Jonah Goldberg asks, “When Did the Rules Change?”
When Rome was “falling,” did it feel like it? When all of the tasty, leafy fronds started vanishing, did the dinosaurs say, “So this is what extinction looks like”? When British troops signed up for a quick war in 1914, they expected to be “home by Christmas.” They certainly didn’t say “goodbye to all that” — in the words of Robert Graves — until long after they realized “all that” had in fact disappeared.
I’m beginning to wonder if the current political moment is much, much, more significant than most of us realize. The rules may have changed in ways no one would have predicted two years ago. And perhaps 10 years from now we’ll look back on this moment and it will all seem so obvious.
In 2008, American liberalism seemed poised for its comeback. The pendulum of Arthur Schlesinger’s “cycle of history” was swinging back toward a new progressive era. Obama would be the liberal Reagan.
Now that all looks preposterous. Of course, considerable blame can be laid at a White House that seems confused about how to relate to the American people when the American people don’t share the White House’s ideological agenda. Indeed, the White House seems particularly gifted at generating issues that put it crosswise with the majority of voters — from the Arizona immigration lawsuit to the cotton-mouthed explanations about whether or not it considers NASA’s primary mission to be boosting the self-esteem of Muslim youth.
But it would be foolish to over-read the importance of much of that. Politicians are sometimes dealt bad cards and play them well; sometimes they are dealt good cards and play them badly. But the basic political rules stay the same.
But what about when the rules change? For nearly a century now, the rules have said that tough economic times make big government more popular. For more than 40 years it has been a rule that environmental disasters — and scares over alleged ones — help environmentalists push tighter regulations. According to the rules, Americans never want to let go of an entitlement once they have it. According to the rules, populism is a force for getting the government to do more, not less. According to the rules, Americans don’t care about the deficit during a recession.
And yet none of these rules seem to be applying; at least not too strongly. Big government seems more unpopular today than ever. The Gulf oil spill should be a Gaia-send for environmentalists, and yet three-quarters of the American people oppose Obama’s drilling ban. Sixty percent of likely voters want their newly minted right to health care repealed. Unlike Europe, where protesters take to the streets to save their cushy perks and protect a large welfare state, the tea-party protesters have been taking to the streets to trim back government.
But even on the Continent the rules are changing. European governments have turned into deficit hawks to the point where the American president feels the need to lecture them on their stinginess.
Of course, he increasingly feels the same need here at home as our out-of-control debt is becoming a live issue, despite the fact that voters should be clamoring — according to the rules — for more taxpayer-funded jobs.
As Margaret Thatcher has been quoted as saying, “The Facts of Life are Conservative.” Western civilization evolved over eons of trial and error. In contrast, the Rules of Progressivism were artificially created during a fairly small window of time in the late 19th century. While they varied to the degree that they were implemented in America, England, Germany, Italy and Russia during the first decades of the century that followed, they were of their time — and that time was the Industrial Revolution. Machinery was Big — from the steam locomotive to the assembly line to the hydroelectric plant to the printing press, the radio towers and the film studios. Thus they were expensive to acquire, and thus, ownership of that machinery was rare. Because it was expensive to change the assembly line, mass production replaced artisan craftsmanship. Mass industry created mass products produced for mass men who consumed mass entertainment.
For the first half of the 20th century, that model worked reasonably well in America. By the mid-1950s though, white-collar workers began to outnumber blue collar workers in the US, signaling the beginning of the end of the industrial revolution. Mass production slowly began to be replaced by more-finely tuned products. Mass entertainment followed as well. By the early to mid-1980s, there were a couple of dozen cable TV channels. Last time I checked, my DirecTV directory has literally hundreds. More importantly, there are literally millions of blogs and Websites on the Internet. Amazon makes almost every book produced in the last 100 years — and nearly every significant piece of popular and classical music, and vast swatches of Hollywood’s back catalog available. eBay takes up the rest of the slack.
But so much of the mindset of Progressivism, particularly its economics, remains trapped in the first half of the 20th century — which creates multiple levels of cognitive dissonance. First, there’s the “Cargo Cult” of the New Deal, as Jonah dubbed it in an earlier op-ed. But red tape, and the left’s general “standing athwart history” mindset, morphing from “Not in My Backyard” to “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone” (AKA “BANANAS”). means that actually building New Deal-era projects such as Hoover Dam are almost impossible. (Not coincidentally, these days, environmentalists are much more interested in removing dams than building them.) Then there’s the constant goal of expanding socialist “freebies” such as welfare and socialized medicine, even when wide swatches of the American public — and increasingly Europe — understand them to ultimately be bottomless financial sinkholes.
I have been waiting for someone to flash on the obvious – conservatives have been slowly walking away from the Republicans. Fewer are willing to hold their nose and vote. In the last election there were indications that many conservatives stayed away from the voting booth. The general reason why is the theory that eventually the system will become so broke that even those who pay no attention until voting day will finally begin to wake up.
Looks like that is now happening.
David:
“…even those who pay no attention until voting day will finally begin to wake up.
Looks like that is now happening.”
Waking up David? Happening now? When more than likely Bill O’Reilly will allow conservatives to vote for Mike Huckabee in 2012? When will people really wake Up? It’s beginning to look like never.
Who is your preferred “conservative” candidate for President in 2012? Another John McCain?
If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time for “conservatives” to get real and demand a choice, not another corrupt inside politics actor, liar, corrupt empire builder in pursuit of personal power.
The absolute Marxist takeover of this country may be only one election away. It can never be undone. A new crop of thieves in the House after November is NOT an answer. It is assurance that the play and the actors will carry on until the bitter end.
The left side of the “Ruling Class” is done as is the pseudo conservative side. While unable to explain why, I’ve thought or perhaps felt that Obama and his minions are simply too late. Perhaps twenty years maybe sixty or seventy. The world has outgrown their worldview. This article does well at explaining why at least in part. While progressivism may have been relevant from the 30′s to the end of the 80′s Marxism had already been invalidated before any country had even tried it.
Another “Communism was never properly applied” argument. Yawn.
That was OFF the wall. Just repetitive argument that we could do it better. The fact that communism is a failed ideology does not bother people like you. Ask those that ran from it.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupt absolutely.
Conservative candidates for the Republicans hasn’t announced himself(herself) yet, because the moment they do, the Lame Stream Media and the Tarballers will be all over them, trying to pull a “Joe the Plumber”. This is why everyone is keeping their head down– look at what a lightening rod Sarah Palin is for their hate ! Just look at HuffPo for the George Orwell ” Daily minute of hate” towards Sarah. A smart candidate will keep their head down until close to the end or they will become Public Enemy Number One in the eye of the syncophantic media and hounded endlessly.
When more than likely Bill O’Reilly will allow conservatives to vote for Mike Huckabee in 2012?
Excuse me? No one tells me how to vote, I decide for myself. And it looks to me like a goodly number of Americans are deciding the same thing (no more party loyalty for loyalty’s sake). Mike Huckabee is not the candidate I hope to see run in 2012. In fact, I would be ecstatic if the Tea Partiers, the Republicans, or the Democrats could come up with someone we haven’t heard of before, who actually recognizes what makes the economy run and wants to facilitate that, who recognizes who our enemies are and what must be done to them, and who realizes most Americans do not want a faceless bureaucrat in Washington dictating every facet of their lives.
