#62: From Mr. Smith to Rod Blagojevitch

I want to introduce you to a new political principle, at least one that I’ve never come across in my reading. In order to do so, it’ll be convenient to begin with introducing a new technical term, the term “political unit,” defined as follows:

P is a “political unit” (“p.u.”) if and only if p is able to intentionally affect events in some social context.

This means that fire plugs and furniture are not p.u’s, while every individual is a p.u., but also every cohesive assembly of individuals. In particular, families can be p.u’s, cities, states, congregations, family businesses, nationally based businesses, multi-national corporations can be p.u’s, and so forth.

So, here’s the principle:

P.u’s only respect the interests of themselves and of other p.u’s capable of affecting their interests.

I think this principle is prima facie intuitively strong and may even seem so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. After all, the schoolyard bully is very unlikely to take the complaints of his weaker schoolmates seriously, but she’ll certainly listen to anyone stronger than she is. This is hardly a shocking insight, but it has an interesting implication for representative democracy. The implication is this:

Individuals have little hope of having their interests qua individuals respected by either the individuals they elect or the institutions they create to serve them.

The reason is that as soon as a person becomes a representative of a group, she becomes by that token alone a p.u. of a higher order and will now respond only other p.u’s at her level or above. She will ignore, distract, lie to, or placate the individuals whose representative she is.

What this means, first, is that women are not represented in any genuine way by, say, NOW, the aged are not represented by AARP, workers not represented by their unions, the faithful not represented by their churches, citizens are not represented by their governments, and shareholders not represented by their boards. These p.u’s certainly have interests and they certainly negotiate for them, but the interests of their “flock,” as it were, are not their ultimate objectives. Their objectives are their own, and those objectives are the objectives always of their respective leaderships, the objectives of their own power.

What it means, second, is that the way in which modern politics is parsed is quite wrong. Popular political mythology casts the modern contest as one between “business,” on the one hand, and “individual workers,” on the other. This mythology is conveniently supported by the historical fact of worker exploitation during the industrial revolution. And in that setting of worker exploitation, the government played many ambiguous roles, though it has emerged in most western nations as the protector of the weak and powerless, a role it has actually chosen for itself.

Seeing politics through the lens of this one quite short phase in our historical development obscures the more fundamental conflict that should compel our attention. The threat to the individual is not essentially business per se; rather, the threat to the individual is in the large. The individual is threatened by any p.u. that is above him. This is a very big lesson to learn, and we can see just how big by considering the ease with which Hitler absorbed the German industries. While Hitler was indeed a Socialist of the nationalist stripe, he understood that it was politically far more effective to suborn big capital than to dismantle it. In effect, Hitler went into partnership with giant industries like Krupp, who put their massive productive power into the service of the state. And Hitler's willing corporate partners were not limited to Germany, see, for example, Edwin Black's study: IBM and the Holocaust.

Hitler’s insight has been well learned by subsequent Socialist wannabes, not least by Obama and his little Socialist rented brains.

It is in vain that ordinary Americans wait for big American business to stand up for capitalism against the gigantic power grab coming from Socialist Obama.

They do not understand that Big Business has more in common with Big Government than with the common man. Both Big Business and Big Government strive for total control, the former through monopoly, the latter through force and conditioned dependency. Until each believes that they can completely dominate, they will do exactly what criminal gangs have always done: they agree to divide the spoils.

The pattern for the relationship between big American business and the Obama administration has become quite clear, it is a two-step. Obama plays the rhetorical populist card, complete with Democrat congressional show trials, during which he demonizes the businesses and distracts public attention from congressional culpability that is largely at home in his party; at the same time, he forms enormous partnerships with the same businesses, suborning their leaderships with sweetheart deals that will benefit the same “miscreants” he publicly excoriates. He’s done this with the auto companies, the banks, and the pharmaceuticals. But he also did it with the A.M.A. and with AARP.

This is not new with Obama, it is just the scale on which he is doing it that staggers the imagination. One must only remember “the Great Society’s” investment in post-secondary education. Prior to Johnson, there were still many private independent universities in the U.S., now there are very few. The reason is very simple, government money. The universities’ were, to put it bluntly, simply bought by the government, and we see the result in the conversion of the Universities into Socialist madrassahs.

This modus operandi is so deeply embedded in the Socialist play-book on the take-over of nations that it trumps all other ideological considerations. One must remember that the only imperative that drives the Socialist ideologue is that of the acquisition of total political power. And this means that individual Socialist commandments are quite easily abandoned when an increase in power is at stake. What this means in practice, is that real apparatchiks will not even blink at the idea of sleeping with capitalists, if the end of total power is furthered by doing so.

Which leads me to the conclusion of this post. The Obama administration is currently implementing a policy of partnership with the American churches. The churches will work at furthering the Obama “green agenda” under the rubric of “ecological justice,” and, in exchange, the churches will receive government “grants” towards various “ecological” religious objectives.

The Socialists and Leftists everywhere have made it abundantly clear that they hate Christianity (no, not “religion,” because religion includes, for example, Islam, and Islam is too ethnic to be criticized). But, if the churches can be suborned, if they can be turned to the Socialist cause, well, then, even Christianity becomes tolerable.

Reagan was right: Government is not the solution, Government is the problem.

But I think his point is not quite general enough: the problem is any representative person or body whose misbehaviour is not immediately and severely punishable.

Sure, you can send Mr. Smith to Washington, but when he gets there, he’ll be reborn as Rod Blagojevitch.