So the Good Guys Won and the Bad Guys Lost?

If we think this way, it may not be long before the bad guys return.

“If only it were all so simple!  If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The good guys won and the bad guys lost. Really? But last time, the bad guys won and the good guys lost. What is the difference?

I hate to rain on the parade. It is all very well for Donald Trump and everyone else to exult in the moment of victory. By all means, let us savor the moment.

But if we let it stop there, without understanding it — why it happened this time and not last time — it is not likely to happen again next time.

Is it because God smiles on us? What did we do to make him smile? And what about when he does not smile? What did we do to bring that about?

Is it because we are the good side, and goodness always triumphs in the end? But it does not. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people who would be alive are now dead — from public health hoaxes, unnecessary wars, and more. Others have been disfigured or impoverished and will lead lives of misery. Goodness did not triumph for them.

Was it because a majority of Americans heeded the calls of our better commentators in the alternative media to “wake up” to the dangers? Then they rose up in righteous defiance of tyranny and voted the “right” way? Yes, they did, to some extent. But why were so many asleep in the first place? And how do we know that we are not still sleeping in some respects?

(By the way, telling us how we are still asleep is the role of intellectuals — real ones, not the parlor intellectuals who inhabit western universities and thinktanks. The kind, like Solzhenitsyn, that pay a price for their dissidence. But do not expect right-wing intellectuals to risk displeasing anyone now. They are too busy seeking jobs in the new administration.)

Casting votes is admirable, but it hardly constitutes an uprising or a sustained revival. It costs little and requires no sacrifice. It is also a notoriously fickle way of understanding and exercising citizenship. It can quickly be reversed.

Above all, it is vicarious. We are appointing others to govern us. It is only a short step from there to hiring still others to govern for us: bureaucrats, lawyers, pressure groups (“NGOs”), contractors, “consultants,” those who finance them — i.e., the “deep state”.

Do we really think that the forces of evil cannot devise yet more innovative ways to take advantage of all this, as they did previously, in ways we do not expect or understand?

As for the voices in the alternative media, we owe them a huge debt for speaking out and “waking” us up (as opposed to “woking” us up?). But they do not necessarily address everything; nor do they always get everything right.

For one thing, there have been strikingly few attempts to explain why the bad guys won last time. This is partly because some of the good guys still have a stake in the system run by the bad guys. I tried to explain it in my new book, but one book cannot explain everything. We need an ongoing dialogue; otherwise we will not get it right this time around either. The United States has just been through perhaps the most devastating 4-5 years since the Civil War, into which it has dragged most of the western world, and we still do not know why. Nor do we show much interest in knowing. It involved forms of tyranny we have never seen before and still do not fully understand.

When I say that we do not know why, I mean that we do not know in terms of what we all did to permit it and therefore how we could extricate ourselves from it fully and prevent it from happening again. The election has given us breathing space. But it is not clear that we have regained more than temporary control over our public life and political system.

I am not just talking about Trump’s shortcomings and mistakes and those of his team. There are some, and there are bound to be more. (Some responsibility for the vaccine hoax and unnecessary wars does rest with the first Trump adminstration. Aside from rumors that Trump may appoint neo-cons to his cabinet, at the very least he will be subject to pressure and attempts at infiltration.)

Trump is in some ways a truly heroic figure, whose obvious flaws are outweighed by his larger-than-life personality. But he is still one man, and the nature of the American presidency is such that we are all subject to his whims alone.

The deeper problem is not with him but with us. Do we really understand what we did wrong? I see little evidence for that. Some say it was caused by “the Left” (I do myself), but many who say this do not even have a clear sense of precisely what the Left is or what it did to take power, and some even seem determined to misunderstand and obfuscate what it is, because they too have a stake in allowing it to continue in some respects. Others suggest that it is not so much what the Left did as what the Right — and the rest of us — did not do (I say that too).

Recently, I argued that the professional Right loses all its battles. I am not sure that this election result disproves that. A majority of American voters did deal a strong blow to a well-organized, highly impersonal tyranny. But most of the organized Right did little to assist Trump’s victory. Before he won the Republican nomination, many were still actively thwarting him. Most deserve zero credit for this victory. Yet they are the people that inevitably will fill most of the positions in the new administration, regardless of Trump’s determination to avoid appointing obvious neocons to high visibility posts.

The Democrats now scold Americans for having voted incorrectly. I for one cannot see any respects in which the Democrats’ gripes are valid. But I can see a few respects in which we, the ones who voted “correctly”, have neglected matters that still need addressing, or we could find yet another election result being undone or reversed. I do not advocate scolding, but perhaps some soul-searching is in order?

It is too early to know where and how the next tyranny could arise. They tend to arise where no one expects them; that is why they arise. Trump and team clearly understand some dangers: the national security state, the bureaucratic “swamp”, the more bizarre manifestations of “Woke” ideology. But some deeper problems deserve not just their attention but ours, problems that have escaped us until now. The very fact that we neglect them may explain why they played a role in the recent tyranny but not much in this past election campaign:

• Our willingness to let the political professionals perform our citizenship for us.
• Our willingness to allow the leftist political class to set the political agenda and terms of debate.
• Our continued reliance upon a right-wing political class that allows the Left to set the agenda and then tags along with them, building lucrative organizational empires pretending to oppose them but achieving almost nothing. (And most started tagging along with Trump in this election once they smelled jobs.)
• Our continued tolerance for hideous injustices perpetrated by the criminal American judiciary (I do not mean the American criminal judiciary), especially at the lower levels which are almost invisible even in the alternative media. This is what enabled the “lawfare” operations and more. Lawfare against Trump did not open the way for injustices against ordinary Americans, as even some of MAGA’s less forthright judicial politicians pretend, but the reverse. Longstanding injustices against ordinary Americans came first, and they still operate with impunity. Administering justice is, along with defense against external attack, the most basic function of government, and yet ours not only fails but refuses.
• The continued degradation of the African-American community, driven by the destruction of the black family and black male, which partly sparked the crisis of 2020.
• Government policies that exacerbate the ever-widening estrangement between men and women that was the decisive feature of this election and is by far the most serious consequence of Woke ideology. It is still not properly understood and intimidates and paralyzes all of us — especially men — from being fully functional citizens and even from understanding why.

The refusal of the professional Right to understand and oppose these and a few other things and the willingness of the rest of us to tolerate their fecklessness is what will most likely permit the next tyranny.

We have been rescued from the railroad tracks this time. But not only are the people who tied us to the tracks still out there; they are supported by tens of millions of Americans — voters whose numbers may be increasing — who think we should have been tied tighter, and they are furious that we were freed.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.