It becomes more and more clear that the robber barons of the Deep State – few of whom work for the US Government, of course (it goes mostly the other way round) – have for the most part, and despite the burgeoning daring work of the 3% who resist (thanks, Tucker!), taken over. They’ve rigged the game, throughout – all the games – for their benefit.
This right now is the transition from Democracy to Ochlocracy, which has been predicted, and many times seen, for more than 2,000 years.
Once the ochlocracy is fully implemented, tyranny – the ascendance of one ochlocrat above all the others – will soon ensue. Indeed, the important ochlocrats must already have their knives at each other’s throats. That’s just how it works, in a low trust society: defective equilibrium sucks, but suck it up and take it, all you who depended upon it and ordered your lives in accordance thereto. Who lives by defection dies by a thousand small defections; indeed, of such defects does his very life consist. Sad!
Then, shortly after the ochlocracy has been perfected in a new and horrible tyranny, it will be on to monarchy. Send it, Lord, and that right soon! May our first tyrant soon begin to feel himself at bottom a man of his own people, and to them loyal. Then might we have a shot at some sort of basic civility, and so prosperity, and peace.
At inflection points of geopolitical history such as these, it’s wise to keep all options open, and credible. Hell, Mel Gibson could be king. I could live with that. What I want in a king most of all is a man who is not afraid to tell me things he feels to be true and that he feels sure will scare me, perhaps to his own detriment. So, I look for a man who *just doesn’t care what people think about his “outrageous” views.* Bring it on. The more outrageous, the better. I mean, come on: given the fantastic delusions about sex and race of our adversaries, what have we to lose by being outrageous in return?
It’s rebellion and restoration, or getting your nuts cut off, and your nose, and your tongue. Choose.
+++++
PS: Could Elon be a good king? Sure. Could there be a better? Sure. Of course. But, let’s not let the perfect drive out the good, OK boys? At this point, we need above all a guy who will tell it honestly as he sees it, whatever his other weaknesses.
One way or another, there shall soon – as “soon” is accounted under the purview of the millennia – be again a king of the West. God grant I live to see it.
The Orthosphere 
The incomparable Walter Bagehot was surely right:
The other great appeal of monarchy (which the cases of Louis Napoleon and of his uncle illustrate) was explained by Lord Acton, the sense that, if the central power is weak, the lesser powers will run riot and oppress – “The little tyrant of his fields” :
Byzantine court intrigue is sickening, but it is more wholesome than bureaucratic intrigue. In the latter, nobody – even the principals – can easily tell what is really at stake in this or that item of political life (for bureaucratic disputes all boil down at last to some obscure clause in a bill nobody much knows about), whereas in the former, it is clear to everybody that the dispositive factor is the health of the monarch. Thus, “Long live the King,” sung with gusto and feeling. May he live forever, alleluia, amen; may the government be upon *his* shoulders, and only his, so that we can all understand where our loyalties properly lie, and what we ought to be about in service of the nation. If the King be for it, who can be against it?
Again then – and here’s where it finally cuts – if the King be for me, who can be against me?
“[T]he dispositive factor is the health of the monarch.”
On! I don’t know. Not a member of James II’s council, who was not in correspondence with the Prince of Orange and not a member of William’s, who was not in correspondence with James.
In the same vein, as Chesterton notes:
Likewise, after the victory of Prestonpans, when the Jacobite army had taken Carlisle and was advancing on Derby, Sir John Murray of Broughton, the Prince’s Secretary, is said to have received correspondence that could have hanged half Pelham’s Cabinet. Hence, the pardons he procured for himself and his friends. The Master of Stair records having seen them.
To be sure. I submit nevertheless that, despicable though such courtly stratagems be, nevertheless are they more straightforward and … honest (if that term can be honestly apt in respect to such betrayals) than what we so often see these days in bureaucratic contests, wherein truth and loyalty thereto – even in betrayal – are not even in question; indeed, are not even comprehensible by the nature of the present political game. In the present game, betrayal is the sine qua non; whereas in the days of the Stuart attempt at a Restoration, it was an egregious and dishonorable – and costly – violation of the rules of the game.
There is these days no such thing as honor, or therefore dishonor. Dishonor these days amounts only to waiting out the news cycle. It is not now, as it once was, tantamount to total disaster of life, and sufficient reason to consider either the duello, or a retreat to a hermitage, and so to waiting out the remainder of mortal life in retirement from the world, and in penance. It is rather only bad PR, that can be outwaited, or countered with “good” PR.
Dishonorable practice these days is standard operating procedure. Anyone who approaches public life – and, a fortiori, public “service” – otherwise is these days taken to be a naïve chump; is these days simply taken, period full stop. So these days all honest men – as Tucker – are by the sort of sophistical evil weak men – as false and errant, ergo weak – whom the present system promotes treated either as hopeless fools, or else, more likely, as themselves consummate and so consummately false masters of the false bureaucratic political game.
When the sophists are in charge of the courts, the most devastating rhetoric is that of the Socratean.
It should of course be adduced also in respect to the question under consideration that, in the age of the Stuarts, the entire feudal and ecclesial system was in collapse; was in chaos (the collapse of the Soviet system, or even the collapse of the Belle Epoque at the onset of WWI, was nothing compared to what our forefathers suffered at that time). At such inflection points in history, it is every man for himself. So in such times, as a matter of mere rational calculus, betrayal cannot but be the default assumption, and so the norm, that as norm reinforces the default defective assumption in a vicious cycle: a defective equilibrium.
Fortunately for the survival of animal life, defective equilibria are autophagous, and so cannot long perdure, as “long” is properly construed under the terms of cosmological evolution. An environment of pervasive defection soon leads to a massive advantage to such pockets of profection as can be in them maintained for more than a few iterations. And as so happy and pleasant, then so powerful is mutual profection – charity, love, mutuality, society – that defective equilibrium is as nothing by comparison, and in contest.
One thinks of Talleyrand, that great survivor, a man who served under the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Directory, the First Empire, the Restoration and even advised Louis-Philippe – And died in his bed:
“Governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the mob will hang you from the nearest lamp-post, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the people.” [« gouverner n’a jamais été autre chose que repousser par mille subterfuges le moment où la foule vous pendra à la lanterne, et tout acte de gouvernement rien qu’une façon de ne pas perdre le contrôle de la population. »]
Amen! I’d take Mr. Gibson as well, inebriated anti-semitic warts and all.
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