A thought experiment:
Had George Washington found himself in President Trump’s predicament—elite intelligence officers cooperating to frame him for “treason” and overthrow his administration—Washington likely would have unleashed armageddon.
In the old days, criminals got due process. Insurrectionists and rebels got the nearest horizontal piece of timber.
As the insurrectionists slowly strangled to death, Washington would have reminded his hearers that the British crown would love to return and do the same to every last one of them, so they had better get their heads straight.
Washington was a mild man by all accounts, but he was unflinching when it came to maintaining command and crushing disorder. He knew from experience the perils of hierarchical collapse.
I miss the old days.
Americans in 2019 lack the visceral fear of social derangement bred into their forefathers. The United States has thrived in domestic peace since the Civil War and domestic prosperity since the Depression.
A multi-generational dearth of experience–combined with a shocking ignorance of less stable societies around the world–have resulted in delusional complacency about social chaos.
The WWII veterans utterly failed to communicate to their Boomer children the wages of anarchy, the staggering atrocities and deprivation they witnessed in Europe as the German Reich crumbled: roving bands of starving orphans, cannibalism, patrician women prostituting themselves to stay alive, revenge murders, epidemics.
The 1960s produced a generation who thought anarchy meant we all would live on communes, pull beets shoulder to shoulder, and go to Woodstock. Who needs order? Who needs The Man and his law? We’ll all just love one another and be free!
And so three generations have grown used to viewing lawful authority as somehow incompatible with “democracy.” They have conflated “order” with oppression.”
I’m afraid coming events may remind those alive today of how precious social stability is.
https://www.redstate.com/diary/ClintFargeau/2019/12/12/what-would-george-washington-do/
 |
| Actual photo of a pillory in a Delaware prison in 1907 |