before becoming a television celebrity as the host of “The Apprentice” decades later.   I did not initially think his candidacy was a serious one but, as he sought the nomination, won the nomination, and then won the election, on a platform that read like it had been written by Pat Buchanan, I came to be impressed. It was about time, I thought, that, someone was taking such long verboten ideas as “a country needs to be able to control its borders”, “free trade is not all it is cracked up to be”, “the United States should not be the world’s police”, “governments should act in the best interests of their own countries instead of some global vision”, and “there are such things as too much immigration and the wrong kind of immigration” and bringing them back into the public debate from which they had been long excluded and desperately needed.   When Trump challenged the established leadership of his own party as well as the Democrats, the mainstream media, and all the other liberal, progressive, and left-wing forces arrayed against him, I developed a respect for him, which only kept growing as he won, and then, in office, set out to do the things he had said he would do in a way that no other elected leader in any country at any level of government that I can remember in my lifetime had ever done.

 

The progressive left in the United States and elsewhere were enraged by Trump’s election.   As anybody who remembers the 1990s and the 2000s knows, the venom directed against the two George Bushes and the unsuccessful Republican candidates who ran against Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not come remotely close to the hatred unleashed against Trump and his supporters.   Even the anti-Reagan hysterics that progressive liberals liked to engage in when I was a kid was nothing like this.    Every presidential election for the last twenty-five years or so, has been followed by a “derangement syndrome” on the part of the losing side.   “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has dwarfed them all.

 

The organized, militant, extremists of the left, such as Antifa - the masked, blackshirted, thugs, who with no apparent consciousness of the irony proclaim themselves to be fighting “facism” – began a campaign of intimidation and violence, directed against Trump, his supporters, anybody who held views they disapproved of, or in many cases, anybody who just happened to be white or elderly.   They have not let up since, and, indeed, took the violence to a whole new level this year, along with their allies, the Black Lives Matter movement.   Throughout this entire period – I am talking the entire last four years, remember - they were aided and abetted by the vast majority of the mainstream media, that constantly talked about mostly non-existent “white supremacists” and “right-wing extremist” while pretending that groups like Antifa were a laudable and legitimate protest movement. In the United States, Democrat politicians almost never repudiated these violent extremists, nor were they called upon or pressed to do so to the extent and as repeatedly as Republican politicians, and especially Donald Trump, were called upon to repudiate the Bogeyman of white supremacism. 

 

At one point, just after Trump’s victory, there was a moment when it looked like the thinkers on the left were willing to take a hard look at themselves, and consider the possibility that Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” rhetoric, and the entire Obama-Clinton strategy of demonizing middle and working class, white Americans, evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics, and males, was what cost them the election and ought to be abandoned.   That moment quickly passed, and instead, the left opted to double down on that strategy.    The message from the mainstream media, almost monolithically left-wing, became that Donald Trump was a crypto-Nazi and that anybody who supported him was likely the same.

 

They did not hesitate to tell the most outrageous lies to bolster this insane message.   How these companies have remained afloat without being deserted in droves by their viewers, readers, and advertisers, as their credibility sank below that of the supermarket tabloids that specialize in celebrity gossip and alien abduction stories is beyond me.  

 

First there was the entire “the Russians are responsible” nonsense, which was especially rich seeing that it came from the people who up until that point had been digging up the skeleton of Joseph McCarthy and rattling it around every time anyone said anything bad about Communists and Communism.  

 

Then, about seven months after Trump was sworn into office, somebody who had until shortly before been a Democratic Party organizer, put together a rally called “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the scheduled removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.   Some of the protestors, most likely left-wing agents provocateurs, showed up in Klan robes and SS uniforms.   Although these hardly constituted the majority of the protesters, the left-wing media declared all of the protestors to be “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis”.   When Antifa “counter protesters” stirred up violence – with the Charlottesville police, upon orders from the city’s mayor, refusing to do their job and keep the two sides separate – the media pinned the blame for all of this on the protestors.   When Donald Trump, the voice of reason at the time, addressed the matter, condemning the violence from the left that the progressives refused to condemn, he said, with regards to the rally and its opponents, that there are “very fine people on both sides.”   The media has persistently quoted these words ever since, applying them to the kind of people that those in the Klan robes and SS uniforms purported to be, without mentioning that Trump clarified his own remark later in the same interview, and said “and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists – because they should be condemned totally.”    He should have refrained from giving them even that much, and said that he would condemn the people they want condemned, when and only when they are willing to condemn Antifa and other Marxist extremists.  

