Interesting post on another blog ...

Bastions And Batteries Part 4: Hobgoblins, Intimidations, And The Weapon
By The Curmudgeon Emeritus
The invaluable Richard Fernandez notes the impact of the Codevilla essay which stimulated this short series:

Somehow the ideas in Codevilla’s essay are popping up everywhere, whether people have read it or not....
Like Brecht’s fictional Atlantean who "the night the seas rushed in … still bellowed for their slaves," the members of what Codevilla called the "ruling class" can’t believe it is happening. They still want their last dollar, their last perk. Literally, no matter what. "Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank caused a scene when he demanded a $1 senior discount on his ferry fare to Fire Island’s popular gay haunt, The Pines, last Friday. Frank was turned down by ticket clerks at the dock in Sayville because he didn’t have the required Suffolk County Senior Citizens ID. A witness reports, 'Frank made such a drama over the senior rate that I contemplated offering him the dollar to cool down the situation.'"...

The Codevilla essay is arresting not because of its originality but because it simply captures the common mood in a concise way. Its greatest virtue is unoriginality. It says everything we already know. The bell sounded was already cast in the foundry of public opinion. All Professor Codevilla did was take out a hammer and tap it. Five years ago the ideas in it would probably not have occurred to him. Had he written the essay as little as two years ago he would have been laughed to scorn.

This is exactly correct. Codevilla's core ideas aren't new to anyone who's been paying attention. However, he has compiled, harmonized, and articulated them better than any major figure in political commentary had previously dared. He has given specific form to the gaggle of inchoate popular fears, and the anger that proceeds from them, upon whose power the fortunes of this nation will soon turn.

But it would be a mistake of the first magnitude to think the Ruling Class isn't preparing its countermeasures.


***
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. -- George Orwell, 1984
No one willingly surrenders privileges or pelf. Even when the portents are beyond certainty, and our fates have been sealed into the bedrock of reality, we clutch and struggle to hang on to what we believe is our due. Ask anyone who's been forced by an occupational or financial setback to "trade down:" to a smaller house, or a less luxurious car, or a reduced schedule of vacations, or a menu of cruder foods and fewer pleasures.

Thus, it is certain beyond all question that the American Ruling Class has taken note of the wave of adverse sentiment and is scrambling for weapons and tactics with which to counter it. There's too much at stake: too much money, too much privilege, too much prestige, and too much gratification in the exercise of power over helpless others.

Some of the Ruling Class's tactics are well known and much used: the use of special interests as proxies; the Washington Monument Defense, charges of "racism" among one's opponents, and so forth. Though some of these have lost power due to over-frequent employment, we may be certain that the Ruling Class will milk them for whatever value is in them. But we must not neglect the possibility of unused gambits, thrusts we've never before had to fend off, as we the freedom-minded marshal and deploy our forces.

The problem, as is always the case in warfare, lies in the struggle to see the battlespace, and ourselves, as our enemies see them. Their planners and advisors are as insightful as ours. Their motivation for fighting us off and keeping us in subjugation could not be stronger. They hold the levers of power. They will not be easily defeated.


***
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed; and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all imaginary. -- H. L. Mencken
The masters of the great tyrannies of history have achieved their best results against a popular tide of opposition by redirecting their opponents' attentions. The most frequently used tactics of this sort have focused public attention on:

■Foreign wars and supposed threats from afar;
■Fabricated threats from notional internal enemies;
■Crises, propounded by "experts," that "demand swift and certain State action."
As our willingness to tolerate the State is based entirely on a perception of threat, these tactics are in keeping with the fundamental rationale for coercive government: the conviction, whether examined or not, that the risks to what we value would be too great without one. Only in recent years have Americans been sold the notion that coercive government can improve our lives materially in the absence of threats -- and the bloom is long gone from that rose.

So we may expect the Ruling Class to confront us with a fine array of Mencken's hobgoblins. As one is debunked, another will rise to take its place.

An excellent example of the sort of hobgoblin we must expect to face is "global warming." That rationale aimed at the totalitarianization of the entire world economy. Had it not been felled by the East Anglia CRU data leak, our political elite might well have fettered us in a fashion from which we could never recover.

