On November 9, 2017, Donald John Trump defeated his Democrat challenger Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. In the process, Trump had successfully positioned himself as the legitimate successor to Barack Obama — history’s most divisive president — who fundamentally changed America by bringing it to her knees. The 44th president of the United States’ 2008 landslide victory over the Republican sacrificial lamb, John McCain, was largely attributed to his ruthless wielding of the “race card” — hedging his bets that he could unify America through force as the nation’s first black president, while the toothless, languid GOP ventured ever closer to political irrelevance during the final catastrophic year of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Indeed, Obama’s campaign strategy worked — and worked brilliantly. The year 2008 was to be an epic one for the Democrats, who were guaranteed either to elect a black man or “break the glass ceiling” with Clinton as America’s first woman president. The party wisely foresaw the greater benefits having a black president over a notoriously corrupt woman — a point which Hillary Clinton would “lament” through her condemnation of Obama’s “sexism”. Indeed, Obama flipped one influential black Republican, Colin Powell, into his camp if for no other reason than Obama stood to be America’s first black president — a point which Obama wasted no time exploiting. Similar to Trump’s victory in 2016 while failing to acquire a popular majority, if all states are included in the final 2008 Democratic presidential primary tabulations, Clinton received more popular votes than Obama. But because the women’s vote will never be slanted so much in favor of Clinton to fundamentally alter a tightly contested race in November, Obama’s capture of 95 percent of the 2008 black voter, a six-point increase from John Kerry’s 88 percent only four years before, would far more likely have shifted the balance into his favor in key swing states with massive urban black populations.
The emergence of the Occupy movement and Arab Spring, not to mention Obamacare and perpetual economic misery under Obama, ignited the destructive fires that have America on the precipice of civil war. Exploiting the shock and anger emerging from the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook (Newtown, CT) Elementary School, the former president launched his personal crusade to erode the Second Amendment. During the George Zimmerman murder trial in 2013, the president drew his firmest “red line” demarcating his ardent black nationalist animus, declaring had he had a son, “it would be Trayvon (Martin).” Repeated suppression of criticism of the Islamic world and radical Islam, only to sympathize with ISIS and Osama bin Laden’s “legitimate grievances” following 9/11, the unrelenting dodging of criticisms for his incompetence and the controversies on account of his race, deflecting the outrage surrounding the border refugee crisis, illegal executive amnesty (DACA) and transferral of Ebola patients from Africa to the U.S. paled by comparison to the ensuing chaos the “Ferguson Effect” created in America’s major cities and universities.
The Obama presidency’s balkanization of America on political lines were driven by his globalist agenda and graduated erosion of America’s border with Mexico for creating conditions conducive for a new Apartheid state. Consequently, 2016 logically resulted in the most likely conclusion for the opposition to be radically driven into uncharted ideological territory. A merger formed between a coalition of angry, disaffected social conservatives with normally “deplorable” white supremacist militias (KKK, Aryan Brotherhood, Neo-Nazis) known as the Alt-Right to create the new American far right-wing nationalism phenomenon. The rise and thirst for a populist Republican candidate — an enigmatic, charismatic, wealthy political iconoclast with the uncanny talent to charm, running a “Notoriously frugal” campaign through “earned media” — emerged in the form Trump, whose ascent from billionaire real estate tycoon to the American presidency can only be explained as the most improbable, yet innovative and greatest campaign in history based wholly on “his uncanny ability to read and react to people and to bait his foes into positions of weakness, his eagerness to accept risk, and, above all, his ability to trust his gut to navigate the race while eschewing professional guidance.” He paints himself as a successful businessman, a political outsider living the American Dream who now wants to “pay forward” — and yet appear on the outside looking in, persecuted by the media and national political establishment. He appeals to the hopelessly marginalized, disenfranchised, alienated little man, and yet his vast wealth buys him the necessary political collateral granting him political immunity while he plays to “people’s fantasies”. By remaining true to his outlandish character, the more he misbehaves, the more electoral power he acquires given publicity is never bad so long as he can sell Donald Trump to some people all of the time and others, some of the time. It is wholly unimportant for him to appeal to all the people all of the time — and he knows it.
