Understanding and Embracing the Role of the 21st-Century American Dissident

written by Brent Hamachek

Recently a couple of stories have surfaced that most people are not associating with one another. In Russia, opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to Moscow after having spent several months in Germany recovering from an attempt on his life by means of the old Soviet method of poisoning. In what was almost certainly at the direction of Vladimir Putin, Navalny was arrested as he stepped off the plane.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, Russia’s opponent during the Cold War, the City of Philadelphia took the gun away from 51-year-old Police Detective Jennifer Gugger. Her “crime”? She attended the rally in Washington on January 6th. There was no indication that she was inside the Capitol, simply at the rally. She had some strong posts on social media, especially about Vice President Mike Pence, but not anything that would constitute a direct threat.

What do these two seemingly quite different people have in common? They are both dissidents. They both acted as though they had the right to say and do what they said and did. They were both mistaken. In Russia, given its history of totalitarianism, Navalny likely knew what he was getting himself into. In our country, however, where totalitarianism is in its infant stages, it is quite likely that Gugger was caught unawares.

This is going to be commonplace for many of us over the next several years as we are forced to come to grips with the fact that this is no longer the “home of the free and the land of the brave.” We can stomp our feet and deny it, we can try to act as though we don’t accept it, but it is not going to change the reality that the great American experiment that was launched just over 230 years ago is finally producing empirical results. The conclusion: People are capable of sustaining individual liberty only for as long as they can be constrained by a system of law that suppresses and contains their true nature.

Hobbes was right.

For those of us who still believe in and embrace the ideas of our founding, for those who believe that the individual and their liberty are of paramount importance and prime value, for those of us who believe that free market capitalism is the most moral and just system for organizing economic activity, we need to have an epiphany. We need to awaken to the reality that we are not a majority. We are not a vocal minority with the same rights as the majority. We are now dissidents. We do not have the same voice as our ever-strengthening oppressors, and we do not have the same rights that they enjoy.

For those who might argue that there more of us, or at least as many of us, who believe in individual liberty and free market capitalism than there are opponents to same, I would suggest that you should not confuse a simple head count with total political atomic mass. The positions within society that our opponents hold and the institutions and machinery they control gives them leverage beyond simple membership numbers.

As to our being cast in the role of dissidents, we have no choice. How we conduct ourselves in that role will be the difference between having a chance over the long term to ultimately prevail or having to spend a century or more under the totalitarian’s thumb. We need to understand the role we are in, the most effective course of action we can take, and above all, we must understand and accept our limitations. A failure to understand and accept the latter will only deepen and prolong our subjugation.

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This is NOT about an election

Understandably, there has been a great deal of focus on the events that have happened since this past November 3. Probably half the country feels as though the reelection of President Trump was stolen through some combination of China, Dominion, corrupt state and local election officials, and overzealous volunteers. I have addressed that issue in a separate piece entitled “Why They Cheat.” This treatise is not about that. In fact, there is a way in which the election of November 2020 was completely irrelevant in terms of what has happened to transform the United States.

There is a myth that political events happen in cycles or that there is some sort of swinging political pendulum that goes too far one way and then overcorrects to the other. People make this mistake because they confuse election results and prevailing political parties with directional changes for the nation. While it is true that election results can swing from cycle to cycle, and while there has been a historical back-and-forth regarding the occupant of the White House, the actual direction of the country in terms of diminishing individual liberty has been consistent over the past one hundred years.

Said mathematically, if the X axis is time and the Y axis represents level of liberty, we have been steadily descending toward the X axis for a very long time. We are now about to test the limit function.

In less than twelve months, we have hit three inflection points along that downward-sloping line that have led to its descent at an ever-increasing rate. The first was the advent of the Chinese coronavirus that made people susceptible to government control and allowed governments to gain control. It also instilled in us the willingness to, leading to reveling in, the turning in of our neighbor.

The second was the incident involving George Floyd, which tapped into an individual’s notion of shame and triggered a societally conditioned need for self-sacrifice (altruism). Millions of people came to feel they somehow had to surrender something, anything, to right a social wrong that was identified with catchphrases such as social justice, police brutality, and black lives matter.

