Conservatism

Before, During and After the Election

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I have a ritual on elections. I volunteer to be a pollwatcher. I have done this several times. It makes me feel like I am “doing something” even though it is probably, on the margin, nothing. I am in a state of suppressed hysteria and can’t sit still or focus on Election Day, anyway.

This time I signed up with the Republican Lawyers Committee. They had a meeting a week or so before the election at the Union League club. It was a class, basically a primer on election law. It had CLE credit, too. Woo hoo. I went to that, and it was pretty good, and I met some cool people.

One guy there was acting really weird, demanding to know why he could not challenge a voter who did not speak English and “does not belong in this county.” His demeanor was all wrong. He slumped in chair, talked too loudly and was offensively argumentative. Other people argued back against him in a sane way. Maybe it is not paranoid to think he was a plant, from some Lefty blog or something, fishing for a chance to talk about how the Republican lawyers are bigoted against Spanish-speakers. He got nowhere, and left in the middle of the presentation. Strange.

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The Insurgency

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Once many years ago my father was sailing in a 30 foot sailboat on Nantucket Sound. The water was clear, and deep down in the water he saw a shape, that was unclear at first, but it got bigger and bigger, and soon its top fin broke the water. It was the largest shark he had ever seen. It was longer than the boat. It swam alongside for a few seconds, and probably not smelling anything good to eat, dipped back down and disappeared into the depths. If he had not been looking, he would not have seen it. He knows what he saw. Take it or leave it.

Something very big may come out of the dark, deep water, and if you are looking in the right place, you will see it coming.

I recently had a two part post on Right Network about the mass political movement which is developing in the USA, which I have called The Insurgency. Maybe I am all wrong about the size and importance of this movement. Maybe the shadows will not form and harden and rise into clarity and solid form. Maybe the mass movement will fizzle. Maybe politics will remain muddle and kludges. Or maybe I am looking in the right place at the right time. Take it or leave it.

The first post is here. Excerpt:

The Insurgency is a movement of citizens directed against unsustainable government taxation and regulation, and spending, both of which benefit insiders rather than ordinary people. The target of the Insurgency is a leviathan in Washington, D.C. that will ruin us all if it is not dismantled.
 
The Insurgency is part of a long tradition of mass political movements in our history. It has the potential to make a fundamental change in American life—for the better.

The second post is here. Excerpt:

When the American political and economic system suffers a serious failure, we can no longer avoid taking a hard look at ourselves. We have to make fundamental decisions about what kind of country we want America to be. At such moments, people perceive that their basic values are being contested, and those who have a stake in the current system are, reasonably enough, afraid of change. People who see the urgent need for change resent the obstruction. Political rhetoric becomes heated, because a lot is at stake. This is also normal, as history shows.

Stand by for an interesting historical period.

[I am more than usually interested in our readers’ thoughts on this.]

Bubbles

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Government employee salaries + benefits + pensions = bubble.

Government schools K-12 = bubble.

Higher education = bubble.

MSM monopoly = bubble.

The foundations of the opposition are crumbling before our eyes.

We are on the verge of a table-clearing, systemic regime collapse.

Once in a century change is coming.

Be happy.

The Late Christopher Lasch on the Tea Parties

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Team Sarah

This post, entitled Tea Party Has Elites on the Run, by Tony Blankley writing in Rasmussen Reports, is very much worth reading. It analyzes the Tea Party in light of the “remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning.

This very similar to the argument of Angelo Codevilla, both book form and article form.

Blankley goes on:

The tea party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by post-modern elitists. The movement’s central tenets — small government, decentralization of power and end to profligate spending — are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

RTWT.

BTW: This article about the Tea Party, by Jonathan Raban, from the usually Lefty New York Review of Books, from last February, is remarkable fair. Worth reading.

(I should mention that the NYRB’s review essays on historical subjects, including military history, are often very good. For example, this article about the French Foreign Legion by Max Hastings is very good. He warns “… only the foolish seek to romanticize this bleak, cruel fighting machine, loyal only to its own. ” But the foolish, myself included, continue to do so. And while we are at it here is Max Hastings’ list of the Ten Best Books About War. I’ve read five of them.)

[Photo credit: The picture above is from the Raban article in the NYRB.]

This Guy Never Dabbled in Witchcraft

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This is the kind of bloodless, antiseptic, dead-eyed smiling, Mr. Perfect Senate candidate that we want to represent us.

We can be sure that this man will not let us down by using the wrong fork at the very expensive luncheons where the lobbyists will giving out their instructions about what is good for America. There is no danger that he will suddenly wax enthusiastic about Battlestar Galatica, or the Lord of the Rings. He did not grope the girl at the frat party, that one time, even though he really thought she wanted him to, because his career might have been jeopardized if she had, you know, not wanted him to. He goes to a church, sure, but it is a nice normal one with a Rainbow flag out front and not too much Jesus-talk or hand-clapping. He does not have a Metallica tattoo on his left pectoral.

He is not OUR Witch, and he never will be.

You betcha.