To divide a nation is to first conquer, then rule, over its people. A common theme through sociology’s social conflict theory predating Julius Caesar by several centuries, dividing a nation along different peripheries, is best achieved by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces with individually less (“puppet states”) than the one implementing the strategy (“the puppeteer”), thereby destroying long established power structures insofar as this would prevent smaller actors jockeying for political control from forging alliances rivaling the strongest actor — and thus, fomenting discord among the masses. Machiavelli identifies a similar application to military strategy in Book VI of his own cover to The Art of War (Dell’arte della guerra), whereby a Captain must politically divide the forces of the enemy by either manufacturing new subordinates he can trust, or in providing an excuse to similarly split his forces, thus weakening it. Sun Tzu (c. 6th Century), perhaps history’s greatest military tactician, believed the best strategy for achieving victory was “To subdue the enemy without fighting....”
Sam Vaknin, the world’s leading expert on narcissism, compared both Obama and Trump as narcissists in a March 2016 interview with Arlen Williams, noting “To my mind, Trump is the most perfect example I have ever come across of a malignant and, probably, psychopathic narcissist.” A primary strategy the narcissist employs to seize and assert control is to create divisions among individuals. This strategy psychologically weakens and isolates the unsuspecting masses, making it easy for the narcissist to manipulate and dominate. Where some are blessed as “golden children,” others become scapegoated. These traits can work either in the family unit, the workplace and among large populations. Clive R. Boddy found that the “divide and conquer” strategy to be commonplace among corporate moguls who, as psychopaths, apply it as a smokescreen to help consolidate and advance their grip on power within the corporate hierarchy. James Madison recommended this strategy to Thomas Jefferson in his letter from October 24, 1787 by summarizing the thesis for The Federalist Papers #10: “Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles.” Similarly, Immanuel Kant details in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795):
- “Fac et excusa” (“Act now, and make excuses later.”)
- “Si fecisti, nega” (“When you commit a crime, deny it.”)
- “Divide et impera” (“Divide and conquer.”)
The conservative adherence to the principle of prescription, writes Russell Kirk, hinges on the belief that the individual will wisely find the permanent things in life more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night, while acknowledging, as did Edmund Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.” The symbiosis of Christianity with Western Civilization are, for Kirk, “unimaginable apart from one another.” And because “all culture arises out of religion,” any erosion to the legality of religious liberty — and subsequently, “When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief.” Furthermore, “A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society — whatever political machinery it may utilize,” writes Kirk, “while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society — no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.” To upset this balance, to separate “The Permanence of a society […] formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity” will inevitably result in “society slipping into anarchy.” Likewise, without “that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement” Kirk defines as “The Progression,” a people stagnate.
Enter James Madison (1756-1836) who as the Constitution’s chief architect focused on constructing a system of checks and balances, recognized that “of great importance in a republic [is] not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part,” whereby “Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.” Madison details in The Federalist Papers #51 how a limited democracy offsets the mob mentality by protecting “the rights of the minority” should “a majority be united by a common interest.” Because there exists “but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority — that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable,” a wise system of checks and balances heavily reliant on states’ rights can alone conserve the entire United States while assuring the colloquial characteristics for each region remain culturally true.
In today’s world dominated by globalist technocrats, a new initiative has already successfully destabilized or undermined nation-state sovereignty which, within the European Union, resulted in corrupt bargains to appoint “in all governments […] an hereditary or self-appointed authority… a power independent of the society [that] may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties.” The Democratic Party, as America’s rising socialist juggernaut, must manufacture class conflict to sow the necessary chaos to prevent the rise of any “free government” that might conserve a civil, free society’s “security for civil rights… the same as that for religious rights” for “the number of interests and sects.” Yet Madison’s most profound warning, that “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society… will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit,” will resulting in liberty’s ignominious end through “anarchy… where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves.” Thus politicians who exploit “the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government” will ultimate form or align with “some power altogether independent of the people… called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it.”
Any conquerors or dictator rising to power through civil warfare, according to Carl von Clausewitz, “always a lover of peace… (who) would like to make his entry into our state unopposed” by eliminating all possible threats from neighboring powers or political opposition. Clausewitz called on all nations to embrace “the art of war,” to “preserve” through “preparations… (to be) always armed in order not to be taken by surprise.” As Benjamin Franklin wrote prior to signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Thus the conflict between Antifa and the Alt-Right is now the great war of annihilation on multiple fronts to replace the America of De Tocqueville with an utopian design — and whose outcome we may not live to regret. We must keep our friends close, because our enemies are already taking care of themselves.
THE CONSERVATIVE HISTORICAL REVIEW 