A Small Revolution by Jeff Deist

[Music] [Music] I recently had the good fortune to interview a gentleman named dr. Yoram Mazzoni dr. ozoni is an American originally but he's now an Israeli he lives not in trendy tel-aviv he actually lives in Jerusalem he's an Orthodox Jew he has nine kids and there's a word for that or phrase for that called skin in the game dr. Arizona has a new book out called the virtue of nationalism and I had heard quite a bit about this book and I went out and got it and read it and I was particularly interested in it because it contains some references to both the aforementioned friedrich hayek and also one of our own mentors at the Mises Institute ludwig von mises and so while I disagreed with portions of the book especially his characterizations I think of what Hayek and Mises would think of of modern nation-states and and their characterization or thought of what what a liberal society liberal in the good sense when a liberal society would look like although I disagree with it somewhat I really really enjoyed the book and I really enjoyed interviewing him and one of the great points that he makes in the book is that for a lot of the world liberalism as we think of it Western social democracy is a form of imperialism it's a form of neocolonialism just as much as it was when we went to India England went to Indian told them how to structure their government with a parliament or when certain countries went to Nigeria and took their diamonds this is a form of neocolonialism or neo imperialism and more importantly it's a form of hubris right if we think about it because conservatives liberals socialists even libertarians all of them have their own Universalist ideas their own notions of universal precepts political and otherwise that ought to apply across national boundaries that actually even ought to a cry apply across time because you now see criticisms of let's say Christopher Columbus by modern liberal standards so I think universalism is bunk and I think more than that it's hubris and so to the extent that dr. ho's oneis book makes that point it's it's very important one to make and sometimes we forget that while those of us who are anti-war and ant intervention think of the US federal government as it's an imperial force of sorts with respect to the rest of the world we forget it's also DC is also Imperial with respect to the states right it is every bit as much an empire over the states and ruling them in an illegal fashion as it is let's say some of the Middle Eastern countries it occupies and so when it comes to this idea of universalism I saw a great tweet the other day I'm sure some of you know an awesome Talib he's the author of the Black Swan which was a very famous book about crashes and and certainty and probability and risk he's a brilliant guy and he's very much a contrarian which I enjoy and so he tweeted something to this effect he said if I had to describe my politics it would be this say that I'm libertarian at the federal level I'm Republican at the state level I'm a Democrat at the local level and I'm a socialist at the family and friends level and I thought that that was really an interesting take because more and more I'm starting to think that localism is the answer for those of us who care about Liberty because if you look at the last election the last national presidential election it takes about 70 million people to vote for your candidate to win the presidency in the United States and that's a pretty big enchilada so I'm not confident about the idea that Roth Barty and libertarianism is going to necessarily prevail among 71 million Americans at least in the near future so a small revolution why small why do I advocate a small revolution well first and foremost I think has been discussed earlier today I think smaller policies are better policies and we'll get to that in a moment but also small in the sense that I think there are actually a million small incremental almost invisible subtle steps that could be taken along the way to making us freer that don't necessarily take the form of a mechanical secession or a war or all kinds of things that were discussed earlier today you know there are a lot of problems and I'm the first to admit although I'm a big advocate of session there are a lot of problems with with some of the the issues we're talking about today in terms of mechanical or technical solutions to breaking up as for whether we're on the verge of a civil war a hot shooting war I don't know I certainly hope we don't and I don't like it when people speak about it in a flip manner I think that's really evil and I think that's also a symbol of a very soft society that's never had real material hardship we're not the same as our great-grandparents who labor through the Great Depression we're not as tough as they are let's not kid ourselves we virtually everyone in this room has woken up every day with hot and cold running water some sort of decent habitation over their head probably a vehicle food in the refrigerator etc so we shouldn't kid ourselves about our toughness and shooting and killing people I think that's that's dangerous but more importantly it's predictive the next thirty years the amount of Americans over 65 is going to double so usually revolutionary societies or younger societies and I think if we're gonna have a hot shooting where it's gonna have to be the Millennials who are now starting to enter their 30s and 40s have gonna have to be pretty soon if it doesn't happen pretty soon we're probably going to slide in some sort of managed Jarrett ah cracy of sorts but there