In 1347 a London resident by the name of Roger the Raker plunged through the rotting floorboards of his house into a makeshift latrine and drowned in his own accumulated excrement. As historian Martyn Whittock informs us, “One major problem in the Middle Ages was sewage disposal,” with many householders forced to dig cesspools in their cellars, or pipe their ordure “into the unused cellars of unwary neighbours,” to accommodate the overflowing waste, practices which sealed poor Roger’s fate. Medieval sewage provides a compelling metaphor for the dubious political sanitation issue of our own times, and especially for the ideological filth voided by the American Left on the social, cultural and political landscape of the nation.
Any decent and impartial observer can see that leftist and corporate America has come to resemble a cloacal bog of lies, corruption, slander, censorship, entitlements and violence, a veritable “swamp” as it has been aptly called. What commentator Diana Sitek writing in American Thinker calls “the entitlement to depravity embedded in the Left’s social justice dogma” is both massive and unrelenting. The media, the academy, the entertainment industry, Big Tech, the Democrat Party, and the “Deep State” are profoundly engaged in a networked alliance to overturn the results of a lawful election and subvert a legitimate and effective presidency. President Trump has vowed to “drain the swamp” but it is moot whether a single individual, regardless of the power of high office, with little in the way of institutional support — and despite his strength of character and resolve — can thwart what is nothing less than an ongoing political putsch.
The attempt to impeach the president on no reasonable or substantial grounds is merely another frantic yet tenacious effort by the coup-obsessed Left to unravel the fabric of a constitutional republic. This is plainly the purpose behind the Democrat’s infamous Green New Deal inspired by the U.N.’s Agendas 21 and 2030 which, under the guise of sustainable development, lay out a plan for the punitive regulation of reliable energy sources, the elimination of private property, redistribution of personal wealth, restriction of due process and, of course, the diminishment of American dynamism and prestige. It is a program that perfectly encapsulates the overarching agenda of the political Left, namely, a protracted war on the free enterprise system and the emasculation of the Constitution of the United States, to be accomplished under the stewardship of a plutocratic elite.
Most conservatives are in agreement about the problem. What should be done about it, however, remains an open question. Clearly something like a classical lustration needs to be undertaken, a “purification of the fields” or, in this case, a cleansing of the noisome bog which is current American politics. It is the Party of impeachment that needs to be impeached, those who advocate or practice insurgent violence or call for the assassination of the president who must be arrested, an activist judiciary that exceeds its mandate and seeks to frustrate executive actions that should be selectively disbenched, and a seditious media that needs to be held accountable for its violation of the SPJ Code of Ethics. The issue, however, is whether the great purge of unsavory and dissident institutions, organizations, and power brokers can succeed via discursive, procedural, and electoral means or whether something far more dramatic is needed to prevent the end of the unique republican experiment that is the United States of America.
With luck, salvation may come from the electoral process, but it offers no guarantee to defuse the threat to the nation’s survival posed by an openly totalitarian Left intent on seizing the apparatus of state control. Elections can be rigged, lost, discredited, or resisted. Perhaps the president’s popular rallies and Twitter fusillades will have a salutary effect on public sentiment, provided the rallies are not shut down and his Twitter account is not compromised. Articles, essays and books by conservative defenders of the republic deploring the ruse of “democratic socialism” may nudge a few fence sitters to come to their senses. All such putative solutions are regrettably weak.
To reduce or dismantle the almost total domination of our public, cultural, and political institutions enjoyed by the manorial Left may require something more than luck, an aggressively tweeting president, or the rhetoric of lamentation. Articles such as this one bemoaning the current state of affairs have been posted and published in abundance; they are laudable but unfruitful and generally stop short of endorsing more decisive measures. As I have written elsewhere, it is not enough merely to say that the Democrat Left is a totalitarian enterprise. If this is true, then it behooves us to offer definitive solutions, to recognize that analysis and verbal alarms are not the equivalent of Paul Revere’s legendary ride and will not deter a dedicated adversary intent on subversion and treason. If necessary, the president must be prepared to invoke Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution, which provides grounds for the prosecution of treasonous acts against the Republic. If such a measure is considered unpalatable, too harsh or counterproductive, there is always the Insurrection Act which enables him “to put down lawlessness, insurrection and rebellion.” At any rate, it is an expedient worth contemplating and falls within the purview of presidential authority.
We cannot say whether Roger the Raker dug his own feculent grave or was the unwitting victim of his neighbor’s malfeasance. Similarly, it is difficult to know whether the ordinary citizen is himself a leftist muckraker or merely the prey or innocent casualty of his fellow citizens’ insidious plotting. Nonetheless, perhaps the time has come to act with resolute determination, deploying the legitimate powers of the state, to filtrate the septic fen in which, like Roger, we are all in danger of drowning.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member