Warlordism
The people who should read this probably will not. Please tell them about it.
No, that is exactly what you did
There is a concerted attack on the authority of the US government and on the underpinnings of order in America. There has been an insurrection.
This cannot be held in doubt — but it is, and by many. There is a rationale for this: The intent of the founding fathers was limited by race and gender. There were broad statements as to inclusion, as in the Declaration of Independence, but the intent according this rationale was not to include everyone, not really. That is what the insurrectionists say to themselves, at least those who see past the violence, which is appealing to some in its own right.
The underlying rationale for violence on January 6 and otherwise was that Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues did not really mean “all [people] are created equal”, but literally meant “all [{white, which is to say, English} men] are created equal [as long as they own property, which was then the source of all wealth]”.
It is interesting to note that many of the most enthusiastic proponents of this narrow interpretation are disenfranchised by it. This includes women and people from all other ethnic and cultural traditions. Some have gone to prison for this. Why would they act against their own interests in doing so?
Perhaps some of them haven’t figured it out. Others might feel that they can benefit personally by making the case for inclusion once the deed is done. History has shown that this can work to limited ends — as in the improved status of house slaves or improved status on the periphery of the system.
On the whole, that doesn’t work. That is the point.
Proponents of this narrow interpretation of the American dream face a dilemma. Sure, they can declare with a wink and a nod that elections are illegal due to fraud. What they mean is that the ethnic and gender status of many of the voters are not approved by them. The voting process was not carried out illegally. The voters in their estimation were not legal in the first place because they were not white male landowners.
There is a good deal of really foggy thinking about economic deterioration that is insurrection-adjacent. Ironically, there are problems with management of the economy by the class of rich old white men that are otherwise insurrection partners. There is sleight of hand here — an old trick foisted on the world for centuries by the British. In recent decades, wealth has been increasingly concentrated on the most wealthy of all. People feel growing rage from this.
This isn’t from actions of immigrants or foreigners so much as from financial overstepping by the big companies and their financiers— think ‘shrinkflation’, sagging quality, downsizing, corporatization of housing, etc. The insurrectionists — the foot soldiers — feed on their rage as to economic pressures and express this rage as if they were rich white men, which few of them are.
The bigger picture
The rest of us are not going to go away easily — or to be put into such niches voluntarily. Even though the aspects of original intent of the founders might be murky on such important points, that does not need to mean that our intent needs to be. Even if Thomas Jefferson was leaning into the wind on the “all men are created equal” point, a lot of people have bought into that. This had little to do with whether he owned slaves or not or whether he abused others with respect to his preferred social position, the point was well made. Millions have concluded, “Why not?”
Inclusion is surely the path to economic betterment, as well. Battling through stagflation, downsizing, sagging income, and other ills brought on by extreme finance requires solidarity, partnership, collaboration, and unity. This is how to resolve pharma costs — medical costs in general. It is a matter of “all hands on deck”.
To impose — or better said, to reassert — the narrow elitist white English male regime, violence surely would be necessary. This comes down to what might thus be called revolutionary acts on the part of the exclusionists. The point is to tear down the old and then replace it with the new. This might be confusing in our case, as the old has now become the inclusive plan; the new plan is to revert to a privileged status enjoyed by white male property owners and their enablers.
I have studied revolution for decades. I don’t know why. Revolution and its implications and characteristics are parts of an understanding of international relations, to be sure, but I had been interested long before entering into serious study of international politics in 1989. I had obsessed over the Russian Revolution in particular since I was a kid. It wasn’t so much the politics of the thing, but its social magnitude. Growing up as a musician — participating in the performance of Russian music in particular — instilled in me a profound respect for Russian culture, for Russian art. Positioned as it has been in history and culture, a strong argument can be made for Russian culture as an amalgam of human culture.
Our own revolution and the American civil war were also of great interest to me. Once in the 1980s I worked with a man who had been a soldier in Hitler’s army. I mentioned to him that I was fixated on studying our Civil War. He laughed at me. He said that we hardly had enough history to be worthy of studying.
Whatever.
What instability is like
In 1979, in college, I had the opportunity to go to China with the first Western entertainment group to go to the major Chinese cities to perform. That got me studying revolution in China under the great Paul Hyer. He had me write many essays with regard to 19th century Chinese history that started out, “Paradoxically, China….” Whatever the question was, it started out with that phrase. To be sure, 19th century China was a violent, deadly, dangerous time for the Chinese.
