Stephen Baskerville argues that the professional political class — both the Left and the Right — sustains and worsens problems to justify its own power and funding, leaving true change possible only through a revival of active, responsible citizenship.
The Iron Law of Washington is this:
People who are paid to solve problems acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they are paid to solve.
There is no avoiding this law; it is inevitable. It holds true for elected politicians, career civil servants, judges, lawyers and lobbyists, “non-profit” pressure groups, foundations, scholars in think tanks and universities, journalists and pundits.
Conservative Republicans complain the loudest about this problem, which they identify with government bureaucrats. But the dirty secret is that they themselves are equally guilty, and the consequences are more serious, given that they are the ones who are supposedly opposing it. If they are paid to oppose it, then they too are in its grip. Regardless of ideology, once your livelihood depends on the existence of a problem, you will do anything to make sure that problem never goes away, and you may well look for opportunities to make it worse.
Once this rule is fully understood, everything else about our current crisis falls into place. We are now experiencing the culmination of the long tragedy of Americans delegating and abdicating their civic responsibilities to a professional political class, whose ever growing power derives from manufacturing problems to justify their own existence, often doing the opposite of what they profess. The left wing of that class is now imposing its will on the world, and the right wing is pretending to oppose them.
Every time we give money to people to perform our citizenship for us, we can be certain that we are paying them to inflict more difficulties upon us down the road.
Once this process reaches the crisis stage, we must create new institutions, which may do some good for a time, but as soon as they attract enough support to make themselves full-time professionals, then they too become part of the problem. And so the cycle renews itself.
This involves more than just the allure of money and power. And it is not just the people that must be preserved in their privileged positions, in which case the problem would simply be a matter of superfluous functionaries, which is how it is presented by those who themselves may be among the superfluous. No, in a republic, unlike an aristocracy, the privileged and powerful cannot maintain their privileges and power without crises to justify them.
The Iron Law obfuscates those problems. Straightforward problems are made to seem intractable. Often they could be worked out fairly easily and at low cost, if the political class could be bypassed. But that is precisely what is not permitted. This is why liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans can operate a duopoly, reducing every issue to a one-dimensional, either/or debate and making sure no one strays “outside the box.”
Elaborate discourses are devised to complicate simple matters. “Experts” are brought on stage to obscure clear choices with elaborate jargon. Indignant rhetoric convinces us that the good guys are doing their best, when the good guys may well be in collusion with the bad guys. Right-wing politicos are especially skillful at this subterfuge, and even the most conscientious among them are under constant pressure to use it.
Fully understood, the Iron Law explains not only the perpetuation of our problems, but also their origins. Taken to its logical conclusion—and we are at this stage now—the central purpose of government itself becomes fabricating evils to justify its power. Once government officials can use their positions not to serve us or to attend to necessary tasks to which we assign them but instead intentionally inflict hardships that make us suffer and sabotage efforts to ameliorate them, leaving themselves alone holding the keys out of our misery, they have become our masters.
The recent coup [the 2020 elections] demonstrates the extreme stage at which we have arrived. The Covid pandemic fits this modus operandi perfectly. State health authorities (of all people) first spent taxpayers’ money engineer- ing a new man-made virus, a bioweapon that would make people ill and kill them, thereby elevating themselves to the world’s most powerful positions. To protect us from their own creation, they then devised authoritarian measures controlling the most intimate corners of our lives, culminating in fake “vaccines” that turned out to be additional bioweapons that sickened and killed more people. The lockdowns and other measures produced numerous medical, economic, social, and psychological hardships to keep public health authorities and other officials busy and well-funded. The deadly “vaccines” they forced on healthy people, including children, represent the logical conclusion of the process, when officials attained the power to administratively murder their own citizens. The resulting economic hardships rationalized massive government spending-for-the-sake-of-spending, in the name of “stimulus.” This money fueled myriad irrelevant, wasteful, counter-productive, and harmful government programs, most of which were designed to bribe Democratic Party constituencies and keep the Party in power.
The manifold destructiveness of the Biden administration provides further variations on the theme. Biden officials took a mostly stable, prosperous society, and began inflicting one ideologically driven catastrophe after another. In each instance, they first created the problem where none existed and then came along with a proposed solution. They opened the borders to allow hordes of rootless, lawless, diseased, and dangerous people to bring numerous social and physical ills that expanded the welfare machinery. Combined with weakened law enforcement, this led to massive crime, in turn empowering politicized prosecutors to launch political investigations not of the criminals but of law-abiding citizens. The reckless government spending provides endless patronage to ensconce themselves in power and set off global inflation where none had existed and then recession, which in turn rationalized more spending and controls over economic activity.
