Why So Serious? Is Conservative Despair Justified?
Conservative at work!
So last week, in what was perhaps a moment of madness, I posted a request on my Facebook page: Tell me your political predictions for the year. Among the more restrained answers: “Hyperinflation,” “Civil War,” “financial collapse,” “terribly awful things.”
Optimist though I am, I can’t help feeling there’s something to this downhearted consensus. After living through the most peaceful and prosperous half century that any nation has ever experienced in the history of humankind, it seems impossible to believe we would re-elect a mediocre reactionary out to “fundamentally transform” our success into failure. But we did, and that’s — well, let’s call it “less than cheering.”
On the other hand…
One of the central weaknesses of radicalism is that radicals seem to lose track of the causes and foundations of the things even they value. They don’t understand that peace is always and everywhere the end result of superior firepower, improved health the result of greater wealth, wealth the result of hardheaded and often greedy business dealing, and liberty deeply linked to a specific concept of man’s relationship to God. They never consider that it may at least be questionable whether the cornerstone can be removed without the structure toppling over.
Conversely, one of the central weaknesses of conservatism is that conservatives see all too clearly how every good thing we have is linked to everything else. They can trace in a moment how any change in the system might lead to disaster. Expand the definition of marriage and civilization falls. Raise taxes and end up in chains. Allow women to vote and government will become an all-embracing over-protective mother state infantilizing the population. Okay, maybe that last one’s true, but you see what I’m getting at.
Loved the line: “Allow women to vote and government will become an all embracing over-protective mother state infantilizing the population.” My husband and I have been joking about it for years and to see it in print really tickled me this morning! I hope all our labors will not be Sisyphean in nature.
It did occur to me about two years ago that all the truly bad developments in American history — Prohibition, the great depression, the rise of FDR and liberalism to political dominance, promotion and formation of the UN, the loss of the Vietnam war and triumph of the 1960′s counterculture, the Supreme Court’s ridiculous misapplication of the Constitution, and on and on — all took place after women got the vote.
Weak, ZZSS, weak.
First, prohibition was before women got the vote.
Slavery, The Civil War and World War 1 were all before women got the vote.
Things weren’t so nice when only men had the vote.
All you did was demonstrate that men don’t have the power to block all destructive female influences, Nothern Light.
Thanks for mentioning Prohibition. The 18th Amendment was the result of a woman’s movement that preceded passage of the 19th, indicating the political power females have even without having the voting privilege.
Things weren’t so nice before women got the vote, but it’s worse now.
I’ve already posted my predictions for 2012/2013 and onward.
Sex is not a valid qualification to vote. However proof that you have an IQ over 50, are able to read more then TV Guide, have at some point paid taxes and can pass the citizen test required to become a naturalized citizen should be.
Teddy Roosevelt started all this progressive stuff by enlarging the claws of the federal government. Wasn’t he also a founder of the Progressive Party?
Yup.
TR broke with Taft because Taft wouldn’t go along with TR’s progressive agenda. So he started up his own progressive “Bull Moose” party. The upshot was the election of Woodrow Wilson, which sent the world into a downward spiral of disaster.
The fear that keeps me awake at night is the Crash/Scapegoat scenario. It goes like this. First the Left’s policies send us into a Crash (almost inevitable, in my view), and then the spin doctors and the media look around for a scapegoat. There are many possibilities, but the designated scapegoat will almost certainly not be the people really responsible. Obama will become the the Messiah Who Was Stabbed in the Back. Which will justify an emergency suspension of constitutional freedoms.
And we’ve already seen who the Scapegoats will be — white men, middle class or wealthier (excepting the wealthiest, who supported Obama).
The last month, I’ve heard rhetoric from the left directed towards gun owners that is more heated and violent than any I heard directed towards Muslims after 9/11. Oh, I’m sure there was some as nasty or nastier on some sites — but it wasn’t published in newspapers or broadcast on the major networks like the lefts’ vitriol.
They’re working themselves up to SOMETHING, and I think we’re all right to be concerned.
What they’re all about is totalitarianism, by EVERY means available.
Need some verbal ammunition against the gun-grabbers’ arguments?
Here ya go.
Thanks 1389AD! I now have your site subscribed to my feeds. God Bless!
Yes, the scapegoats. I’m concerned about this one, too. Conservatives, Christians, anyone who fits the definition of the left’s “Other.” When leftists work themselves up into a froth, they call for outright violence and jailing or executions these days. When the crash comes, I’m afraid it won’t be just talk.
You are right to be worried, aharris. Karen Lewis, Chicago Teachers’ Union president, joked about beheading the rich at a recent conference celebrating labor’s “historic leaders”. She spoke admiringly of the early days of labor unions when, as she put it “the labor leaders of that time, though, were ready to kill. They were. They were just – off with their heads. They were seriously talking about that.” The union members she was speaking to laughed and applauded approvingly.
Robespierre much?
The revolution always devours its children.
But never soon enough.
France has never recovered from Robespierre, (although the argument could also be made that both Robespierre and the last two hundred years (at least) of French history are due to some defect in the French character).
Ive been recomending a 527+ member beheading on the national mall for years, bronze them like baby shoes and put them on pikes so the next group of over ambisios Marxest can see them on their way to work every morning. I stated this repeatedly to DOD cops who were memorizing my rant so they could get the quote correct and spell my name right.
SO I guess it’s only fair that the enemy considers beheading us. Time will decide the winners and loosers of this contest.
With regard to a crash being blamed upon a scapegoat. Communism and its weaker sister, leftism, need the scapegoat to justify the ongoing revolution. Marx hated the capitalist. The capitalist is just a different caricature of “the Jew”. And, with Obama, the rich man, the white male, the Republican, the gun owner—are also another versions of “the Jew”. In his book, 1984, George Orwell portrayed this focus of hatred and object of projection as Emmanuel Goldstein. You just got to love it for propaganda value—Emmanuel, a biblical name. And, Goldstein—-gold and a Jewish sounding name wrapped up in one!
Of course, we all know how intelligent and worldly people on the left are, as compared to us gun-toting, Bible thumping, Republicans. This was brought home to me when I was a student many years ago at Harvard. Before bagels were a mass market item, I explained to a fellow freshman student that bagels and cream cheese, or bagels with lox, were a traditional Jewish food item. My, presumably educated, friend said,”Jews—those people who control all the money in the world like bagels?”
Finally, a comment that is aware of antisemitic tropes, identifying capitalism with “the Jew”, not to speak of Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984. I made a little list here: http://clarespark.com/2010/11/14/the-abcs-of-antisemitism/.
I never really thought of it that way, but now that you’ve said it I believe you may be on to something.
I have to say though, perverse as this sounds. I am going to enjoy watching their attempt at removing something like 300,000,000 guns from a bunch of already pee’d off clingers and redneck rubes.
The three B’s…. Make sure you’ve got plenty. Tough times are coming.
Take a look at the way Mitt Romney was portrayed, or the “1%” as caricatured by the Occupy crowd. It’s anti-semitism without the bloodline.
Thomas Sowell has a brilliant theory about the Jew/capitalist/richperson construct he discusses in a couple essays in his book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” (mostly in the second essay “Are Jews Generic?” but also in other essays in the book.) Basically, IIRC, he talks about how the general population always hate the person in the “middleman” position – which is why Korean shopowners always get burned out in ghetto riots, for instance. The Jews, who were in the middleman position for over a millenium, just caught it worse than most.
Thomas Sowell is a secret agent for a world-wide Zionist conspiracy.
A failure of the dollar seems inevitable; the “The Coin” thing is a smoke screen for printing more money, which in turn is a smokescreen for default. When the dollar is nearly worthless in international trade, oil and diesel will be in short supply to farm food and to transport food to supermarkets.
The Constitution is forgotten, nearly null and void, via the Supreme Court; and just looking at the fact that no one has been able to get the Senate to pass a budget in 4 yours is clear evidence (not even getting into rule-by-czars); and that the President chooses which laws to enforce and creates regulations when the Congress doesn’t act, he is truly neutralizing the whole legislative process.
The President has toppled reasonably-controlled dictators in the Middle East and has encouraged islamo-fascist takeovers, even supplying the armaments to rebelling militant terrorist groups. Even an Egyptian newspaper has just published some of the so-called muslim Brotherhood members of the President’s high-level staff.
Three or four four-star-level military officers have been forced to resign.
DHS is being prepped for civil insurrection, and has ordered nearly a billion rounds of hollow-point. The President’s “civilian national security force” is now in all likelihood fully in place and indoctrinated; otherwise he wouldn’t have begun his program to confiscate guns.
Why would anyone want a defenseless population except to be able to kill them? Purging is to come.
As for “and history shows religious fundamentalism is never a good thing for anyone”, tell that to the first-century church. The existence of Christians (that is, those that know and hold the testimony of Jesus Christ) has changed the world for the better.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!
Good.
One of the issues with scapegoating is that to some degree the Rich White Guy deserves it. Oh, not to the degree he gets it, but you got folk who want Big Business, and wealth, and morality of contracts and hard work…..but no other morality.
And thats why the RWG deserves blame. He wants to be rich, safe, and be able to boff his secretary on the desk.
Man can serve God or serve tyrants…William Penn.
