[I've been working like crazy on several projects outside of E3 and PJTV, and had so many plates spinning on sticks that I've felt like that giant plaster statue of the mammoth trying to crawl out of the La Brea tar pits. Needless to say, most of my energies have been spent on Afterburners. I have to write a serious essay a week, shoot, edit and air it... and to that extent I've utterly neglected Eject! Eject! Eject! Even the personal interaction I used to have in the comments has moved to my Facebook page, so things have been pretty lonely here while I was trying to figure out a long-term plan.
Well, from now on, a few things are going to change that should improve the level of service around here. First, I'm going to post the Afterburner essays here at E3, in text form, as soon as or perhaps even before they hit the air on PJTV. I've been so busy making them as TV segments that I have neglected to post them as written essays, and they hold up very well in that regard, I must say. So there will current Afterburners, some of the backlog of unpublished old Afterburners, and a continuation of re-posting the Silent America essays, which did not survive the move from the old site very well.
I hope to embed the YouTube version of the Afterburners as soon as they become available, too. Also, I plan to provide a few paragraphs several times a week on a story that catches my attention. These, I believe, are called "blog posts" and apparently can be less than 17 pages long! I will give this radical new idea a try as well.
Look for more action here -- a lot more -- starting now. And to get continuous updates on everything I write or shoot, you can't beat my Facebook page (link above) or follow me on Twitter @Bill Whittle]
If you asked the average American on the street what kind of government we have, they’d likely as not say we live in a democracy. A democracy is – by definition – where the people rule.
But we don’t live in a democracy. You don’t get to determine when or if our country goes to war. You don’t get to decide whether we drill for oil in Alaska. You don’t even get to decide how much of your own money is taken away from you – by force, if need be.
Unless, of course, you are one of 535 special Americans. Those people live in a democracy. The rest of us live in a Republic. This is an important thing to fully grasp – not just academically, but deep in your marrow. You need to understand this in your very bones.
308 million American lives are determined by 435 members of the House of Representatives. Now the real number varies by district, of course, but on average, that means that every member of the House speaks for about 708 hundred thousand Americans. Imagine seven Super Bowls filled to the brim, arranged in a circle, all emptying out into one massive parking lot. Imagine every singe man, woman and child from seven Super Bowls spilling out into one giant field… and there, on a small soap box, sits one man or woman who determines whether or not they go to war, how much they will be taxed, whether or not they will be able to see the doctor of their choosing, and thousands of other little tendrils of control over their very lives. That’s the House.
For the Senate, imagine every single person in your entire state! – in California that’s about fifty Superbowl stadiums – and all of them beholden to two – two! — men or women.
That’s a Republic. And despite the mind-numbing terror of it, it’s actually not a bad way to go. But why would so many free citizens be willing to put their lives and their fortunes into the hands of so few people?
Well, we would do it if we believed that the person in question was one of us. We do it because we believe that the person we send to Washington represents not every little detail but at least the core of our values and desires, our needs and our hopes. We do it because the person – in theory, now – has led a life at least somewhat like our own: known some hardship, and some success; tried to start a business or at least worked in one, as the huge vast majority of us do. They need to know who we are so that they can speak for us.
That is the one crucial element that makes a republic work. I may be Constitutionally entitled to have a defense attorney if I am accused of a crime, but if that person sleeps through my trial his physical presence is irrelevant since I am not being represented. And that disconnect between having a representative and actually being represented is what drove the election of Scott Brown.
At its core, the people of America’s bluest state found in the red candidate with the truck was in every way more like most of them than the Democrat with the pedigree and the endorsement of the state royalty.
On the eve of First Bull Run, in the heady days before the first big battle when everyone – North and South – though the Civil War was to be a ninety-day affair, President Lincoln looked out from his window in the White House at the fresh-faced men marching off to Manassas Junction.
“There are many single regiments,” wrote Lincoln “whose members, one or another, possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known to the world, and there is scarcely one from which there could not be selected a President, a Cabinet, a Congress and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself. Nor do I say this is not true also in the Army of our late friends, now adversaries in this contest.”
This sentiment of Lincoln’s reflects more than just a love of the American people, professed, whether true or not, by all politicians. Lincoln did not only love the American people. Lincoln – as did Reagan and a few others – respected and admired the common American citizen. Reagan, and Lincoln, held themselves to be servants of these free and industrious people, and did not fancy themselves their nannies or their nursemaids and certainly not their betters. Contrast that attitude with the Imperial sense of noble obligation we see in this Congress and this President, at their smug, condescending and self-appointed role as the saviors of we poor, uneducated little people, who without their guidance can not dress or feed or employ ourselves.