That word paradox is apt with regard to revolution generally. Once started on that path, there are no guarantees. For example, American insurrectionists bent on upending the current legal, political, and military order may have an outcome in mind that is far from what would ultimately occur. They may think that they can surgically remove aspects of our current system that they do not like, retaining those that they do.
What I sense from their comments is that they have only a very vague notion of what this may mean. There is some sense in their dialog that firepower is an answer to their problem, but history offers an inexorable lesson:
There is always someone with a bigger gun. Similarly, there are also more ‘someones’ with more and bigger guns.
Let’s say that the people in question pull out their guns and start firing. Who are they going to fire at? Let’s say they decide to ‘storm the gates’ at either the state or federal level. What would they do then? There was a taste of this in the comments of certain of the January 6th “intruders” in the Senate Chambers that were commenting on what they found in Senator Cruz’ desk. They wanted to gather damning information it looked like, but they also were talking about setting up a new government.
Would they think that time would stop for them, allowing them to pick and chose governmental features as if from a menu? Absent federal and state authority, who do they think would be able to sit down an hash out a solution? What would happen to the personnel? What would happen to the stockpiles? How would the lid be put back on?
A system where groups of people with guns and other armaments hold sway is a warlord system. It is not in the least uncommon through history. Warlords are basically pirates, raiders, or gangsters. Ultimately, they eventually become lords, dukes, and kings — that is if they don’t kill each other first.
As a rule, warlords do not make for good political theorists. They make for despots, for insatiable thieves, and for immoral criminals. This isn’t to say that they are criminals from a legal standpoint, because warlords declare themselves as personifications of the law. They are criminals from the standpoint of morality and human rights.
The first published mention of warlords in English according to the Oxford English Dictionary was in the mid-19th century (Emerson, 1858):
Historically piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The phenomenon is very, very old, however — dating to long before the original settlement of England. It has always been the antithesis of civilization, a dangerous parasitic burden to any form of society.
Life in war
The point of warring devices originally was to protect one’s turf and the source of wellbeing of a family and a people. These were to allow for agriculture, to work the land, to protect it such that food could grow there. It is an onerous task to protect crops in the field. The famous story of the Slavs in mediaeval times was that they could hide their gardens in the Privet, or Pripet, marshes of the upper Dnieper River from raiders from the east and the north.
If one warlord proved his power over the others — through violence — he was able to declare himself as king. His kingdom would thus be divided into sections where “little kings”, typically referred to as dukes, would be able to lord over their people with violence and extortion as the order of the day. Where do you think the phrase ‘lord over’ came from? As long as the dukes didn’t cross with the king, they could do pretty much whatever they wanted with the people.
Guns as the object is kind of odd in this light. It is not to protect people so that their livelihoods and lifestyles could thus be sustained, but to have guns as a right itself. Firepower was the point; violence was thus to be the principal motivating force for all else.
Who among the gun lovers, especially the big guns, would want to live in a world dominated by warlords? What would protect their right to guns under such conditions? Would it be a matter of arming themselves to match the guns of the Duke’s men? That does not sound too promising.
What would allow the people to prosper under the watchful eye of the Duke, the Duchess, and others around them that had the right to steal, to abuse, and to sow genuine grounds for fear among the people? Heaven forbid you should prosper, at least in any ways they could observe. Heaven forbid you should have anything they wanted.
Would guns among the people be even allowed? Would it be necessary to pay some price to clear the way to to work your job, whatever that was? Would guns be necessary to protect your right to go to the store and buy food? Would they be allowed by the warlords/dukes, who would have little need to be reasonable. Perhaps use of guns — or the threat of this — would work once or twice. A warlord is seldom patient — unless, of course, gun-holders were to vow fealty to the warlord’s cause. That could lead down a tragic and pathetic path.
Once guns constituted the law of the land, what is to say that foreign gangs would not infiltrate our world — fulfilling on the fearmongering of the fearmongers? Why would drug cartels, for example, stop at the border then, when governmental policing was broken, if not substantially weakened?
Life under conditions of peace
What kind of government is sustained — by principle — with munitions? It is one based on munitions, dependent on them. Unfortunately, there is no bottom to that bucket.
Typically, protections have to do with basic rights and fundamental needs. People have the right to the quiet enjoyment of their lives. This comes back to “trade, politics, and letters,” as Emerson said over a hundred years ago.
Do you really want to protect your rights — well, first of all to understand them? Study up, dudes!
References
Emerson, R. W. 1856. Eng. Traits xi., 176.