I see you’ve caught on to the sure-fire way to be known as a great prophet: predict the past.
A major factor in the current recession was the housing bubble burst. I think there’s little debate on that. That burst was caused by liberal policies that forced banks to make loans to people that the banks knew were unlikely to be able to ever pay the money back. Liberals noticed that minorities got turned down for loans more than white people, and so, before checking on tedious details like the borrower’s income and how much he was trying to borrow, they instantly concluded that these loans were being denied out of racism. So they passed laws forcing banks to lower standards. Well of course when these people didn’t repay, the banks were out billions and the whole system neared collapse.
So who did the liberals blame? Barney Frank and his pals who pushed these laws through? Of course not. They blamed the banks. They called it “predatory lending”. Yes, that was a sneaky plot the banks had: exploit the poor by loaning them money that you know they will never pay back. Yes, once they’d given away all this money they’d just rake in their ill-gotten gains when … umm, exactly how was this conspiracy supposed to work to the banks’ advantage? That was never clearly explained. But it was a sinister plot, all right! Ripping off poor people by giving them free money!
Oh, and of course the other villain was deregulation pushed through by right-wing politicians. Yes, when banks were forced to lose money by excessive and irrational government regulation, clearly the problem was that there wasn’t enough regulation. We all know how businesses try to lose money all the time, so we need laws to force them to not bankrupt themselves. If only in addition to laws forcing the banks to make loans that will never be repaid, there had also been laws to … umm, do something else that would magically make the loans get repaid, without the borrowers having to actually pay the money, then there never would have been a problem.
First, you need to develope a sarcasm font for comments like “Allow women to vote and government will become an all embracing over-protective mother state infantilizing the population.” Just on the off chance that anybody but a conservative would read anything with your name attached to it, you need to realize that they don’t understand that you can say something that funny and not mean it literally (unless of course you’re a Liberal trying to distance himself from the foot in his mouth.)
The other fear I have is that your fracking and federallism sections will get blended, and fracking will not splatter The Won on the windshield, but rather he will be able to ride the top of the bubble and take credit for the prosperity that he couldn’t find a way to squelch.
Right on both accounts.
Obama and the Dems will be credited for any success, even if it isn’t related to them. Oops, I already wrote that sentence in my comment below.
As for the comment about women’s vote, I came across this type of comments a lot on this website, but usually in the comment section. I think it’s the first time I see it in an actual article. I’m not American, but as an observer I’m curious how do you plan to get the women’s vote when you say things like that. You’re right that an outsider (that includes non-conservatives and not just non-Americans) won’t see it the way you do, and are more likely to take it seriously, particularly after encountering this type of comments quite often on conservative boards. I don’t think it’ll make them laugh, nor rethink their vote for the Dems and how it is supposedly influenced by their womb (probably as much as your vote is influenced by your overflowing testosterone). It’s more likely to reinforce the Dem claim that the GOP is anti-women and deter some women from voting for it. I mean if you give undecided female voters the impression that you oppose women suffrage they’ll be crazy to vote for you, and then you complain about the majority of women not voting for you. It’s just a strange way to get them to vote for you.
Women who aren’t whiny pansies will vote conservative, so our success depends on girls womaning-the-f*ck-up.
Yeah, I’m female. And yeah, we’re in trouble.
I think you’re wrong and in the end, whomever you’d like to blame for it, it’s the conservatives who lose elections and the US as a whole, including you, that pays the price for the bad leftist policies, while just minor “concessions” on your part could make a difference in how some women vote. These are not major concessions on principles or policies because women do have the vote and will continue to have it, they can study and can work and can own property and can do many other things they couldn’t in the past, and that isn’t going the change because women will not give it up. So the only “concession” here is in language that wouldn’t threaten women. And it doesn’t even take silencing or censoring those conservatives who express views like that, whether seriously or jokingly. It only takes a few other conservatives that will respond to them so a non-conservative woman who just dropped here for the first time will not get the impression that all conservatives agree and hold such views. David Feith was wise to remark that it was not meant literally and that it needs a “sarcasm font” because he took into consideration the possibility that outsiders might draw their own conclusions and run off and vote for somebody else.
Anyway, I’m not trying to get into a quarrel here. It’s your party and your country, so it’s your business. I’m just saying what makes sense to me looking from the outside.
*shrug* I’m a woman and I got the joke. Andrew always uses sarcasm. The kind of woman you are referring to is already going to come here with preconceived notions. Whether or not Andrew uses a sarcasm tag isn’t going to matter. In her mind, the very idea that he used the language in the first place is evil enough even if it was a joke because it just re-affirms that kind of woman’s already set in place paradigms.
If, as you say, you aren’t from around here, than you likely aren’t familiar with the way our pop culture is already saturated with subtle and not-so-subtle negative messaging aimed at all kinds of conservative thought. It’s everywhere and in everything. You can’t escape it. Many of the bad guys on TV and in Movies are conservative or traditional American in some way. A lot of shows take pot shots at conservative or traditional Americans in their dialogue. So, many people coming here are going to be primed to think of this place as bad from the outset. The inclusion or not of one sarcasm tag isn’t going to change that perception at all.
The was no “conservative” involved in the last election so how could a conservative lose? Romney may have been (a little) more conservative than Obama, but that doesn’t make him a “conservative”.
@oldguy52,
Mitt Romney was the only one of the GOP hopefuls who truly was UNelectable. He never stood for anything. He never really wanted the job all that much to begin with, certainly not enough to fight for it when it counted. Because the GOP establishment and the big contributors would rather lose than allow a conservative to run, they lined up behind Romney and, one by one, torpedoed each of the other candidates, until only Romney was left.
A woiman who uses her brain rather than her lady parts to determine how to vote will understand that sarcasm. And, if she’s using her lady parts to determine how to vote, odds are she’s going to do just exactly what Andrew said.
And, yeah, I’m a woman, and I vote with my brain.
the way our pop culture is already saturated with subtle and not-so-subtle negative messaging aimed at all kinds of conservative thought.
This is so true. Our family recently discovered an ABC show called Once Upon a Time, a kind of fractured fairy tale. I was reading an interview with the actress that plays the evil queen and she just gratuitously threw out that the character was a republican.
It’s not enough to make me take my ball and go home, but it has dimmed my enjoyment of the show.
If she is Republican, she’s a RINO. She is definitely power-hungry.
I am so damned sick of that kind of gratuitous nonsense – so sick I’m trying to start a movement to bring conservatism back to storytelling, get rid of the dumb potshots at Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin and George Bush, and encourage art that focuses on ignored themes important to conservatives like the many negative consequences of abortion or the heroism inherent in standing up for God. (Website’s in my name link, and I’m also working for Liberty Island Magazine, which you’ll see a lot more about this year when it launches around early spring.)
When artists and other entertainment figures do stuff like this, speak out about it. Let them know that yes, believe it or not, conservatives DO watch television and read stories, and we make up about half their audience if not more. Write to the sponsors and advertisers and let THEM know you’re sick to death of this kind of garbage. Quit taking it and start fighting it.
Stories are important. Storytellers have a specific type of power. They shape memories and impressions. The victors write history – but anyone can write a story, and those who write the best and most popular stories win the culture wars. Don’t just give it up to them. Fight back.
We’re going to tell the truth.
Fact is, women are great. Liberal American women are ******* nuts.
Considering the massive amount of election fraud we have in the US, it is rapidly getting to the point where it no longer matters whose votes we can obtain through the lawful means of communication and persuasion.
In any case, any social structure founded on debauchery must soon collapse. All the more so if the unmarried women are voting for this debauchery.
Exactly right. A fracking boom would merely solidify the current socialist ideal as one indispensible to wealth.
The New Deal still gets credit for postwar prosperity, which would be swell to reproduce — all we have to do is let all the other powers of the world fight a massive, sub-nuclear conflict and destroy their infrastructure and manufacturing without touching ours. Then our unions can go back to getting whatever they want from compliant companies that make godzillions no matter how stupid they may be from time to time.
Yesterday, you were happy, healthy ,wise and free. Today you woke up anxious and you can not put your finger on it . the 4 corners of the earth now have 4 voices saying : “resistance is futile ” all 4 voices are in conflict with each other and one you can believe one hour then you switch to the next reason as to why resistance is futile and then they disappear why did they you ask ? Am I not that important to hear voices from the 4 corners of the world?
But then they begin again and you see your nerves are shot and this is what i think Saint Paul was going through in the Roman dungeon in chains but something happen , his doubts left and he could believe so he wrote:”38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[k] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8
This happen to many saints I read great despair from what they face before the light once again shine on their faces
Why do I hear the music from the Twilight Zone playing in the background?
Uh, because you’re starting to dimly realize “There are more things in heaven and earth… Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet. Act 1, scene 5)
Rod Serling used entertainment to teach the likes of you that not everything is mundane, profane and material. There’s poetry, for instance. Justice too. And sometimes, poetic justice.
Too many who have indulged in hallucinogens, and/or far-eastern mysticism, mistake their fleeting misperceptions for wisdom. None of it makes sense to anybody else.
Reality is on our side.
But not the media who’s in charge of conveying reality to the public. Obama and the Dems will be credited for any success, even if it isn’t related to them. The Repubs will somehow be blamed for every failure.