are some other mechanical technical problems one is you you've got vast federal lands throughout the West especially it's not that easy to break them up we have a military which has lots of bases and personnel in places like California we of course have the national debt which was discussed earlier we have an entitlement system which is vast and and so these are problems that would have to be worked out but what other types of revolution could take place what other ways could we sort of secede from the current status quo from the federal government well I would say there are quite a few of them and if we want to look to the blueprint for how this might happen although it would be damnably slow and talking speaking of Jericho see we'd all be gone perhaps but we don't need to look any farther than our progressive friends some of you may know that Garrett Garrett he was a journalist in the around the turn of the century I think I believe he was born in the 1850s and lived into about the 1930s and he was a writer in the era and in the same voice and manner perhaps as HL Mencken and one of the concepts he talked about as a as a really strong critic of FDR in the New Deal was something called a revolution within the form and a revolution within the form is something that our progressive friends have absolutely mastered and they especially did so over the twentieth century and even what we called the beginning of the Progressive Era beginning in the 1880s so a revolution within the form is when the names or the forms of some things change or excuse me when the names are the forms of something stay the same like the Constitution and the 9th and 10th amendment so it all stays the same they don't get abolished but the meanings of things radically change like for instance the Commerce Clause which was mentioned earlier today well it took a pretty convoluted court decision to say well because you're you're you're growing something domestically within a state you're not buying it in other states so that affects interstate commerce that's a stretch to put it mildly but nonetheless that's the that's an example of a revolution within the form and really all of what passes as constitutionalism today represents a revolution within the form nobody thought during the 1780s that Supreme Court jurisprudence that Court cases would supplant the Constitution itself there was always going to be a difference whereas today we say well the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is and that was never intended and of course that's not true but nonetheless we have revolutions within the form and we can go back to it really as late or as as recently as the 1880s the sherman antitrust period represented a huge change in how America went about business and you fast forward a little bit we get into all kinds of progressive revolutions in the 20th century in the United States we get into something the creation of a central bank in the Federal Reserve an absolutely revolutionary institution we get an income tax we get a couple of progressive world wars of choice I don't like the term convenience but in a sense they were Wars of convenience as a matter of fact the New Republic magazine which was found in 1914 one of its first tasks it was kind of an unholy state military corporate nexus magazine it still exists the New Republic was formed in part to gin up support for US entry into World War one because of stubborn Americans about sixty percent of whom had some German ancestry weren't necessarily thrilled about the idea of going to war with their first cousins so we needed the New Republic to come along and explain to us why this was an important thing for America to do that's a revolution within the form then of course we have the New Deal we have FDR which results in Social Security retirement insurance we have a series of Supreme Court cases that obliterate the Lochner era they're what we call the locked era that obliterate the idea of economic substantive due process we fast-forward a little bit farther into the 1960s we get the LBJ entitlement period the Great Society we get things like Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and AFDC all of these things wildly of course extra-constitutional wildly beyond the power of Congress to to enact under article 1 section 8 but nonetheless these revolutionary things are accepted by the majority of Americans because they take place these revolutions occur within the form of what we're used to the Congress and the Senate and voting and elections and all these silly things so that ultimately of course progressives were in the culture wars and they come to dominate the twentieth century in a way that we don't even really fully understand even as we live in it because progressivism is so dominant in our culture that it's kind of like it's like the furniture or the potted plants it's all around us everything we say and do takes place within the framework of the debate as they've said it so basically progressives spent the 20th century getting everything they wanted but they're never satisfied are they they're never satiated there's always something more it never ends and of course the past is always retrograde and sinister the few sure is always better if only if only those pesky human beings would evolve a little bit and get with the program they keep hanging around longer than we think and the election of Trump shocked the you know one out of them because it turns out there's more deplorable x' hanging around in society than they thought brexit had a similar effect in the united kingdom so what happened was on