Wretchard, I profoundly disagree.
At it’s heart, this is a deeply divided nation, and one that will see (a narrow, 51-49 victory) enact sweeping changes by a smug, self-satisfied elite over the populace.
For example, as Obama promised, skyrocketing electricity bills. Now, the smart thing is to be hyperpartisan. As the bills go up, as they must, to meet the Cap and Trade, run ads after ads after ads with Obama’s voice and face saying he will make bills skyrocket.
There is no middle. There is no muddle. One side must completely destroy the other. That’s the nature of the struggle. The elites hate/loathe/fear the populace (I know this, I work among them and pretend to be one of them) because they feel threatened and hate rivals from below. How can you be special, and attract that someone, in the mating dance that never ends, the endless audition that characterizes modern, single, dating life for a good 15-20 years, when there is someone just like you waiting to take your place as a “cool hip knowledge worker?”
The only way is to turn the entire nation into cool hip twenty somethings with Ipods and Iphones, and toiling and impoverished Central Americans and Mexicans.
This is at the heart of the conflict between the masses and the elites. For their part, the masses just want to move up into the elites. And you can’t be elite, by definition, if everyone is elite.
So no, the way forward is not to write plays (which will never be published or performed), or poems or comic books, since Hard Left lunacy dominates all the creative endeavors and orthodoxy is rigidly enforced to produce the hip herd consensus to achieve maximum mating/status points. Nor is it to teach and offer off-campus seminars — no one will come and no one is interested.
The way is what was shown by a fat old retired man who everyone wrote off as a crank, and a lunatic. The incomparable, improbably heroic, Howard Jarvis! A man who knew what he wanted to stop — taxing people out of their homes, and got it stopped. When everyone said he could not.
Jarvis was not nice. He did not play the middle. He did not write and perform plays, or educate, or play by any of the sneering, elite media and government and academia and entertainment rules. He bulldozed them by breaking all of them. The more they sneered at him for being old and uncool, the more he worked hard to get more seniors on his side. The more he was told he could do nothing, the more he organized his Taxpayers Association to stop taxes, and defeat pols in his way.
Elby — the way to defeat that mentality is to show that the average White voter will get nothing, in bad times, because a tidal wave of immigrants, all non-White, will overwhelm the system and he will be both a discriminated against minority in his own country, not even speaking the language, and far behind instant Affirmative Action people who the second they step into the nation, are eligible for preferential treatment before HIM.
In bad times, if you can convince most people they will get nothing, it will go to privileged minorities, well it’s political defeat for the Welfare State. It’s why FDR deported anyone who could be labeled Mexican, and citizenship was required for New Deal programs. Why the AFL and FDR kept Blacks out of the New Deal and labor unions. The only jobs for Blacks on the Railroads was the Porters Union. That was it. Ugly, but winning politics.
Welfare States are like giant patronage outfits. Convince a group they won’t get anything and they’ll turn over the whole thing. That’s the weakness of the cut. Everyone always figures someone will get screwed over, and they’re usually right.