…a grievance-based socialist ideology he learned in college from professors who were probably old even then. As these academics die and go to hell for all eternity, up-and-comers may begin to notice that the poor suffer under left wing programs and rise under the free market etc.
Those old professors already indoctrinated younger generations of professors with the same grievance-based socialist ideology.
That, after all, will be the off-beat, radical position..
It won’t be the radical position uneless your country becomes communist (which I don’t think will happen). Much of Europe has been social-democrat for a while now and I don’t see the youth there turning to free market as the off-beat, radical position.
A new generation is already on the rise that understands entitlements are unsustainable and that freedom works.
I don’t know the younger generations of academics in the US, so I can’t tell if you really mean it or you’re joking.
The media and entertainment industry as we know it today is in a race to the bottom. They propagandize current events and history. The debase entertainment with sleaze of all sorts. Eventually, they will run out of body parts to expose and lies to tell. That then will be their undoing.
The part about the new generation: Klavan’s correct and non-sarcastic there. The question is, what will they have to work with when they inherit the power? Our generation must hold onto what we can while our kids grow up.
You’re a great guy. Funny. Talented. Smart. Decent. But your blind spot is showing. The one thing you don’t talk about, and don’t want to talk about, and conservatives don’t want to talk about, is race. The demographics of the last election revealed the basic problem. The only group that did not massively support Obama and Dems is Whites: White men and White married women. No one else wants to hear conservative talk: Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, unmarried females…all are bought into the Liberal State. 90% of Romney’s votes came from Whites. That is, ironically for Republicans, the elephant in the room.
Some of the best conservatives I know are second generation latinos. Most consider themselves “white” – only because race isn’t important to them. If we can keep the children of the illegals off the government dime or falling for race pandering things will turn around.
Yeah, but Latinos aren’t assimilating anymore, not like they used to. My grandmother was a Lopez. Her family assimilated, in part because they didn’t have much choice. But today, you see Spanish signs everywhere, Spanish TV channels, Spanish radio, everything is also in Spanish. They don’t need to learn English, much less assimilate, and they are bringing the old corrupt culture from their old country with them.
Wrong. My example is my handyman. Second generation. Can’t speak a lick of Spanish. Married a Caucasian. Their kid (3rd gen) knows no Spanish.
My guy, who has worked for me about 20 years, is a commuter. I don’t know how he does it but he regularly travels to his home on Oaxaca and back. He might even be legal. But I think it’s safe to say assimilation is not a high priority for him or his family.
And there are many others. Here in Houston an astonishing amount of house construction work is done by Hispanics. For some reason, all those projects shut down for about two weeks at Christmas time. Could somebody else be going home for the holidays?
A few years ago (2006), I worked as a caregiver on an Alzheimer’s unit of a facility that had a lot of other caregivers who were Hispanic women of different ages. I noticed 3 or 4 of them would spend our supper break pouring over English language newspapers and magazines. Led by a 20 year old among them, they would read out loud to each other and ask people like me about the way to pronounce different words. That’s pretty strange behavior for people who don’t care one way or another about learning our language.
Unfortunately you are right about the lack of assimilation. I live in a rural area in southern Hillsborough County, Florida, and I’ve seen tremendous change over the last thirty years. Back in the day Latino families had a “no spanish” rule. The children learned english at school and came and taught their parents. It was a matter of great pride to families to be Americans. This is no longer the case. My little town has become heavily segregated. The newer Latino families make no attempt to learn english and are hostile not only to “whites” but also towards “white Hispanics”. Additionally, unassimilated Latinos view lower income blacks as competition. The bottom line is that when I moved here thirty years ago race wasn’t even a consideration but now it is at the forefront. So much for progress.
In central California, the lack of will to assimilate is overwhelming, to say the least. Last Christmas, even the Christmas music playing over the store sound system in JC Penneys in Fashion Fair was entirely in Spanish, at least it was when we were there. I rarely heard English being spoken. My wife teaches English to middle school 8th graders and the lack of English skills/speakers in her classes is astounding. When I was a kid, that simply didn’t happen. I think California is a lost cause and am planning to get the hell out soon. It’s unfortunate that our country’s leaders look to California as a model for the rest of the country.
Even the Mexicans are voting with their feet these days.
Conservatism is the real and natural way of thinking of at least 70% of Americans. It doesn’t matter what race they are. However, only whites will vote GOP because the the deceit that Republicans are racist has completely prevailed. When someone speaks to your most basic levels, down to your DNA, you ARE their captive.
We won’t know if you’re right until conservatives make a real effort to push their ideas in these groups. Other than Jack Kemp, they never try.
In every Presidential election of the last 20 years at least, the GOP started off by writing off the black vote. The GOP did not run ads on Black Entertainment Television. The GOP did not campaign in black neighborhoods. Except for the one–exactly one–pro forma appearance by the GOP candidate in front of the NAACP, the GOP wrote off the black vote the rest of the time.
And similarly for other minorities. The GOP does try to win the votes of Jews sometimes–but on the issue of Israel, NOT on the issue of fiscal conservatism.
When Bush ran for re-election in 2004, he got 44% of the Hispanic vote. If he could do that well, any other Republican candidate could–if they understood how he did it.
(1) The Romney campaign is not “The GOP”.
(2) Nothing but your own choices is stopping you from producing and running your own ads on BET.
Read my post again.
I specifically did NOT single out the Romney campaign.
Every GOP Presidential campaign of the last 20 years at least has used the same playbook: Write off blacks; get some Hispanic votes; but put together a narrow Electoral College majority by starting with the base of Red States and then using the evangelicals to win Ohio.
Can we please stop picking on Romney??? Give the guy a break!
EssEm, I think you’re underestimating the effects of intermarriage and assimilation. I have a Latina friend who married a Russian man, producing a “white” baby in both name and appearance. Dean Cain, born Dean Tanaka, is 25% Japanese in ancestry, but “white” and American enough to be famous for his role as Clark Kent/Superman. Several years ago I watched Los Lonely Boys perform on the 4th of July and left with the feeling that over time Latinos will assimilate like the Italians and the Irish did before them. They brought their father on stage for great cover of “Folsom Prison Blues”.
Regarding the specific problem of Republicans and race, Republicans just need to win over a significant minority of non-white voters to win most competitive elections. George W Bush won 35% of the Latino vote in 2004 and 40% in his 1998 reelection as Texas governor. Vietnamese Americans are open to supporting Republicans. Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao won a special election to become the first congressman of Vietnamese ancestry. South Asian support for Governor Chris Cristie probably helped push his win well past the margin of fraud.
Having emerged somewhat recently from an Ivory Tower of PC bullsh*t, I feel the irresistible impulse to rain on your parade. It’s not that you haven’t made good points, it’s that we have so much friggin’ work to do to deprogram our college-made idiots. They don’t understand ANYTHING, and they won’t until neither Mom nor Dad can afford to pay for their data plan any longer. The non-college-made idiots might be more teachable because they aren’t so emotionally attached to Marxism and its various offshoots (modern-day feminism: what a steaming pile that is), but they, like nearly all humans (including the college-brainwashed ones), learn best not from books but from experience. And a lot of people are having tough experiences these days. We need to use these to help them; we need to get them when they’re ripe, to counter the liberal class-warfare lies.
What we need to do is tailor messages to specific “experience groups,” and explain why people having particular experiences are having them. “Why do things suck for you, Ms. Working at Walmart? It’s not your retail overlords – the picture is much much bigger.” Most importantly, we need to preface our explanations of economics with CARING – We need to show that we conservatives actually understand people’s suffering, and empathize – otherwise, they won’t bother to look at our charts. It’s sad, but without hugs and hand-holding, they’ll believe the media and see us as big, bad top-hat-wearing Capitalists (GASP!). We need to be a little touchy feely, listen to their feelings, and then teach them why the world is the way it is (No, the “Progressives” are not your saviors).
To do this, we need our own “great orators” – men and women on the street/Youtube/TV/everywhere, talking to people, not debating with them (they can’t win debates, pout when they lose and stick their fingers in their ears). Changing worldviews must be done gently. I am not good at this. I do not suffer fools gladly, but I’d better learn how, otherwise we’re all screwed.
Well said and inpiring. We conservatives need to get more skillfull in teaching the benefits of adopting conservative principles. Our track record here is not so good, especially lately. Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
Approaching people with the “touchy-feely” doesn’t come easily to most conservatives. Beyond that, most conservatives are not attracted to the goal of influencing other people to take a hard look at things like the failure of the keynesian approach to economics, why AA doesn’t really work, etc. Conservatives are much more at home thriving in the private sector. So, yes, we’re pretty much screwed for these (among many other) reasons.
You are right. A mission team I work with uses this as our motto – “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Bill Clinton’s teary eyed “I feel your pain” public persona was brilliant.
But the tone of the message can be changed. This needs to happen but will take time to have an effect. The larger, and possibly insurmountable problem in the near to medium term, is the rot within mentioned by David Scott at #14 above.
The US federal government, and by extension the various state and local governments, who we the people have elected and therefore deserve, have wantonly pursued policies to eliminate any adherence to the concept of the Judeo-Christian creator God. We now reap what we have sown as there is no longer an objective morality around which we the people can find common ground.
