Based Burnham: An Account of our Ills
Leland meets in Secret…again! Terashima Supports the Current Thing! James Burnham—Suicide of the West/Managerial Revolution
As I was writing this, I found out that the Town of Leland is engaged in ANOTHER closed meeting, June 4, 6pm. You have got to be kidding me. Corruption always happens in secret. And this council meets in secret a lot.
You should watch the short video of 4 June. The council members rubbing up on each other like they won some political battle: fist bumps, and careless laughter all around. Sluggo and Bozeman are laughing and having a great old time in their seats. They are not phased by their unpopularity. They have no regard for the people of this town.
I am working on a few things related to Leland and Brunswick County. So, I did not want you to think I disappeared. I am trying to keep the postings regarding Leland and BC to once a week digests. I also know I have posted a lot in the last few weeks, so why bombard you more?
Still, I did not want anyone to think I had drifted off. Paid subscribers expect, and deserve, something useful on this site.
I have hinted at some of what informs my view of things here locally in NC. I have suggested, and sometimes outright said, that the problems we face here are not new, nor specific to our region. In fact, what is happening all over this country is the result of a long determines, methodical march through the culture and the institutions. No matter where you move to, you will be faced with the clown-world of politics we face here.
Case in point: I have noted Sluggo is a loony leftist. I will detail McHiugh at a later date. But we are also suffering from people like Levitan and of course, the ever defeated Eric Terashima, who is all in on pedophile presidents, and rigged court rooms—makes me wonder if he also supports the Dred Scott decision (I bet he does certainly in principle):👇
Terashima is…not well. Comparing a two tier justice system conviction to WW2 victory (we have lost every war since) is just plain stupid and unworthy of an opposition party. Hey Terashima: what wars have you won? Fun fact is that Terashima also volunteered to fight in the Ukraine military against Russia—so much for being a soldier of ONLY the USA.1 Trouble is, there’s no record of his service. I remember a time when our “military” men loved this country more than other countries. This is increasingly not the case any more.
So the point is, and always has been here—partisanship is always present on the left. You may not want to the right to be partisan—one person did not want this substack to notice all the partisanship around us—but I assure you, THEY will vote their party if they get power and get the chance.
I was lucky enough to study in grad school with smart people who all told us what we face now was coming. I suppose you can say I went to a place more prestigious than any shitty college of the Ivys. Thank God. I have been prepared for this for a very long time and watched the year by year decline in the mores of our elected officials.
Yet, we were all asleep for a long time. I certainly was when I was young. Perhaps, maybe, you identify with this:
What was there to worry about then? 1976! A blessed time gone by. Or was it? In fact, we were not paying attention; not much really as long as we could trust those at the helm to rule wisely. Turns out, they weren’t. Our monopolistic media certainly told us nothing of truthful value then either. No one noticed, and certainly not our parents, who after the Great Depression, and then a world war, were…exhausted.
There is something about a people that gets happy with the plenty they have, and modern conveniences, and they forget it was not always this way. Plato calls it the city of pigs. We were living in it, but fat and happy, and the future seemed bright.
Enter Burnham. While we were blissfully unawares, the ruling elite of this country was busy at work, and had been busty at work since Woodrow Wilson took over and his ideologues began to transform America. It was rather quietly done, but really, we just did not pay attention to what people like Wilson were saying, and doing.
In his Managerial Revolution, Burnham accounts for the change in freedom and liberty by the take over of business through government rule and expert managerial practices. The process was so slow, we hardly noticed. I mean we had elections right?
Burnham notes that elections hardly mattered even back into the 60s because the deep state, the unelected experts in the government, really ran the show, through their “expert” knowledge, and through the increasing deference to their abilities to know what was needed in any govern situation. You want environmental knowledge? EPA (and their 501c3 lackeys Greenpeace, Sierra club, blah blah blah). You want foreign policy experts? CIA, NSC, Dept. of State, etc. (and their 501c3s Hoover Institute, Brookings, blah blah blah). Want to know about highways and rail, etc? Why that’s Dept of Transportation, and ALL the associated non profit companies (like the NTSA) who will tell us leaded gas=bad (but we will still use them for our planes, so we, elites can fly around the world).
Keep in mind Burnham wrote the Managerial Revolution in 1941. 1941! Prescient does not even begin to explain his brilliance.
By the early 60s Burnham wrote Suicide of the West. All those progressives/Democrats were calling themselves Liberals by then, but so too were MANY Republicans who bought into the premises of liberalism. In other words, while there were partisan squabbles, the Republicans were pretty much locked into the liberal mindset early on after WW2. The few who were not were shunned from office or worse (see Joe McCarthy as a prime example).
Burnham rightly points out that liberalism rolled over all of us, and Republicans always gave ground. Ever notice that? Throughout the 50s-70s liberals won and moved the ball down the field; Republicans noted to us, their “opponents” may have moved the ball, but we stopped them from gaining more yardage, even though we lost yardage….yet again. And so it went for the rest of the decades. Feckless losers.
The west was contracting, and losing wars and territory. That is one sign of collapse. He also questioned all the tropes we hear from the rabid left today—colonialism, social justice, blah blah blah, by wondering if it was even a good idea to impose liberalism (American style) on the world. We were doing that you know.
The simple argument is, America is liberal, and the liberal mindset is committing suicide. The ideology of the country is destroying the country.
Well slap the dog and spit in the fire, you do not say.