The third was the rally in Washington D.C. on January 6th, which provided a visual image that could justify having to silence our speech, remove us from our positions, and generally limit our freedom in order to “protect us from unruly and dangerous elements.”

Over a period of less than twelve months, the American “body politik” was given a mainline injection of an emotional cocktail that included fear, guilt, dependency, revenge, anger, class struggle, oppression, and even empowerment (for those joining the “cause”). We created what Charlie Kirk calls “micro tyrants”, people of normally limited status who by virtue of their position were able to exercise authority over others (wear your mask, keep your distance, and so on). These were people used to feeling of limited significance who were suddenly given the ability to be part of something bigger. Something that was moving. Something that had force.

Of all the factors, fear has probably been the primary driver. Politicians and the media have stoked the public’s fear masterfully. Fear of the Chinese coronavirus, fear of riots, fear of insurrection, fear of their neighbor, fear of just about everything. Fear is what triggers the basic fight-or-flight response in humans. In a crisis of an instant, that instinct can save our lives. Living in fear for a protracted period of time, however, can destroy our psyche and take away nearly everything that makes us a rational, skeptical being.

We made victim status—a sought-for attribute often contrived, which has been gaining membership and momentum for over thirty years—something that brought with it not only an entitlement to get from others, but now an entitlement to outright take from them. At the heart of this is, as it has been for millennia, the attack on private property. You have too much. You acquired it unjustly. You exploited others in the process of acquiring it. These arguments are as old as man himself, but they have taken on a new sort of tone in 2lst-century America.

We also created a new way for humans to group together and exploit other humans through what Victor Davis Hanson has termed the Zoom/Skype class and the muscular class. This conflict is between the people who get to sit at home in comfort during the Chinese coronavirus and the real men and women out there doing the work that needs to be done to keep the country fed, warmed, cooled, etc. This has led to a feeling of empowerment on the part of the Zoom/Skype class over those in the muscular class and feeds the inclination to control and subject.

All of these seemingly disparate elements have one unifying theme. They are all hostile to individual liberty and free market capitalism. The hostility to these twin towers of American exceptionalism was present and steadily increasing over the course of several generations. All the events of the past year did was to hasten their receding into the shadows and being replaced by groups of people wanting to make collective decisions for all, and with a group of citizens receptive to having them make those decisions.

That leaves those of us who still believe in both the ideas of individual liberty that are codified in our Constitution and in the virtue of free market capitalism as threats to the new order that has been forming.

That makes us dissidents.

For anyone who holds to the notion that if only Donald Trump had won the election, none of this would be happening, check your premises. Look what has happened in this country over the past four years while Donald Trump was president! This is much bigger than one man or any one party. This is historical in nature and involves over 200 years of continuous cause and effect.

People who are learned in history like to point out that our Founding Fathers were inspired by the likes of Aristotle, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith. These were all great thinkers whose ideas, when joined together, led our Founders to design a country that would enable the freedom of man, freedom they felt was man’s natural state, to take hold in virtually every aspect of their daily lives. It is fair to say that without these philosophers, America might have existed, but it would not have existed as designed to promote so much individual freedom. To promote the best hopes for man.

Regarding that design, there was another element. It is true that our Founders took their inspiration from the great natural law thinkers of the Enlightenment. It is just as true that they had read that most foreboding of pre-Enlightenment thinkers, the Englishman Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who wrote his seminal piece, Leviathan, in the early 17th century, warned of man’s true nature, that of a fearful moral relativist, who was incapable of living civilly without the oversight of a strong monarch.

Our Founders wanted nothing to do with a strong monarch, but they took Hobbes seriously. They built such a complex system of government with so many fail-safes to protect us from ourselves that they hoped it would be able to contain our nature.

However, give a madman locked in a stone-walled room a heavy-duty spoon and enough time and he will find a way to dig through the walls. After 200-plus years, human nature in America has escaped its Constitutional walls. There are many of us who want to put the beast back inside.

We are now called dissidents.
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