“Because they did not think it worthwhile to retain a knowledge of God, He gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity…full of malice.” Romans 1:28-29
Bingo– well said.
Wow, I could have written all of this. Well-said.
Surely, you are onto something here. For decades, I was a construction inspector [Heavy, underground and roads]and could not believe some of the help I had to work with, my own confederates and contractors alike.
I was taken in-hand early by numerous Old-Line Italian Contractors who told me that allowing people to see ‘the reaping of their follies’ was The Best Teacher.
It was painful to watch,and often not inexpensive in money and time, but oh-so true. Lessons learned in this fashion are not soon forgotten, if-ever.
Soon very soon we’re going to have a slew of ‘potential learners’ and they will be open to alternative ideas and economic history, as what they ‘Were Taught’ just is not makin’ it.
Those that are ready, willing and able will see results…and who will fill this vacuum?
Screw that.
They can just adjust their touchyfeely without me.
Hard times are educational without conservitive narration and hand holding, in fact, people tend to learn more from bashing their heads HARD, not reading about bashing their heads hard. This country NEEDS Darwinowwing, it’s hard, brutal and criminal, but it’s reality and it’s un-escapable. YOu want to influence the survivors of the coming tribulations? reprise Thomas Paine in modern terms.
“… we are all screwed”
That is the message in God’s word the Bible . Revelation 12 Heaven is saved. But the Dragon takes her great treasure and uses it to devour the other woman’s seeds
I guess this could another way of seeing it
“For years, the Queen selected industrial age worlds and did not assimilate them, but instead gave a select few on these planets technology, advancing the cultures dramatically over a small time period. Among these inhabited worlds were those of Species 642, Narisia, and 1429, a planet which later developed methods of traveling through time in starships. When either the species made significant progress towards something useful or lost their usefulness to her purposes, the Queen severed the assistance and cut off their links. (ST novel: Engines of Destin ”
Perhaps it is ok to conclude there is no hope and the search for hope will get much stronger turning to the True God
Okay, well maybe we can put that off for a while?
I believe the key is to get back our innocence, the innocence of the wolf as an example. the Two -headed dragon i find so very innocent and that’s why she needs chain around her neck Abraham when God told him to take his son to the sacrifice altar Abraham i believe kept his innocence getting giddy about God’s promises , the miracle of his son’s birth and now this command . There was no shame.
All the angels come to me naked as women with the most beautiful bodies man can ever see yet they are in total innocence with no experience being women and no desire being women but serve me.
So when the angel stop the knife in Abraham’s hand a new age began with this encounter with God something else to know about good and bad besides not eating the innocent fruit on one tree in the Garden of Eden the bite into innocence you know good and bad as God knows where the worm does not die after you bite it in two so the woman who extracts the worm in her belly can not help but doubt it is only a worm and has great shame for eternity so it seems and she can not come back to innocence since she is not a dragon or a wolf in their innocence but a woman with a woman’s experiences in need of repentance and forgivness unlike the very very innocent nature of the two-headed devouring dragon
And that is the purpose of inventing a time machine far from another thrill ride but to find innocence once again
then make peace with the animal within where there is no shame
Alrighty, then!
Nurse, we have a patient who needs attention in room 10.
It’s demographics, Duncan Munchkin.
Bathsalts?
By continuing to fight on the same battlefield, barehanded and with their mouths taped the Murphy Brown society will simply continue. Note even though Quail had it right (for the kids, the fact that single mom homes exile most kids to eternal misery for life) AND most of the left acknowledges it, one of the BIG issues of the last campaign was women’s vaginas.
Same thing with Baleful Bawling Boehner. He conceded the loss and then set about adding Wimpering and Whinning to his vaunted arsenal of legislative triumphs.
But life is good in that we’re now out selling Y10K insurance and puffing up how great it’s gonna be.
Better to spend time figuring out how to fight, change the battlefield and take back the culture because, folks, you’ve lost. The choice is either become a Legionaire and join the French in celebrating defeats or prepare Alexander’s army. Nice article for the Legionaire though.
“Reality is on our side. When I call Obama a reactionary, what I mean is that he adheres to a grievance-based socialist ideology he learned in college from professors who were probably old even then.”
And I think the last election proved that a bare majority in this country is OK with that. THAT is perhaps the most troubling aspect about the last election, that a majority of the people in this country are OK with socialism and actually expect the government to take care of them and all their needs. Of course, these same people will never tell you how to pay for all of this, expecting that if we just “soak the rich,” like their leader Obama says, all our problems will be solved. I guess it will be a rude awakening for them when we finally do run out of money and end up like the other bankrupt European social welfare states, like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, to name just a few.
We will need our own version of Margaret Thatcher who famously said that socialists always run out of spending other people’s money. We need a Margaret Thatcher now more than ever to bring this country out of its socialist darkness and into the well-lit uplands of capitalism, which only made us the most powerful country on the planet.
Where will we find that person? I wonder what Allen West is doing four years from now?
You see the support Sarah Palin got from the Republican Party when the mauling started and continued on her and her entire family.
She was as close to a Thatcher as We’ve been.
Too bad she had more moxie than McCain. It was like Pee Wee Herman running for President and having Norman Schwarzkopf as running mate.
Maybe it was BECAUSE of Thatcher that We didn’t get Palin. Apparently there are some that are aware of history.
I live in Illinois. Too late for me to leave. But anyone else living here, take your families and get out while you can. Don’t go down with the ship. The Democrat Party and political corruption destroyed this state, along with the help of the public service employees union and NEA. Without federal aid Illinois would collapse. Without Cook county and Chicago Illinois would be a red state. Out of over 100 counties Obama only carried a handful. It is amazing and sad that one county and one city can affect the rest of the state so negatively.
I understand your plight. The Seattle Metropolitan area handily outweighs the much more conservative Eastern portion of the state in all state-wide elections. Which is why we’ve had an unbroken procession of democrat senators – and more painful – governors – since 1986 when the last republican governor left office (voted out). John Spellman rode in on the bow-wave of Reagan. Had he lost the 1980 election it would have been to the very liberal loon Congressman Jim McDermott – AKA ‘Baghdad Bob’ – a title richly deserved. Thank G-D for small favors! McDermott gets re-elected in his district (Seattle and thereabouts) without having to campaign with much vigor and gets 60% and more each election and does nothing much in Congress other than rubber-stamp Feckless Won’s progressive agenda. Had he defeated Spellman in 1980 our nanny-state would have been very much like California – as it is we are only trailing them by a few years unless something gives. We elected a new governor in Nov. – another G-D’ed democrat!
We here in Michigan have a like problem and it is called “Wayne County” and Detroit.
Now that so many are leaving {over 250,000 in 10 years from 2000/2010}and moving to adjacent areas, the mindset is moving, as-well.
Colorado sees it when CallyFornians move there, and some areas are getting really touchy about movers-in ‘bringing their politics with them’.
When it happens, then what…?
We lost and reelected the man who’s hellbent on taking away our freedom for one reason. We fought about money and failed to fight the real war the left had been singularly engaging in for half a century or more–the culture war. We tossed out God, the family, neutered the mission of the churches from salvation to social justice, stood quiet while they took over our schools, our media, our entertainment our purse-string with which they bought off any opposition. We sat quiet while the left was engaging in PC, abortion, pornography and gay marriage, and bio-diversity equating man with a mere animal and no better and wonder why America has become a nation of animals–as they intended. They have successfully divided the old melting port and turned everyone into a groups with anger and hatred –using envy and racism to tear down the successful and responsible.
The GOP is merely the other side of the ruling coin. Many of them hate social conservative and love libertine licentiousness-telling those faithful to leave the party by their actions. The GOP still refuse to talk about social issues (as if the nation’s inner cities and the fatherless home with generations of young pregnant welfare girls and boys with 9 mms doing drugs has no economic effect.
The GOP has shown it’s elite ruling class screw-you attitude when they dumped Sarah Palin our of fear we might just like someone who would clean up the good old boy party and that Trig incident–well it’s not sophisticated enough for tghe country club set so they sent their media and folks like Dick Cheney and Bully Christie to dispose of her so we could fight freebies and lust with boring economic lessons from a rich man.
It’s over–democracy itself has been proven far too vulnerable for less than honorable folks to govern with, and America , because we ignored the culture wars, has few honorable men and women left.
“It’s over–democracy itself has been proven far too vulnerable for less than honorable folks to govern with, and America, because we ignored the culture wars, has few honorable men and women left.”
It’s not that the culture wars have been ignored, it’s that the left has spit in the face of the laws of God, and has succeeded in corrupting the rising generations. The pattern between America and ancient Israel before her destruction is quite striking. May of Isaiah’s prophecies move back and forth between near-future and the last days, so it’s rather difficult not to see that the words of the Lord are soon to be fulfilled.
ISAIAH Chapter 3:
1 For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water,
2 The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient,
3 The captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator.
4 And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.
Should be “Many of Isaiah’s prophecies”….
Judgement begins in the house of the Lord so I will focus on my own sins to hear the voice of God more clearly although my first main revelation is how God Loves me so much more than i love myself God make me snow-white figure of speech so i see more clearly how much God loves me God’s Mercy how can we measure this Mercy?
