We shall see what Indiana brings, but so far all have been convinced Cruz is going down in serious flames. Even were he to win, one has to wonder just how one is going to unhorse Trump.<\/p>\n
The more important question is who the heck are we. Toquiville was amazed by Americans and found them to be different from the rest of the world. Perhaps one can distill the singular characteristic as equality – real<\/em> equality. Before the law and in society.<\/p>\n Today that doesn’t seem the case. ?What has happened to us. This premise is tackled by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart<\/em><\/strong>. He contends that the upper-middle-class has walled itself off and become cocooned and self propogating. His data consists of looking at the living zip codes of graduates of the elite schools and how that has changed from 1960-80 to 2000. What he finds is that MOST of the grads of the elite colleges (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) live in limited locales. Furthermore they have become more concentrated in these regions. AND the zips have increased into clusters in a few locations – namely DC, NYC, and SF. There are others but no where the concentrations in these three areas – especially DC.<\/p>\n One of the observations is that there is little contact of these zips with regular people. The surrounding zips may not be quite as “exclusive” vis a vis ruling elite but are filled with high scorers on ACT’s and college grads.<\/p>\n ?How is all this important. Well, the single biggest reason is that once upon a time America was intermixed in terms of social “status”. So except for the very rich most places had a mixture of different people living there. Now we have the movers and shakers living all by themselves, untouched by any of those they “CLAIM” to be concerned for. It’s hard to be concerned for someone you know nothing about.<\/p>\n This wasn’t very true in the 60’s, but the attitude was. It is the essence of the Left that they are “fixing” peoples’ lives about whom they know nothing. Note also that today most of the ruling elite are very much internationalists. Listen to the comments of the likes of Obama, Kerry, Clinton, Boehner, McConnell – they all believe in the international approach. We no longer live in a world where we can afford to isolate ourselves, or so the story goes. Thus the endless wars, the intervention in the business of other nations “so it won’t come here” or “because it’s the right thing to do”.<\/p>\n Perhaps we are all looking for an America that no longer exists.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We shall see what Indiana brings, but so far all have been convinced Cruz is going down in serious flames. Even were he to win, one has to wonder just how one is going to unhorse Trump.<\/p>\n The more important question is who the heck are we. Toquiville was amazed by Americans and found them to be different from the rest of the world. Perhaps one can distill the singular characteristic as equality – real<\/em> equality. Before the law and in society.<\/p>\n Today that doesn’t seem the case. ?What has happened to us. This premise is tackled by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart<\/em><\/strong>. He contends that the upper-middle-class has walled itself off and become cocooned and self propogating. His data consists of looking at the living … Continue reading