The war in Ukraine offers a textbook example of the Iron Law’s international dimension. The political class engineered a completely unnecessary war, knowing that war and foreign adventures expand government power at home on multiple levels. NATO was their tool: a bureaucratic “organization” whose menacing expansion, long after its original purpose was obsolete, together with the American-controlled European Union, provoked precisely the war that both organizations were ostensibly created to prevent. The concocted war rationalized economic sanctions against Russia that backfired spectacularly (and predictably), inflicting further economic hardship on the West. Combined with extremist, often counterproductive environmental measures, sanctions are now creating acute energy shortages and possibly global famine. All this rationalizes further allocations of power to government officials.
Throughout this power grab, the radical Democrats have understood that government has grown to the point where it becomes a political protection racket: Give us power and money, or you will have problems. Republicans (along with numerous private sector hangers-on) complain but ultimately go along, because they too gain power, either by pretending to object or by actively colluding, and because they can then offer a protection racket of their own (soon to be described).
Finally, these multiple and overlapping catastrophes were sup- ported, disguised, and used to justify indirect and direct censorship of the mass media and other measures to suppress and punish dissent.
None of this came out of nowhere. It is the logical but grotesque outgrowth of the modus operandi we have permitted to operate in Washington and other capitals for decades. Electing “MAGA” Republicans or RFK, Jr. Democrats might slow its growth, but it will not reverse it. It will never be brought under control — it will continue to multiply like Hydra heads, consuming everything and everyone — until we return to the origins of the problem and root it out…
The first stage in the coup goes back some years when, under the influence of radical ideology, Americans lost their citizenship to a new kind of professionalized politics. This transferred control over civic life from unpaid citizens to paid professionals. Instinctively, we blame elected “politicians” for our ills, but their puppet masters in the larger political class may pose the greater danger.
Like most political innovations, this one came first from the Left, with the invention of “public interest” lobbying firms. These ostensibly nonprofit organizations provide political advocacy for affluent, ideologically driven Americans. Corporate lobbyists have a bad name because their money buys politicians and legislation on behalf of wealthy special interests, but in the long run those who claim to speak for us and the “public interest” may do more to undermine our freedom. These “nonprofit” and “nongovernmental” organizations (today’s almighty “NGOs”) are now wealthier and more integrated into the power structure than ever, and their only real opposition is just different versions of the same. George Soros and his Open Society organizations are only the latest example.
Some go back generations: Americans for Democratic Action (founded 1947), American Civil Liberties Union (1920), NAACP (1909), Sierra Club (1892). But their numbers and influence exploded with the radicalism of the 1960s, of which they are the institutional legacy. Alongside these firms came ideologically driven media and “think tanks” that furnished the information and spin. Colleges and universities also abandoned their detachment and were sucked into the maelstrom of professional activism, with pressures and enticements to retool both research and instruction to serve the needs of advocacy.
So effective were they at imposing elitist, mostly leftist agendas on the population that they were quickly imitated by rightist versions. Thus was born the Washington political class: professional activists (not so different from what Lenin called “professional revolutionaries”) or professional surrogate citizens, people we pay to perform the duties of citizenship for us.
For all their pretense of representing the “public interest,” the lobbying firms do not “empower” the citizens. On the contrary, citizens are precisely what they eclipse and even muzzle. Like courtroom lawyers advising their clients, the message of the lawyer-lobbyists to the citizenry is, “Be quiet and let me do the talking,” as if we are accused criminals on trial. Small wonder that that is precisely what we are all becoming.
Nothing did more to decimate the civic culture of America, transfer power from citizens to a judicial priesthood, and entrench an ideological duopoly operated, not simply by the Democratic and Republican parties, but by the larger political classes of Left and Right. On every issue that arises, a delicate pas de deux immediately plays out in Washington, where the Left leads and the Right follows.
While the professional Right claims to oppose the Left, its operatives have other priorities. Adopting a formulaic anti-ideology of boilerplate conservatism, their main purpose is not stopping the Left but build- ing fiefdoms and power centers of their own. Toward this end they may well collude with the Left (whose foundations often fund them). Without leftists threatening us, after all, professional conservatives have little justification to exist…
This reactive (or “reactionary”) method of the professional Right, trying to respond to each grievance or attack from the Left, is a Sisyphean task that in the long run cannot lead to anything but defeat. No pressure group, no lobbying organization of lawyers or political operatives, however skillful or conscientious, can possibly have the omniscience to understand and the flexibility to respond effectively to all the innovations devised by a rapidly evolving Left, especially when it is sponsored from above by Permanent Washington and fed from below by dysfunctional adolescents. They can only respond with pinpricks — a lawsuit here, a bill there — always with an eye to protecting their own bosses, turf, donor base, media image, position relative to rival groups, and other organizational interests. Even if they want to, they cannot recalibrate their operations quickly or precisely enough to check the Left’s latest grievances or demonizations. The Left will always remain a step ahead of them. At best, their claimed “victories” slow the Left’s progress temporarily.