So which view – elitist or populist — is correct? Well, what does history show? The attitude of Jefferson, and Lincoln, and Reagan, is that the collective genius of hundreds of millions of free people over two and a half centuries – we call this vast subterranean cavern of wisdom and experience “common sense” – is baked into our society and its traditions. That belief in the practicality, energy and ingenuity of the common man took a small group of rugged, proud and hard-working individuals and turned them into the most powerful, innovative, influential and decent nation in the history of the world, while all around us, for two and a half centuries, other nations have allowed pedigreed elites of one stripe or another to compete against us and be utterly left in the dust – every one of them.
All of the government intrusions into the free market that brought us the housing collapse were the result of isolated and imperial elitists who had no experience whatsoever in the real world of business, but were rather academics and lawyers who had a transparently untenable theory and the political power to enforce it. All of the exotic financial instruments to arise from this government intrusion – things like collateralized debt obligations – were the result of elitist Harvard MBA’s and not the failures of small, regional, common-sense banks that had the collective wisdom not to make loans to people who could not pay them back.
The most destructive and – by the way – power mad president of the last century, Woodrow Wilson, was an academic – in fact, he was the President of Princeton University. And the man who appears to be planted firmly in his footsteps with his plan to replace rule by the people with rule by Czars and Professors and Lawyers and other elitists, Barack Obama, is also an academic, having been a Professor at Columbia. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan – who after fifty years of appeasement at the behest of the best and the brightest decided to and then did defeat the greatest threat to freedom the world has ever seen – well, he went to virtually unknown Eureka college. Barack Obama’s self-professed idol, Abraham Lincoln, had about 18 months of formal schooling in his entire life. The greatest communicator of American values did not finish high school.
Or look at the Founders; men we revere for having set this nation on its course to unprecedented prosperity and freedom: Sam Adams was a brewer. Paul Revere was a silversmith, a man who made things with his hands. Franklin was a printer, his fingers black with ink. Washington and Jefferson were planters… farmers, basically. Thomas Paine, whose brilliant prose turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the American Revolution, had no schooling whatsoever. He became an apprentice corset maker at age 13.
There is a plank in the eye of the elitist. I know, I used to be one of them. Looking back on those days, I marvel at how certain I was about things I knew nothing about. I wince – I cringe – when I recall how dismissive I was of common people, the people you see at Wal-mart, say. Like so many of the elitists I see today, I wore a sense of intellectual superiority to make up for a profound sense of loneliness, failure, insecurity and lack of life experience.
It’s okay. I got over it. I got over it by listening to the wisdom and the goodness and the strength of self-identified “common people,” and discovered that not oneof them did not have some uncommon trait or understanding. I realize now, as I did not then, that every single person I meet knows more about hundreds if not thousands of things than I do. So I changed. I became a Daywalker. Now my mission is to go out and turn other elitist vampires and send them back toward the light.
Which brings us back to Scott Brown. He joked about his daughters being single. He joked about his truck. He said our money is better spent killing terrorists than defending them in court to cheers and thunderous applause and chants of U-S-A! U-S-A! … and this happened not in Texas but in Massachusetts! He is in touch with the common sense certainty that we are at war and not with the Ivory towered position of the President who thinks that we are not.
And parenthetically, how it galls these elitist so-called progressives that these two people who they so despise are so sexy and attractive and confident and at home in their own skins, as I have come to be once I realized that there is nothing particularly special about me other than my membership in the most awesome extended family this species has produced. Just an American citizen.
So, Scott – can I call you Scott? Doesn’t seem like you’re kind of guy who insists on being called Senator after all the hard work you put in getting there… Scott, I hear your truck has 200,000 miles on it. You’ve worked hard. If you want to buy a new truck to celebrate your win, I say go for it.
But when the day comes – and if you stay in Washington long enough then the day will come – when you decide that rather than driving yourself somewhere in your truck a man of your position deserves a chauffeured limo ride or an excursion in a private jet – then Scott, you won’t be Scott anymore. You’ll be Senator Brown. And when that day comes, Senator, you won’t be one of us anymore. You’ll be one of them. When that day comes, Senator, we’ll thank you for your service, because then it will be time to come home.
Bill, I love your commentaries. I have written for a newsletter for several years and know how much work goes into these. I wrote something very similar a couple of years ago – just talking about Constitutional republic vs. a democracy. Most people don’t have a clue what the difference is. In any case, keep up the good work! From a graduate of Navy AOCS class 29-87 Sierra Hotel!