Liberals differ, or may differ, among themselves on application, timing, method and other details, but these differences revolve within a common framework of more basic ideas, beliefs, principles, goals…
Burnham, p. 26.
Of the many ideas and beliefs of the liberal then and now, the primary one that I think explains all the others is this: they believe that man’s nature can be changed—that it is plastic, and malleable to be formed to whatever we wish. By “we” they mean “them.”
Think about that liberal principle. ALL man is able to be changed, and fashioned into whatever they wish. This explains many things—the sexual revolution, the sex changes of kids in schools, the hostility to parents, the hostility to the traditional church, the hatred of the family, the belief that AI is the new God that will make man God.2 Everything then, explains why we are here now. It reveals a roadmap of purposeful intent.
Globalism was always the goal in terms of erasing nations, and tying all man together as well. Liberalism was to remake the world, and pursue a foreign policy along those lines. Can you see that now? USA tells people all over the world what to do and/or think it is their business to enforce our own liberalism on all. Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Jordan, Japan, etc., etc., etc. After all, why do you think Carter and McHugh were all for (one party state) Ukraine and hating Russia? Coincidence? No. Liberal mindset.
Burnham makes a strong case that the undermining of the country—we do not celebrate the 4th of July like we used to—changed the unalienable rights of man to one that only those rights the STATE grants are those that humans can possess. Got that? This is huge. Of course, in 1976, we were all supportive of our latest craze nodding to the greatness of America: 👇
So Burnham is making an argument that the greater emphasis on the STATE meant an undermining of the people—what mattered was what the elites told us to do, believe, and what we could say.
Sounding familiar yet? And this was all hatched decades ago!
The welfare state grew, and was reimagined for grander ambitious plans at this time. More and more people became tied not to their community and family, but the state who was increasingly the source of your wealth. It had a stranglehold on the food supply, the market, Wall Street, the military, the environment, what you drove, what you learned, the media, your paycheck….the Constitution is set aside, more and more by slight misdirections. The law becomes a joke. Justice is now two tier system. Thanks Democrats!
Before Fox came on the scene, there was no variation in the press, or the media. The only place you could get respite was Paul Harvey. For a brief moment we had freedom and access to ideas—Rush Limbaugh, and the internet. Where are we now?
The beginning of the unlimited state is actually the weight we are suffering from today notes Burnham. The left/liberal has no answers for the crap they have created, and cares not for straight up debate. Their mental exhaustion is the cause of their anger at anyone who has a different thought.3
The liberal promised a better society that after decades still has not arrived!
Burnham thus states that this is a part of the suicide. Their grandiose promises can never be realized. Their mental and political arguments are exhausted.
The ideology of modern liberalism has become so powerful an influence in contemporary American thought and conduct, it is worth noting that the liberal doctrine of human nature is sharply at variance with the view that prevailed among the Founding Fathers…
~Burnham p. 125
Burnham accounts for how liberalism took over the education system slowly. Look at our public schools. Do you really think they are healthy? Once institutions like k-12 are taken over, the left began to indoctrinate. Slowly but surely, the character of a hearty people changed. Students got dumber and dumber—our education rankings consistently declined since the federal government took over with the DoE. The facts are too clear to ignore on this point. And the people who support the current education arrangement want more and more money—so much that 61% of the NC state budget goes to wacky left wing unionionists in education to “teach” our kids…………..nothing.
But that is only one mechanism of how the country changed. In their heart, liberals were always socialist. Go back through time and see for yourself. Read the opinions of the Democrats from before the civil war until after it, and into the 70s. It is all left wing bullshit, that, there is no real God, or that God is history and man is evolving into something greater than himself. It is a complete secularism even if it is dressed up in lipstick and made pretty.
They also assert that Man has no nature, and time is the moral law—history is revealing to us what we will be. Burnham does not mention it, but he could—this is rote hegelianism here. Hegel is the author of the rational state—the managerial state—the rule by experts. Hegal was the influence of Marx, and into a little “man” named Michele Foucault and that moron who wrote One Dimensional Man that the Boomers all loved in the 60s. All our actual conflict from communism to fascism (Churchill said they were siblings of political thought) comes out of Hegel, and the Democrats embraced that thinker like he was their forever lover.
Burnham ends his book contending that the increase of secularism, materialism, and the decline of the Church came out of liberalism. The left unleashed excess, and shamelessness.
Now you understand the character of the town council on June 4, laughing like they were having a party in spite of the turmoil they have caused.
The ruling elite of the left, does not care about you; they are expertly taught, and know more than you do. They cannot deliver what they promise and do not care, because they are delivering it to themselves.
I add what is no longer a supposition but a fact: Democrats will never forgive Russia for leaving communism. Let us also be clear that Ukraine has outlawed all opposition parties, and shut down the Eastern Orthodox Churches who did not agree with the government. This is tyranny, a tyranny Terashima supports.
See pp. 40-66. Burnham goes somewhat into the liberal attempts to liberate the mind from…your fathers, and your father’s fathers. Once liberated, man can become anything, so goes their optimism and pursuit of utopia.
Burnham also notes that we have lost creativity—look at Hollywood. Has there been a movie made that is not some retread of a past movie made? The liberal mind cannot even think up interesting ideas any more. But hey, go see the new retread Mad Max, or the “new” Star Wars movie….or…pick one. ANY ONE. There is nothing really new any more.
I'm trying to think of something meaningful to add, but you pretty much said it all. 👍🏻👍🏻