Let me expand upon the title: Self-government isn’t government structure, it’s a claim for (positive) rights successfully made by a morally well-ordered population; that is, a claim for rights not magically granted to us but earned by real-world efforts and made possible by a bit of luck.
We, the American people and our government, can’t just impose self-government on other peoples and governments. The procedures can be designed but the reality of self-government depends on a variety of other factors. In the modern West, self-government has been associated with some sort of complex independence on the part of a substantial percentage of the residents of a region; that independence is complex because it involves moral and economic and political and cultural factors.
The Swiss peasantry owned their own land early on compared to most regions of Europe and by the 14th century, those peasants owned weaponry—the famous pikes still carried in ceremony by the Pope’s Swiss Guard—which allowed them to stand up to the knights in battle. The Swiss peasants worked hard to develop discipline and ways of fighting while the knights remained convinced of their inherent superiority. By the end of that tumultuous 14th century and after decades of massacres of common folk by armies led by warlords and bishops and abbots—perhaps a hint of what’s coming for us during the remainder of the 21st century—those peasants were able to drive out their Austrian overlords with all of their suits of armor and warhorses and broadswords and the rest of that. During that same century, peasants in part of Portugal did something similar to their Spanish rulers, but I’ll leave it to others to find out the details.
The common folk of the British Isles were more lucky than determined or disciplined, yet, they also gained some substantial forms of political rights. This is a complex story and is coming to no good end—a bit like all stories in this mortal realm of tears. After gaining a good amount of self-government, the Anglo-American political communities extended political power through centralized governments which were not really under the control of or likely to ever be under the control of the mass of citizens; that sort of control by common folk could have been exercised only by way of political processes which could have been labeled `federalist’ or—even better—described as a political form of the economic system of distributivism advocated by the Anglican thinker G. K. Chesterton. (He became a Roman Catholic near the end of his life, but he was really always an English Catholic, which I consider better than Anglican or Roman Catholic for one who was an Englishman.)
Anyway, we can skip a lot of history, much of it quite disedifying to those who think human rights come to us by some `natural’ endowment. Let’s consider the sad case of two countries glued together by fiat of European colonial powers: Iraq and Libya. As brutal as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were, they had created economic conditions which had led to the growth of a middle-class and even some growth of a reasonably prosperous working-class. Gaddafi was even increasing prosperity and expanding those classes in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa. The existence of such classes isn’t a sufficient factor in the development of self-government, political `rights’ for much of the common folk. The existence of such classes is a necessary factor.
The American destruction of those dictatorships and their prosperity put an end to some terrible crimes but also put an end to some social and economic and political processes which might have led to self-government in some form. The psychopathic juvenile delinquents who rule the United States and staff too many of its private and governmental institutions put in some half-assed efforts to jump to the state of (formal) self-government in Iraq after destroying one of the necessary factors for that state. Self-government in the United States is at an end, probably ended in the 1970s, since such wretched excuses for human beings so dominate the American political and economic and—yes—cultural communities; we have no virtuous bastard of the likes of Andrew Jackson to destroy the centralizers and it’s unlikely one would grow up in the West without being co-opted by the institutions at the corrupt centers of wealth and power or marginalized as a danger to those centers. The modern processes of rising into the ranks of—supply your own scare-quotes—academia and politics and banking and business and intelligence services and (increasingly) military services and religious groups seem to include selection for lack of knowledge about reality, lack of knowledge about how to acquire reliable knowledge, lack of mature and well-practiced thinking skills, and utter lack of moral character. Some of them, especially religious leaders, have some virtues but not the courage to exercise them and not the will to gain courage by way of pretending to have it—painting ourselves into a corner can often be a good moral strategy and it’s one I accidentally developed and still practice though with trepidation.
Be realistic about what the real situation was in Iraq and Libya and about what seems to be happening in the West, not just the United States. Those who are greedy and overly-ambitious control great wealth and great power and they are not friends of God nor do they desire to be living in communion of any sort with the bulk of their fellow human beings. They have largely, though not yet fully, destroyed one of the necessary foundations of self-government in the United States and in Europe (an independent and prosperous middle-class and working-class) just as they destroyed similar foundations under construction in Iraq and Libya. As I’ve argued in past writings about the entirety of the foundations of Western Civilization: they are mostly inside of us. That proper independence of human being, individual and locally communal, develops out of an understanding of all that exists, especially our relationship to God, and we no longer have a coherent understanding of that sort. To the extent we, especially the younger residents of the West, have any understanding of all that exists or even of just this world, it isn’t coherent and it most certainly isn’t Christian, nor is it Jewish, nor is it even paganistic in a virtuous way.
In my writings, I’m providing an understanding sufficient to reform or to build anew a Christian civilization, which means it’s sufficient to repair our own human being, individual and that of all the communities to which we belong to any substantial extent. I’m confident my own efforts or those of someone engaged in a similar effort will help greatly in the re-establishment of Christian civilization. The pilgrim Body of Christ will find a new embodiment in this mortal realm. It would seem it will take years, perhaps decades, for my works or similar works to gain much attention. It will probably take generations to see much in the way of larger-scale results.
We have let our exploitive classes destroy our own insides, our minds and hearts and hands—including all that is meant by “moral character.” We have, in old-fashioned language, sold our souls in return for television shows and the Superbowl and affordable tennis clubs and fancier housing than we need. As terrible as their suffering is, the peoples of Iraq and Libya are in better shape than those of the West because they, unlike us, didn’t voluntarily participate in the destruction of their own human being, individual and communal. Human beings who sell themselves and their children have shaped themselves to be incapable of sharing God’s life, incapable of living in the world of the resurrected. If such human beings are resurrected, their ongoing existence will be hellish even if they are located in Heaven. (A purging, necessarily painful, would always be possible for a merciful God, but a mere pass into Heaven by an absolutely forgiving God would lead to a wretched creature living for time without end in a place to which he is unsuited.)
Convert, turn to God, or accept damnation and pray that it means a permanent grave rather than a hellish existence without end.
End of sermon. End of lesson on what Christian leaders would be saying if they were not so well domesticated by the exploitive classes of the West, if they were more in touch with reality and if their minds were not so clouded by edifying homilies based upon scholarship having little to do with modern knowledge about God’s Creation.