Considering current events, it may be appropriate to reflect on selected principles that are perpetually applicable, no matter the time or place. Democrats, by ignoring them, are hastening a dystopian future in America.
The Carousel Principle
Everyone knows of Lavrentiy Beria, the Russian Wolf Hound who promised Stalin, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Less well known is that Beria met his end in the dungeon, his own crimes having been shown to Stalin. This illustrates the Carousel Principle: “What goes around comes around.”
When Alvin Bragg’s chief witness, Michael Cohen, a man described by Victor Davis Hanson as “a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump,” stated a few days ago that the New York indictment was “only the beginning,” his divination foresaw other follow-on indictments of Donald Trump.
Yet he may be more accurate than he imagines, as every state and federal prosecutor in the land can play the Beria game with any state or federal politician. Bear in mind that damage does not require conviction; the accusation is sufficient. Per the Carousel Principle, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Image: The dangerous playground carousel by Killarnee. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Meaning of “Politics”
An inadequate understanding of the term “politics” can be the source of great mischief. The proper definition of the term is “politics is the art of influencing behavior.” Thus understood, the infant’s chortle is a political act intended to influence the mother’s behavior. On the ranch, the invention of the round corral is attributed to the political tactic of the horse sticking his nose into a corner of the fence so that cowboys would have to come uncomfortably close to the hindquarters to reach the horse’s head. And in philosophy, Thomas Aquinas’ intonation of “Fides Quarens Intellectus” (“Faith seeking understanding”) can be understood not as a metaphysical stance but as a political tactic to get the Pope off his back.
Is the Bragg prosecution political? Former Ohio Governor John (“the RINO”) Kasich recently told Andrea Mitchell that, because of the indictment, “normal people” and “traditional Republicans” won’t vote for Trump. That is precisely the effect on behavior sought by the prosecution, which renders it political.
War & Politics
And having in mind the correct definition of “politics” illuminates the meaning of the Clausewitzian observation that “War is politics by other means.”
Revolution & Rebellion
Current events especially demand that we understand the distinction between revolution and rebellion. A revolution is a radical change in the locus of power. A rebellion is the defiance of lawful authority. The American Revolution was a revolution but not a rebellion. In point of fact, it was the British who were the rebels because they were changing all previous political and lawful norms to harm the colonists.
The Purpose of the American Revolution
In light of the foregoing, we can precisely understand what the issue was behind the American War of Independence. The issue was whether the Americans were to continue to enjoy the full benefits of the common law. Our forebears loathed war every bit as much as do conservatives today. But the British forced war upon our forebears precisely as today's left seeks to force violence upon us.
Today’s conservatives are not firebrands who want a shooting war. On the contrary, they believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, and they moreover fully understand that any possible victory would be Pyrrhic. The reality of modern society is that the “winner” of such a war would preside over an anarchic Mad Max world devoid of all physical, technological, legal, and moral structures.
The great need today—the Reality Principle of the 21st century—is to get the rank-and-file Democrats to understand that their elites' approach to politics is already leading to that Mad Max society by destroying our economy, infrastructure, borders, energy and food supplies, military defense capability, etc., thereby effectively bypassing the type of war that was once needed to get to that nadir.