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Sept. 16, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:55
7) Michael Vlahos - “When the Devil Drives: The Dynamics of Revolution and Civil War"

How did the English civil war, the French Revolution, and the US Civil War all lead us to where we are today? Professor Vlahos ties it all together in an amazing way...

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Time Text
Three Revolutions, One Future 00:02:50
We're a little bit behind, so I won't spend a lot of time talking about our next speaker, but you will be delighted to hear what he has to say.
Professor Vleos has been in academia, he's been in government, he's seen it all, and this is a great talk.
We had a little preview with the scholars yesterday, so you're going to love this one.
Professor Michael Vallejos.
The United States has entered an extended period of revolution and civil war.
But you all know that.
What you want to know, more pertinently, I think, is the answer to three questions.
First of all, what is happening?
How far will this go?
And where will we end up on the other side?
So my answers are based on comparing patterns and dynamics of three other revolutions and civil wars.
First, the English Revolution and Civil War of the mid to later 17th century, which had a great effect on our founders, by the way.
Second, the French Revolution, which is celebrated and has many things to tell us.
And finally, the American Civil War.
Now, all of these revolutions were extended.
They weren't simply the period, for example, that the Cavaliers and Roundheads were fighting on the fields of Naseby.
It wasn't simply the period of the terror from, say, 1792 to 96.
And the Civil War wasn't 1861 to 1965.
The American Civil War was well underway by 1857 and didn't end until 1877.
So we have to keep this in mind when talking about what lies ahead for us.
Now, revolution and civil war are just different modalities of the same national upheaval.
And that is the coming apart and the putting back together of the constitutional order.
First and foremost, this is a story of elites gone wrong.
But elites always go wrong, all the time.
This is just a fact of civilized life and of civilization itself.
Elites Gone Wrong 00:06:36
City-states, empires, and nations need a leadership class and a leader who is the symbolic representative of the collective whole of the community.
So the leadership class is there because of its outstanding successful historical performance as wealth creators, as the leaders in war and the makers of national destiny, the keepers of the sacred narrative of the nation from past to future.
And they are the source of sacred authority, whether it's a state religion, divine right, or as our founders created, a civil religion.
So they're there for a reason.
However, over time, growing wealth, inequality, stratification of society Forms a kind of long-term secular trend over which the people are sort of glacially being pushed to the political and the economic margins.
Meanwhile, the elite has grown comfortable in power, and their prime directive shifts from leadership to wealth enhancement and passing on power to their progeny.
Yet their offspring, those progeny, the generations that succeed the makers, the creators of the leadership elite, they are increasingly generation by generation more spoiled and more and more narcissistic, and worst of all, most of all, less competent.
This is because the original merit system of elite promotional attainment and promotion has been thrown over.
The elite faces competition.
It emerges from a new and rising elite or simply from the people.
The leadership class is at this point viscerally unwilling to accommodate to change.
And increasingly, the ruling class right to rule is questioned.
Yet, the need to hold on to power becomes the deep conviction of the elite.
The competitors, the new elites or resistant people become existential threats to their way of life.
This, at first, is a deep motivational conviction, not necessarily voiced, but it settles in the soul of elite sensibility.
At this point, elites feel threatened and really insecure.
Rival forces or movements created by change become literally the enemy of elite ownership of the state and the civil religion.
Elite conviction rises that only it can lead society, and they come to believe that only they can save or stave off the peril of disorder that they see on the horizon.
So when they're confronted by opposing movements, this leads to the creation of an elite ideology that rationalizes their need to control and dominate.
And this, furthermore, serves as an all-absolving dispensation that allows them, A, to believe that they are the only savior of the deplorable masses, and yet that B, those same masses are absent elite guidance, the enemy of divine order, who will bring calamitous disorder if they take power.
Hence, the elite refuses to give up power and will do anything to stay in control, and even if it means sacrificing the constitutional order.