Tell me please
Is reverse quoting the author allowed?
“When I call Obama a reactionary, what I mean is that he adheres to a grievance-based socialist ideology he learned in college from professors who were probably old even then. As these academics die and go to hell for all eternity, up-and-comers may begin to notice that the poor suffer under left-wing programs”
“Okay, maybe that last one’s true, but you see what I’m getting at.”
Articles like this show the author to be naive. I feel like we’re walking on a floor that still looks, largely, shiny and strong in most places, but the supports underneath are rotting… we’re going to break through shortly, and discover that beneath the surfaces of society, the rot has progressed further than the vast majority of people suspect: Liberal or Conservative. Look at what happened in Steubenville, Ohio (Google “Steubenville Rape”) – THEN recognize you’re only aware of the rot there because the rape transpired… the day before the rape, that rot was still there. NOW recognize that that rot is virtually everywhere in our young people. Wait until these youth move into middle management… and wait until today’s 5 and 10 year olds move into entry level in a few years… and the subsequent progressions. For those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, prior to GPS: Do you remember that bad feeling when you accidentally drove into a bad neighborhood? You were desperate to find your way out. I believe in 5 to 10 years, simple trips to the mall or work will risk running into spontaneous riots – what the media will call “demonstrations,” and just about everywhere we go will involve a “bad neighborhood.” The rot is amazing: Kathy Griffiths and Anderson Cooper incident? (Google that, too). Unbelievable. And consider this: If an Obama is possible, which would have been laughed off as a proposition a mere 10 years ago – what’s coming?
I keep hoping against hope that the proverbial cultural pendulum will start swinging the other way. Right now the ’60s far leftist “flowerchildren” are ensconced in the veritable seats of power. Some say Gen X, the next ones in line for said powerful positions come from a far more conservative lot. I hope for our society’s sake that this is true.
“bobbcat
I keep hoping against hope that the proverbial cultural pendulum will start swinging the other way.”
What culture pendulum? Greece is still waiting for their glory days to return. The USA has proven that fallen man cannot be responsible to run a democracy without corrupting everything to get his share at the expense of others. Politicians have left statesmanship and have become become images and narrators de jour–without souls-but with agendas, telling us daily the very lies we insist they tell.
Without God and traditional values at the nation’s center, it morphs into Sodom and Gomorrah and parasites in control.
I agree to the extent that what you describe is the result of man believing that he is the center of his own universe & is ruled to an extreme degree by moral relativism, with a rather loose grip on the basic concept of what is right versus what is wrong.
“up-and-comers may begin to notice that the poor suffer under left-wing programs and rise under the free market, that education improves under conservative guidance and gets worse under liberals, and that big business actually gets more entrenched and powerful under the left while the right helps the little guy thrive. ”
And it won’t make any difference. Although the electorate has had moments of lucidity when it did actually perceive these truths through the haze of liberal bullshittery, did it make any difference? Even with two Reagan landslides did we undo *any* of the damage done under FDR or LBJ when leftists ran wild? NO. Leftism is on a ratchet; all it seems we can ever manage is to hold it up for a while, never push it back.
As Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi demonstrate so proudly.
We are culturally “toast”. Better hunker down and prepare for the ride. Positive thinking won’t get you out of this one….
Darn; After all these years I read Andrew Klavan and find out where I went wrong.
I should have just gone from pauper to wealth by skipping all that useless skills, education, and labor nonsense. Even today, my labor, skills, and education would be TAXED AT A HIGHER RATE. Easy to see why nobody wants to waste their time at a stupid job.
One more little quibble; Congress has ENABLED Obama to get away with his juvenile supervision well before he was elected President. I believe his negligence was his most attractive quality. But, it could also be his jihad for the Democrat Party.
Does it look like Congress will ALLOW any change?
We now have only one effective Branch of government.
And Obama is treated like he is a disadvantaged space alien, disabled, with special needs.
Obama is so immensely incompetent, I don’t know how he lights a cigarette without burning himself. But, that could explain his short hair.
The man is not at all incompetent, but perfectly successful if his goal is to fundamentally change America by dismantling all that was good about it,and turning its ashes into another 3rd world Marxist entity. Everything he has done points in that direction IMHO.
I agree with you completely. If Obama is incompetent then it is planned incompetence. So far everything he has done has succeeded in moving the country towards the socialist *cough* utopia *cough* that Obama and his ilk crave.
Well, Don;
Obama illustrates his incompetence every time he speaks with a tele-prompter, which is 99% of the time.
He displays his fear of his own media by never having a Press Conference.
If he was COMPETENT, he would display that by reciting his beliefs and convictions WITHOUT A TELE-PROMPTER, and fall back to them when confronted by the media.
You have the recent closed door meetings with Obama where Obama simply used the power of his office to intimidate Boehner, instead of actually trying to negotiate anything; That’s his ONLY METHOD of “administration”. He acts no different than an IRS agent performing an audit.
He has his position merely because he has been a good jihadi for the Democrat Party Elders.
Like I said; He is treated like a mentally challenged, disadvantaged juvenile in interviews and in his debates. And if there is no allegiance to treat him that way, you can’t get near him.
Depression for me ? No – more like frustration – at watching the systematic dismantling of American structures, rules and incentives that benefited more people than anytime in human history.
Mr. Klavan , I think a significant factor you may be missing in assuming that radicals want peace, the best health and the most wealth for all indiviuals is that this doesn’t appear to be the case. Obama seems to be content to be sure there is an equal peace for all, equal health for all, and as close to equal wealth for all as can be accomplished short of outright pillaging the rich outliers. That kind of goal justifies some radical approaches to running the country.
In other words, jam his socio-economic moral calculus down our throats, with fundamentalist zeal, because he believes that he and his fellow Best and Brightest “know better”.
This is the “theocracy” we need to be concerned about … the Cult of Human Omniscience, whose members possesses more blind faith in the object of their worship than any Christian, Jew, or Muslim.
It’s not Obama, it’s that he seems to be finding and promoting all like-minded sanctimonious idiots and breaking everything he can get his hands on, to the applause of the Democratic party and MSM.
When the inmates are in charge of the asylum, yeah, there is objective reason to worry about the irreversible harm that may happen at any moment.
Great column. Very true. Linked to it on my web site endtimestavern.com, while also mentioning you write some great books. Best regards
I am sick of the whole thing and only desire to secede.
The first time I’ve seen your religious bias toward America’s religious foundations – or just letting ill defined terms create old divisions? After about 400 years, Who hates the Luddites who loved having a Bible for the people? Are all Jews and Evangelicals who know the Bible is God’s word the enemy once more?
I have to take exception to one of your points. It’s when you suggest that radicals “lose track of the causes and foundations of the things even they value,” and then (you imply) that radicals also want or desire “peace.” Wow. I think that is naive. There are a large number of people who claim to be wanting peace, yet do nothing more than foment violence. Just consider, for example, Obama. Do you really believe he “wants peace” in the Middle East? (as I laugh derisively) Do you really think he wants “reconciliation” or to reach any form of “compromise” with his domestic political opponents? (The other day, I happened to watch a CBC panel — the usual commentators ranging from The Left, to the Further Left, to the Ultra Left, who were espousing their drivel– and one of them, gushing about Obama, claimed he just so loved Obama because Obama is just so “conciliatory.” Hilarious. I had to wonder if we’re on the same planet. (If you parse Obama’s speeches, he routinely delivers veiled, and not-so-veiled threats. He is a bully. He is not interested in being “conciliatory.” He’s interested in waging an all out political battle to defeat the best of America (which formerly included a freedom from tyranny.)
There will NOT be civil disorder or anarchy or anything rediculous like that during the next year. Get a grip. Great empires take decades, even centuries, to fall apart.
On the other hand, if you are worried that Republicans will never have power again, that’s legit. There will not be another Republican president in my lifetime. It’s impossible. Romney only won a majority of the white vote, and whites will be a declining percentage of voters every year forward.
Republicans are NOT going to win over Hispanic voters–this is based on the foolish belief that Hispanics will vote Republican because they are religious Cathlics and Republicans are controlled by anti-abortion evengelical protestants. Hispanics will vote Democratic because Democrats give them stuff they want, and they don’t care that much if white Americans are having abortions.
Republicans should really be trying to win over Asians.
This analysis is flawed because it assumes eventual rational action. The universal (over both time and space) response of socialists to the failures of socialism has been to apply stronger socialism. Obama’s re-election is proof of the dominance of that mechanism even here.
Why don’t you lay out the whole right-wing program? After overturning Roe v Wade, it will time to reinstate Plessy v Ferguson and get past Loving v Virginia. Undoing Social Security and Medicare may take even longer, as will removing the right to vote from women and repealing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Eventually you’ll also want to return to the natural state where there is a property qualification for voting. You already believe that the wrong kind of people shouldn’t be allowed to freely associate, ergo your hysterical fits about ACORN and your steady hostility to unions. Actually outlawing such abuses will take time.
