The Linchpin Theory

Is it us? Is America the linchpin?

If you grew up on a farm or ranch - or have ever hooked up a trailer - you know what a linchpin is. It is the pin in a shaft or a hitch that holds two things together that you want to hold together. When it comes out, things fall apart.

In socioeconomic and sociopolitical theory, there is a thing called the linchpin theory. The linchpin theory says that there could exist a single event, a linchpin that gets pulled, that can trigger a series of unpredictable and non-repeating incidents. This can lead to a cascading effect that leads to events of catastrophic magnitudes.

Since the linchpin could be a person or event, it is virtually impossible to identify, making forecasting such events damn nigh to impossible.

One wonders if America is such a linchpin.

If America succumbs to tyranny, and the Biden regime certainly fits the bill for that, will our fall plunge the world into a second Dark Ages?

I don’t know, I missed class the day the oracles taught everybody how to see into the future, but there are signs that seem to indicate it is more than a possibility if we don’t stop our current trajectory.

The world is seemingly spinning out of control (classical James Taranto reference).

According to Antonio Ugues, Jr., the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at St. Mary’s College, around the world “Democracy is in retreat. Authoritarianism is not just on the rise, but really flexing its muscles.”

Doesn’t matter if the action taken is morally correct, autocracy is autocracy, as much as I hate to say it.

I’m not sure the government of Ukraine is the paragon of democracy, I do think it is horribly corrupt, but Putin’s unprovoked invasion is nothing less than an authoritarian move.

We can’t be seduced into a game of tit totalitarianism for tat totalitarianism. Ayn Rand said that “Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.”

For my entire lifetime – and largely since the end of WWII – America has been the one bastion of republicanism (little “r”) liberty in the world. There was a time when America was the threshold that could not be crossed when the vampires of collectivism and totalitarianism came calling.

Everybody knows that vampires can’t cross your threshold unless they are invited and it appears about half of America, and based on recent surveys, buoyed by a large percentage of young, urban women are ready to issue engraved invitations.

It certainly seems there is a rising tide of autocracy in America and while most of our citizens have a pro-liberty, pro-republic orientation, there is also a high level of sympathy, if not support, for authoritarian rhetoric and organizing systems – and it isn’t just the left who has a taste for such things. We must understand that the right’s attraction to banning a thing the left is trying to legislate or do puts us on equal footing with them.

The American left called President Trump an authoritarian when there is little evidence that accusation has any basis in reality. Compared to the Stalinist bent of the Biden Administration, President Trump looks like Samuel Adams or Thomas Jefferson. Biden’s fascistic alliances with big corporations in the so-called public/private partnerships where private companies carry out the wishes of government in a workaround to the Constitutional limits placed on government are stealing liberty and freedom of choice from all Americans.

Examples of such alliances are worldwide – from American credit card companies refusing the process transactions at gun shops, to banks refusing to fund oil exploration, fund managers investing in companies complying with ESG scores - and in Australia, banks only loaning money to buy electric cars – the private sector has become useful idiots supporting authoritarian causes.

Fighting against the rising tide of global and domestic authoritarianism isn’t the sole job of government or the military. We do need our government, as it once did, to take the fight to the authoritarian regimes abroad, but we as individuals have perhaps the most important role of pushing back on undemocratic processes and actions domestically.

America has a chance to elect people to office who will take sledgehammers to the Biden agenda and stand up to the fast encroachment of authoritarianism and collectivism that seems to be at our gates.

The challenge we face is to avoid allowing our fight against an authoritarian left turning us into them.

Is America the linchpin?

It is possible.

But it is equally possible that “linchpin” leads to a cascade of republicanism and liberty.

Not every cascade ends in disaster.