Claes Ryn Warns Of The New Jacobins And True Democratic Mob Rule

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Constitutionalists are raised, structured, socialized, you could say institutionalized to be constitutionalists.  This does not happen much any longer, which is why our United States Constitution can be as seemingly useless and not referred to or deferred to as you would like to see it or as it once was.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  To the paperback book The New Jacobinism, I just want to read this to you because I was discussing just a moment ago about how constitutionalism only works when there are people that are constitutionalists.  Constitutionalists are raised, structured, socialized, you could say institutionalized to be constitutionalists.  This does not happen much any longer, which is why our United States Constitution can be as seemingly useless and not referred to or deferred to as you would like to see it or as it once was.  Ryn writes in The New Jacobinism, under the chapter title “Democracy and Aristocratic Restraint” — by the way, he, without saying it, refers often in the first couple chapters of this book to a phrase that we use often on this show, which is obedience to the unenforceable.  He doesn’t actually say obedience to the unenforceable, but he most certainly is basically saying give obedience to the unenforceable.  I’ll explain that in just a moment:

[reading]

It should be remembered that government is indistinguishable from moral, intellectual, and cultural conditions that give it shape and direction, that it manifests the preferences of an entire civilization. The transformation of American political practice and theory forms part of developments that encompass social life as a whole. If the weakening of ethical and other restraint [Mike: There’s that reference to obedience to the unenforceable.] is changing American government, so is it changing intellectual, cultural, and economic life. It is appropriate to reiterate that the distinction between two forms of popular government, one compatible and one incompatible with aristocratic self-discipline, implies other distinctions between opposed potentialities of human life. Again, terms like “liberty,” “private property,” or “free market” have to be dichotomized no less than democracy. Central to the need dichotomies is the extent to which particular understandings emphasize or deemphasize the importance of ethical and other restraints, and the kind of social and political structures from which they are indistinguishable. Each of the terms can have vastly different meanings. Without the proper distinctions, it is not possible meaningfully to classify advocates of liberty, private property, or the free market. Like democracy, these terms may hide meanings that are sharply at odds with the old Western ethical and cultural ethos, and may actually express a burning wish to overturn traditional society. The extent of the transformation of America and of the larger civilization to which it belongs is partly hidden by the vague and uncritical use of general terms.

[end reading]

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Mike:  I’m going to stop right there.  You can add the term conservative to that, as he puts it, “the vague and uncritical use of general terms.”  Think about the term conservative, as we have talked about over and over and over again.  It’s an advertising slogan; it’s a moniker; it’s a bumper sticker.  It is a term that you can use interchangeably with low-fat, sugar-free.  It is a term that you can use interchangeably with scalable, some of the other buzzwords of our existence.  It is a term that, because of that, has come to mean something that it never meant before in all of its 200 years, or I would say 160 years of use.  This is something else that you learn when you start studying this stuff, folks.  I don’t mean to bore you with intellectual pursuits and details but this is important stuff.

The term “conservative” basically was coined and gained traction and started to be used after the Englishman Edmund Burke began studying the horrors of what was going on in France in the French Revolution, when Burke identified the first generation of Jacobins — Claes Ryn in his book identifies the new Jacobins — he has identified a bunch of people that have completely and totally jettisoned all tradition and institutional knowledge that they had in place of massive and at-will democratic tendency or democratic process.  I can explain that in layman’s terms so everyone can understand it.

What Burke identified was government by Gallup group.  I repeat, what Burke identified was government by Gallup group.  In other words, whatever the mob wants, 50 percent of the population plus one vote, that’s what the mob gets.  What is one of the more fanciful longings of the democrats out there today?  I don’t mean democrats as in the party, I mean democrats as in those that think everything can be solved by going to this place called a polling booth.  It’s one of the great desideratum, that’s Latin for “the thing longed for,” of the day.  What is it that they pine away for, that their hearts are beating and swelling and are broken because they have yet to achieve it?  It is mob rule election of the president.  That’s right, they want an end to that anachronistic, fuddy-duddy, antiquated, old electoral college.  It’s not fair.  The people ought to be choosing the president.

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You do know that in the Federal Convention of 1787, the reason why the election of the president was given to the electoral college is so that the nitwittery, the hoi polloi couldn’t choose the president.  I would say that the men and women — of course women couldn’t vote — of the 18^th and early part of the 19^th century were a lot better educated and far more wise, and certainly far more morally and spiritually upright than we are today.  If the men that were in that convention did not trust their fellow citizens with the awesome power of choosing the chief executive to govern a landmass that at that time only included colonies, but that they thought could include as many as 20 states, they didn’t trust the people to do this sort of electing.

Please answer the question: What has transpired in the interim that should cause us to want to trust them or believe that that awesome power can be put into the hands of democracy?  You want to talk about a recipe for instant national suicide, forget about going bankrupt and having the federal government broke.  Break down the dam.  End the electoral college.  Make the election of the president a democratic institution. Do it by constitutional amendment, by the bye.  Then the final bough would be there for the breaking and the final end to the constitutional system to be replaced by what we basically have now, which is the American regime, will be at hand.  If you think things are bad politically speaking today, just go ahead and break that final barrier down.  It’s one of the things that Ryn is referring to.

End Mike Church Show Transcript