By the way, a smaller point. I frequently encounter assertions similar to Klaven’s remark “Expand the definition of marriage and civilization falls.” I guess that sentiment never fails to garner applause in these parts. Tell me, exactly what civilization has ever failed because of an expansion in the definition of marriage? If it happens all the time, I guess it must have happened at least once. If I were going to pick the commonest single reason for the decline of states, it would be the reluctance of elites to pay the freight for keeping ‘em going. I can name plenty of examples of that. Or is it unfair to bring historical realities into play?
“Is it unfair to bring historical realities into play?”
Nah, go ahead and try. But all you’ve done so far is lie and push the standard leftist illogic that we’ve all seen before. You’re wrong, we all know you’re wrong (and so do you, if you’d just have even a moment of honest self-evaluation), and if you think you’re pitiful attempt at browbeating those of us who actually understand how the world works you’re much less intelligent than you’ve convinced yourself you are.
About them historical realities:
Tell me, exactly what civilization has ever failed because of an expansion in the definition of marriage?
The Roman Republic. The definition of marriage expanded over the last century BC from “married or not yet unmarried” to “married, not yet married, or not interested in getting married at all”, with the result of precipitously falling birthrates and the extinction of ancient families. Hence the Papian-Poppaean Law of 9 AD, a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to promote the institution of marriage.
We don’t share the Romans’ abhorrence of bachelorhood, because we don’t consider the continuation of family lines to be of paramount importance. On the other hand, the Romans would not have comprehended the idea that it was possible for two men to pretend to be “married”.
The law you’re talking about imposed penalties on celibacy.
You really think that’s why the Roman Empire was declining? Too much celibacy? Victor Davis Hanson would laugh at that notion.
It’s never been done before. We’re throwing out thousands of years of cultural evolution on a whim and thinking no harm could possibly come of it. #Arrogance
Even Klaven was making fun of you guys for thinking that changing the definition of marriage was going to cause the collapse of the state.
The precedent involved in declaring that the male-female relationship can not be considered special to the point of merely having a different name even though it is the only reason relationships, private parts, sex, and the human race exist is obviously quite a serious problem.
Allowing that precedent paves the way for declaring that pretty much no actually important difference can be a basis for discriminating even merely in terms of the name used to describe something.
Please don’t waste your time and energy on the likes of Jim Hitlerson. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
… never, never, never …
so don’t bother responding to him … or even acknowledging his existence … ever, ever, ever …
THIS CRETIN FEEDS ON YOUR ATTTENTION!
Jim, comprehend much? Go back and read the article again; specifically the part around “Expand the definition of marriage and civilization falls.” We’ll be here waiting.
For your reading pleasure…
“Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, USA (ret), 2012.
“Of Alarms, Militias and Destiny” by Bob Owens.
“Dear Mr. Security Agent” by Matt Bracken.
“If They Come for Your Guns, Do You Have a Responsibility to Fight?” By Dean
Garrison.
“The Next American Civil War” by J.D. Longstreet.
“Rise of Extremism” by Warren “Bones” Bonesteel
“The Next American Revolution” by Warren ‘Bones’ Bonesteel
“Beyond Conspiracy: Police State America.” by Warren ‘Bones’ Bonesteel
“A Reader’s Resources on Systemic Collapse.” by Warren ‘Bones’ Bonesteel
It isn’t a matter of outcomes. In spite of Mt. Klavin’s Polyannish outlook, it’s just a matter of timing and details.
…but neither of you have done any real research…into history or much of anything else.
How do you introduce Conservatism and Free market Economics to a Liberal?
When aid workers who know their business go to parts of the world where famine has been in place for long enough to see distended bellies, they start with Gruel. Gruel is easy to digest (that gastrointestinal system is way out of shape if the belly is that distended) but is a nutritious meal. Only after Gruel has re-acclimated the stomach to food can you introduce more solid meals.
Basically, Famine infantilizes its victims digestive systems, so you start with a liquid diet.
People too long in Academia and in Progressive Land are similarly reduced to mewling children, and need to have their food pre-cut and chewed for them. So I would start someone like you, Jim, off on something accessible and entertaining before I introduce them to hard-core food for thought.
Because, let’s face it, Jim, you and people like you know more about how to make babies (and how not to) than how jobs are created (or about anything else for that matter)
I’d use Milton Friedman as an Introductory to why Conservatism and Free Market Economics. If I didn’t know better, I might think Saint Paul had Friedman in mind when he wrote Romans 12 …
Then I would move on to EconTalk
http://www.econtalk.org
Then to Thomas Sowell (Look up his Uncommon Knowledge interviews – they are an excellent start) …
And finally, Jim, to Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101 and 201.
Hillsdale’s lecturers are simply not as gifted at it as Milton Friedman, but what they reveal about Woodrow Wilson, FDR and LBJ is, well, revelatory.
This will help you grow up into a Real Boy, Jim.
See, someone here gave you a gift for the New Year.
You’d think that 2008 would have raised a certain level of suspicion about “Conservative” economics…
I note the stupid assumption that the only alternative to plutocracy + political paranoia is some sort of utopian socialism. It isn’t. One of my greatest bitches about the triumph of right-wing economics is the way that it has crippled American capitalism. Like Keynes and many others, I think that free market economies have to be saved from themselves precisely to remain free market economies.
By the way, at least in recommending Thomas Sowell, you’ve set an easy task. Since he’s rewritten the same book now ten or twelve times, you only have to read one. He’s just another Hoover Institution welfare baby with a chip on his shoulder.
Translation (in re Sowell):
“I can’t refute what he says, so I’ll belittle him. It’s what Alinsky taught us to do.”
And has yet to prove anything other than the irrefutable fact that he is a Self-Righteous Moron.
Embrace it. Feel the joy. And feel the shame of being for so long such a Useless Git.
Unfortunately, the radicals have never lost sight of their causes and foundations. THe current situation is the outcome of decades of America’s increasing decline into liberalism in the US: those causes have been with us a long time, and in fact have gained ground, not lost ground. (Whoever we would ever hear of Bill Ayres again?)
Moreover, the current source of pessimism does not come from just one thing: the degradation of marriage, for example. That degradation is not an isolated trend: it is the result of an overall, large-scale decline in morality and societal underpinnings. Increasing taxes alone is not necessarily the end of the world, but when it is part of a larger process that includes crushing debt and general fiscal irresponsibility, it is just one piece of a larger decline. History has proven many times that any general societal decline has many symptoms and takes place over many years. Societies have crrashed and burned on such things. To see changes in marriage or increasing taxes as isolated one-offs is to entirely miss the grand lessons of history.
So you think that modern American society is immoral?
When in American history did we ever have any Golden Age of Morality?
Was it in 18th century colonial New England, when there was no legal age of consent, girls got married as early as 13 years of age, and child prostitutes plied their trade in several large Eastern cities? (In fact, that was the original reason for passing laws making the age of consent 16 or higher–it was to put an end to child prostitution.)
Was it in the first half of the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of black men and women were enslaved?
Was it in the second half of the 19th century, when the newly formed New York City Board of Health did a survey and discovered that half of men in New York City were infected with STDs?
I see a lot of implied nostalgia for a vanished idyllic American past–which never really existed.
And what is wrong with 13-year-olds getting married? At least back then there was some expectation that a man would marry a girl if he was going to have sex with her, and would support the children conceived by that union, and that she in turn would be faithful to him.
The point is that society always realized that female virginity was an impossible goal.
A study of wives in 18th century colonial New England (a little before the American Revolution) showed that some 40% of them had given birth to their first child less than 5 months after marriage. That’s right! Nearly half of New England wives had premarital sex and got pregnant before marriage.
At least they kept bastardy under control; it’s common knowledge that children are much better off being raised by two parents, preferably under wedlock. There have always been facets of decadence in any given society across the entire spectrum of history. Some facets are more deleterious than others & there is the matter of degree as well. “We may very well go by the way of the Romans” is an observation that no longer sounds so far fetched, considering the way things are here in the US & elsewhere these days.
Despair is warranted. Too many tipping points have been reached: Percent on the public dime; voting by race and ethnicity; unbridled immigration; corruption of the electroral process; liberal entrenchment in education, academia, media; and re-election of Obama, who will appoint Supreme Court judges. The current national situation cannot be reversed, and it will only get worse. There is no recovery from this. The country is lost. The only POSSIBLE solution is insurrection. And while there exist the people and the means, we don’t have the leaders we need to call us to arms and lead us in the struggle. In our first revolution we had Washington, Adams, Henry, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc. I fear we don’t have such people now. Our conservative leaders are too occupied with book deals, paid appearances, etc. Who among them will pledge the lives, their furtunes, their sacred honor?
“…it seems impossible to believe we would re-elect a mediocre reactionary out to ‘fundamentally transform’ our success into failure. But we did … .”
No we didn’t. We voted for Romney, 60-40. Who did re-elect the mediocre reactionary? The reflexively socialist and tribalist third-world hordes with which the Left since 1965 has been feverishly replacing America’s historical population.
No third-world immigration, no President Obama.
Excellent, Mr. Klavan! Bravo, and a needed bracing slap to the face of whining conservatives everywhere. So what if we narrowly lost the election? We’re still the biggest most brawling, innovative, creative people and country the world has ever seen and Obama is going to be nothing but a bug smear on our windshield as we accelerate into the future. Remember the big, bad Bill Clinton, who was going to suspend the Constitution and designate himself Emperor forever? Yeah, me too. Now he’s a chicken-necked old dude who gives speechs and leers at young girls and he’s a private citizen just like you and me.