Their fervent ideology, moreover, tells them that any path to hold on to power is justified.
Hence, constitutional system is outdated and must be reformed.
Indeed, their giving up power is the height of irresponsibility.
This is the primary purpose of today's Church of Woke, as I call it, to assert itself as the successor civil religion to the old American religion, and in fact, the necessary successor.
So the elite will go down the path of deliberately delegitimating the very constitutional order that once made their bones.
In extremis, holding on to power becomes more important than preserving the constitution that underpins order in society itself.
So the elite risks disorder to stay in power.
They cannot see that this course risks the same outcome they say they are fighting to avoid.
So here, a contemporary example would be to focus on the critical role in their discourse of gaslighting.
Gaslighting, A, is a technique to hold onto power through manipulation.
It highlights elite ruthlessness.
It highlights their unanimity.
And above all, it highlights their weakness.
Because B, they need to believe the gaslighting in order to continue to believe in the pillars of their ideology.
In other words, the elite becomes completely prey to totalizing suspension of disbelief.
This was especially evident.
I mean, it was evident in the run-up to the French Revolution.
It was also front and center with the planter aristocracy and their vision of slavery and their ideology of the necessity of slavery and the need to extend it as law throughout the nation.
Good News Amid Upheaval 00:04:48
And it is certainly true today.
So the historical examples of new elites, and I'll just mention them, I can't go into them.
In England in the 17th century, you had a rising yeomanry and London had become the giant center of the nation, the engine of trade and finance.
And they were not aristocrats.
In France, of course, you had the rise of the bourgeois as a rival aristocracy, both in terms of productiveness and of wealth.
And the U.S. in the 1850s, you had the rise of the Republican Party, especially in the Midwest.
And these were similar in some ways to the yeoman ancestors in England in the 17th century.
And in the USA today, you have a different picture.
Here, there is no rival elite, the blue elite, which has coalesced in its present form over the last 50 years.
And I watched it in its early days being birthed in the 1970s at Yale.
And those people are the ones who are now the gerontocracy of the heart of the blue elite.
So there is this difference when you're comparing historical antecedents to what we're facing today.
Today, blue owns the wealth, the institutions, what Lenin called the commanding heights, the established media, and the levers of enforcement.
They have the arrogance of the antebellum planter aristocracy, who, in its day, thought it owned the Democratic Party and could force their agenda, which came to naught in the Convention of 1860 and led immediately to the breakdown of the Constitutional Order.
But they called themselves not Democrats.
They called themselves the democracy.
How interesting is that?
because it's very much like blue today as they intone constantly about our democracy.
So where, oh, here we go.
Yeah, I want to talk about the third issue which I'm sure is the one you're most interested in, and that is where we will all come out on the other side.
And looking at past revolutions, there is some good news.
The good news is we will come out on the other side.
The bad news is that the constitutional order will come apart in spite of all of our ardent hopes as were voiced earlier by Mr. Turley.
It will come apart and it will have to be put back together.
But above all, know this.
The bad news is actually the good news.
And the reason is clear and it is vested in the behavior and the very consciousness of the blue elite.
This elite will never consent to go back and agree to rebirth the old order, the old order we cherish.
So there is really no alternative.
And again, as Mr. Turley cited in his presentation, the truth of that statement that the elite will never consent to go back should be at this point self-evident.
So I see two, I wish they could get a better ringtone, don't you?
I see two paths as imminent awaiting us.
The constitutional order comes apart, yet somehow both parties are accommodated.
So after some upheaval and crisis, a new order attains and reigns.
How could this peaceable outcome happen?
Well, the foundation would be an alternative constitutional order based on state nullification.
How Could Peaceable Order Emerge? 00:07:02
And it would, if it were to emerge, if it were to happen, would have to resemble more of a confederation or a confederacy.
It would be as if we were to go back to the misty origins of our own nation when we had something called the Articles of Confederation.
