The Perpetual Emergency Excuse

With 9/11 on the minds of Americans again, it is interesting to see how sentiment regarding it has moved from misplaced rage and nationalistic xenophobia to recognition of something larger lost than even those who died that day.

The great Dave Smith was partially right:

more from A Twisted History of the United States, 1450-1945:

If this book illustrates or proves anything, it is that without the gradual and then all of a sudden erosion of liberty that began in the Progressive Era and then culminated in the New Deal and World War II, Americans would never have succumbed to the Covid hysteria that provided cover for the real effects: The largest transfer of wealth from the American middle class to the rich in history; The government contrived culture wars that move Americans to resort to base tribalism; The unremittent growth of state and corporatist power and the concomitant evisceration of individual rights and market freedom; The demonization of those who dare dissent. And this is no counter-factual argument, for just as we can look at North and South Korea from space at night in order to determine by the lights which is free, so too American history shows that when cholera or typhoid epidemics ravaged American cities in the 19th century, or the Spanish flu struck in 1919, statism had not yet taken such a hold over them so as to allow the government to determine who could work, and who could not; what medical treatment you could take, and that which you could not; where you could go, and where you could not; who you could see, and who you could not; what you could think, and what you could not.

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Only when enough people awoke out of this naïve stupor did all of that fade away… sort of.

The future decision, therefore, is between taking the morphine of nationalism or the smelling-salts of secessionism. The latter is the cure.