Despotic Regime Staying Power

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Such polities have a staying power that the West has long been unable to understand. For instance,

Iran’s ability to resist despite large civilian casualties, the decapitation of much of the regime’s leadership, and severe economic damage shows the staying power of authoritarian governments. For decades, Tehran developed a toolbox that includes widespread political repression, relentless propaganda, an ideology of martyrdom and a powerful security apparatus—all aimed at protecting the state from enemies abroad and within.

But who (emphatically not what) is this state that’s being preserved?

The men and women populating the government and its levers of power are that “state.” These men and women don’t think like we do; in particular, they don’t put the same value on life that we do. What these personages value is their own power and their own lives; they don’t care a single minim about the value of the subjects over whom they reign, nor do they care a whit about the economic damage done to their nation as a whole or to those unvalued subjects. None of those tools of power are designed to protect their “authoritarian government,” they’re designed to protect the lives, personal power, and economic condition those men and women who manifest that government.

Nikolay Kozhanov, of Qatar University:

The state’s first priority was to ensure the survival of the regime. There are reasons why the government, elite, and to some extent the people, end up uniting around the regime.

Kozhanov needs to take that one step further: the state and the regime are those persons, not an impersonal, generalized institution to which we too often refer, in misleading shorthand, as “government” or “state” or “regime.” Those institutions don’t exist without the men and women who occupy the various positions in them.

The leadership…shares an ability to endure casualties and economic hardship, pain that is often borne by their populations. And when their people do rise up in protest, the regime’s foot soldiers have proven ready to use lethal violence to put down dissent.
“There is a much higher tolerance for pain among authoritarian regimes,” said Edward Howell, an international-relations lecturer at the University of Oxford. “That’s because we see very little evidence of them prioritizing the needs of their people.”

None of that should be a surprise. That leadership doesn’t care about the casualties of the people over whom they reign; those unfortunates are merely tools for maintaining/enhancing their own wealth, ego, power. Even a despotic regime’s “tolerance for pain” is a misnomer. They don’t feel the pain their subjects are experiencing, they feel only the pain they personally feel. Nor do they prioritize the needs of their subjects; their subjects are only tools.

In the end, there are only two ways to collapse a “state.” In many cases, those state men and women are pecuniary and can be bought off—Idi Amin, for example—especially if cut off from the money and material wealth sources of their physical comfort. A state comprised of ideologues, though, won’t collapse until the ideologues do: they’re cut off from life itself—they’re killed.

A Sanction of New York over its Board of Elections

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New York’s State Board of Elections has inadequate safeguards regarding its elections and appears to be refusing to correct that.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a nonpartisan organization focused on election security, alleges the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) stonewalled a request to fix the state’s voter registration form to comply with federal voting law.

Absent those corrections, the State-dominating Progressive-Democratic Party could register loads of voters of whom Party approves, thereby cementing Party’s reign over the State for generations.

If RITE’s allegations are true, and the NYSBOE continues to refuse to correct its errors, there is a sanction that would have strong and sharp teeth. Here’s Article 2 of our 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The 19th and 26th Amendments modify this Article only to the extent of extending the right to vote to women and lowering the minimum age of eligibility to 18 years old.

Allowing ineligible persons to vote dilutes the votes of eligible, legitimate voters, and that is a functional, even if not direct, denial of those eligible voters’ right to vote. That dilution means their votes no longer count as whole votes, but only as reduced, fractional votes. In our system of elections, any reduction in the value of a vote to less than that of the entire vote is a denial of that vote.

The sanction, then, should be a reduction of New York’s representation in Congress according to the proportion of registered ineligible voters to registered eligible voters plus the proportion of eligible voters denied registration to the whole number of voters in the State.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

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Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.

Regulating Reputational Risk

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Progressive-Democrat ex-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used their banking regulators to “encourage” banks to do no businesses that might inflict “reputational risk” on the bank’s soundness and to end existing business relationships with such enities. Those reputation-damaging businesses—according to those administration men—centered on such Nasties as payday lenders, gun retailers, and crypto.

By focusing on reputation risk, supervisors attempt to understand and anticipate public opinion regarding issues and events and then to attempt to directly connect this public opinion regarding issues and events to an institution’s condition in ways that have proven nearly impossible to assess or quantify with accuracy[.]

Those are the words of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Comptroller of the Currency bosses as they work on a rule that would bar regulators from “reputational risk” evaluations. If regulators can’t quantify what it is they want to regulate, they have no business trying to regulate it—that’s on top of regulators need to be limiting on their regulatory activities in the first place.

Reputational risk assessments in particular are entirely subjective, and that just excuses and enables administrations of whatever stripe to regulate out of business any enterprise of which the regulators or their political bosses disapprove.

The market is fully capable of assessing reputational risk, and it should be left free to do so without government “assistance.”