This is why the Left always wins and the Right always loses. The current coup demonstrates that, in the short run, losing can be better than winning for the professional Right, because it perpetuates the threats and dangers that rationalize their existence and funding. Their monopoly over opposition ensures that they will never be held accountable for their failure, a principle vividly illustrated by the 2022 election and the subsequent reelection of the Republican Party’s internal leaders. No one points the finger at their multiple failures, which ironically ensure them a lifetime of demand for their services and an endless supply of contributions from frustrated citizens for whom they provide the only hope. This amounts to another political protection racket, in response to that of the Left: Give us money, and we will be your voice in Washington. If we fail, as we have done so spectacularly for the last four years, then give us more money. And if you do not like what we say in Washington, well, there is not much you can do about it.
But in the end, this political ponzi scheme can only collapse. Defeat is baked into its logic, because mistakes, misdirections, fundamental flaws, and major defeats cannot be acknowledged and corrected. The Left survives its failures by innovating: it can ramp up its militancy and change its targets. (If it cannot eliminate poverty, it can liberate women, homosexuals, people with fetishes.) But for the Right, the dynamic is different. One can double down on the PR and fundraising, citing the Left’s victories. But criticism — even constructive self-criticism — threatens professional and organizational survival and above all donations, so it must be silenced. Sooner or later, people start asking why they should continue supporting losers. That is the point we are at now.
So ingrained are these habits in our political culture that Americans who seek an alternative invariably begin by imitating them, trying to create new organizations and parties with what they hope will be the right people, opinions, and policies in place of the wrong ones.
But a truly effective opposition can only come from precisely what the right-wing firms have displaced: citizens, householders with families and property, millions of them, with a thousand responses to each move by the Left in a thousand localities, each a little different, all exerting face-to-face pressure. And they must be organized in thousands of local civic groups, especially churches, with clergymen exhorting and channeling the diverse voices and giving them coherence (a connected absence).
Such citizens do exist, and some try to speak out. But they lack any organizational voice or coherence, because the conservative pressure groups, law firms, think tanks, and media monopolize the responses. Ordinary citizens are reduced to venting their frustrations on social media, which even when it is not censored provides no outlet for action. This allows them to be ignored, not only by the Left, but also by the Right. Instead, charismatic social media “influencers” enrich themselves by thinking and speaking for us, enraging our passions and prompting endless chatter without offering any remedy. All we have to do is click “Like”…
During World War II, some small nations of eastern and central Europe sought to drive out the Nazis by allying themselves with the Soviet Union. They paid dearly for accepting this “help.” Weak peoples trying to defeat one hegemon by relying on what turns out to be the next hegemon is very common in history, both internationally and domestically. Since the 1960s, it is what we, in our weakness, have been doing with the professional establishments of the Left and Right. Freedom depends on taking back control over our own defense and defeating the insurgents on our own terms.
How can we do this? All this might sound like just an inevitable truism, a tragedy with no remedy.
The only long-term remedy is to resuscitate citizenship. Only the citizen has an incentive to confront problems effectively, because citizens are unpaid amateurs whose commitment is sacrificial of their time, money, and more. Citizens alone have an interest in finding solutions, so they can get on with the business of private life.
If a silver lining can be found in the multiple catastrophes now being perpetrated by the alliance between the political class and the far Left, with collusion from the Right, it is the awakening of a sleeping citizenry. When every existing institution is corrupted, the only solution is to take matters out of the hands of the political class and confront them ourselves. After all, that is what self-government is about.
If we all follow the logic of this principle and search our own hearts for “the sin within,” then none of us should ever be complaining about our professional leaders; we should be ridding ourselves of all impediments and acting. Ultimately the place to fix the blame and find the solution, not only in a democracy but in any free society, is in ourselves.
If we prefer to be governed by an elite, it is much better to return to monarchy and aristocracy, with rulers who are independently wealthy enough that they do not need to inflict chaos and pain upon us in order to justify their salaries. Better to have real knights in shining armor governed by a sacred code of chivalry than to be ruled by saboteurs who pose as knights in order to rescue us from their own perfidy.
In a weird way, this explains the appeal of Donald Trump, who may seem an unlikely candidate for knight status. He does not have to justify his salary by dwelling on endless problems (he does not accept one), and instead he can focus on solving them. (And we have yet to see if this is also true for other newly prominent members of the leisure class: Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., or Vivek Ramaswamy.) This is why, for all his obvious flaws, he inspires such adoration by the masses and such visceral hatred from the political class of both parties, who must constantly debase themselves morally in order to thrive politically, to the point of mobilizing all their energy and resources to eliminate him from the scene. And yes, this is despite his armor being less than shining and his code of personal conduct, to say the least, sometimes less than chivalrous.
The above is an excerpt from Stephen Baskerville’s Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It. If you found it thought-provoking, make sure to check out the whole book.
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