December 21, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The Real Meaning of
Impeachment:
My Essay at The Intellectual Takeout
Friends,
Another Website has begun to run some of my columns, and I am
honored to mention them. That site, The Intellectual Takeout,
is a program of The Charlemagne
Institute, whose motto is: “Defending and Advancing Western Civilization.”
The Charlemagne Institute sponsors three initiatives:
1) The premier
American journal of traditional conservatism, Chronicles magazine (for which I have written
several articles during 2018-2019);
2) The Alcuin Internships, annual paid ten-week programs geared “to college seniors, including
seminars with thought-leaders from around the country, to discuss topics like
virtue, the history of conservatism, the roots of the Western intellectual
tradition, and Christianity’s role in shaping the West”; and
3) The Intellectual
Takeout (ITO), “a website and social media network
popular with Millennials and younger Americans. Its mission is to challenge the
intellectual and secular orthodoxies of today. The program covers a wide
variety of topics from metaphysics to daily life, culture, and politics. Each
year, we publish over 2,000 articles which are viewed by over 9 million
readers. Via social media, ITO's content is viewed roughly 150 million times a
year.”
The first essay that The Intellectual Takeout has selected to
publish is my piece. “The Historic Impeachment Vote: The End of the Democratic
Charade?,” which first appeared on December
18. The ITO version has been substantially edited and it is that version
appearing on their Website.
I pass it on today:
The Historic Impeachment Vote: The End of the
Democratic Charade?
Boyd Cathey | December 18, 2019
On December 19, 2019, the Democratic majority in
the House of Representatives will vote to approve Articles of Impeachment
against President Donald Trump and agree to send them to the U.S. Senate. It
will be only the third formal impeachment of a president in American history
– the other two being that of President Andrew Johnson in the post-war
1860s and of President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.
As everyone knows by now, the Senate will, after the
formality of most likely a brief trial, vote down the two articles, and that
will be that.
Or will it?
Given that almost certain outcome, why, then, have the
frenzied denizens of the left proceeded in this manner, knowing the outcome?
The answers – there are several – have
already been widely given, and the major ones are:
1. Extreme
pressure from the hysterical “social justice warrior” foot soldier base of the
Democratic Party which continues to grow in strength and threaten incumbents
who do not toe the line.
2. Demands by
the powerful mainstream media, whose ranks are now cluttered by zealously
indoctrinated former journalism students whose thinking and outlook were formed
in our universities by their teachers – I should say “polluted” by our
post-Marxist academic oligarchs (aka professors).
3. The certain
political use of the issue in the upcoming 2020 election.
Of course, the overarching rubric for all of this is
an unrestrained and all-consuming hatred for Donald Trump (and his voters), and
the concomitant desire, at all cost and by whatever means, to expel him from
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. No measure, no tactic, no weapon is out of bounds,
and that includes what in effect is the virtual destruction of what is left of
the American Constitution itself.
President Trump, for all his foibles and U-turns,
despite some misfires in foreign policy, and despite his major mistake of
placing in positions of power around him those – including Republican
hacks and those whose loyalty is dubious at best – who wish him to fail
and wish him harm…despite that, he has done an immense service to the creaky old
American republic. He has pulled the mask off of the “Deep State”
administrative and managerial bureaucratic Establishment. The Deep
State has basically governed this country as its own private fiefdom for
decades, with utter disdain and condescension for the rest of us…for us
“deplorables” and “irredeemables,” to use Hillary Clinton’s oft-quoted
language.
In certain ways, President Trump is not the real
target here. His role has been far more symbolic and emblematic of something
going on, something far more fearful to the elites so accustomed to running
this country. It is something that he may be only vaguely aware of; and it is
happening not just in the weary old United States, but also in Europe, in
Brazil, and elsewhere. It is the rise of a popular reaction – a populist
conservatism which rejects both the dominant establishment left and the
“don’t-rock-the-boat” establishment conservative movement (and Republican
Party). It is, to paraphrase Gilbert & Sullivan, the rejection of the
“tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum” of our politics. It is also the realization,
perhaps only vaguely, that the historic liberties and traditions, the historic
moral codes of behavior, and the traditional beliefs upon which our
civilization is based have been progressively perverted and decimated by a
century of constant and ongoing revolution from the top, extended into every
aspect of our lives.
Too many of our fellow citizens believe that all we
have to do is tune into Fox News or vote for the GOP candidate to staunch and
halt the Revolution. That is not sufficient. In fact, in some cases such
devotion only abets and enables the forces of Revolution, as too many
newscasters and pundits at Fox and too many Republican politicians are too
deeply invested in the Neoconservative wing of the Deep State. Of course, there
are exceptions, with Tucker Carlson, in some cases, as it were, getting
“outside the box” and speaking truth to power. But even he must mind his “p’s
and q’s.”
Thus, “the man with the orange hair” has to be
stopped. Not so much because of who he is, but because of
the extreme danger he symbolizes and means for the future of
what can only be called the increasingly totalitarian globalist template. And
that template is a dystopian nightmare far more demonic than anything George
Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four) or Arthur Koestler (Darkness At Noon)
ever contemplated in their literary works. Or, by Russian film director Nikita
Mikhalkov in his chilling cinematic masterpiece about the insanity of
Stalinism, Burnt by the Sun (1994).
At base, then, this is what this charade called an
impeachment is all about. It is an effort not just against Donald Trump, but
against any and everyone who voted for him. Against all of those who dissent
from the ongoing policies of and control by the Deep State. Against all those
who have realized or begun to realize that what we stare in the face is not
Jerry Nadler or Adam Schiff, but a “rough beast” (to use William Butler Yeats’
term) of satanic proportions. This beast is intent on our extinction and
the enthronement of a new false god of Baal, what the late Dr. Sam Francis
called the Leviathan – a totalitarian world government, more fierce than
anything envisaged by Stalin or Mao. Without liberties, without tradition,
without morality…and without God.
Boyd D. Cathey holds a Ph.D. in European History from the
Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver
Fellow, and an M.A. in Intellectual History from the University of Virginia.
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