If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time for “conservatives” to get real and demand a choice, not another corrupt inside politics actor, liar, corrupt empire builder in pursuit of personal power.
In this you are correct.
The absolute Marxist takeover of this country may be only one election away. It can never be undone.
Never say never. The Soviet Union did fall (although now it’s a sort of kleptocracy run by a former KGB agent… Russians, whaddya gonna do with them?). The Chinese talk communism and practice capitalism. Cuba’s an overgrown sugar cane field with rusty ’54 Chevys, waiting for the Old Bastard to finally die. Even in Africa, lots of people live in houses with chairs and stoves. Americans beat all of them when it comes to freedom and economics, and oh by the way, sheer stubborn persistence.
“… if the Tea Partiers, the Republicans, or the Democrats could come up with someone we haven’t heard of before, who actually recognizes what makes the economy run and wants to facilitate that, who recognizes who our enemies are and what must be done to them, and who realizes most Americans do not want a faceless bureaucrat in Washington dictating every facet of their lives…..”
I like Mitch Daniels
I wonder if Obama will welcome a Republican win in 2010..as his policies start to fail..he would say in 2012…
“see America, we were doing really good, making progress, then we got Republicans back in the house/senate, and look at what has happened, everything we worked for is falling apart!”….all in reference to his failed policies that will reflect as failure by the republicans not his policies.
Obama and friends may be hoping for a republican win in 2010 so that they can retake in 2012. It is obvious that American’s are easily led down any and all garden paths..just throw up a few good commercials, get fussed at by Pelosi and Biden. Staying away from the polls is the worse thing we could do.
Republicans/conservatives need to learn to talk back, NOT be afraid to call Obama a liar, in public not behind closed doors, call him on his crap!!! I don’t care what office he holds, he doesn’t deserve our respect. He and the minions will be out in full force…the conservatives need their own James Carville…
Some of those voices have begun to emerge. Sarah Palin, for example, is so effective at exposing Obama for who he really is that the Left /media complex is utterly obsessed with her. I recently heard a snippet of an NPR show with a lame 5th-rate comedian who started the show with a string of Sarah Palin jokes (she’s stupid, she’s aquitter, etc.) It shows how badly they need her to reinforce their self view, which is defined solely as what/who they are not. But it also shows how effectively Palin has pierced their smug, reactionary world view. Glen Beck drives them similarly bonkers.
But yes, we do need more conservatives who are willing to speak directly and truthfully like Gov. Christie in New Jersey. It’s not going to help if we elect establishment droids like Romney, a McCain, or lame nuts like Huckabee. We need serious grownups, fast.
Sure; Like islam has faded into history. Democrats are using the same philosophy.
I was one of the Repubs who almost stayed home on Nov 4, 2008. McCain’s choice of Sarah palin is what made me change my mind.
Richard Gere’s quote to Louis Gossett Jr. in “An Officer And A Gentleman” — “I’ve got no place else to go” – pretty much fits the left here. They hate big business; they hate mainline organized religion; they hate the idea that they are not the superior human beings who shouldn’t, by rule and force of law, be allowed to tell everyone else how to run their lives. Even if the public turns on them in November and continues to punish them in 2012, they’ve got no place else to go, and with certain seats being dead solid locks to remain in Democratic hands, you can be sure even major defeats at the polls won’t stop that core group from trying to use government to run everyone’s lives. They might look to once again repackage and re-brand their ideology, in the same way ‘watermelons’ were created by having far leftist champion the green movement, but they’ll be around forever, because any mindset that thinks it has the right to control the most minute details of everyone’s business can’t help but push for more government control at the national level over all those activities.
We don’t have to defeat all of them. We just have to so thoroughly discredit them that no one will ever listen to them anymore, at least not to the extent that they’d ever again be capable of doing serious damage.
Never going to discredit them that thoroughly. How many times have the statists come a cropper, only to spring up later pretending that everything was going well until the backsliders screwed it up? After over a million murders in the 20th Century, we can still hear lefties plaintively cry that we shouldn’t give up on Communism because it’s never been tried.
Don’t underestimate the stupidity and gullibility of youth. Face it, late teens and twentysomethings are largely idiots who will try anything their parents don’t like. Some Pied Piper will come along, be it Timothy Leary or or Bill Ayers or Barack Obama and tell them “Nobody knows how special you are except me! Follow me and we’ll remake the world!”
If they survive drinking the Kool-Aid then maybe they look back, ask themselves “How could I have been so stupid?” and start living like a responsible human being.
All salient points, Steve. But this typo or misstatement must be corrected for the record:
“After over a million murders in the 20th Century, we can still hear lefties plaintively cry that we shouldn’t give up on Communism because it’s never been tried.”
from The Black Book of Communism:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam[4]
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist
movement and Communist parties not in power.
That’s roughly 100 million total dead humans in 100 years thanks to a social structure the powers-that-be in the good ol’ U S of A are pushing us into. Goodie for us!!
I recall the Congressional Hearings in the mid-50s documented 23 million Kulaks murdered in the 20s because they wouldn’t collectivize, and 12-18 million Ukranians intentionally starved to death by withholding their own ag-products from them in the 2nd five year plan. That brings the total USSR murders to way over 30 million.
They followed Marx’s dictum that the bourgeois shall be destroyed by the implements of their own trade. Printers had their limbs fed into printing presses. Whole Kulak families were bound in their fields and their harrows driven over them.
This, America, is what the evil dreams of the statists come to — every time. And they DO succeed.
And the “short term”, as Driscoll notes, “looks ugly”, but it doesn’t look as ugly as the long.
These are just the deaths that can be accounted for. Historians estimate that the number is actually closer to 200,000,000 because of people who simply disappeared (at the hands of the State) and were never accounted for.
Read Jamie Glazov’s excellent book, “United in Hate” and find out about the “fellow travelers” and the mindset of the liberals/progressives. It is frightening. And these same kinds of people are now running our country! God help us!
The problem with this (desirable though it is) is that is doesn’t happen. You would think that with the repeated (often enough catastrophic) failures of left/socialistic/progressive/communistic ideas, governments and programs people would stop pushing for them.
But those in that camp are religious zealots and simply ignore results. “I want it, therefore it is” remains their mantra. Those of us who live by “it is, therefore I want it” will be locked into this endless dispute forever.
Those who know that one of us, or a few of us, know that’s best for the rest of us will not be confused by bad outcomes. They will wade through rivers of others’ blood so that (imagning that they won’t be caught up in it) they can ride atop the flood.
Robert Fuller
Hopewell, NJ
We can discredit a lable, but all they need to do is to change lables and begin again. We need to have “what ideologies are” taught in schools so people know it’s the same old pig dung with a pretty new coat of paint.
They’ll be around forever because envy conspiring with the will to power will be around for ever.
And the battle to resist them will be around for ever.
Lack of bigness is a part. But the real reason, is that Big Government is comprised of wealthy, hereditary elites (Kennedys, Clintons, Daleys etc.) allied with non-Whites. AS LONG AS credit bubbles kept consumer goods going and employment high in the private sector, this was politically sustainable.
