I'm a little busy today, so this response is conditioned by a lack of time. I don't have much time for editing or concise writing. Apologies in advance for incoherencies, typos, etc.
Anyway, no, politics isn't the solution, here. Our problems run a little deeper. Our social pathologies are no longer solvable by politics, and our politics can't be recovered until we do something about our social pathologies. They will require cultural, spiritual renewal.
As an example, the government, our politics, can't fix 40% illegitimacy (which includes 70%+ illegitimacy in the black community, 50% in the Hispanic community and even 30% among whites). The fatherlessness that arises from illegitimacy and divorce drive most of the bad stuff in our society and our politics.
Schools broken? You can blame the teachers union, and they deserve a good bit of blame. You can blame the elites for “dumbing down” our educational content. You can blame government for making schools one more bureaucratic empire to build. But the heart of the problem is that so many young people come to schools already maimed. They are maimed psychologically, socially, academically, spiritually, because, well, their fathers just didn't give enough of a damn about them to marry their mothers.
Women don't have access to quality daycare? That's an issue exacerbated by an order of magnitude when large percentages of the community are single moms with illegitimate children (or children abandoned by their fathers through divorce - or children forced from their fathers by their mothers, again, through divorce).
Problems of poverty? The anti-Christ’s policies may have exacerbated the problems - and extent - of poverty, but he didn't invent it. Quick fact: About 16% - 17% of households now live in poverty, and something like 20%+ of children now live in poverty.
But intact families have a low, single-digit rate of poverty.
An intact, mom+dad family nearly always does well enough to take care of mom, dad, and all the children.
The only thing government can do is ameliorate the effects of fatherlessness, of divorce and illegitimacy. And as an expanding segment of the population sinks into this life, this culture, they view that government amelioration as the “solution,” rather than as what mitigates the damage until the underlying problems are addressed.
Thus, the problem becomes that a certain portion of the electorate wants bigger government, and that portion of the population is growing. That demographic is expanding, not shrinking. And we are now at the point where there are a few more of them than there are of us. Gov. Romney's 47% plus a few married, well-off, white, guilt-ridden liberals.
Talk of reforming the Republican Party nominating process is magical thinking. It doesn't deal with reality, and it doesn't deal with the underlying problems that we face.
As to what elections can and can't do, here's a link to an essay by someone who goes by the moniker Sultan Knish:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/11/game-called-on-account-of-darkness.html
He points out that the left uses the system to build, develop, execute, and lock in its agenda. He shows how the left has worked long and hard to win the culture, and now, the politics flow naturally therefrom. We conservatives are always fighting against a headwind, because all the institutions of our culture, all the cultural assumptions, are now property of the left.
When the left doesn't quite have the strength to win fair and square in the democratic process, it gets victories anyway it can and then fences those victories in through means it steals from us. We can see this with Roe, where the left took the question entirely out of the democratic process, and invested it in liberal elites cowed into thinking they could not do otherwise than to agree with “informed opinion,” and that has artificially stultified our politics concerning abortion for 40 years, now. Because of the ingrained respect we conservatives have for constitutional processes, and because the Supreme Court has an arguable case to make for respect for its decisions, the left is able to make opposition to Roe look almost... unpatriotic! Even unconservative (I have often seen it argued by leftist scum)!
The left is good at this sort of thing. They are already doing it with Obamacare. By giving away enough freebies, whether it's frivolous junk like condoms and birth control pills, or more serious stuff like guaranteed insurability with no penalties whatsoever for failing to be insured prior to becoming ill, or forcing folks to allow families to keep children on their policies until age 26, these goodies appeal to that part of society which is engaged deeply in the social pathologies previously mentioned.
They will be loathe to give up the goodies Obamacare gives them, all paid for by increasingly-high taxes on the “rich” (anyone with a low six-figure income, and up).
As well, Obamacare will become increasingly entangled and implicated in our daily lives. A simple repeal TODAY would already be nearly impossible as the system has been grafted into the business model of insurance companies, of Medicare, of Medicaid. But at this time, a repeal that left intact certain pieces could yet be accomplished.
In four years, it will be nearly impossible for even good and just men to figure out how to disentangle the beast, the parasite of Obamacare, from its host, the health care system of our country.
And the elites won't stand for it. And the folks mired in social pathology won't stand for it either.