Regards,
Tim Pickles
Bill, I thought this piece on PJTV was spectacular. It’s a must-see as far as I’m concerned.
I love the new idea and if you need any help, I certainly would be willing to try to give you some assistance. Let me know if I can help.
Well said, Bill.
I was at the Pentagon for 4.5 years and I came to realize that if you work in DC for over 4 years you will either become corrupted or even more honest than when you got there.
I got even more honest. And that ended up making me unpopular. One reason Ronald Reagan was so unpopular with the elites is that he was right so much of the time. They think it more important to be “correct” than right.
A beautiful essay!
“Lincoln – as did Reagan and a few others – respected and admired the common American citizen.”
This is sorely lacking in many of today’s politicians. They also lack class. I can’t imagine that Lincoln or Reagan would have ever called any one of his own citizens a mobster. Well, unless that person really was a mobster.
One important fact you omitted, that I know you’re well aware makes living in a representative Republic a lot less scary (in theory at least, if not so much in practice today): We have a Constitution that draws a line in the sand, and denies our representatives the power to do just anything they want, no matter how disconnected from, or beholden to, the popular will of the people they become. For that inheritance, we can’t possibly thank the Founders enough.
Great to see you posting here again! Look forward to seeing more of your superb Silent America essays republished, particularly those that remain broken/M.I.A. (Trinity, History, Victory, Magic, Sanctuary, and Freedom, by my accounting), as I find occasion to refer people to them often for their distilled buts of pure insight. Thanks and best wishes as always!
Right on, sir! Hear hear !
Bill:
I really thought that you had reached the pinnacle of influential perfection with Iconography — truly a masterpiece. With the above, you have outdone yourself. It is your best work yet and captures what I have been unable to articulate. Many, many thanks for your good work. I have passed this on to my small, but growing, following.
Bill:
thanks for a razor-sharp delineation of the differences between a democracy and a Constitutional republic. To Kulak — I agree with your “line in the sand” metaphor, although I would push it further. The Founders, understanding the corrupting nature of power, intentionally crippled each branch of government in crucial ways so that excessive power could not be achieved by one branch.
This distinction, I think, is lost on those who turn to government at every opportunity to solve all societal ills or bestow lately discovered “rights.” We were founded on the seminal principle that all rights of man are natural rights, enumerated and recognized (but not endowed) by any government. Those who think otherwise need to re-read the first few paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.
We are citizens, not subjects — and we bow to no government, for we are its masters, not its servants.
Bill,
I agree with you in theory, but some of our elected officials have crossed the line into treason. We are used to graft and corruption at all levels of government, but making common cause with our enemies is something of an entirely different order. “Elitist” is too nice a word for people who are in fact a gang of quislings.
To provide for the common defense is the first job of any government. How is it that C.A.R.E. has a seat at the table? They are known enemies. Why does the president embrace our sworn enemies? Either he is sympathetic to their ideologies, or he aspires to be like them. Why was Michelle Obama unable to say “I am proud of this country” without qualifying her statement? Because twenty years of hate-mongering from the pulpit of Reverend Wright has left her with a deep loathing for everything this country stands for. Ditto her husband.
The second job of any government is to maintain a stable currency. How do we explain the reckless fiscal policy proposed in the current congressional budget? It goes beyond mere looting for the purpose of paying off favored constituencies. No one can be so stupid as to believe this is just fiscal ignorance on the part of our elected officials. It’s a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the nation. No other conclusion is possible.
We are witnessing now an attempt by quislings to overthrow the republic. Make no mistake about it, these people are totalitarians to the core. The 2010 election might stall them, but even a vast groundswell of voter opposition won’t convince them to quit. Our “elites” are playing for all the chips on the table. There is no tactic they won’t try especially when they start to get desperate.
True enough, the election of Scott Brown took the barely beating heart of our republic off life support. Small “r” republicans now have a fighting chance. But this is going to get very ugly before it’s over. The outcome will prove either that the Founding Fathers were right, or that republics have a natural lifespan before petering out. It’s up to us to decide.
Love your work Bill. I am a U.K. subject living in East Sussex. We could do with a Scott Brown here to clean away some of the tricksters in parliament who have been cheating us for years. It is maybe too late for me but I hope my son will be able to emigrate to either the U.S. or Australia. The piece about your father made me cry,and it is all true for my Dad as well. Also thanks for turning me on to Steven DenBeste’s site. Wish I had seen it years ago.Keep it up.