Your average White person hates Big Government because it cannot employ him, as Robert Reich said of the stimulus, no White guy need apply. Government employment is almost exclusively non-White and elite, hereditary White. FDR kicked out every Mexican he could find, including Hispanics of American citizenship. He suppressed the Pullman’s Union and Blacks unionizing in general. This was how FDR despite obvious failures lasted for so long. It was the patronage.
Now the patronage is reversed. Government jobs (closed to Whites, particularly White men) grow at astonishing rates while the majority finds private sector jobs falling. The successful model of White elite crony capitalism-government partnership and Affirmative Action patronage simply cannot adapt to collapsing private employment, lack of a credit bubble to keep consumer goods rolling, and so flails around. The political model built around prosperity has no “give” facing a long term economic crisis. When the Fed predicts stagnation for six years, and Obama has nothing to offer in Keynsian employment to the White middle/working class, a revolt is certain.
I noticed you left out the Bush family. Can you explain why?
Let me add that repeal of Prohibition was extraordinarily popular, and FDR got a lot of good will by backing it. Now a punitive Liberalism that denies economic prosperity in any form to the majority, has more and more restrictions on:
Health Care.
“Obesity” — your BMI will be recorded in a permanent computer record. There are moves to “tax fat people.”
Fast food and soda taxes.
A hectoring, lecturing First Lady who herself is somewhat fat and deeply unpopular.
Personal life with Carbon taxes on everything from BBQ to lawnmowers.
Rapidly rising electricity rates due to carbon taxes.
FDR knew that relaxing just some of the daily restrictions on personal life particularly booze would generate a lot of good will. Thats because FDR though an elite liberal practiced at heart Daley style Machine Politics. Obama, though he comes from the Daley Machine, is at heart a lecturing, hectoring Liberal out of the Wilson mode. A minor bit of “royalty” who sees himself as chosen to lead everyone’s moral life, as opposed to a real scion of wealth, who habitually hid his privilege under manufactured folksy ordinariness.
Obama just can’t let even a bit of the good times roll. Nor can liberals. Certain they are the elect, and chosen by Providence to “save” the rest of us regardless if we wish it or not. That would be questionable if the economy was booming — now its pure poison.
Hey, Whiskey….how are you doing?
Notice that the Obama Administration is no longer prosecuting federal marijuana laws. Repeal of marijuana prohibition is working its way through our legal system. This is certainly popular with a large subset of Obama supporters and progressives. It might even be the right thing to do, especially in the eyes of the libertarian-oriented.
But the effect will be a large number of voters with even more dimenished critical facilties. And that’s good for the Democratic Party.
No ancien regime has EVER gone out ‘without a fight.’ The hope for a non shooting civil war in the US lies in the ballot box. Which is why this DOJ and Black Panthers case, as well as a relatively honest census is of such importance. Of overwhelming importance, actually.
And I don’t think ANYONE in the current elite – Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, has any idea of what is going to hit them.
“No ancien regime has EVER gone out ‘without a fight.’ ”
What struck me about the downfall of the Warsaw Pact regimes and the USSR in 1989-91 is that the final fall was relatively bloodless (yes, I know of the revolts of 1956, 1968, etc). Rumania had the gunning of some people at Timisoara, and the Red Army tried its pathetic coup against Gorbachev (and then again against Yeltsin in 1993), but I long thought that these regimes would only fall by not only massacring millions of their own citizens, but by the Soviets lashing out with nuclear weapons against the West.
If they can be brought down, so can our Marxist regime.
There is definitely something in the air.
And you DO?
The white-only government of Rhodesia and the apartheid government of South Africa relinquished power with little violence. Granted, the consequences of those transfers of power weren’t terrific, but it does suggest that now and then, a ruling regime can be displaced without rivers of blood in the streets.
Mass amnesty immigration trumps the ballot box.
That is a major reason for the First US Civil War, the ballot box was twisted by Northern immigration, even if the Democrats had not split their vote, Lincoln and the Republicans would have won outright as a sectionalist party, backed by the industrialists and bankers.
PS – This whiskey fellow has interesting things to say.
I agree in general with your post, but a slight correction is in order. Twisting the ballot box with immigration may be seen as a major reason for the imbalance of power that led to SECESSION. The proximate reason for the war was Lincoln’s decision to invade with an army of 70,000 in response to a dispute in Charleston harbor in which no one was even hurt (read the details). Lincoln’s government had reneged on an agreement with S.C. over the disposition of a newly constructed fort that had not at the time of secession been garrisoned. The army had slipped in under cover of darkness in clear violation of the agreement.
Correction acknowledged and agreed.
The Civil War was caused by the South, because the southern oligarchy wanted to stay the largest fish in their pond by their making their pond smaller. There was never any Constitutional excuse for secession, and ample constitutional grounds for using war to suppress it.
Lincoln did nothing to cause the war except his duty.
In fact, the attempt of the South to use war is an example exactly of the ancien regime not going without a fight–the fight they started at Sumpter.
The feds owned the fort free and clear, per the state legislature and the constitution.
The war was caused by the North treating the South like a colony, using it’s numerical advantages to pass laws that transfered wealth from the South to the North.
There is nothing in the constitution that forbids secession, therefore secession is not un-constitutional.
Agreed. Not only was the South treated as a colony to be exploited, it continued to be exploited and repressed for decades after.
The South was in a bind. Succession would result in trouble from Europe, but the North was robbing and oppressing them, economically.
The Constitution was a contract between the newly formed federal government and the sovereign states. Given the way it was drafted and ratified, it’s unreasonable to view it any other way. Therefore, secession would be the rational response to Washington’s failure to fulfill its duties under that contract — failure to defend against invasion or protect the republican form of government guaranteed to the states, for example.
(Is anyone else thinking of Arizona?)
“The war was caused by the North treating the South like a colony”
The South was not treated as a colony to be exploited, it’s federal laws were the same for it as at any other point in the country.
“using it’s numerical advantages to pass laws that transfered wealth from the South to the North.”
Turn about’s fair play–the South had been using its artificial electoral advantage (the 3/5ths compromise, when it should have been 0/5ths), to advance slaveholding interest since the Founding. The South betrayed the Founders by not abolishing slavery in the first place, and they had no expectation they would get to unconstitutionally start ignoring the law when it was no longer serving their advantage.
“There is nothing in the constitution that forbids secession, therefore secession is not un-constitutional.”
As I have already explained to the confederate apologists here many times, the constitution is the law of the land, and the confederate secession was contrary to it–so it was unlawful, unconstitutional, and treason. From the 10th amendment to the supremacy clause, to the power of the president to execute the laws by the military if need be, secession was treason.
If the South had sought and gotten an amendment to the constitution to permit secession, then they would have merely been repugnant to the conscience of man and the meaning of the American Revolution, but not treasonous.
@ Francis Porettom except the comments dialog won’t let me reply directly.
The Constitution can never have been a contract between states, for which the federal government was merely an “agent”–except to the extent the states are themselves merely agents of the people and the federal government also is another agent of the people.