 

Since to relate the entire story of the media’s dishonest war against Trump would require an essay much longer than what I intend this one to be, I am going to skip ahead to the events of two nights ago.   It is now the morning of Guy Fawkes Day, which, contrary to the delusions of Alan Moore, does not commemorate some sort of libertarian hero but rather the defeat of the plot of a terrorist to blow up Parliament and King James I.   The Americans held their election on November the third, two days prior.  As of this moment, the outcome still hangs in the air.

 

On the evening of the third, as results of the election were counted, at first, Biden, the nominal Democratic candidate, gained a lead.  While some took this as an indication that the polls, which had been suggesting that Biden would win by a large margin, were accurate, I, in conversation with a couple of such people, said that this was merely the result of the early votes being tabulated first.   As the votes from Election Day itself, were added to the early votes, states that were showing blue on the map would start to turn red.   This prediction was soon borne out.   Amusingly, as this happened, the numbers on the top of the map, supposedly indicating electoral votes for Biden and Trump, became increasingly disconnected from the map itself.   It was apparent that the media had come up with a new form of mathematics for this election.   Biden’s total included both states where he was the declared winner and states where he was significantly ahead.   Trump’s only ever included the states where he had been declared the winner.   As states switched from blue to red, their numbers were not subtracted from Biden’s total.   States that Biden won were called as quickly as possible.   Other states, such as Florida, were not called for Trump until hours after it was obvious that he had won them.  By around 11 pm, the numbers from the states where Trump had won and was leading, if you manually added them up, showed a Trump total of close to 300 electoral votes, well over the 270 he needed.   The number on the top of the screen, however, still read just over 100.   

 

By some point around midnight – keep in mind, I am talking Central Standard Time here – the total electoral vote acknowledged for Trump had risen to 213.   Biden’s total had not been revised downward, in accordance with the red surge of the previous hours, but was sitting at 238 on the network news stations, 227 on Decision Desk.   The counts remained at those numbers until morning, although the map continued to show Trump with a sizable and winning lead over Harris and her stand-in Biden.

 

No, it is not standard procedure to put an election count on hold, send everyone home for the night, and start again in the morning.

 

By the time the morning came around, it was evident that the Democrats were returning to one of their older traditions.   Since they have been acting in recent years, as the devil possessed party of wokeness, Cultural Maoism, and Year Zero, it might be thought that for them to return to their party’s older traditions was a major improvement.  Sadly, however, I am not talking about Jeffersonian decentralized anti-federalism and agrarianism.   I refer to the tradition of Tammany Hall, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the long-standing Democrat lock on the cemetery vote.   The tradition, to put it plainly, of voter fraud.

 

The left had long signaled that they were planning this.   This is what all those fake polls – obvious to some of us at the time, to everybody now – and all of the talk about Trump refusing to concede was all about.   That is why the Democrats were so insistent upon a mail-in vote option, and, if it were not happening all around the world, I would have suggested that this is what was behind the whole “lets blow the latest strain of respiratory disease way out of proportion by giving it a scary new name and lying about it being an Apocalyptic superbug that will end all life on earth if drastic measures are not taken” all along.   Sure enough, overnight, under the cover of darkness, in districts locally controlled by Democrat bosses, some of which had been irregularly delaying reporting their returns, others of which “discovered” a whack load of ballots all marked for Biden at the last minute, tipped what had been a sizable lead for Trump in some key states into a lead for Biden.  

 

At the moment that I write this, the mainstream media are claiming that Biden is six electoral votes away from winning and fifty electoral votes ahead of Donald Trump.   Decision Desk has Biden leading, but at only 253 electoral votes.   They give the same 214 to Trump.

 

What is somewhat odd about all of this is that the Democrats seem to have put very little effort into disguising what they are doing.   With a paper trail a mile long, whistleblowers coming forward to testify to the cheating ordered by their higher ups, and the statistical impossibility of some of what we have seen, the likelihood that Donald Trump will win a legal challenge to all of this is incredibly high.   Is it possible that the left’s intention in all of this is not actually to steal an election, but to lay the foundation for a new set of charges against Trump – that he won by stacking the court – in order to justify a new wave of revolutionary violence?

 

In either situation, for the sake of our American neighbours, let us pray that the Donald is triumphant yet again.

 

God bless our American neighbours and God save the Queen!