So in this possibility, this path, the federal government would be equivalent to and responsible for defense, social security, and some other entitlements, interest on the national debt, and a functioning Treasury Department that could ensure stable currency.
And that would be it.
Civil war in this path would only be averted because of an aging society that is not ready for this, not ready to go head to head.
And you have to remember that in the historical antecedents I mentioned, you had extremely young males as the source of political authority.
And if you were to look at the United States in the 1840s and 50s, you had the highest level of voter participation ever in our national life.
And these were very young men.
They were very ardent and eager.
And they were willing to follow the flag, whichever flag it turned out to be after 1860.
That was a very different society.
It was ready to go to battle.
This is a society that couldn't stand more in contrast to that antecedent.
And also, the military and the breakup of the military, which could be rooted in the fact that governors have a claim to their National Guards and can muster their own militias, there might be a real aversion for the military to engage in any sort of action on one side or the other.
And finally, I think most people at this point harbor what I would call fear precedents.
The BLM riots January 6th opened a little aperture on the way things could be.
And I think people don't want that.
And finally, in 2024, overreach by the FBI, DHS, and justice may bring most of us to the conclusion that this has to stop.
So this would be an American society says no.
And with very motivated state governors with the authority to challenge Washington rulings, they could challenge blue itself.
Now, that's the happy outcome.
The other outcome or path, and there's no outcome here, it's all process.
The elite seizes power.
Blue seizes power, and it's not very far from doing that.
I mean, it may not happen, but it might as well also.
The old constitutional order in this path is simply eviscerated.
So when blue takes power, 2024, and ensures that it is the holder of power, the Constitution is hollowed out.
It's eviscerated.
So outwardly, it remains a kind of empty carapace.
In other words, it becomes the equivalent of the old Soviet Constitution, a wonderful document ensuring everyone rights and all the best of things in life, their own right to happiness, for example.
But we all know what it was really like in the Soviet Union.
And that's why I think that if this pathway were to attain, that it would go down very, very hard.
And we know the blueprint and the battle plan of this darker path, packing the Supreme Court, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia becoming states, a modification of election management to ensure perpetual blue control.
There's a lot here.
A lot of it would be through the media, as Max mentioned, in terms of the capability of social media to be used as a control arm of the state to silence opposition and to intimidate the citizen.
Now, the problem with this is that it's the same problem that you have with an elite that believes it must adopt this path, even if it undercuts itself in doing so.
So to do so by blue would immediately begin a process of delegitimation of the regime, because it would be illegitimate to half of Americans.
There would be widespread, sometimes violent resistance and rejection.
And the key here, in terms of a dynamic which you can see in what happened in the French Revolution and in the English Civil War, is that each step in elite enforcement of its control and power threatens another crisis and yet more resistance.
So even if it is successful the first time and the second time and the third time, there is an unraveling.
And we can see this in an easy metaphor of Soviet repression of Eastern Europe.
Well, we can put down Poland in 1953, Hungary in 1956, get to Czechoslovakia, and it's looking bad.
Things are beginning to come apart, and a few years later, then you begin the final process of delegitimation, which is the rise of Solidarnos in Poland.
So you have an unraveling that is the inevitable outcome of overreach and repression and tyranny.
So the bottom line here, and this would suggest an eventual regime collapse and a revolution which would create another constitutional order.
Now we've been through this before, so we can go through it again.
And when I say constitutional order, I don't mean scrapping the Constitution.
That would even remain in place in the blue tyranny.
However, it does mean that the terms of how the Constitution is both interpreted and enforced would change dramatically.
Path of Tragedy 00:00:36
So inevitably, this darker path ends in crisis and eventually in accommodation, as I spell out in path number one, but with more tragedy and pain.
And yet there is one thing, and you can't rely on history to give you parallels or lessons, but there is one thing that history does tell us: that societies in this sort of crisis always choose the path of more tragedy and more pain.
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