the election day in 2016 we had this very sort of facile narrative you know that election was decided really by six swing states that Trump won which Obama had won just four years previously Ohio Pennsylvania Florida Wisconsin Michigan in Iowa and really three of those six would have been enough just Wisconsin Iowa and Michigan just those three states would have been enough for Trump to prevail and the difference in votes between Trump and Hillary in the in those three states was only about 75,000 people and if you take all six states the difference in in actual raw votes was only about half a million people so imagine because of half a million people in a country of 320 million people we woke up the day after the 2016 election and had this profoundly different narrative in the media because if Hillary Clinton had won the narrative would have gone something like this well of course the progressive arc is inevitable it was her time Americans were America's a center-left country and Americans are too smart to fall for this flim-flam real estate conman and of course you know just as polls predicted Hillary Clinton was the wise choice in the whole world reflects this and you know progressivism precedes a pace that would have been the narrative that the the narrative of inevitability the arc of progressivism that we've been sold throughout the 20th century but instead we woke up to this to this narrative because of a half a million people's votes oh my god America it turns out is this deeply regressive retrograde even racist country with these Reds eight people who were voting for this guy who was clearly unfit and they clearly rejected reason and common sense and then this sparkling charisma of Hillary Clinton so why did they do this why did they do this well I wish it had more meaning than perhaps it does but I'm an optimist that way I think the meaning of Trump has nothing to do with the man or his policies or his cabinet or what he says this day or that day or his tweets I think it represents as did Briggs it the beginning of the great pushback and I hope it's the beginning of something more I truly do okay and that pushback is not necessarily ideological it's not ideological in the sense that I would want it to be in terms of my own perspective and that's okay because something had to change that's what's the meaning of Trump and here we are after being just abused beaten like a rented mule for the twentieth century to even hear libertarians at my camp not understand the Trump phenomenon galls me to no end it really does I had to get that out there so let's have a thought experiment some of you may have heard me discuss this before but this is one of my favorite thought experience and I've tried this in front of left-wing college students I've tried it in front of libertarian audiences and economics audiences college campuses around the country and I really enjoy it let's take a tale of two regions okay the first one we'll call the wonderful republic of Switzerland okay how many people in this room have heard of Ln there say does that name ring a bell al amber say see you were all able to wake up unencumbered by the knowledge that Alam Bear say is the president of Switzerland the reason you don't know who the president of Switzerland is it because doesn't much matter they have a six-member excuse me a seven-member Federal Council and they rotate those seven members rotate the presidency is just one year so in Switzerland there are approximately 26 Canton's which which are the states so to speak of Switzerland and then they call the cities communes so what's so interesting to me is that if you go to the Swiss government's website which of course is helpfully an Italian French English German etc if you go to the Swiss government's website they have a section on federalism and in that section they even talk about they say well other than military matters and that managing the Swiss franc our policy is to move everything down to either the cantonal or the communal level as much as possible in other words we defer to them and our jobs to do as little as possible and unlike here where you send about 80 80 cents of every dollar in taxes the Fed gov and maybe the other 22 your state unless you're fortunate enough to live in Texas Texas gets you in other ways in in Switzerland if that's kind of flipped you send the majority of your taxes to your communal government less so to the cantonal government and very little to the federal government and what's more is on the Swiss government website website they even talk about we think federalism as a principle is effective in assisting with social cohesion imagine that imagine Trump or Hillary campaigning a couple of years ago and being in Des Moines Iowa one day and saying you know we don't really know what's best for Iowa we never lived here it's sort of agricultural but you know what we're gonna do is I my campaign promise to you is to allow the Iowa government or better yet your county or local government the greatest degree of freedom possible and the federal government will Uncle Sam won't be much involved no but our national politicians do the exact opposite they wade into places like Des Moines Iowa and did didn't some staffer just briefed them 10 minutes ago by oh my god this flyover place I got to go to and they gave them some goofy facts and so they go in there and presume you know perfect knowledge we're gonna we're gonna create a health care system for 320 million people we're gonna we're gonna go remake Afghanistan in the image of the University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson somehow I mean this is hubris folks but it's also universalism and and what strikes me about reading Yoram his own ease book that I mentioned earlier was that what is starting to become every bit as important as as the idiom the ideologies or the the politics of how we're governed is the level at which we are governed in other words this this questions almost become more important than left versus right or liberal versus conservative so I really think the Swiss have it right and as an example of this in Switzerland people at the local communal level can even go and vote and have a say on whether a longtime resident can become a citizen the the Swiss immigration process is very difficult and very time-consuming but can you imagine after you've been there as a resident working hard in your job for about ten years you people who actually know you and your local community could go so oh yes I think so and so should be made a should be allowed citizenship they're very hard-working they're a great great person you know respected trusted in the community that sounds bizarre to us but the why should it be so it seems to me a good way to go so let's contrast that and by the way Switzerland's about eight million people so it's maybe a little bit beyond the five million but nonetheless eight million people is plenty big enough plenty big enough to do all kinds of things including having a very capable system of national offense that's aided by some mountainous trade but nonetheless a very capable system of national defense on which they do not spend the stupid amounts of money that we do to have aircraft carriers which would new you much good I suppose an Alpine setting but let's take it another region that's not so fortunate as whitson let's take the San Francisco Bay Area an area I've had the pleasure to live in and it's very beautiful it has a lot of national geography and things going for it but at wore me down it wore me down to a nub to talk to people who had the mindset and the mentality the average person in San Francisco my wife absolutely lost her mind our our son was little at the time she absolutely lost her mind going to the playground and everything every day I mean it was just unbelievable you know because of the playground for all of their talk there's an astonishing number of Hispanic nannies rather than actual moms at the playground and so you have all these Hispanic nannies taking care of the kids and the kids are all named Cooper and Madison and Ashley and you know there's no Jose or Mike's or anything but this is this is how things are so San Francisco Bay Area is about 7 million people and it consists of nine counties and these counties in pure politics are actually very homogeneous as homogeneous is you might want to get for a region of that size and again with with 7 million people clearly capable of being a country on its own now those 7 million people voted overwhelmingly for people like Nancy Pelosi Dianne Feinstein etc for Barack Obama they also voted overwhelmingly not to recall governor Gray Davis if you'll remember that a special election a few years ago that resulted in Arnold's forcing there's only a nominal Republican of being put into office so this is deep blue country folks as a matter of fact Marin County which is on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge is limousine liberal Central that's where the former Senator Barbara Boxer lives I mean this is one of the most grossly hypocritical parts of the country when it comes to NIMBYism for example Steven Spielberg has his Studios there and there are a lot of people who live in Marin County who are very glad that the BART the underground does not go across the Golden Gate Bridge there's a lot of people who live in Marin County who are very happy that a low-income housing project that was going to be put in near Steven Spielberg's studios was rejected by the city of nevados council etc so they like the poor in the abstract let's just say but what if we allowed those nine counties those 7 million people those deep blue progressives tab everything they wanted right here right now no more waiting what if they could have highly progressive income tax rates really tax the hell out of let's say incomes over one hundred two hundred thousand whatever it might be let's say they could even have a wealth tax on just net wealth above a certain level let's say right here right now they could institute a single-payer health care system in those counties what if they could make education especially higher education free just make it free the University of Berkeley would be included Stanford would be included may come free you'd get a lot of applicants what if right here right now they could have the kind of relaxed abortion laws that they would overwhelmingly favor what if they could have it's very strict perhaps even outright prohibitions on firearms ownership and as a matter of fact anyone in this room who knows the work of Brian McClanahan he'll tell you nobody thought the Second Amendment applied to States it doesn't apply to States it didn't federalize gun laws I should say nobody at the time of their ratification the Second Amendment thought it applied to States so they could have gun control right here right now they could have open borders with other parts of the country or or with the seaport that they controlled they could have hate speech laws and codes put people in jail for saying bad things they could have whatever sort of protections we might call them neo civil liberties for LGBTQ folks that they wanted to have in other words it would be entirely