My dad tells a story about how when he was a toddler he remembers pushing his toy truck around behind the couch while his family spoke of FDR’s election with grave despair. FDR, socialist, was going to destroy the country. They knew it; and maybe FDR’s policies still will, but in the meantime look at what we built while dragging all that socialist crap along with us, like something stuck to our shoes. Now we have more stuff stuck to our shoes, but it’s not going to stop us. “There will come a time when the courage of men may fail, but it is NOT THIS DAY.”
Demographics, Andrew, Demographics. The only group at all receptive to conservative policies when it comes down to the polling booth is Whites. 90% of Romney votes came from Whites. 90%.
We Whites are 67% of the population now, but on 60% of us vote from non-Democrats. By mid-century, we will be less than 50%. And we will be toast.
I always believed in the ROE effect – the belief that the left’s love of abortion and the 30 million “unhappened” children – would be their own ideological death knell. I hadn’t counted on them importing 50 million third world dependents to replace their voter rolls. Well played, liberals. Well played. The Labour Party of Britain made their own brand of “multiculturalism” a party platform to forever undermine their own country and to a large degree, Cameron aside, it has worked, forever changing that country. The open, mocking hostility towards “white guys” is a game changer. There is no going back. We’ve lost – and THEY know it. The left. While they might manage one designer baby. The Hispanic and African immigrants are having four, five and six children each that will forever be convinced “whitey” and “republicans” are evil because they didn’t want to just hand them a check. These people are bought and paid for and know where their bread is buttered. The six or so kids? That’s a beautiful thing. Life is a beautiful thing. But those six or so kids reflexively voting Democrat? That’s a freakin’ disaster from which there is no recovery.
I agree wholeheartedly that we need to avoid despair and negativity. It’s crucial for all of us personally to remain positive about our lives and to work for the best in our own lives, and for the people we love.
Thing is, we don’t have a coherent cultural-renewal or political program we all agree upon. The Randian/libertarians don’t have much in common with cultural conservatives.
What really sucks is we’re missing an obvious opportunity: Democrats have left themselves dangerously exposed on numerous hit-home issues for everyone, especially globalism, corporatism, the lack of accountability by bankers after the 2008 financial crisis, the growing surveillance state, and drone warfare.
The subset of beliefs that are shared by conservatives and libertarians is fairly large, upwards of seventy five percent, but libertarians feel toward real conservatives rather like black activists feel toward white men. Unfortunately, that means we need to kick the libertarians out.
I say we run Sarah Palin for President in 2016 on a conservative ticket. Screw the Repubs. We did it their way this time and look what happened. If we are going to lose, let’s do it honorably.
Sorry, not buying the sunshine pumping. Yes, things looked dark in the 70s, and yes, Reagan turned things around… sort of. The fact is, the problems that we had before he was elected continued to metastasize during the 80s, and it was during that time that the structural deficit came into being. The welfare state grew. Societal decay continued. Freedoms shrank.
Few civilizations fail in one, long, uninterrupted slide. There are always peaks and valleys along the way. But it is pretty much impossible to honestly look at the trajectory of our nation over the past 50 years and not see that the overall trend is sharply downward. The self-inflicted wounds and debts we have accumulated cannot be healed. We’re going down, and only Divine intervention can prevent that now.
The very notion that Americans are willing to vote for the America-hating incompetents now pillaging the U.S. treasury precludes optimism.
Beyond a certain threshold of national debt, there will be no deliverance, however well-intentioned America’s leadership.
True, day does follow night — until it doesn’t.
Alex, I’ll take ‘Revolution’ for a 1,000…
I got news for everybody here:
America is pretty much the same country today that it was in 2007. A country of this size and history doesn’t totally change itself in the space of just 5 years.
Yet I didn’t see any of this declinism coming from conservatives in 2007. While Bush was President, I didn’t see conservatives bemoaning that “America is lost.” Even when the 2008 financial crash happened, the stock market crashed, and unemployment began to rise sharply, I didn’t see conservatives saying “America is lost.” That started only after Obama got inaugurated President.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED in America, except that we’ve got a liberal President. So if you weren’t bemoaning the sad state of America in 2007, don’t bemoan it in 2012.
What is striking though to me is that it’s not just a “liberal President” but a POTUS who is the most liberal since LBJ. The changes Obama has brought forth are every bit as significantly deleterious to the future of our country as LBJ’s “Great Society” has been. As in the case of that, our country will feel the ramifications of what Obama has done for generations to come. If that isn’t worthy of something to “bemoan,” I don’t know what is.
I didn’t like the changes that LBJ brought to the country either.
But guess what! *After* the LBJ administration, we Americans:
Landed men on the moon and sent space probes to the outer planets
Created the personal computer revolution and the Internet “dot.com” revolution
Elected Ronald Reagan President and won the Cold War with the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
Which inspired nations around the world from China to India to Africa to dump Soviet Communism and embrace market reforms.
The moral is that the LBJ administration didn’t doom America. Rather, America continued to pile up quite a remarkable track record.
I do realize that the Obama era won’t last forever; hopefully a similar pattern of progress will ensue in similar fashion in its wake. One can only hope, as they say. Bear in mind though that we are witness to unparalleled societal decadence; I cannot help but wonder how much impact this is likely to have……
Except that, instead of a President that at least paid lip service to the need to reverse course back then, we now have a President whose motto is “Forward!” … right over the cliff of class warfare and dependency.
As the other poster pointed out, the LBJ administration was just as liberal. (Maybe more so, because LBJ had a much more liberal Congress to work with than Obama has had.)
The problem with folks like you is that you were apparently oblivious to the changes taking place in the country as long as we didn’t have a liberal POTUS.
You’re wrong. Real conservatives were complaining vociferously about the Patriot Act, the rising national debt, and the passing of the Medicare prescription benefit. But the downward change under Obama isn’t just additive, it’s geometric:
Bush’s Patriot Act: We can see what you’re reading at the library
Obama Doctrine: We can use drones to kill American citizens (overseas, for now)
Bush Nat’l debt after 8 years: 5.3 trillion
Obama Nat’l debt after 8 years: 19 trillion
Projected Part D cost: $419.3 Billion
Projected ObamaCare cost: 1.4 trillion (with a T)
There is cause for increasing pessimism. Bush caused a lot of unintentional damage because he was a genial idiot. Obama’s damage is intentional as the “fundamental transformation of America”
The bad news is that conservatives have already lost. As George Will said recently (paraphrased), most people in America voted for unsustainable spending and eventual default and financial ruin. Most politicians aren’t willing to try and explain how bad it is, because people don’t want to hear it. Expect a long slide (or short plunge) into the dreary greyness of the life of one of Orwell’s Proles from 1984.
The good news is two-fold. First, although we can’t save a society as sick as this one, there is One who can heal men’s souls, regenerate their consciences, and renew their morals. And second, this world is not all there is.
I sometimes feel like a Christian in Rome, circa AD 395. And I fear for my children’s future. But I know that there is hope, even if it’s not hope in this world, but in the world to come.
No truer words ever spoken,
“…peace is always and everywhere the end result of superior firepower, improved health the result of greater wealth, wealth the result of hardheaded and often greedy business dealing, and liberty deeply linked to a specific concept of man’s relationship to God.”
#OpenGov: XML of House Floor Summaries Now Available in Bulk Posted by Don Seymour January 8, 2013
http://www.speaker.gov/general/opengov-xml-house-floor-summaries-now-available-bulk
While concerning, the inevitability of our decline as a function of demographics is hardly assured.
The strength of the American experiment, in its pure form, is that it nurtures and protects the central HUMAN value when it comes to living day-to-day: the ability to live free and pursue happiness on our own terms as responsible individuals, families, and neighbors … a value that transcends origin and ethnicity as a driving force.
The problem is that we now have at least three generations, with millions of immigrants among them, that have been led to believe that they CAN’T get ahead on their own terms … that “others” will use their race, gender, or lack of “intellect” against them as leverage for exploitation, and therefore they are not only compelled, but ENTITLED, to delegate their decision-making authority to those whose credentials and connections give them the appearance of champions.
But such as these are not being shown the “flip side” …
… they believe that credentials and connections inherently confer insight and wisdom in infallible quantities upon the champions, even though the credentialed and connected do not walk in their world, much less know them as individuals well enough to be relied upon to solve their individual problems.
… they believe that responsibility is solely a function of pocket depth and political power, and the corollary that “brightening the corner where you are” with what you have around you is a fool’s errand. They can’t countenance that simple solutions … that DON’T involve government grants, peer-reviewed studies, and intervention by the champions … might just solve a lot of the problems around them, and do so with better results.
… they despise crony capitalism, but do not see that the cronies have power over them ONLY when they can collude with the champions who possess the coercive force of law – and that asking these champions for more and more help increases the opportunities for the very thing they despise.
… they do not realize that part of being free, is being free to work around the errors and mendacity of those you encounter – and that delegating their decision-making and resources to the champions could leave them with no effective recourse in the event that the champions developed a severe case of clay feet.