The states after the revolution had the plenipotentiary lawmaking power of the crown devolving to them, subject to the bounds their political processes could place on their governments as delineated in their charters and constitutions. The Founding severed some lawmaking powers from the states and with the people’s blessing conveyed those areas of sovereign lawmaking to the federal government–these powers were the state’s no longer. Those powers cannot simply be reclaimed by the state governments by an act of those governments because they belong the people, and the poeple have given those powers to another governemnt.
In those areas of lawmaking power enumerated in the Constitution, the federal government is sovereign–and it gets to enforce those laws with the sword every bit as much as the states can enforce those laws they make persuant to powers the states have retained.
The myth the federal government is not a sovereign government as much as the states are is one the addle brained fumes which poison–it does not inform–the liberty minded in this country.
We’ll do much better holding the feds to the constitution than by pretending to ourselves it doesn’t what it says.
The Civil War was an War of Imperial Subjugation, by the North over the South (and the rest of the Nation).
This essay (and the whole site) is excellent commentary on the Civil War.
The Cost of Union
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/intro.htm
“Immigration ” was also pro-confederacy–immigranys didn’t want freedmen competing for wages.
The only thing interesting about Whiskey is his racism–the real kind–and his ignorance.
Obama and his ilk are not going to give up power without a massive fight. Defeating Barry the Vacationer is going to be tough and I look forward to working for candidates in either party who have common sense solutions and favor smaller government. Agree with heathermc, the current elites are not going to like what comes next.
Here’s the plan; it has three parts. The socialist wing of the dems (Obama wing) is working in concert with the liberal wing (Pelosi). What the socialists must do is crash our economy and our way of life. That will create a huge dependency on the government and Obamaites will rise like the socialist phoenix from America’s ashes. But the first step is for the Pelosi tribe to create more dependency on the government through conventional means through tax, spend, immigration, and regulatory policy. This sets the stage for the socialists because American have lost their options of taking back their country because the majority of voters are now dependents.
Pelosi keeps power and Obama creates a new society. The third step is to throw God under the bus and use the newly established government to enforce His exile.
Its going to be a close call.
Only one problem: it can’t be paid for. Taxpayers are out of money and can no longer borrow. Banks are insolvent and can no longer lend. USG can no longer force the rest of the world to buy our debt. Eventually even the most virulent, parasitic socialism will die when the host starves to death.
The basic underlying flaw with socialism is that, even in theory, it runs counter to millions of years of evolutionary programming towards self-interest. In practice, it is just another means of one group grabbing and holding power. Unfortunately, because the serfs cannot be exhorted to work hard enough against their own self-interest, they eventually have to be imprisoned and murdered. It always ends the same way.
It’s a drag to be on the scene–and having brought children into the world–at a time when socialism makes its first naked grab for power in this country. They will not win, but if they’re not turned back with ballots soon, it will be with bullets later.
My take from Florida:
http://www.practicalstate.com/2010/07/18/florida-legislature-time-to-correct-the-past/
Cheers
I recall a big TV epic of decades ago that had a huge cast and a lot of pretentious dialog about the 1930′s and 40′s and it had a wonderful haunting musical score. ” The Winds of War” was the serialized drama that enthralled us week after week.
What it could not overcome was the tendency of humans to view recent history as unusual. Every one of the major characters in the drama had this “insiders”knowledge that, a big war was coming. Certainly , events in Europe gave most people an uneasy feeling that some thing big was coming. But no one predicted when or how it would occur. Hindsight is 20/20 say the critics.
Regardless, such history usually involves bloodshed and events of scope beyond our imagination. Like the actors in “The Winds..” we can feel it coming just over the horizon.
The singularity is near.
The people’s rebellion against the Marxist tyranny with be the match; whereas, the stagnation it offers will destroy itself along with the people killing the beast. Sure, the monster will go without a fight, but once the monster realizes they are collectively off the cliff anyway. They only have one direction to go.
I meant to say, “Sure, the monster will NOT go without a fight,
The Ancien Regime Isn’t Going Out Without a Fight
The Old Guard surrenders, but never dies ?
The political revolutions following the deaths of
Kennedy, and now Byrd, disprove that rule.
The political correlation of forces is already changing,
as Democrats desert, change their coats, or take one
for the team, and fall.
Ten years is a good estimate of the time required
to carry out the Progressive Putsch. The Bad/Good
news is that the economic Hard Times will begin in
January, with rising taxes and Inflation, and grow
worse as state bankruptcies/bailouts occur; By 2012
the exceptional American people, united by an obvious
existential threat, will make their representatives
the same offer Lincoln made his Generals: Produce
results _now_ or be replaced.
Like the FUSSR, the Progressives will patiently push
forward per their long-term plan, and be overtaken by
events in the short-term.
Anyone who is thinking that the present situation will not end up in a smaller and possibly bigger bloodshed is deluding himself.
As for today there is a PINOCHET option still avaiable to save your great country.
Tomorrow it shall be only the FRANCO opton left.
The prof is in the evolving behaviour of THE DEMON’s supporters; increasingly intolerant, lying, shrill, aggressive, insolent, violent – just like when the COMMUNISTS were taking over the Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Russia.
At the beginning, they (communo-fascists) always fake civility and pretend to cooperate.
As soon they consolidate their grip on POWER, they start murdering the real and potential opponents.
Few years ago I read in THE AUSTRALIAN an interview with a former member of now defunct Australian Communist Party’s operative – a living fossil (the commie).
The BEAST admitted freely that in the fifties of a previous century it was their objective that upon winning the political power in Australia the Aussie commies would embark on killing spree of the “enemies of revolution”.
Nothing has changed in the degenerate minds of the RED PARASITES.
It is still applicable to your own version of TOTALITARIAN COLLECTIVISTS.
Perhaps even more than ever…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
so, why is anything different now that we’ve had fifty years of government that ignores the will of the people and is now so obviously despotic?
Nothing is different. We just have to do it. Sign onto the 2010 Declaration at usdissidence.com. Let it be known that we do not consent to this tyranny. That is a start.
The Republican party stinks…. What’s really bad is that the Democratic party smells a lot worse.
Let’s push the whole mess into the Pocomac and go build a new one.. maybe in Saint Louis, and re-stock it.
I want a sane country again!
Better yet, lets secede again. The Libs can have their “Workers Paradise” and the Conservatives can have their freedom again. Let’s see which system survives and thrives. If you don’t like the politics of where you are, leave.
If you leave can California come too.
“I want a sane country again!”
A multi-party situation is even worse because it reduces the number of socialist fascists needed to halt all progress in both bodies of Congress or to win the Presidency. Elect Republicans and then weed the garden by never electing a democrat or a RINO again and always have an alternative candidate in the wings if some Republican gets weak-knees. Don’t do like the last election and hand the whole garden over to the democrats to “teach dem publicans a lesson”.
If after about six years that doesn’t work, then it’s time to resort to our “right & duty” according to the Declaration of Independence. Believe me, it’ll be a lot easier to put Republicans in and weed out the bad ones than to resort to our only remaining alternative.
