Losing the Mandate of Heaven. Joe Paterno, the Gunwalker Scandal and the crisis of legitimacy.

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence." -John Locke

Say it ain't so, Joe.

In political science, legitimacy is the popular acceptance of a governing law or régime as an authority. Whereas “authority” denotes a specific position in an established government, the term “legitimacy” denotes a system of government — wherein “government” denotes “sphere of influence”. Political legitimacy is considered a basic condition for governing, without which, a government will suffer legislative deadlock(s) and collapse. . .

In Chinese political philosophy, since the historical period of the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BC), the political legitimacy of a ruler and government was derived from the Mandate of Heaven, and that unjust rulers who lose said mandate, therefore lose the right to rule the people.

The Enlightenment-era British social theoretician John Locke said that political legitimacy derives from popular explicit and implicit consent: “The argument of the [Second] Treatise is that the government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed.” -- Wikipedia.

As Penn State fans try to come to grips with the outing of their life-long hero JoePa as someone who allowed his football program to become the clandestine recruiting ground of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, turning his back for years on child rape in stadium showers, Nile Gardiner writes in the London Telegraph that opinion polls show that "Barack Obama is facing an anti-Big Government revolution."

It is little wonder that 57 per cent of Americans today “have little or no confidence in the federal government to solve domestic problems” in Gallup polling, with 27 per cent believing “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens”. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments have tried and failed with top down policies that stifle economic freedom while reducing prosperity. It is a foolhardy approach that is both unsustainable and antithetical to the cause of liberty, and faces a growing conservative revolution in the United States.

Perhaps, but don't think that the collectivist Mandarins are going to go away without a fight. They won't. Their dogged defense of the indefensible in the Gunwalker Scandal shows that if nothing else.

Non-Penn State fans look on in mounting horror at the growing revelations and ask themselves what ever could have possessed people in authority like Paterno to turn their backs on a savage predator of innocents like Sandusky.

The answer is simple, and it is the same virus that infects the larger society and that is on full display in the Gunwalker Scandal -- the desire to protect the collective at the expense of the individual. In service to the collective, people will break any law, violate any moral code, tell any lie -- all to maintain their own position, power and security within the collective. The increasing humanism and moral relativism that has crept on little cat feet with Gramscian stealth throughout American culture in the past sixty years has facilitated this collectivism. If all belief systems are equivalent, then the Ten Commandments become the Ten Suggestions until they become the Ten Whatevers, and boys are raped in showers while so-called "good men" stand by and watch.

Without a moral center, without a rule of law based upon the God-given, natural and inalienable rights codified in the Constitution, without the sense of personal responsibility that goes with liberty and the maintenance thereof, we are all plunged back into the jungle, where young boys are raped and governments provide the instruments of murder to godless cartel butchers, all done to the tunes of Dancing With The Stars while the majority of the deliberately clueless chattering monkey class in the electronic trees worry about Justin Beiber and the Kardashians.

History, if it shows anything, shows that a nation cannot endure such a state of collectivist depravity for long. The collapse of the united states of America -- moral, political and economic -- as it has existed since the founding cannot be far away.

The present political system certainly has lost "the Mandate of Heaven." And I mean both political parties, for both are responsible for their own corruption, and for the delegitimization of the government and the destruction of the rule of law. Whether the few righteous men and women within the political leadership, prodded by those of us who see the danger, can retrieve enough legitimacy to survive is at best a dubious proposition, but one that must be attempted. It must be attempted if for no other reason than to buy time for the rest of us who see the danger to prepare for the coming collapse.

It is the very legitimacy of the Founders' Grand Experiment which is at the heart of the Gunwalker Scandal. If the putative adults in the political hierarchy cannot find the will to fix that most monstrous of federal scandals, then the center will not hold and a very rough, bloody and tyrannical beast, its hour come round at last, will slouch towards the District of Columbia to be born.

Citizens who wish to remain free will then have to take their own decisions, defending the ground that they stand on, based not upon the rule of law, but the law of the jungle. We are then, in the words of Locke, "left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence."

Got militia?

THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats (1916)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?