David
~Paules:
Don’t you mean C.A.I.R. instead C.A.R.E.?
Bill,
Glad to see you haven’t taken the views shown here of Lincoln.
Returning to the original congressional representation of 1:30000 would give us almost 7000 congressmen. Meeting electronically, their very numbers would ensure that only issues truly of concern to the union of the states would be addressed.
Thanks for highlighting the representative(Like a senator who has never worked in the private sector outside a university setting can represent me, Senator Brown[D-OH]!) nature of our form of government. I get so upset when people say we live in a democracy. Don’t they have Civics classes in schools anymore?
Boston was a Smokin’ time at the Alter!
Now where have I heard that be-four? :0
One nit to pick. In your stadium analogy, you said Californians would fill 50 stadiums. Wiki shows the current California population to be 37 million, so at 100,000 folks per stadium, that’s an astonishing 370 stadiums worth.
This is great stuff. Like you I was one of “them” but have since grown up and seen the light. I was a post graduate economics student leftie know-all. Later I worked for some years as a central planner in the third world, and later as a ‘consultant’ to donor agencies. Strangely I don’t see those years as wasted, for it was only through this experience that I came to reexamine all the conventional liberal explanations of “under development”. It is not poverty as such, as many third world nations (literally) sit on a gold mine. It is not lack of education, many have had close to universal primary education for a generation or more, and more PhD’s than they know what to do with. Its not due to developed (read ‘western’) expropriation in some non existent zero-sum game. They are as they are BECAUSE THEY HAVE INFERIOR CULTURES. They don’t have the preconditions which would allow prosperity and growth to take root. The massive flow of foreign aid is mostly used to entrench the tribal kleptocrats and buy them superior arms with which to oppress the people. “Underdevelopment” is increased by aid, not diminished. It is the destructive force of the welfare state on an international scale – it is Detroit gone global.
Setting up and running my own education-related business was the final reality-attack I needed to see the world as it really is. I can feel deeply for the wretched of the earth but I don’t have feel guilty about their plight. After returning to Australia in the 70′s it became increasingly clear to me that our representatives exhibit all the characteristics you describe so well. Australia too has a tax-and-spend socialist government squandering the surplus built up by the previous Liberal (in Oz that means ‘conservative’) government. It too will blow debt levels through the roof and create unprecedented generational theft, while SLOWING down economic recovery. Our Government is also attempting to centralise control of health, education and other important sectors of the economy. It too is intent on passing a cap-and-trade bill in the name of ‘climate change’. As in the US some of the most vocal advocates of this piece of idiocy stand to make millions literally out of thin air if it goes ahead. Like you we have a government hell-bent on introducing internet censorship. And now to add insult to injury we are told that your Dear Leader is coming to visit our Fuhrer and we all have witness their nausiating love-fest.
Perhaps what we need is some ethnic cleansing, an Attaturk-like exchange of population. All the leftie liberals move to US and all the right-thinking folk to Australia (our weather is better!!!!)
PS I also fly, but in aircraft without engines.
Cheers mate, keep up the great work
Well, up to a point, Bill, up to a point. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Benjamin Franklin was a genius and prodigious inventor. Moreover, all of these men where fiercely schooled in the Enlightenment and its teachings. And the Enlightenment was the quintessential case of a progressive elite dragging a reactionary mass out of the Dark Ages, which, as a European, I am profoundly grateful for.
The United States is the most radical and revolutionary country ever founded, as a specific breach with millennia of superstition and tyranny. The Founding Fathers were able to make it so.
What we have now is the opposite: a liberal (in the original sense), enlightened populace and an Elite that wishes to bring back, albeit in a new form, superstition and despotism.
Heh, the Founders valued education very much and were strong proponents of the Enlightenment. Something the present so called teaparty “patriots” hold in contempt much like you do or pretend to do. They were all “ELITES!” in their day.
There is a book written by a “populist” German author in the 1920′s that you should read if you have not already done so. Your style reminds me a lot of his. It is called “My Life.”
Jefferson spoke several languages: Latin, Spanish, Italian and (gasp) French. Thomas Paine was a left wing athiest intellectual. Nice try.
Correction: The name of the book at #19 (last two words) should be “MY Struggle” and not “My Life”. I regret the error.
Bill Whittle is a politically correct coward. Most 3 year old girls have more balls than him. I guess Billy Boy thinks that the only way he can not lose an argument is to run away like a scared pussy cat.
If comments #19, 20 and 21 survive moderation, I wish to delete comment #22 and aplogize. Otherwise, my previous comment stands.