Regards
Here’s how the Gulf of Mexico fishermen will try to screw BP. They will put down their wives and 10 year old children as crewmembers so they can keep all the money. Then they will inflate their fish catch. But these fishermen have been under reporting their income for years to the IRS, so hopefully BP will ask for tax returns from these scam artists and their accomplices.I live in Alaska. This is how many fishermen here played during the EXXON/Valdez accident. And the scam here continues. We have some type of watchdog that is paid for by EXXON to do nothing.Of course,the attorneys and the fishermen are going to say oh we’re still suffering.
So as my mother would say, “Let me get this straight.” The po folks in the Gulf have been under-reporting their income, a solidly conservative sleight of hand, is it not, and now will over-report it, trying to screw po BP. Sounds like humans being human. Is your argument that they were unfairly getting rich before, or unfairly barely making ends meet?
Yes, there will be a lot of bogus claims, but many will also not be able to get what they need. The “accident” HAS ruined the Gulf for at least the short term; no more sustenance lifestyles living off the Gulf. Now what?
Wages paid to locals who help BP clean up the oil spill
will be deducted from payments make by BP to those same
people for income lost due to the oil spill;
As the Administration says: ‘Fair is Fair.’.
and stupid is as stupid does.
So-called progressives will always be with us. The task is to constantly take on “progressive collectivism” whenever it presents itself. Progressives live on Planet Doom. Conservatives live on Planet Plenty. Example – I think that oil is a gift from nature – progressives think it is a curse on mankind.
My home town is next to a rain forest and we have clear, clean water up to our eyeballs – yet we have water restrictions every year because progressives can’t be happy with abundance. They must pretend that we live in a desert. We have to be in solidarity with our poor foreign brothers who don’t have enough water. Yet, when I suggest that we ship tankers full of water to all those poor dried out folks, progressives are horrified at the idea. Apparently their brotherly love can’t survive the hydration of said brothers.
Too many people yearn to diminish the lives of others by banning joy, regulating away individual freedoms and demonizing achievement. The flag they fly today is progressive collectivism. Tomorrow their cover may well be protesting cruelty to peanuts – all that crushing and squeezing that happens between the innocent peanut and the jar of peanut butter. Whatever their disguise, these misanthropes will always be with us.
The only civilized response is to call them out over and over again.
I am an American living in Canada (not by choice, but by marriage) and my greatest fear is that if Obama and his cronies are successful in turning the U.S. into a Marxist regime, it will embolden the progressives in Canada to follow suit. Canada is already further along the slippery slope into Statism and a victory by Obama will give the Canadian progressives the confidence to go all the way.
Look, just give me the the 74 more weeks of unemployment I was promised and I promise I won’t screw with politics until my money runs out.
Assuming I can’t find a job in that time, of course.
Tomorrow. I want my taxes back.
Here’s another possibility: business as usual, FUBAR, but survivable. Every so often history takes a real twist, but every generation envisions the end time days. Let’s assume that Obama and all the Progressives get voted out or Revolutioned out; then what?
Industry returns to the USA?
Industry returns to the USA?
—–
Under a sane govt, much of it would return.
Some industries would return, others wouldn’t.
Capital investment is heavily influenced by labor considerations. We’ve seen certain chores exported to faraway places because 1) labor “over there” is cheaper than American labor; 2) there’s an adequate skill base to be employed for the particular purpose; 3) the balance of other considerations is far less important for that application. For example, help desks have largely been relocated to India, because there’s an adequately educated, largely English-speaking labor pool there that will do the work at a fraction of the cost of having it done here, and other considerations (e.g., capital plant, regulatory, environmental) are at least not unfavorable to the relocation. By contrast, our domestic automakers don’t build cars in India to be exported to the United States. Nor, after a protracted and painful set of learning experiences, do the great majority of our high-tech companies “offshore” their engineering design or software development.
Many chores that have been “offshored” were exported because of our regulatory burden or our environmental laws. Those costs are less in other lands — in some other lands, sufficiently less to more than offset elevated costs of training foreign workers, managing foreign capital, and bribing foreign kleptocrats. Should those burdens on our shoulders be lightened, such exports might well be re-imported — always assuming that the new state of affairs appeared stable and trustworthy for the long term.
The key insight here is that American captains of industry and venture capitalists are not stupid. More, they have legions of bright young MBAs who know perfectly well how to work Microsoft Excel. And they trust in both the numbers and the lessons taught to their predecessors.
The key point is that businessmen, especially American ones, chase profits, not employment. Who gives a hoot about hiring a bunch of people when their return as profits is trivial. Better to find products, industries, and services where money can be made and put your management attention and investment capital where there is large returns.
A good metric for this is revenue per employee.
Don’t worry about bring auto manufacturing jobs back to Detroit. There is a global glut already – it is a stagnant, low margin business.
Move on to innovations where your product or service increases customer productivity. Then you can leverage your business to capture the profits made by ytour customers since they will gladly pay a relative high price compared to your costs.
That’s why redirecting a nation’s capital to political favorites starves REAL growth. Witness the rush for green energy jobs. That’s is one huge loser that distracts from finding solid business opportunities. When Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists started funding “green energy,” that’s when I realized that they thought the party was over and only political suckup could make returns.
What we need, IMHO, is opportunity for small business to grow and flourish. Small businesses grow and provide jobs. Lenient start up requirements facilitate opportunities for those out of work who have the ability to “make it on their own”. Then those who do not have the desire to start their own business, but have valuable skills and/or work ethics have some place to work and prosper. In my experience, small businesses don’t tend to be socialist.
This looks like the solution to a lot of problems, again, IMHO.
Hey Whiskey, good to see you again.
“federalizing higher education”
Already started. We at Local State U were just informed that the feds are requiring disclosure of race under new rules. So we have to take a new “survey.” I declined.
I think, as a person of pallor, I am not long for the academic world.
Maybe the only option is to never put what your true race really is.
“Charles Krauthammer writes that if President Obama wins a second term, it’ll likely be a glutinous orgy of taxing, spending, and regulating…”
Krauthammer seems to overlook the obvious fact that in order for Obama to do his second-term “taxin’, spendin’, and regulatin’” he’ll need appropriations from Congress to accomplish these in some way, shape, or form. Unfortunately for The Light Worker, he likely isn’t contemplating the very real possibility that a GOP Congress will simply defund most, if not all, of his agenda and then double-dare him to do anything about it.
“Listen, Mr. President Hope and Change, you can make all the recess appointments and set up all the czar-doms you want, but don’t count on us paying for your little exercises in self-aggrandizement.”
…”the very real possibility that a GOP Congress will simply defund most, if not all, of his agenda and then double-dare him to do anything about it.”
Unfortunately, that scenario may end up playing into The Lightworker’s hands. The state media will simply scream “obstructionists” (along with the predictable “racists”) at the GOP for the next two years; they’ll do a full-court press across all types of media, both entertainment and “news”, pounding and pounding and pounding the message that GOP = KKK. They’ve been perfecting their techniques in demonzing Sarah Palin and they’ll be ready to do the same to ANY Republican officeholder or candidate, from Sarah and Mitt all the way down to the guy running for a seat on the Overshoe County Public Sanitation Commission. If Ogabe’s able to regain the White House in ’12 and bring back a 2-house Quislingcrat majority, you can bet the “emergency decrees” won’t be far behind.
