Most rightists today are depressed.
It appears to them that leftists have
gotten a stranglehold on every source of power.
Daily the voting power of minorities grows, and
they are a slavish leftist power base. In the media,
NBC, ABC and CBS remain solidly leftist.
The traditional family is being undermined,
illegitimacy has reached proportions among whites
which they once reached only among minorities. Among
minorities these rates have long since gone ballistic.
"Taking back America," the conservative
battle cry, seems hopeless.
Leftists have sewed up all the old
power bases. But that will not determine the future.
If one knows American history, the
old ruling class has always controlled the established
power bases. It was the rise of new kinds of power
that overthrew them.
America's first contest for power
was the expansion westward, and the South won that
contest hands down. We not only settled new Southern
and border states at a frantic rate, but we populated
a large portion of the Midwest as well.
Seeing the South dominating the westward
expansion, New England despaired of ever gaining
power in America. New England held secession conventions
in 1814.
New England fought every expansion
westward because the South led westward expansion
completely. The Northeast had lost the old contest
for power.
When the slave states wanted to introduce
Mississippi, Alabama and Missouri into the Union,
the free states could only get a matching free state
by splitting the east coast into tinier and tinier
fragments.
The South had won the old contest
for the old power base. But a new one rose. When
the westward expansion was at its height, American
industry was made up of a lot of tiny factories.
The real power back then lay in settling new lands.
But in the nineteenth century, the
new industrial technology steadily became dominant.
New England got its power when they
took over the new industrial technology. Their power
came from the new rules technology made, not from
"taking back" under the old rules.
By 1900, New England and its industrialists
had transformed the rest of America and especially
the South into economic and political colonies.
Then these capitalists lost power
to a new group, the liberals and social planners.
Once again, this was not the result
of "taking back" the old power sources. Until they
had won overwhelmingly, the old industrialists remained
solidly anti-liberal. Liberals did not win power
by "taking back" industry.
What liberals took over was a new
power source. In the first part of the twentieth
century the educational establishment was tiny.
It survived on the generosity of industrialists
and other big money.
Just as New England and its industry
reduced the South to colonial status, leftism has
turned big money into its servant. Liberals did
that by dominating the new power, the growing education
complex and the growing power of government brought
on by a more and more interdependent economy and
new communications.
In each case, the new rulers USED
a new political ideology, but that ideology was
just the tactic of a new power group.
In the name of fighting the Old South's
slavery, New England built a coalition with Midwestern
farmers. But beneath all this, as Calhoun so clearly
saw, was the rising NEW FORCE of industry.
America got rid of the old slavocracy
when it was taken over by Eastern big money.
Likewise, in fighting the old New
England capitalist power, liberals got the South
and the Midwest on their side. Liberal rulers got
their total dominance today by crushing "wage slavery"
and replacing it with tax slavery and rule by regulation.
Now, in its turn, leftism is rotten
and out of date. That is its weakness. But it will
not be defeated by taking back the old power sources.
It will be supplanted by new sources of power, the
kind we are seeing exploding out all over the place.
Once again, the ruling group controls
the old power sources, like the media and the universities
and public education. But once again a new power
is rising.
A biological revolution is under way.
A communications revolution is under way. They will
produce new power sources and new political approaches
to get rid of the present rule by social science
planners that we call leftism.
I am optimistic because the left is
doomed. It will be unseated and replaced, maybe
by something even more dangerous. But I know that
the PRESENT gloom of the right is absurd.
The old power that is based in universities
is being challenged by new powers which were produced
by the same process that allowed capitalists to
replace the slavocracy, and the same process that
allowed social planners to take over from the capitalists.
The real future has absolutely nothing
to do with the processes that today's conservatives
consider so modern and inevitable. The real future
will blindside our present rulers. Like the rise
of industry which so few recognized, like the growth
of planner power, it will completely upset the processes
we are used to.
Gloom comes from the fact that today's
anti-liberals are looking at the future the way
liberals want them to.
There is great promise and there is
great danger in the real future. But today's conservatives
don't see either. They are looking the wrong way.
The left rules, for example, by its
rule over education and the media. But new communications
are rising, and the education complex today is rigid
and exists only because of things like rules of
accreditation.
The left is doomed. What the future
will look like has nothing to do with what present
political thinkers think it does.
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