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   Strakon Lights Up, No. 88

A civics lesson for the New Americans

The System's tidal pull may be a little more visible now through the fog. In a column that appeared today, Richard Cohen, Establishment-liberal columnist for the Washington Post, says he originally voted for Al Gore — naturally — but that if he had it to do over again he'd vote for George W. Bush. Cohen says a whole lot of healing has got to begin and the Texas governor would do better as a healer. Man alive, that's a jaw-dropper, and I'll bet that behind closed doors it evoked a big "whah-oh!" from the Goreites.

Then there's the strange disappearance of Warren Christopher from the Gore team, noted by Brit Hume tonight on Fox News. Hume himself wasn't sure about its significance — and we ought to remember that Christopher zombie-walked out of Bill Clinton's Cabinet long before he formally resigned from it — but Christopher's total fade might signal the state of opinion among respected Democrat graybeards and mildcats. That's assuming the poor wretch hasn't died, and no one has checked his pulse yet.

The Demo wildcats are still screeching. Appearing on the telescreen immediately after Florida's secretary of state certified the results for Bush, the Blessed Lieberman assured us that the Gore team would pursue every possible legal angle to make sure the electoral apparatus "respects every voter and every vote." Lieberman is focused on winning this particular election, of course, but that business about respecting every voter — even those who can't manage to cast a legal ballot — is something we ought to think about, no matter who ends up winning.

***

I've speculated before about why the higher circles let the circus in Florida run on and on. Yes, it effectively demoted both candidates from somebodies or at least somewhatbodies to nobodies. And, yes, the ruling class effectively reminded its subordinate political and media classes of its stabilizing power by temporarily withholding the exercise of that power.

But another lesson may have been in progress over the past 18 days, intended especially for the New Americans pouring into the country in their fecund millions. Some observers have opined that the election deadlock has made the United State look like a banana republic, and while that's surely false — you need firing squads and tanks in the street for that — it is surely true that the ruling class's long-range business plan has to include some measures for suppressing any whiff of bananas in the future.

Jared Taylor and other paladins of white Western civilization remind us that it was white Westerners and white Westerners only who invented trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and the rest of due process, the first bills of rights, and the entire apparatus of representative government in recognizably modern form. Those distinctive traditions and institutions emerged from a distinctive people as a result of that people's distinctive experiences over centuries and also as a result of that people's distinctive gifts and temperaments. Taylor and the others want to know how we can expect the nonwhite, non-Western aliens from exotic lands who are now flooding our country to carry on those traditions and institutions in the absence of a self-confident white Western majority.

The question is especially pointed in light of the burning hostility toward the white West demonstrated by so many of the aliens' most influential leaders and spokesmen. (Similar hostility is also demonstrated by many of the most influential leaders and spokesmen for American Negroes.) And it is pointed, too, in light of the artificial barricades against assimilation thrown up by the System: the new exotic Americans may never even have a chance to disprove the racialists' assumption that they are naturally unassimilable.

***

The ruling class, as race-unconscious and egalitarian as it may pretend to be for public consumption, must meditate upon those questions, too. Our rulers are replacing America's old white majority with peoples they consider cheaper and easier to exploit and rule; but however cheap and easy the ruling turns out to be, the Establishment will have to develop techniques of rulership different from the techniques that were appropriate for managing Old Americans. Unlike us native Americans, most of the Third World exotics who are the foot soldiers of the American demographic revolution are indeed accustomed, during a shift of political power, to hearing firing squads at work and seeing tanks in the street. Some, I am willing to concede, may have seen a ballot once or twice, but how many can have seen one that listed more than a single party and a single set of candidates?

The principal exception is the Mexicans, whose Third World oligarchy long featured a thin veneer of Western-style political respectability — thanks to its proximity to the American colossus — with opposition parties on the ballot and with no firing squads within earshot. It is now time for the ruling class to start thinking in terms of a similar veneer for the United State. The symbolic value of America's hollowed-out republican institutions may be limited, what with the demographic inundation and the deracination of the Old Americans; but the ruling class cannot allow the New Americans to replace those institutions willy nilly with institutions from their home countries.

Our rulers have a revolutionary agenda, but it's a quiet, relatively bloodless revolution they have in mind, a methodical revolution from above that will not shake but instead reinforce the castles of power and established wealth they inhabit. As we saw at Waco, a few dissenters may be massacred from time to time pour encourager les autres  — especially if they're mostly white — but sustained uproar and systemic instability are not on the menu.

So it's doubtful our rulers would wish to see an outright coup d'etat by La Raza in California or a bloody war of independence waged by Mexicans in south Texas. It's doubtful they'd look forward to state-level schisms, with one California governor in Sacramento and another in Los Angeles controlling competing police forces and tax collectors. They wouldn't care to see National Guard commanders dramatically cancelling elections from behind beards and aviator shades. And it would never do to permit firing squads that were not under the close control of the mandarins in Washington and New York. Why, some bond salesman might be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get himself perforated!

Consequently, the New Americans must be educated — educated not, certainly, in the old, dead republican traditions, but in the religion of mass democracy where every vote is counted, and counted obsessively. Counted even in the face of obvious voter incompetence, so long as the counting serves the "right" outcome.

***

For many years the principal ruling party in the United State has sought to make voting as easy as possible, in order to draw to the polls more of those with little grasp of public affairs and little natural interest in them. With the helpless acquiescence or suicidal complicity of Republicans, Democrats abolished the poll tax and literacy tests; they mandated federally supervised assistance for illiterate voters; they imposed the "motor voter" law, better understood as the welfare-voter law; they pushed same-day registration; they subsidized get-out-the-vote drives by welfare-rights and anti-Western pressure groups; in some localities, they ushered non-citizens into the voting booth; and now in Florida they have even sought to relieve the voter of the responsibility of performing the physical act of voting.

Whether Gore wins or loses this election, his forces, with the acquiescence of their ultimate masters, will have established a precedent for future elections — and those are elections that New Americans with no tradition of representative government will be participating in ever more heavily. The New Americans are being educated in the new tradition: If you're capable of stumbling your way to the voting booth and doing something  to the ballot, the Establishment's lawyers will do their very best to make things turn out "right." As you see, our elections here are pretty much symbolic and pro forma, as they were in your country of origin, if it had elections. But leave it to us; we'll manage things just fine, much better than those tinpot dictators you used to know. So even if you can't make it to the polls, put your trust in our lawyers, and not in uniformed figures shouting pronunciamentos into bullhorns. And, oh, yes, you must especially eschew the sort of "mob rule" that Republicans practice, when they engage in those terrible, intimidating, subversive protest demonstrations they're so notorious for.

Ever since America became fully shysterized, the elevation of pettifogging Establishment lawyers as the Priests of Election has been an accident waiting to happen. It's a happy accident for the ruling class. Using its lawyers, it can extend a reassuring helping hand to our exotic new fellow citizens while at the same time keeping its revolution a private affair.

***

The Florida deadlock possesses a lot of educational bang for the buck even if it's never repeated, but it's still possible that I'm according it too much formative influence. After all, a squeaker like that occurs only once in a blue moon, and, that being so, it looks as if the lawyers can't expect many future chances to take over an election. But I won't be betting on that. They've been unleashed now, and once they heap precedent upon precedent, and succeed in relabeling routine voter incompetence as "technical mass disfranchisement" — while throwing in a few loud cries of racism for good measure — why, more blue moons than we care to imagine may decorate every November sky.

November 26, 2000

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