“Unrepentant Kulak is correct when he writes: “We have a Constitution that draws a line in the sand, and denies our representatives the power to do just anything they want, no matter how disconnected from, or beholden to, the popular will of the people they become.” Or perhaps it be more accurate to state that his sentiment once was correct.
Starting with Woodrow Wilson, Propgressives have now spent nearly a century relentlessly trashing what is unquestionably the most awe-inspiring political document ever written by man. After a hundred years of unremitted attacks, the Constitution (and Declaration)can no longer be said to be a “line in the sand.” Instead, to Progressives, this wounded and tattered document is merely a “road bump” on thier way to emasculating American rights.
If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you take a look at Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.” Levin and Fox TV’s Glen Beck have done the Nation a great service in alerting us to the threats against the Constitution. We ignore their warnings at our own peril.
Nice post. Loved the last little bit especially.
As usual your commentary is crisp, to the point, and very much appreciated. There appears to me to be an inconsistency in your selection of Presidents respecting our citizens, one I’ve seen you make on Afterburner before. Certainly, Jefferson and Reagan not only talked about the common man, but took action based on their respect for the citizens and the Constitution. While Lincoln talked about this type of respect, immediately after assuming the Presidency he started a war against the people of the Deep South for leaving the USA. To defend the Constitution, and the seceding citizens from Pres. Lincoln’s unconstitutional use of federal military power, several southern states not originally leaving, seceded. Hundreds of thousands of those citizens and millions of slaves died as a result of his actions. Inconsistencies like this weaken your points, otherwise well made, to folks like me. Regards, V.
Absolutely right. Too many dark liberal Mao vampires draining the vital soul of this country.
We must fight these vampires libetarian tea style!!!!!!!!
Hey gocart, this is in support of Bill, though I belive he needs none. Read his other works and see if they compare to “Mein Kampf.”
Bill, great essay as usual. I live in fly over land and it has been truly amazing to watch the country stagger to conscienceness from its drunken bender. There are alot of angry people out here and it is amazing to see them come together to put things right. The left should have learned from history as they have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.
Nice post indeed.
Nodart Noseart’s silliness aside, there is something that separates the common people of today, from the common people of yesteryear, and it does have to do with what the likes of Woodrow Wilson did… but far worse than what he did as President of the United States, was what he did as President of Princeton and which he and his fellows did throughout this nation – their assault on our educational system turned the common people of this nation for whom the Federalist Papers were written, into a group where it t is uncommon for most men to even have heard of the Federalist Papers.
Think about that – what nary a college student today can even crack open, was written to sway the common man in the street, and field, back then.
The good news is that our lost knowledge of who we are, is easily recoverable, and the most heartening thing I’ve seen in the last year with the Tea Parties, is that people are realizing that they’ve been robbed and they are seeking that lost knowledge and understanding on their own. Over the last twenty or so years, I’ve tried over and over to interest people in such things as the Federalist papers and other such documents, and received nothing but blank stares of indifference in return, but this last year, person after person asks what one quote after another means, how do I know that, and where can they find the info themselves… the proregressives have spent 150 years or so, battling to remove America from our minds… and all that ground they’ve taken over all of that time is being lost so fast their heads are spinning like Regan MacNeil’s – you get that allusion Nodart? That is your struggle, and you are losing it.
Bigtime.
For those looking to recover what was lost, the understanding not only of what our Constitution says, but what it means, you won’t find too many resources better than this one, ironically put on by the Univ of Chicago and the Liberty Fund, The Founders Constitution, check out the links below the Preamble, and see what the Common Men of their day understood – it’s what we need to relearn, in order to become such uncommonly good common men once again.
“I hope to embed the YouTube version of the Afterburners as soon as they become available, too.”
I’m glad to hear this. I was wondering why so(relatively) few of your segments were making it to Youtube.
My wife frequently refers to you as “the sexiest brain in America”, and, you know, I can’t even be jealous.
Carry On, Sir!
Matt
(PJTV Subscriber)
“Contrast that attitude with the Imperial sense of noble obligation we see in this Congress and this President, at their smug, condescending and self-appointed role as the saviors of we poor, uneducated little people, who without their guidance can not dress or feed or employ ourselves.”
Bill Whittle calling someone else “smug.” Never seen a pot talk about a kettle quite that blatantly before.
Ajay;
I believe you’re confused. Bill isn’t “smug”-what you’re looking at is called “confidence”.
Don’t feel bad about your mistake tho; it’s a common lefty error.