up to those nine counties to do so and more importantly and I really mean this they would never want they would no longer have to worry about a Senate race a US Senate race let's say in my home state now of Alabama they wouldn't have to worry about Roy Moore okay Roy Moore wouldn't be the one calling the shots the only the only relationship they would have with the federal government if they were a lot more like a Swiss Communist was kenta would be sort of military defense and the dollars that they used as run by the Fed so who in this room would object to it I mean I haven't found anybody anywhere I've been that objects to this idea young people black people white people conservatives liberals it just seems to be common sensical to people the San Francisco Bay Area ought not to have to govern itself by the same rules as a Byrne Alabama does so why do we persist with this what is it in the American psyche that makes us is it manifest destiny is this idea of westward expansion which I think was actually a bad idea we had a Louisiana Purchase then you know ultimately we'd come up with this nice round number of 50 states including implausibly Alaska which is not even connected to the United States and really it ought to be part of Canada I think and then Hawaii which was just a nice let's face it a refueling stop for our military so we took over a rightful Kingdom and I visit Hawaii a couple times the last few years they're not real big fans of Maine lenders I can tell you that much and there's a huge Hawaiian secession movement they have a lot of internal fighting over who's a real Hawaiian but but beyond that there are plenty of people in Hawaii who don't much like Uncle Sam so why should this be so why should we be forced to live as one not necessarily in terms of getting rid of the federal government or seceding but even in terms of localism well I think the short answer for progressives was that they were winning right why should we just have San Francisco and the coast went pretty soon we'll have it all okay well that's as a political or pragmatic matter that's a pretty good argument we're winning all this secession and federalism and states rights and localism talk that's for losers am i right but then something happened and it started to shake this arc of inevitability and I think one of the first real tremors in that was the crash of 2007-2008 because we've been told that the technocratic bureaucrats the regulators of our money had it all together and we weren't gonna have these crashes anymore remember we'd also been told by Francis Fukuyama that we were upon the end of history and that Western liberal social democracy was going to prevail everywhere we were told there weren't gonna be more booms and busts that there weren't going to be more complications that nationalism was dead well the crash of 2008 sort of shook that narrative and it made a lot of people start to wonder about these technocratic elites and then breaks it comes along and shakes up a lot of people in Europe saying wait a minute this European project this was cast in stone we thought what's going on here and then Trump Trump gets elected and all the sudden people wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats because they thought that a certain narrative was unfolding in front of them you know inexorably and it turns out it's not inexorable it turns out that people are stubborn animals that nations sometimes can be stubborn things and then in fact if you agree with Murray Rothbard as I do nations can be very different things than states in other words nations can be natural they can be organic they can be things that arise spontaneously in a sense in the marketplace as a result of things that are imposed by politicians writing Geographic lines oftentimes after the end results of wars and so as Americans we're really bad at history we don't care about history forget world history even our own so we imagine that the way things are is the way they always will be and that goes with to the 50 states it goes to the lines on the map but we forget sometimes in our lack of knowledge and our in our lack of information that America is a relatively new country I heard a commentator on the radio talking the other day about how the Chinese still view us kind of as a start-up when it comes to geopolitics they're kind of waiting around buying their time to see if we make it or not okay and let's not forget that much of what we call Western Europe today has radically redrawn lines that that just came out of World War two those lines were very very different just a little more than a hundred years ago let's look at the former Yugoslavia which was broken up into six countries in about him in about a tenth of the time it took him - yeah more about brexit my god this bridge that thing is still going on so we imagine because we're dumb and because we're misinformed we imagine that things will always be as they've been forever and ever and I think that's really the hope the idea that some of these small revolutions which are very very difficult to defeat by government because people just want them will turn into big revolutions and what I hope what I seriously and stridently hope for myself and of course for my own kids and maybe someday grandkids is that these small revolutions are bloodless thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Abbeville Inst

Views: 1,270

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: Abbeville Institute, Jeff Deist, Secession, Nullification, Mises Institute

Id: d67do3iv68Q

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2018