Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The week after the election, I was very disappointed in an acquaintance that I both like and respect intellectually. As I was saying that if we let this election stand, the republic is gone, he said if our institutions were already corrupt enough to let this stand, the republic has been gone a long time, perhaps our whole life.

I was angry, because well…. Because I prefer people spit out the black pill. Sure, maybe the game is rigged, but as RAH put it, if you don’t bet you can’t win.

As it turns out, we were both right, but mostly wrong.

You see, I’d forgotten—as I’m sure he has too—who the sacred ruler of these United States is.

Before I go into that, let me take a detour. As most of you know, I was a bookish child raised in Europe. Well, in the romantic, daft portion of Europe, which is better and worse. Particularly in the North of Portugal, a land of mists and crazy people, legends are very important. And being a bookish child, of a fantastic disposition, and the child of a man obsessed with legends and the past, I have heard about a million variations of the “The King Comes Back” story.

Heck, one of my favorite stories growing up, consumed in every form I could find it was Robin Hood (The liberals have him all wrong. He was, quite obviously, the first tax rebel.) Though that story, as history, is a bit confused as Richard the Lion Heart had…. as they say zee issues and his brother John Lackland was actually a pretty good steward. But history written by winners, etc.

Anyway, most of “The king comes back” or “the sleeper wakens” are based on older, much older stories. It wasn’t unusual for a king to have to go away, particularly when like the king of Itaca, their kingdom was kind of small, and they plowed their own lands. I mean there was business and stuff that called the householder/king away from home and you know travel had to be hazardous in those days.

While the king was away, his servants and underlings had a merry time, and when the king came home, he had to set things back in order.

This is related of course to “the sleeper wakens” which tended to be what the stories turned into when the king didn’t come home, and the righteous subjects needed to dream of a rescue.

Most kings, of course, at least after the Neolythic were no good, and wastrels, and all that, which is why we kicked them out. Oh, there was the occasional good one, in a string of f*ckers. And unlike Heinlein I’m not convinced proper breeding would fix that. It’s not the genes, it’s the behavior and the checks on that that makes the just king. Or ruler. Or whatever the heck. Which is why I will write later on why letting the franchise slip away is a very bad thing, perhaps the worst thing. (For example, we need do no more than look at Europe which has transferred all its power to unelected bureaucrats on purpose (shakes head.))

But the important thing here is that “when the good king/responsible householder goes away/falls asleep, his servants become corrupt and abuse the people” is, as far as history is concerned day ending in y, or year ending in a number. (Or in real old times, in some kind of name.) It’s the normal course of events.

And of course, the fault is ours doubly: one, because we forgot we were the king of this land. And two, because we fell asleep.

The fault of the first is, ultimately, the education system which has been taken over for a long time by a cabal of our enemies. (And people who think themselves superior, which most teachers do, though perhaps never as unwarrantedly as in the late twentieth/early twenty first centuries, are unlikely to teach the sovereignty of the common man.) And the second, well… World War Two after the shock of the depression (More on both later) made people inexplicably believe the government was competent to look after everyone. (A good thing to consider here, is that at the time “scientific” governance was all the rage. I don’t think this myth lasts very long.) And we were prosperous. Very prosperous. We’re not the first sovereign to be lured by his pleasures and his wealth into not minding the kingdom. Fortunately it’s not irreversible.

Also, fortunately, We The People were not a dissolute king, not at bottom. Except for those “disloyal servants, who have been eating out our worth” we retained enough ability not to be tempted by the really crazy sh*t. Or at least we retained a core of horse-sense. No, we are not the hardest-working people in the world, but study after study has proven we are the most efficiently-working people in the world. We are also, despite the (willfull?) corruption of our education, quite competent, thank you. And as I pointed out in 2016, people offered a choice between a party who was screaming they’d given them things, and one candidate saying “we’ll create jobs” chose the jobs. This sovereign is not an air-dreamer, or completely out of touch with reality or his roots.

Then there is the fact that after five generations of communist indoctrination, after four intensive years of denigrating the guy who brought jobs back, after endless beat downs, starting in infancy, on how we and our country are the worst, people hunched their shoulders and voted for Trump in such numbers that the commies had to emergency-fraud (this beyond their well oiled fraud machine, or as the potted plant put it, “the most inclusive and largest fraud network”? was it?) in front of G-d and everyone to get the commies in.

This is not an addled and defeated king. This is a king who fell asleep for a while; has just woken up; is a bit confused, but is ultimately, quite capable for his duties and his throne. He’s a little disoriented now, having just woken up, over the last three years, so be patient. (These things always take longer than we expect them to!)

But in the end, the story is clear: when the good king comes home and he is GOOD—and we are, despite everything—he sets his own house in order and he prevails. (See Ulysses, Itaca, probably a codifying of much, much older stories, and a sort of prototype.)

Which means the Republic isn’t lost. Not while We The People remain. It might be temporarily mislaid, but only because we’ve been absent/asleep.

Not saying that it won’t be a little while before we take up the throne and set things to rights. (Look, the thing is that the left is daft and their minds almost virgin of history. They don’t understand that they’re a lot closer to the Nazis than to the commie regimes, and the nazis only lasted 11 years by constant invasions of other lands. Even if we wanted to take that way, we can’t. There aren’t—particularly after the covidiocy—any lands even as close to our wealth. Socialism, national or international, is a parasite, it only works by stealing from other lands. And yeah, the commies, USSR and China lasted longer but admittedly that was because our elites fed them/gave them special deals/helped them survive. And even so, they still had to parasite/steal from other lands. The other thing is that they think we are Russian barefoot peasants, or completely downtrodden Chinese. Instead they’re dealing with—by the grace of G-d—spoiled Americans, where even our lower middle class are used to, by global standards, living like kings. They/we will not take the deprivations of communism. Particularly not communism that we didn’t choose, and which can’t be fed by cannibalizing other lands.)

In other words, yeah, things might get pretty bad for a couple/three years. But in the end? The king of this land is awake and has come home. And we all know how the rest of this story goes. WE ALL KNOW.

Square your shoulders. Be not afraid. In the end, we win, they lose.

Remember you’re Americans. We The People are the sovereign of this land. We’ve been asleep, but now we’re wide awake.

This only ends one way

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for December 29, 2020