Such as these need to see not only the “flip” side … but see the power they have when they exercise their personal initiative, and understand that it is that initiative that is the golden goose of American prosperity … not expertise and connections, who trend toward paths previously trod because they are “safe” … but personal initiative that leads individuals down new (or re-discovered) paths that lead to doing more with their lives, for themselves and for others.
“…and atheism is massively destructive whenever it takes over the majority.”
Mr. Klaven:
Would you be so kind as to substantiate this statement?
Thanks.
USSR, East Germany, Rumania, China, Cuba…
Or consult pretty much any American Founder including Jefferson and Franklin except for Paine.
Atheism is a prime example of a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
It was not the USSR’s atheism but their totalitarianism and imperialism that made them dangerous.
Thank you for a bit of light.
Sorry to have to tell you this, Klavan – but from now on, you’ll have to pay to read and be enlightened by my comments, in the special Members Only area!
Not my words, but my brother’s, after having read Klavan’s commentary:
i did not feel so bad when clinton got elected,
and did not feel so bad when obama got elected the first time.
but the second time…
i agree with the author when he say, “things, in other words, are almost as bad as they always are.”
actually, i’m glad we aren’t expecting a mongol or viking invasion, or anything THAT bad.
but it is hard to say what “rolling the sun up the hill” is really supposed to mean.
work harder?
become politically active?
buy guns and ammo whenever i can find them on sale?
a lot of people are probably thinking “what can i really do about any of this?”
one thing i don’t like is the idea
that conservatives need to “change” if they want to have a stake in future american politics.
the way a person votes is SUPPOSED to be about PRINCIPLES.
i think it is ok to compromise on things that do not matter, and perhaps politicians should do more of that.
but if it means conservatives are supposed to become like liberals,
just to woo a lot of bleeding hearts who can’t tell an underdog from an under-handed dog,
then why should i be happy if a conservative wins if he might just as well have been a liberal?
it think i learned last election to be happy with the way i voted,
even if everyone else in america voted against me.
Thank you, Andrew.
This was what I needed to read today.
Let us not forget that just beyond our shores lies a whole world with it’s own concerns and troubles. Slidding to Hell in handbasket at an ever increasing pace. And the foot on their accelorator is the retreat of American Power from the global stage. Without the Yankee umbrella shielding them the other nations will soon find themselves returning to the old tried and true methods of balancing their treasury’s books: LOOT Thy Neighbor. ‘Hmmm… lets see here, they have more gold and a bad attitude. While we have more warriors and a Devine Right!’ (not that it would ever happen [again] but France has 160K+ men under arms while Germany has 60K+). It never seems to fail. Just when we become focused on the latest and greatest home grown disaster ever, heaven throws a crurveball and totally changes the subject. Usually involving blood and terror and loss.
Political science, and political campaigns have taught everyone to fight over the middle of the bell curve.
The Democrats lock their base, and try and move the middle towards them, Republicans do the same, their strategies are the same, their tactics differ slightly.
There is another way of course, lock your base, move the middle AND capture part of their base. The middle which is always rather random and difficult to move then becomes less important.
It’s almost impossible to do for the left since they don’t have any “Currency” to offer our base. Obama on the other hand has shown that large parts of his base can be purchased, and rather cheaply.
I can already hear the howls of “…our principles” well you don’t need to give them up, just use your head so that both sides get what they want.
We want small government, they want goodies. Shrink the government and give the takers a big bag of goodies that sunset over time, say 2 election cycles.
We spend about 60K per year on an impoverished family, most of it goes to the middle man ( 1 Trillion ) the IRS and affiliates cost us about 1/2 Trillion etc. and so it goes, there are a lot of goodies to be had by selling off federal government programs.
Promise to reform / eliminate those so that people making 35K or less get a nice check for 4 years and some services that make them better citizens (budgeting, civics) make it “neutral” so it does not cost us anymore than what we are saving and of course message it so that we promote the positives to both sides.
The left will hate it, but short of raising taxes, or printing massive amounts of money, so much so that event he left-middle rebels, they have no options really.
Never work with the Republicans though, they like big government as much as the dims.
End this madness and here is how – come help take our rights back from the Progressive central government.
A new Gallop poll just out showed 77% of the people think Washington is broken and can not be fixed and will not change. We Constitutional
conservatives have a winning issue and a perfect storm to unite all against the Central government.
Join the efforts to take back our Freedoms and Liberties – States rights and powers. http://tinyurl.com/c2owkbu
I don’t mean to throw a wet noodle on your parade here, Andrew, but you may wanna duck. Here comes a wet noodle.
Fracking: I firmly believe that Obama, and his EPA, are working their fingers to the bome, trying to come up with a way to end the practice. And will do not everything in their power (regardless of legality) to put an end to it? Whether through a new EPA rule. Or an executive order from the president. Or through some other trick. And with an impotent Republican congres unable (or unwilling) to stop them, I am convinced – sooner or later – it will happen.
Federalism: I’m from Wisconsin. After Scott Walker won the 2010 election, and the Republicans won majorities in both house of our state legislature, AND Gov. Walker survived the recall, I was very encouraged. But then Obama won the state in 2012. And not only that, but Tammy Baldwin (who’s even far to the left of Obama) won the senate seat. Temper my enthusiasm. Voters are fickle. For many reasons. Not the least of which are apathy, ignorance, and greed. All those Republican governors could be out as soon as the next election.
Reality: It has less and less influence on modern politics. Impression is far more important to today’s voter. And, unfortunately, the entertainment industry (including the news media) does much to decide, and shape, what impressions are delivered and received by those voters. So until we can take back the culture (which I, frankly, have little hope of) we will not see any long term gains.
I’m sorry to be such a downer. But this is how I see it. The “47%” will soon be 50%+. That will be the final tipping point. And it will be a quick slide to the bottom. And few, if any, of the takers who got us there, will acknowledge their own part in the fall. Their fingers will be pointed else where.
Bottom line, few people feel any sense of accountability any more. And when you are no longer accountable, you are fee to do anything. And blame others when things go bad.
Federalism I believe’s our best hope to restoring the United States into fiscal shape. While voters reelected Barack Big O 51.0% to 47.2% GOP came out with approximately 58-41 legislative chambers. Now that’s including the VA Senate where technically tied has a Republican Lt. Gov. who breaks the tie in the GOP’s favor. Then there’s the unicameral legislature in NE where technically non-partisan really holds a GOP majority. The Dems did score big gains in the state legislative races due to Big O’s coattails but GOP still hold dominant with 28 state legislatures. That’s helped for the fact of gains from the AR Legislature (first time since Reconstruction), the AK Senate and WI State Senate which they lost for a short time due to 2nd round of Senate recalls last June. And GOP holds 30 governorships topping with 25 HALF of all states in the country. There’s hope yet people, there’s hope yet. That is except Sacramento, Springfield and Albany as a few examples of leftist loonism.
Also let’s not forget that GOP still holds slightly smaller but still solid control of the House we just have to rally them to hold firm on spending issues.
Sign of hope: A 23-year-old black guy recently said to me, “Obama sucks, I just didn’t like the alternative.”
Look, I’m not exactly sanguine. Our republic has gone past the 200-year limit for republics. Islamist fundamentalists are on the march — and history shows religious fundamentalism is never a good thing for anyone.
I wasn’t sure how to respond to the implicit expansion condemnation from a specific version of fundamentalism to ALL religious fundamentalism until this article by Ed Driscoll here at PJ Media appeared today. Here’s a memorable quote Ed cited from Sarah Hoyt:
Blaming Capitalism or affluence or industrialization for those evils is like blaming the cat for removing the scones from the oven and eating them – with jam and cream, mind you. (Yes, younger kid did that. He seemed absolutely convinced it was true, too. He was four.)
And invoking to resist these evils the untamed primitive (No? “Smash capitalism” and well… OWS in general) which IS the found of these evils is not only insane, it is counterproductive.
It is also where our culture has been for the last twenty years, caught in a recursive loop where everything – such as the collectivist massacres and poverty around the world – that doesn’t fit the narrative is swept under the rug, and “shocking” things that shock no one are continuously hurled Tourette’s-like at the one civilization that COULD have been shocked by WWI or seen anything wrong with death on that scale. (Hint, other cultures BRAG of how many they kill/how many of them are killed in war.)
Really, how many Christian fundamentalists boast of how many people they have killed versus Islamist fundamentalism?
Ed closes with this bit of advice from Sarah that he (and I) agree must be done:
I’m not a psychiatrist, but I looked up what to do for someone who is caught in a neurotic recursive loop of counterproductive behaviors. Apparently one of the ways to fix this is to correct the misapprehension and projection at the heart of the loop.
So, I say – break the cycle. Speak real truth to power. Write of war and evil, sure, but as human ills, and not as the result of the unique badness of Western Civilization (or civilization) or capitalism, or affluence, or industrialization. Dare point out that while humanity has had savages aplenty, few of them were noble. Dare point out that while civilized man can be conventional, conventional behavior is often decent and moral and better for everyone.
Smash fake intellectualism. Speak truth to power. Dare write of individuals who can and do control their destiny and make things better (or at least try to.)
Administer shock therapy.
Write Human Wave.
If you’re good at it, soon all the “right thinking people” will hate you. What more could you want?