But will anybody other than committed leftists believe the dinosaur press?
All we need is control of the House and Senate in 2011. Then we control all the committees. With control we can launch investigations into the numerous instances of fraud on the part of this president and his cronies, fraud already documented but about which, as things now stand , nothing is being done. We do need one additional thing – republicans with guts.
Maybe our elected officials should only be in one term. They are there to serve, not to make a career of it. No lifetime salaries or benefits. They go back to their previous lives and struggle just like the rest of us. Maybe then we could get people who really care about this country and not about themselves and their new lifetime salaries. They will think about what it’s like out “here” and how they can make it better, since they’ll be out “here” also after a few short years of serving.
Right on! I don’t believe for a minute that our Founding Fathers intended for people to make congressional election into a lifelong career. We need term limits!
Tom Perkins–your ad hominen attacks are puerile and add nothing to the conversation. Grow up.
Everytime the subject of the ante-bellum south, he pops up with his same ignorant claims.
The “ignorant” claims are ones against which he has no persusive reply.
There is nothing ad hominen in observing a fact–Whiskey makes general, prejudiced claims which facts do not support, and they are perjorative of non-white persons in this country. What to call it but racism?
What is peurile is not to call a spade a spade.
On the topic of the Confederacy, it had no excuse for existing–it was an evil enterprise dedicated to the meaninglessness of the American Revolution, and I will not see it held up a example anything but what should be thrown down.
Because many otherwise thoughtful and open-minded Americans only see the South, past and present, as a failed society, poisoned by slavery and racism, peopled by evil masters and wretched rednecks — Simon Legrees and “Deliverance” extras. Any love or respect for anything Southern, to these people, is just a transparent mask for racism. This is palpably false. And it is destructive. First, because objective historical inquiry is an essential aspect of a free, thinking people. To ask, “was slavery profitable?” is not to say, “slavery was justified,” even if the answer you come up with is, “yes, it was.” Moral abhorrence does not preclude honest study. The historian’s job is not to tell you the way things ought to have been, but the way they were.
Trash-talking the South also incidentally sanctifies a New England-based political and moral culture that is the root of much that is wrong in modern America. The North was a great deal more than just abolitionists and Freedom Riders, just as the South was more than the slave auction block and the lynch mob. Manichaean history does no justice to America’s complexity.
Dealing with American history on this level requires patience and the ability to get past attitudes unwilling to go further than, “They had slaves, slaves were wrong, the South deserves everything it got.” The American Civil War was “about” slavery like the Boston Tea Party was “about” tea. Slavery became the symbol and character of all sectional differences. It was the emotional gasoline on the sectional fires. Its moral and social implications colored every issue in terms of right and rights. William Seward, the Republican leader whose party made so much of this, recognized the fact: “Every question, political, civil, or ecclesiastical, however foreign to the subject of slavery, brings up slavery as an incident, and the incident supplants the principal question.”
Those who make the mistake of treating modern American racism as some perverse peculiarity of Southern white culture often make the same mistake about slavery. Slavery originally existed in all the colonies (as well as European, Middle Eastern, and African nations). In the United States, it took root in one region and not the other; an accident of climate and geographical economics having nothing to do with inherent moral qualities. Slavery was profitable, and its profits enriched all sections of late 18th and early 19th century America. The South was stripped and plundered and impoverished after 1865, but Northern communities and institutions still enjoy the legacy of their wealth.
But if the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, what was it about? My favorite (historical) Latin professor, Basil L. Gildersleeve, put forth the proposition that the Civil War was fought over a question of grammar — whether “the United States” is a singular or plural noun.[2] The American union was like a marriage, and the South wanted a divorce. She got herself together and left the jealous spouse who abused her and took her money. But she was dragged back. I have found nothing in the writings of Southerners to match what I read this week in a file of unpublished letters of Thaddeus Stevens. The words are echoed in plenty of published correspondence, of course. On Sept. 5, 1862, Stevens hoped the leadership in Washington had “a sufficient grasp of mind, and sufficient moral courage, to treat this as a radical revolution, and remodel our institutions …. It would involve the desolation of the South as well as emancipation; and a re:peopling of half the Continent. This ought to be done but it startles most men.”
The CSA was a bid to form an independent nation out of a region that had a common enemy and some collective regional identity. But the CSA comprised many sub-cultures (a few of them didn’t want to be there), and it had a leadership that sometimes confused self-interest with public policy. It had its fair share of charlatans and profiteers and criminal opportunists. It had some brilliant generals and a great many men in uniform who would be the pride of any army in human history. It was committed to 18th century republican values that were incompatible with fighting a modern war, and it had internal social conflicts that the war aggravated.
In nearly all of this it was entirely like the American Revolutionaries. The colonists in 1776: one-third for independence, one-third against, one-third uncommitted. That must be the standard for legitimacy, or else our United States lacks it. The CSA fought a much larger enemy than George III, mostly on its own soil, without a Dutch loan or a French fleet to aid it, and the majority, in spite of internal divisions, put up a herculean effort, won spectacular victories, made shift with what little it had, and held out till the place was literally gutted and blood-drained by its foe.
The four-year history of the CSA is not necessarily the place to seek an example of the values Southerners sought to uphold. Any nation fighting for survival from the cradle, invaded and blockaded all its life, doesn’t get a chance to express the finer points of democracy and civil culture. If all we knew of Americans was how they actually behaved from 1776 to 1783, we wouldn’t think much of our sense of “democracy” or commitment to “personal freedom.”
And since it is impossible to rewind the tape of history and see how it would have played out under a different script, I can’t say “the South would have been X, Y, Z today if it had been allowed to separate in peace.” That being said, I’d assert there was a tremendous level of self-sacrifice evident in the civilian sector of the South during the war. Southerners endured more and sacrificed more during those years than any large population of Americans has, before or since.
And, even amid the hell of losing a destructive war on home soil, the Southern government remained more true to its own constitution on matters like habeas corpus and freedom of the press than the Northern administration did. In the South I see nothing like the war-profiteer fortunes piled up in the North, or the vast government bounty system that bribed men into the army.
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/apologia.htm
I dispute few if any of your “facts,” but still don’t see how your commentary changes the big picture, where finally, the peculiar institution trumps everything else. All human beings should be able to identify with and understand the rationalizations we make when we do not want to give up something which is profitable for us, especially when we are being pressured by hypocrites, consider ourselves more honorable and better fighters, AND are prepared to die for our cause…even when we ourselves know that slavery is NOT morally acceptable. It is the kind of double think which we humans can do, BUT it does not change the fact that our cause was fatally flawed at its core. I say that the South got trapped by its own institutions, honor, and pride and as McCaslin Edmunds concludes in William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” “God used the Yankees to punish our pride and our sin.” He has little use for the Yankees, but also knows that the Southern Cause deserved to lose. Lincoln decides on the fly that all the blood being shed needs to have some meaning, hence the “new birth of Freedom etc.”
If there was no slavery issue, then there would have been no Civil War. What other issue could have trapped the South into such Divine/diabolical madness?
If there was no slavery issue, then there would have been no Civil War. — Dwight
No matter how many times you repeat it, it still isnt true.
