I do not advance Article V as a fix but as an opportunistic tool which has a chance of passage only with a cataclysmic event of some sort which alters the politics for a season. The passage of such amendments will temporarily change how the political game is played and that is to the advantage of conservatives but the secular drift cannot long be frustrated by a political fix. A fix, even a temporary fix, is not to be despised if we recall that the original Constitution spared a civil war for only 80 years.
We do not disagree for one second that conservatives have quit the battlefield in the culture wars. They fight the wrong fights the wrong way in my view. But even more important, the institutions which wage those wars have been utterly relinquished to the left and so when conservatives engage in the political theater it is already too late.
However it is not entirely clear how center-left the country is as opposed to center-right. We know that when it comes to breaking the middle-class Rice bowl, such as touching Social Security, there is a third rail. Americans want their Social Security but they also say they want balanced budgets. On the other hand, "social issues" like homosexuality are not so clear. We ought not to forget that there are consistent polls that show a plurality if not a majority of Americans regard themselves to be conservative-if they even know what that means.
So it may be to some degree that the electorate is instinctively center-right on many issues but expresses itself at the polls in a centerleft vote because of the influence of the media, academia, and other institutions. This might just be wishful thinking on my part and the part of people like Ronald Reagan who voiced that opinion but who also made it prove out at the polls. The fact remains, however, that every election seems to make our situation more detached from the cultural drift of the country. Beyond the institutions which shape the culture, there is the matter of runaway immigration which certainly distorts everything.
It is from this line of thinking that we hear pundits tell us that it is not the conservative message that is wrong but the messenger. Of course, they point to Ronald Reagan as the kind of messenger needed to sell the conservative message. I am inclined to agree more with you, that every generation makes the conservative message a harder sell as the culture shifts beneath our feet.
In this context, I often try to identify on these threads where the tentacles of The Frankfurt School have insinuated themselves into the culture and perverted it.
The arithmetic of 13 legislatures out of 99, a majority of which are Republican, leads me to our only disagreement. I see no realistic downside risk in an Article V convention. If the nation is at such a risk, our problem will not be the nature of the document, that only counts to conservatives, it will be the reaction, whether left dominated all right dominated, to the global event which triggers the process. If the reaction is leftist, the constitutional changes will not be the cause of our problem but merely the present constitutional charade made explicit.
