There is a contradiction in an essay by a political commentator in which he decries proposals to pack the US Supreme Court:
That is why it is poisonous to our democratic form of government to do what the national Left is trying to do to our Supreme Court in order to advance a liberal agenda it most likely cannot advance in the appropriate and legal way—through legislation in Congress. It is also corrosive to the trust Americans must have in the judicial system to create the impression that the courts are nothing more than a third political branch.
If the federal government were really of the democratic sort, then efforts to enlarge the number of justices on the Supreme Court, to subject them to elections, to make it a ‘third political branch’ – in short, to make it more responsive to the whims of the majority, is exactly what folks should be demanding.
This gentleman, however, and others who oppose such a change seem to understand that crying for ‘more democracy’ will only make things worse. Democratic elements can be helpful in government, especially when they are part of the ancient customs of a people; but more often than not, the people who seek elected office are demagogues, some of whom have serious psychological problems. And this has been the case since at least Plato’s days. For those who want to see a wiser and more just government, they will have to go against the grain; they will have to demand a return of what has been banished in the States; they will have to bring back the landed hereditary aristocracy.
The landed gentry is a class in society that can give it a number of good gifts: a long memory, stability, and so on. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville described this rather poetically in Democracy in America. We have quoted this before, but it is worth repeating:
Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become, as it were, contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him (Richard Heffner, edr., New York City, Signet Classic, 2001, Part II, Book 2, Chap. 27, p. 193).
But it is precisely this class that has been eliminated in the States. It held on the longest in the South (because of which, many great leaders could be found there), but with the victory of the Yankees in the War, it has passed from here as well. Many of the stories of William Faulkner, in fact, are the fictional depiction of the slow, tragic demise of the South’s old planter aristocracy.
What has risen up to take its place as the States have ‘progressed’ further towards democracy has been worse than its predecessor: Instead of a landed aristocracy we have now got a combination of an oligarchy of judges and lawyers and an oligarchy of rootless money. Both of the latter tend to associate only with those in similar circumstances as themselves, cutting them off from contact with plain folks, constricting their knowledge and interests very narrowly, giving birth to their snobbish, ivory tower beliefs and behavior.
It is just the opposite with the landed aristoi. By virtue of their land-holding, they must be concerned with what is happening around them. The health of their fields and waters depends on the health of their neighbors’ lands and waters. Their economic well-being depends in some measure on the ability of their neighbors to buy what they produce. Their neighbors are in a sense an extended family for whom they care (and have cared for generations), keeping up roads and bridges, churches and schools for the common good of all.
The duties required of the hereditary gentry, usually service in a country’s military, likewise brings them into contact with the lower classes, further linking the lives of the two.
Even those dastardly kings were not so isolated as our modern judicial and moneyed oligarchs. As Professor Sarah Foot recounts in Æthelstan (Appendix II; New Haven, Yale UP, 2011, pgs. 259-65), King Æthelstan (King of England from 924-39) and his retinue were frequently moving from one part of his realm to another so he could deal with affairs in person as much as possible, though some delegation was necessary (p. 79). When was the last time you heard about Jeff Bezos or Chief Justice John Roberts coming down from their Olympian abodes to rub shoulders with the common folk as kings like Æthelstan did?
To revive a virtuous leadership class in the States, the re-establishment of an hereditary, landed aristocracy ought to be seriously considered. Thus, whatever other revisions one wants to make to the Philadelphia charter or to the various State constitutions, throw this one in as well: the repeal of clauses like the following in Article I, Section 9 – ‘No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States’.
By doing so, conservatives/traditionalists could build up a counter aristocracy, if you will, capable of challenging the domination of the culture by the Woke aristocracy of the judiciary and the plutocrats. If nothing else, this counter aristocracy could at least offer shelter and sustenance (land, an occupation) to those who have suffered dispossession at the hands of the Marxist, Cancel Culture Elite. But, more than that, their manors could serve as a series of bases from which peaceful, long-term efforts to retake captured institutions could be organized and funded.
But the reappearance of a strong and vigorous landed aristocracy is intertwined with the overall spiritual condition of society. As long as the creation is viewed as a poorly developed object waiting to be re-shaped by technocratic minds into whatever form they want it to take; as long as it is viewed as a thing with no intrinsic value or structure of its own, as an abstraction; then an Elite that is likewise closely tied to abstractions like fiat money, the digital bits of cyber space, and ‘evolving’ laws, and imbued with an exalted view of their own expansive powers, will be dominant.
However, if we take the pre-Modern view that the creation has a definite form, identity, and purpose, then the prominence of an Elite rooted in fixed, concrete physical realities like the soil will reflect that. The Native Americans Black Elk and Slow Buffalo give voice to this pre-Modern view when they say, . . .
The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/restoring-landed-aristocracy .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
No comments:
Post a Comment