What other issue could have trapped the South into such Divine/diabolical madness? — Dwight
Imperial subjugation and tyranny. The issue wasnt slavery, but that the North be profiting from it, with favored markets and access to the goods produced by that slave labor. After the war, the compromise to what really mattered to the North, was that blacks would be subjugated and their free labor, freely exploited to the benefit of the North. That was what the battle was about. Imperial subjugation. Follow the money.
The Cost of Union
We know what America is today, and has been in the last century. And we can look at what America was in the generation of the founders, and we can read their vision for it. And we can see the wrenching turn in the nation’s destiny that stands between us and them.
By the mid-1800s the North was boosting its population and aggressively asserting state power in the interest of its own industrial capitalism. The South was not. The two sections were diverging, and it was the North that had evolved a new culture since 1787, one that sought to control the national destiny.
Before the seats vacated in 1861 by the Southern congressmen were cold, the economic order of the United States had been turned on its head: the tariff had taken off on an upward trajectory that would leave even industrialists breathless. The nation’s resources were thrown open to private profit; and the whole banking and monetary system was revamped to suit investors and creditors. A tax scheme was created that weighed against the small consumers, the North’s factories (and even its army) were thrown open to immigrant contract labor, and the federal government was using the U.S. military to put down labor strikes. Congress and the President gave another 100 million acres to various railroads, free of charge.
After the war, Reconstruction had far more to do with reordering the South as a section and reducing it to the status of a financial-industrial colony than with black people. Fear, vengeance, love of union, and interest in civil rights may have played a part in Reconstruction, but it seems clear, especially after the 1876 election, that what the South suffered had much more to do with the establishment of permanent Republican party control, tariff protection, and rigging the nation’s financial arrangements to suit bankers, creditors, and New England industrialists.
In the 1870s, when the North debated within itself topics like the black vote and delaying the readmission of Southern states, the argument in favor was frankly presented as being good for the tariff and government bonds and New England “ideas of business, industry, money-making, spindles and looms.”
Midwestern farmers, the same men who swelled Sherman’s army that broke the South, bore the brunt of the new order and soon found themselves being herded into the same colonial status the South had resisted, in vain. By the time William Jennings Bryan and others rose up to defend them, in rhetoric reminiscent of John C. Calhoun, it was too late. The country had been turned over to foreclosing banks and greedy railroads so thoroughly that Missourians were ready by 1880 to make a hero of a murderous ex-Confederate named Jesse James.
After the war, state legislatures trying to protect their people against predatory trusts and capitalists were thwarted by the Supreme Court, which swept away state laws to regulate corporations (230 in 1886 alone), using the argument that corporations were “persons,” and thus protected by the due process clause of the 14th amendment. Between 1890 and 1910, of all the 14th amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court, 19 dealt with black people, and 228 with corporations.
That’s what America bought with four years of hell and 10 years of civil enslavement of the South. Even in New York City in the 1850s a respectable fortune was a few hundred thousand dollars. In the next generation, of “Robber Barons,” of big fortunes and big depressions, men like Rockefeller and Carnegie were able to amass countless millions. The culture that gave birth to Washington and Jefferson was branded as backwards and immoral. The sectional balance cherished in the vision of Madison and Hamilton was swept away in the name of greed.
Whatever else it was besides, the South had been the brake on these forces, which were pent up in New England and itching for dominance. The region’s distinct economy and social values blocked this “progress.” The South favored restricted central government, purely local financial agents, and a leisurely way of life. The South was pulling hard after 1850 to avoid becoming a backwards dependent of a North that was now opposed to everything about the South except its cotton and its money.
Greed hid behind anti-slavery morality. Practical selfishness and pious abstraction merged beautifully. The Lord’s “terrible swift sword” that smote the South was made in some Connecticut mill whose owner piled up millions in the process. It is important to remember that outright anti-slavery work — as opposed to a sense of sectional rivalry and resentment — was limited to a very small class in the North. Prominent among that class were a great many leading capitalists.
In New York City during the war girls sewed umbrellas from 6 a.m. to midnight, earning $3 a week, from which their employers deducted the cost of needles and thread. Girls who made cotton shirts received 24 cents for a 12-hour day. One historian, after studying in intimate detail a cluster of Northern cotton factories, summed up the owners’ abolitionism like this:
“By making chattel slavery the uniquely immoral form of human exploitation, abolitionism undercut the mounting working-class complaints about wage-slavery and beatified the capitalist order. These abolitionists hated slavery not just for its inhumanity but also for impeding their vision of a capitalist society of free individuals whose labor could be freely exploited.”[1]
The Republican Party’s conviction that it has the God-given right to legislate the morality of all Americans runs right back to Civil War. The GOP has never quite forgotten it was the party that God anointed with victory. Henry Wilson, the dedicated abolitionist who headed the important Senate committee on military affairs during the war and was later vice president under Grant, declared the Republican Party had been “created by no man or set of men but brought into being by almighty God himself … and endowed by the creator with all political power and every office under Heaven.”
The Republicans committed themselves to being the “Party of Piety,” and gave us Anthony Comstock, the original national censor. The first act regulating U.S. mail content was passed in March 1865, spawned by complaints that boys in blue were getting obscene carte de visites and dirty novels. Congress made mailing such material a crime. One of Comstock’s most illustrious victims was Ezra Heywood, the veteran abolitionist who had mailed pamphlets that criticized marriage and advocated birth control. The old man (well into his 60s) served two years at hard labor.
Lysander Spooner was an influential and ardent abolitionist and a true American radical humanitarian in the mold of Thoreau. By 1867, he had come to understand that the war was a defeat for men like him. The North had fought for the principle that “men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support a government they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.”
Southerners saw this sooner. They saw the victory of Lincoln in 1860 as defeat after a long struggle, the final reduction to helplessness in the face of a majority determined to force its social and economic values on the whole nation.
You can love your homeland and still lament the place it might have been. Is 20th century America — with its Babbittry, its rotten bureaucracies and its destructive disregard for natural resources and human lives — really the best we could have done? Or did we take an unbalanced, headlong tumble into modernity because the Northeast, child of industrial capitalism and Puritan morality, became “America” by grinding an economic and political rival under its heel?
http://www.etymonline.com/cw/intro.htm
The 4 states that originally seceded were paying 75% of all Federal Revenues, and 90% of all Federal expendiatures were in the North. Very lucrative. This tariff took off like a rocket, when the Southern Congressmen vacated. Classic protected market…classic imperialism. Preferred access to resources, and market for finished goods.
The 7 states that seceded after Lincoln declared war and sent requests for troops to make that war (not including Maryland which was imediately placed under Marshall Law), and Kentucky and Missouri, which fell under similar jurisdiction….were valiantly defending liberty from the tyrannical military despotism of the Lincoln government.
Look, if you are trying to make the point that there was something attractive, even romantic, about the South’s slower-paced, agrarian model of life, you won’t find any argument here. And yes the North was full of capitalists, industrialists, and (gulp) PROGRESS. Slavery was still at the core of how the South could accumulate the wealth that it had.