Another hobgoblin, this one unfortunately more successful than the previous one, is the "health care crisis." Somehow, despite 90% of Americans being fully covered with medical insurance, the Ruling Class sold us on the notion that, absent massive federal intervention, health care would soon become unaffordable. (That the uncovered 10% seemed to be in no danger of going without seems not to have mattered.) Mind you, the regular increases in the costs of various sorts of medical products and services have largely been driven by Medicare and Medicaid, two anti-Constitutional programs that perennially operate in the red, but no one was willing to discuss that.

But the probable direction of impending Ruling Class hobgoblinry will be shadowy internal enemies: forces that intend to "topple the government," or "impose a theocracy," or "restore slavery." Some of the preparatory rhetoric has already hit the newsstands. We're hearing about "anti-government militias" more than we have for quite a few years. We've seen heavily publicized raids on "radical Christian sects," as well. (Note that no comparable operations have addressed radical Muslim sects.) If it weren't for the unsavory antecedents of the late Robert Byrd of West Virginia, no doubt we'd be hearing about a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Happily, our current masters are unlikely to undertake any foreign military adventures beyond the current ones. If not for the entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq, "peacekeeping" and "humanitarian" missions to various Third World hellholes would be on the table as well.


***
The next category of Ruling Class gambits involves intimidation of the resistance. Few are the sincerely give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death types among us. Indeed, most Americans, even those most vocal in their denunciation of Ruling Class shenanigans, would be unwilling to accept a month's interruption in their incomes as the price of successful resistance. Doubt it not, we are a softer people than our forebears, recent or remote.

Mohandas Gandhi's resistance to British rule over India, supposedly based on unstoppable mass opposition to continued subjugation, in fact commanded the loyalty of a much smaller fraction of the Indian populace than the hagiographies imply, perhaps no more than ten percent. Gandhi's rebellion depended to a far greater extent on British tolerance, the British sense of justice, and the weariness of the post-war British at having to govern its fractious colonies. Throughout the rebellion period, most Indians were, if not enthusiastic about being colonial subjects of a distant power, willing to accept that condition in exchange for the many benefits of British law, British technology, and British trade. Had the British been minded to put an end to the Gandhian insurrections, they could easily have done so; the one effective military force in the subcontinent, the Indian Army, was almost wholly loyal to the British Empire.

Matters are far worse in America today. The most optimistic commentators believe that perhaps three percent of the populace would be willing to join a national campaign of nonviolent resistance to a Washington decree, regardless of the subject. We've accepted that "the consent of the governed" legitimizes the harassment and prosecution of persons exercising noncontroversial rights. Homeowners have been killed during "no-knock" raids, some of which have produced only misdemeanor charges, others of which have gone to the wrong address. Homeowners who've resisted illegal raids with firearms have been prosecuted for it. Owing to police and prosecutorial harassment, American citizens are afraid to record the actions and statements of a policeman acting under color of law. That state of affairs would have been unthinkable in 1950; a citizen who accepted police misconduct out of fear of official reprisal would have been regarded with contempt.

(A commenter on Part 3 claimed that there's no reason to worry about the Dishonorable Charles Rangel's recently introduced conscription bill, because "Congress knows it could never get away with it." That was hardly the point of the citation, but all the same, given how determined our Ruling Class is to maintain its rule over us, how little heed it paid to our opposition to ObamaCare, and how soft we've become, your Curmudgeon would not want to bet his next mortgage payment on that proposition. If memory serves, the Income Tax Amendment was passed with the assurance that rates would never rise as high as 10%, because "the people would never allow it." Verbum sat sapienti.)

A key question for the future of freedom in these United States is whether the "reliable three percent" -- perhaps 5 or 6 million adults -- can be intimidated out of resisting even the most draconian invasions of their rights. Should popular discontent come to a head, it might be the question that matters most.


***
No force is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo.
Our weapon, if we have one, is the anger of the American people. But anger can be focused or diffuse. The latter kind is too easily misdirected into side issues and bagatelles of no enduring importance. Only a sharp, coherent focus upon the illegality and arrogance of our Ruling Class will serve us in any contest of wills.

We've heard that the Constitutional restoration movement will fail because it lacks structure. But it isn't structure, but resolve and courage that wins contests of this sort. We've been told that it will fail because it lacks leaders. But no amount of leadership can mobilize a people who aren't angry enough to march.

The structure and the leaders will emerge, if we can keep a tight focus on our anger.

May God forever guard and guide these United States of America.