THE FUTURE | 2001-08-04
Most rightists today are depressed.
It appears to them that leftists have gotten a stranglehold on every source of power. Daily the voting power of minorities grows, and they are a slavish leftist power base. In the media, NBC, ABC and CBS remain solidly leftist.
The traditional family is being undermined, illegitimacy has reached proportions among whites which they once reached only among minorities. Among minorities these rates have long since gone ballistic.
"Taking back America," the conservative battle cry, seems hopeless.
Leftists have sewed up all the old power bases. But that will not determine the future.
If one knows American history, the old ruling class has always controlled the established power bases. It was the rise of new kinds of power that overthrew them.
America's first contest for power was the expansion westward, and the South won that contest hands down. We not only settled new Southern and border states at a frantic rate, but we populated a large portion of the Midwest as well.
Seeing the South dominating the westward expansion, New England despaired of ever gaining power in America. New England held secession conventions in 1814.
New England fought every expansion westward because the South led westward expansion completely. The Northeast had lost the old contest for power.
When the slave states wanted to introduce Mississippi, Alabama and Missouri into the Union, the free states could only get a matching free state by splitting the east coast into tinier and tinier fragments.
The South had won the old contest for the old power base. But a new one rose. When the westward expansion was at its height, American industry was made up of a lot of tiny factories. The real power back then lay in settling new lands.
But in the nineteenth century, the new industrial technology steadily became dominant.
New England got its power when they took over the new industrial technology. Their power came from the new rules technology made, not from "taking back" under the old rules.
By 1900, New England and its industrialists had transformed the rest of America and especially the South into economic and political colonies.
Then these capitalists lost power to a new group, the liberals and social planners.
Once again, this was not the result of "taking back" the old power sources. Until they had won overwhelmingly, the old industrialists remained solidly anti-liberal. Liberals did not win power by "taking back" industry.
What liberals took over was a new power source. In the first part of the twentieth century the educational establishment was tiny. It survived on the generosity of industrialists and other big money.
Just as New England and its industry reduced the South to colonial status, leftism has turned big money into its servant. Liberals did that by dominating the new power, the growing education complex and the growing power of government brought on by a more and more interdependent economy and new communications.
In each case, the new rulers USED a new political ideology, but that ideology was just the tactic of a new power group.
In the name of fighting the Old South's slavery, New England built a coalition with Midwestern farmers. But beneath all this, as Calhoun so clearly saw, was the rising NEW FORCE of industry.
America got rid of the old slavocracy when it was taken over by Eastern big money.
Likewise, in fighting the old New England capitalist power, liberals got the South and the Midwest on their side. Liberal rulers got their total dominance today by crushing "wage slavery" and replacing it with tax slavery and rule by regulation.
Now, in its turn, leftism is rotten and out of date. That is its weakness. But it will not be defeated by taking back the old power sources. It will be supplanted by new sources of power, the kind we are seeing exploding out all over the place.
Once again, the ruling group controls the old power sources, like the media and the universities and public education. But once again a new power is rising.
A biological revolution is under way. A communications revolution is under way. They will produce new power sources and new political approaches to get rid of the present rule by social science planners that we call leftism.
I am optimistic because the left is doomed. It will be unseated and replaced, maybe by something even more dangerous. But I know that the PRESENT gloom of the right is absurd.
The old power that is based in universities is being challenged by new powers which were produced by the same process that allowed capitalists to replace the slavocracy, and the same process that allowed social planners to take over from the capitalists.
The real future has absolutely nothing to do with the processes that today's conservatives consider so modern and inevitable. The real future will blindside our present rulers. Like the rise of industry which so few recognized, like the growth of planner power, it will completely upset the processes we are used to.
Gloom comes from the fact that today's anti-liberals are looking at the future the way liberals want them to.
There is great promise and there is great danger in the real future. But today's conservatives don't see either. They are looking the wrong way.
The left rules, for example, by its rule over education and the media. But new communications are rising, and the education complex today is rigid and exists only because of things like rules of accreditation.
The left is doomed. What the future will look like has nothing to do with what present political thinkers think it does.