Look, if you want to study history and you know that your agenda is to somehow justify the South, then since life is complicated and there are endless facts, you can find things to build a case. It also helps to be a Luddite too, I guess.
You know, Strom, if only you had won, maybe things would be different now.
As for the assertions about four southern states paying 75% of all Federal revenues, please supply facts here, which include total taxes collected, total revenues and expenses for all the country. Virginia was, by far, the richest and most powerful state (how else could the war have lasted so long?) but you are dealing with some cherry-picked data, probably relating to just one tariff.
Why the democrats will stay in power…….
1) The GOP leadership refuses to work with and to listen to Conservatives. GOP indeed is out of touch with the electorate.
2) GOP lacks leadership, vision, and ability to counter liberal rationale with sound alternative solutions.
3) Third party will be Co-Opted by Progressives as soon as the ink dries.
4) The Sarah Palin’s of the world that had a chance to show courage and support a conservative turned her back to support a RINO. If she lacks courage there then when will she show it when it counts even more?
5) My conservative vote will remain on the sideline because of reasons 1-4.
I am not looking for a perfect GOP party, just one that shows courage, leadership and conviction. Oh wait I just described the corrupt Democrats. See, even the Democrats have enough guts to stand for their convictions no matter how wrong they are!
So is the GOP that ignorant or are they part of the plan to subvert our nation into a 3rd world power? I just cannot believe educated men & women in the GOP are that stupid, but can believe they are that devious.
Thus I watch the entertainment from the sidelines.
Good luck star fighter…..yes…powder dry red leader one, just stay outside my perimeter and all is well……..
I am not looking for a perfect GOP party
—-
Could have fooled me.
I enjoyed the article. But I wouldn’t be too smug.
Obamacare was not about medicine – it was about getting everybody in the US on the dole, to get us all used to it and beholden to the government. It was never about medical care, otherwise we could have supported Bernie Saunders’ call for medical clinics.
The financial bill, it turned out, was not about preventing the next crisis, impossible anyway, but about inserting the national government into all aspects of our financial life. More regulations, more agencies. And anyway, it let Fannie and Freddy off the hook, as if we needed more proof of the real intent of the bill.
We hear lots of talks, on PJM and elsewhere, the Democrats will ram through more progressive legislation after the election – regardless of the outcome of the election.
Thomas Friedman writes wistfully about China’s economic system.
The left is on the march in Latin America. Only little Honduras has found the sand to resist.
Our educational system was many years ago kidnapped by progressives. Despite the numerous falures of leftist policies, they have been very successful at teaching our young otherwise.
We all want our economy to get better. Should it do so before the coming election, voters will sigh and say, OK, lets stay the course; its not that bad.
As someone in PJM wrote recently, we are in the midst of a civil war fought in the media. And the other side has more troops and weapons.
I think Thomas Sowell was correct when he recently wrote we have only this coming election to stop the leftward trend, and after that its too late.
It’s unfortunate that the world has run out of places to colonize. If the progressives hold onto power in 2010 and 2012, there will be no place for moderates and conservatives to go. The question of secession and/or vigorous resistance might then become interesting to more than just a few neo-Confederates. If that question should begin to receive a lot of positive attention, benevolence may recommend that Americans, left and right, agree to an amicable devolution.
Western civilization evolved over eons of trial and error. In contrast, the Rules of Progressivism were artificially created during a fairly small window of time in the late 19th century.
You skipped a step: the transition from “trial and error” (also known as pragmatism) to a principled approach to culture in the late 18th century, follows by a reversal back into pragmatism in the late 19th century (the “rules” — not principles — of “progressivism”).
1776 is not, and never was, a result of blind “trial and error” luck, nor “divine providence”, but the end result of a chain of reasoning about what sort of society ought to exist, based on the givens of human nature. America was founded on purpose — the first and only such nation in history.
Of course, there’s a reason for that; conservatives fundamentally distrust reason, on the grounds that you cannot determine what ought to be (morality) on the basis of what is (facts). 1776 refutes this; America embarasses the advocates of this is/ought dichotomy just by being there.
A proper understanding of 1776 is the enemy of both the Left and conservatism, and that’s why they both insistently deny its nature, pretending it is something other than what it is, even as they pay it the lip service of veneration.
1776 is over, except for its cherished legacy. So is the industrial revolution.
What worries me is what form the ‘new way’, based on the technological age that has begun, will take. Somehow, I do not expect benevolence.
Keeping Malvolio out of power
is necessary, sufficient, and
not that difficult.
It does feel like July 1914.
A new world is on the other-side of the Nov elections. If Democrats are allowed to consolidate power an implement the Obama agenda then the USA is done. Our future is now in Detroit, East Saint Lewis and Oakland.
If the Republicans win, I think they will fracture on progressive/conservative lines. The Republicans are too invested in big Government and have as many Entitlement pimps as the Democrats. Just as the Whigs would not fight slavery, the Republicans wont fight big government.
If the Conservative Republicans become dominate we will unfund the left and kill it fast. The armies on the left are all on the public dime. Obama has shown that the community groups and unions are our mortal enemy. The House can refuse to fund the left and the only thing Obama can do is bring the Government to a halt. That would be fine with me.
EV, I love you! So many of those sophists believe the crap that our miserable education system has perpetrated over the years. TRUTH!!!! Abolishing slavery was the LAST thing Lincoln wanted. He finally did that as a means of getting black recruits into the army and as a means of creating mass rebellion of blacks in the South.
@ W. B. LaCroix, EV, Mark the Great, and for that matter the fool Thomas DiLorenzo and the Kennedy brothers.
The only excuse anyone can have for thinking the education system teaches anything OTHER than that Lincoln saw his first duty as upholding the Constitution, is that they weren’t paying attention in school in the first place.
No, he didn’t want to end slavery initially–but you can’t say he was happy with it either. It wasn’t his first cause. The preservation–the conservation–of the near best legacy we have from the Revolution was his first cause; and that was upholding the Constitution.
And to do that, Dixie and her treason had to be driven down. That it couldn’t be done to a fitting bunch of people is all their own fault–they chose what they were–which is that of all the great evils this nation has faced, the Confederacy is in the top three any way I judge it.
Very little will prevent the success of the attempt to get rid of the “Illinois nazis” we have in charge now more than, a tolerance among us for those who in any way admire those proto-nazis who wore grey.
BTW, in support of Lincoln’s goal of first preserving the Constitution as the top priority stood Frederick Douglass. Unlike Thomas DiLorenzo and the Kennedy brothers–and evidently unlike W. B. LaCroix as well, since it sounds like he goes along with them, and if he doesn’t he might explain himself–Douglass and Lincoln both knew that the Constitution and the Revolution inhering to it were the greatest chance the enslaved in this country had.
You know the Republicans are in sorry shape when the question is how to pay for extending unemployment benefits instead of “why are we extending unemployment benefits?”.
“The absolute Marxist takeover of this country may be only one election away.”
Even that is being unrealistically optimistic. That particular election that all the Right is chiming about like they saw panacea, is nothing but a mirage. If you want to see the reasons why, read my comment following yet another of Driscoll’s post on pajama’s media: Here’s the link to it:
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2010/07/21/the-manchurian-listserv/