Even today, we say how unpopular Obamacare, but that unpopularity isn't all that great. We're talking something north of 50% disapprove of Obamacare, but something south of 60%. As more and more folks get their health care through Obamacare, especially as it accommodates their social pathologies, it will become increasingly unthinkable to undo what has been done.
And the anti-Christ will have four more years to further embed the program in our national DNA.
“’He gets rid of the competing civic institutions AND he causes a crisis in health care (and education) that will permit the erection of single-payer, entirely government-controlled health care.’
“That is probably his plan, yes. My bet is, the American people won't like it very much in 2014.”
Some Americans won't like it. The increasing irreligious population won't care less. And we'll have nothing by which to stop it. The Obamacare legislation provides enough power to the executive that he needs nothing else to crush any institutions that get in the way of the arbitrary mandates the regime decides to impose.
Mr. Akin’s comments on legitimate rape constituted a coherent pro-life view?? LOL!! That is truly delusional!
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that beneath that entirely idiotic exterior, there actually IS someone with a coherent pro-life view, but his remarks, WHICH WERE ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE, did not represent such a view. Mr. Mourdock’s comments were less egregious, but COME ON, FOLKS!! We've been at this abortion thing for 40 years! Any politician worthy of running at the national level (and that's what a US Senate seat is) MUST have the wits to avoid making comments so easily caricatured, so easily taken out of context, and so easily turned into a fuel for the whole “war on women” propaganda.
It may not be fair, but we pro-lifers cannot make those sorts of mistakes. The media is our enemy and the general culture has been taken over by leftists so that even just speaking plain sense hurts the ears of ordinary folks.
“unless your magical new primary process results in replacing all the Republicans in the Senate, even with a newly-minted majority, they will confirm pretty much all his Supreme picks
“That, too, entirely depends on the mindset in the electorate.”
No, it doesn't really. Your views evince a sort of magical thinking that is not conservative. At least, not organically conservative.
Even if we manage, by the grace of God, to enter into a time of cultural and spiritual renewal, not everyone changes all at once all at the same time. We will have to change the culture FIRST before we see much progress in our politics. But changing the culture will not result in a fast turnaround of our politics.
The election of Gov. Romney would not have stopped the cultural and social decay we currently experienced. The re-election of the anti-Christ, though, accelerates that decline, and guarantees harsh and hard times for us as we await the change that we actually need.
A Romney presidency would have fixed, in the short-term, some of our economic problems, and would have provided some hope to put in place some of the things that will be needed to improve our society and culture.
Most importantly, it would have given us a little more time.
“I find it amusing that I, a monarchist, have better faith in the resilience of American democracy than you.”
As a Catholic, I put no faith in any political system, whether republican, monarchist or otherwise. The Church has always stood apart from political systems, realizing that they are the invention of men, not God, but that God didn't necessarily provide us with a political ideology by which to organize societies. The Church teaches us to be loyal to our countries, to try to help bring about a just society, no matter what form the government takes.
As America was founded as a republic, I think it is foolish - and wildly dangerous - for her to try to be anything but what she was from the beginning. Similarly, I think it was profoundly foolish, and did great ill, for Europe to sweep away its monarchies over the past few centuries.
Now, in America, we are sweeping away our republicanism. This is, in part, because we are seeing swept away the culture that sustained a free republic - a religious people who acknowledge the Creator and His laws.
sitetest
I like you post and agree with it.
Of course I did not mean to propose that America’s problem, spiritual at its core can be resolved by politics. Not any more than you was suggesting that by electing Romney that spiritual problem would get any better, — surely you did not mean that.
My decision, not an easy one, to break away from the natural instinct to vote for a marginally more conservative candidate was not because by writing in the best candidate that reach certain prominence and doing so publicly, I foresee a solution to the spiritual problem. Mine is indeed but an incrementally better application of my vote, for reasons outlined in my previous posts. So far as politics is our concern, a vote for Romney (or, of course, for Obama) was a vote cementing our political demise. If we have a chance as a nation it is in the direction outlined by the Tea Party: broad reform of the political culture, rather than sitting on the GOP plantation and looking to eke out one more electoral cycle. Such reform is impossible if it is limited to the primaries because the party machine has learned to circumvent primaries. Is such reform likely? — I don’t know, but I refuse to wait to get boiled like a frog, and you should too.