One of the areas of great angst to me has been the frustration of dealing with what should be our side in the great struggle against progressivism.
I can understand the left, their social justice warriors they created by entrenching in higher education and public education. The rent a thugs who even have their own training camps for radical disruption, the donor base who have their own purposes for the chaos created and Hollywood, who is really worried that their gigs are falling apart as media fragments into thousands of channels.
Parts of the right puzzle me no end. I can understand the blue collar folks, they have love of country and the respect of work, family, God and flag. The hate being screwed out of their dreams.
I can understand the standard politicians, they just want the donors and the voters and the good life that comes with it. No mysteries there.
I can understand the white collar folks who see the country drifting left yet still send their kids to insanely expensive schools to get a crappy education along with indoctrination. They hate being screwed out of their dreams also.
So now where I get totally lost is the intellectual right. We have some real sharp folks who study, do research and come up with real fine insights on policy and what can work or not. Unfortunately, the real guys are being displaced by the new generation of proto pundits, who skim the works and can quote the great tomes but never seem to have actually done anything other than be a pundit.
They tend to not be real deep thinkers but they are really quick to name drop and share shallow understandings at the speed of google and twitter, quoting the other shallow guy who just commented on the third shallow guy all holding the ‘accepted conventional conservative wisdom’.
Their readers eat it up and adopt the style. If you discuss something with them and they ask you for your source, the response you get if you happen to say “I was there, I saw it every day for ten years” usually is “Give me a link to that.” No link, no reality.
I am a crusty old guy. If I want to get something done, like buy a bridge, I talk to a guy who has built a few bridges, not the eminent pundit who wrote a piece on “bridges as a key piece of infrastructure funding” unless they are the same guy. (Usually not. One meets you at Starbucks, the other guy pours you coffee out of his Stanley outside his pickup truck near a bridge he is inspecting.)
The left has their Social Justice Warriors. The Right now has their Small Government Warriors.
Now, I like small government as much as the next guy, but to me , you have to use the tools you have to get to a better place. We have a big, creaky, leaky and lumbering government and if we work real hard , we can move pieces back to the private sector and personal choice in area by area using the government we have.
The Small Government Warrior, like their leftist SJW counterpart, has created the perfect slacker gig. The Social Justice types know they will never achieve world peace and love and understanding, and will always be outraged and never never have to get a real job.
The SGW, or Small Government Warrior can win any argument by declaring any progress as not small government enough and get all the wanna be cool right kids to immediately want to be cool and agree. Nothing using what we have will ever be a valid way to move forward, so the SGW can never , ever have to actually do anything but google, cite other shallow articles and occasionally get on a podcast.
Meanwhile , the rest of us will just have to try and get something done and fend off the crazy progressives out to enslave us without their help.
And just to stay out of trouble, if in any way you feel I was talking about you, I was not. It was those other guys. You know the ones. The ones the crazy zombie progressives leave alone as their brains are not fresh.
Well said, as usual.
Bwahaha. Now I know this is the one that did it. This is like saying that 2+2=4, which is not welcome over there.
Never mind Peter and Rob’s money — I suddenly think I know why Claire “CraigsList” Berlinski “just loooooooves” John Walker.
I’ll try to be on the Nightcap AMU this week, and I bet JW is not pleased at the direction his money is going.
Just a hunch mind you.
Say hi to John for me. If he is investing, tell him I assume he likes throwing good money at stupid management.
I am trying to imagine any other management team that could not attract members to a political site in the hottest political year in recent memory. It takes real lack of talent.
Interesting observation.
All cultures are led from the top, doesn’t matter how they are organized. The degree of leadership exerted and the manner exerted will vary with organization, but not the actual leaders.
For America, the leadership has long been East or Right Coast. These have been the Protestants in general, the crazy ones being from Boston, the staid from Virginia, and the business ones from Baltimore/Philly and New York City. But note this leadership has not been exercised by law but rather by social norms. For this reason, America was God-fearing (religious), industrious, honest, and married.
The progressives screwed all that up. Now it’s unclear who the cultural leaders are anymore. Anarchists roam the “demonstrations” and youth – and upper middle class – demonstrate although generally they appear clueless about what they are demonstrating for OR against. Marriage as a pillar of family has been dying in the working classes although it is still alive and well in the upper class. Likewise industriousness, once the driving force of every young man, is now greatly suppressed, governmental “help” having taken it away. Indeed, in an earlier period (like 70’s and early 80’s) some of the “support” agencies of government were lamenting that the “poor” didn’t seem to want to take advantage of what they had to offer and preferred to do for themselves (how quaint!).
In all of this what comes out is that it isn’t so much a lack of virtue (in the upper classes) as a lack of self-confidence to press that into the population – societal pressure. Without that there will continue to be a degradation of performance in the lower classes who have only the likes of Madonna or Merryl Streep to follow as an example.
So I would submit that what you really see is a lack of resolve, or confidence, in the upper classes. Instead you get blowhards who are “pundits” – know nothings who don’t really have standards to espouse but rather cliches to export.