Obama's Legacy

The last year of the US presidency of Barack Hussein Obama is now half over and it is abundantly clear what his enduring legacy – that for which he will be remembered – will be. It will not be his disastrous attempt to give the United States a socialized health care system that has all the failings of ours up here in Canada and none of the more positive aspects. It will not even be the relentless jihad his administration has waged against traditional Christians on behalf of birth control, abortion, gay rights, and other aspects of the ongoing sexual revolution. Rather it will be a legacy of racial division and strife.

It would not have taken a great degree of prescience to have predicted as much in the fall of 2008 when Obama was first elected president. At the time media progressives in an orgy of self-congratulatory rejoicing proclaimed that the election of Obama was ushering in a new age of a new “post-racial” America, oblivious to the reality that in a republic which, for the first time its history, had chosen its president largely on the basis of his skin colour, race was obviously more important than it had ever been before. Less than a month after Obama’s first inauguration, his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. provided another clue as to the direction in which this administration would lead the United States when he berated Americans as a “nation of cowards” that has “still not come to grips with its racial past” and called for a “national conversation” on the subject of race. What Obama and Holder meant by “conversation”, of course, was not a dialogue, an interchange in which varying points of view are respectfully heard and discussed, but a monologue in which blacks voice their complaints and everyone else listens and grovels.

Then began the long stream of incidents in which the media shamelessly politicized the private suffering of black families who had lost a son to the gunfire of police or, in the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case that started it all, a neighborhood watch co-ordinator, and Obama, even more shamelessly, interjected himself, and tried to make it all about him. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.” “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

This gave birth to “Black Lives Matter”, which started as a banal cliché and then grew into a radical protest movement. The movement is founded upon the idea that the United States of the present day is a white supremacist country in which black lives are devalued and the police, the agents of white supremacism, systematically target blacks with violence causing a disproportionate number of black deaths. This idea is, of course, completely contra factual, although every smug, snarky, self-assured, progressive on the planet seems to be convinced of its truth.

As was reported last year, far more whites die at the hands of the American police each year, than blacks. In Philadelphia, at least, black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot at blacks than white cops. Forty percent of cop killers in the United States are black, making blacks much more likely to kill cops than the other way around. For that matter, violent interracial crime in the United States is overwhelmingly black on white rather than vice versa. Finally, far more blacks die at the hand of other blacks each year, than at the hands of the police. If anyone devalues black lives in the United States, if anyone thinks that black lives do not matter, it is not white police officers, but other blacks.

If the people who parade under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” really believed their own slogan, they would be preaching at other blacks, rather than at white cops.

The slogan and the movement, however, have never really been about bringing down the black death count in America so much as stirring up bitterness, anger, and hatred against white people and especially against white cops. That there was an abundance of such bitterness, anger, and hatred already is quite in evidence in the statistics referred to above. To deliberately stir up more can only be regarded as an act of pure malice especially in the light of the deadly consequences that we have seen over the last couple of weeks.

On Tuesday July 5th a black man named Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the following day another black man, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in St. Paul, Minnesota. The media immediately began to fit these killings into their narrative of racist white cops killing innocent blacks – despite there being plenty of facts which do not fit that narrative (1) - while politicians like Obama and his heir designate Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to do the usual grandstanding and posturing. Then on Thursday, July 7th, at a protest over these killings organized in Dallas, Texas by Black Lives Matter, a black army veteran named Micah Xavier Johnson, having declared that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers” put this wish into action and went on a shooting spree, killing five officers and injuring about a dozen other people before holing up in a college building, where, in a bizarre sci-fi twist to the story, a police robot armed with a bomb took him out.

It did not end there, naturally. The next day similar incidents, albeit on a smaller scale, took place in Bristol, Tennessee, Valdosta, Georgia and Ballwin, Missouri. On the Saturday night after that someone began shooting at the police headquarters in San Antonio and that same weekend protests in Baton Rouge and St. Paul turned violent, with protestors in the latter attacking the police with crude projectiles and Molotov cocktails. Then, on July 17th, a man named Gavin Eugene Long, who referred to himself as a “black separatist,” shot six police officers in Baton Rouge.


At the recent Republican National Convention, David A. Clarke Jr., the Sherriff of Milwaukee Country, Wisconsin called these events “guerilla urban warfare against the police”, which seems an apt description. Perhaps it would be more apt, however, to paraphrase the notorious remarks of the American president’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and say that “Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

At the beginning of his presidency, Obama’s administration asked for a national conversation on race, and at the end of it, what he has given America is a race war. This will be all that history will remember him for.

(1) Among other contra-narrative facts were that both men were armed, Sterling was resisting arrest, and the cop who shot Castile was not white.