Posted on 06/12/2008 3:11:39 PM PDT by forkinsocket
No matter who prevails at the ballot box in November, John McCain or Barack Obama, the four-decade-long conservative counterrevolution is over.
Now that Hillary Clinton has conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, the primaries are over and the general election campaign for the White House has begun. On the Republican side, however, the general election campaign began months ago -- and presumptive nominee John McCain has spent much of that time tacking toward the center. He praised multilateralism in a March 26 speech in Los Angeles and in general is trying to appear more like an Eisenhower Republican than a Reagan Republican. True, every four years all major-party presidential candidates race toward the center. But in the last decade, even during the seven-plus years of the Bush presidency, the center of American politics has moved considerably to the left. Whether Obama or McCain wins the White House, liberalism has already won the national debate about the future of the country.
For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as "conservatives" are better described as "counterrevolutionaries." The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radicals who dreamed of a counterrevolution. They didn't just want to stop the clock. They wanted to turn it back.
Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large.
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
I hope liberals get the world they wish for. It will be hell, and there will be no one to bail them out.
Liberal internationalism - his term, not mine - has resulted in a stifling bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, and a system of diplomacy whose principal function appears to be to apologize for and enable terror wars by proxy armies. Its failures are legion, its successes largely self-declared and of minimal impact to their nominal beneficiaries. It is internationalism that has failed, not conservatism, and its stinking corpse is still doing its best to drag the world down with it.
As for some grotesque abstraction Mr. Lind characterizes as "liberal individualism" there is nary a sign in the current rage among progressives to stamp out individualism of every sort through hate speech laws, legislated class warfare, political correctness, and codified racial intolerance.
All of this liberal self-congratulation has succeeded largely through redefinition and historical revisionism, not through any systemic rejection of a "counter-revolution" that exists - both rejection and counter-revolution - largely in the perfervid imaginations of liberal commentators. Mr. Lind may crow that neither of the Presidential candidates is a conservative but only by sidestepping the inconvenient fact that neither was their predecessor, nor his predecessor, nor his predecessor. In point of fact there has been relatively little good news for conservatives since the Gingrich Contract in 1994 which returned Congress to the Republicans for the first time in some 40 years.
I would, therefore, pose an alternate interpretation of these events that is far less flattering to Mr. Lind and his co-religionists. It is that liberalism has learned nothing from its failures and will continue stubbornly down the same failed paths that led it to its current passionate and defiant irrelevance. And the biggest certainty of all is that its adherents will continue to risk rotator cuff damage by patting themselves on the back while the country whose charge it is for them to lead suffers from their self-absorption, self-aggrandizement, and self-deception.
Yep. The proof of your post is that the voters of South Carolina have voted to nominate Lindsey Graham to the U.S. Senate.
Again.
One thing often assumed is that leftists don't want failure, that it's just an inevitable side effect of their misconceptions about the world. Actually that is a key goal, not for themselves but for others. They seek to raise themselves up by bringing those more successful down. Leftists want failure in America. It's much easier to succeed at failure than to succeed at prosperity.
Yep. There may not be much about Hussein in those files but I'll bet there is plenty of garbage about many of the super delegates. Stuff they positively don't want their wives to find out about. Of course, Hillary being a moral upstanding citizen would never use the information for personal gain. </sarcasm>
Guess you have no self respect
You should have been banned for using profanity and personally calling me names on another thread. I noticed the thread disappeared, but here you are.
I may get banned for calling you out, but you went over the top here. If I did that, I would have been banned.
It is now the new liberal slimeball America. Conservatives are going to feel like and be treated like a North Korean dirt farmer. Its coming. Hang on for the ride.
The impending fall of the Republic is a direct consequence of Constitutional Amendments 19, 24, and 26, which gave the right to vote to Women, the landless, and those under 21.
These are exactly the people voting for this Marxist crypto-muslim, and now with Motor Voter, illegal aliens and morons are enfranchised as well, and its not going to get any better.
At some point in the near future, conservatives are going to be hit with the reality that its all over but the shouting, a corrupt socialist government coming and will be here to stay.
Unless the types of voters that elected Roosevelt 3 times, Jimmy Carter, Clinton twice, gave Gore the popular vote, made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House and have now propelled a racist muslim born Marxist to head their party have their right to vote taken away, this Republic is doomed.
The leftists quiet revolution has been under way for the last 90 years, the socialists have been steadily expanding the right to vote against the wishes, warnings, and advice of the Founders, and there is no going back.
The political class will conspire with those the Founders warned against giving the vote to in order to hold onto power.
Nothing short of revolution can stop it.
Intelligent hard working Americans with common sense are outnumbered by lazy drooling imbeciles, its all downhill from here, and nothing is going to change that equation.
As if the fact that Pelosi is Speaker of the House isn’t proof enough that the electorate has swung irreversibly to the other side.
IDIOCRACY is nigh.
Quite true but my wife and I and my children and grandchildren will be living in hell. No thanks.
I’m sincerely worried McCain will pass any socialist slop the Democrats send his way.
I agree that McCain is better as far as not letting the Hezb’Allah be equipped with nukes by the Iranians. But that’s setting the bar pretty low. Hell, I’m not certain if McCain disagrees with letting enemy POWs sue our soldiers in American courts, given his position on Guantanamo.
“which gave the right to Women, the landless..”
“The landless” are citizens. Owning land does not make you a superior being. Asserting so is anti-American and will get you beat like a mule in most of the West, boy. See, we are not monarchists or aristocrats here like it seems you would prefer. “The landless” are of far, far greater worth than a snobbish, petulant, neo-aristocrat who believes that owning land makes them into a better “class” of people.
Take my advice. Go to Europe so you can play at being a princess because you sure don’t fit in here in America.
That has nothing to do with the idea that "the landed" ought to be the only ones voting. Personally, I'm beginning to take a minor shine to resurrecting the idea myself. Basically, our forefathers only wanted landowners voting, because they were the ones paying the lions share of the taxes. Today, we're nearly at the tipping point where (50% + 1) of the electorate are net drains on the treasury, rather than net contributors. Once the non-contributors can consistently out-vote the contributors, then entire system will fail. Under what just and rational system could those who give nothing have power to direct the proceeds over those who actually did give? Should your dinner guests have the insurmountable right to tell you what you should buy for dinner?
Sorry, but elitism has nothing to do with it. It is pure logic that dictates that those who do not contribute ought not have superior voting power over the treasury over those who put the money there in the first place. The Founders were elitist, and neither are those who today are starting to appreciate the wisdom of that ancient little voting caveat.
Errr, that should read: “the Founders were NOT elitist”, LOL
Bullcrap. Taking the franchise from fellow citizens due to finances or having land makes us into a class-based, European-aping aristocracy. That is pure fighting words and no manner of sophistry about the pure wisdom of the Founding Fathers (who also thought that leeches were great medicine and who tolerated slavery) is going to excuse making fellow citizens into the slaves of those who own land.
The Founders had some baggage in their outlook from jolly old monarchistic England and one of the piles of filthy luggage was the idea of landed aristocracy. The other was slavery. They were wrong on both those counts and I will not be spoken of as if I were a subhuman because you and Rome2000 believe that since I have no land I have no rights.
You’re wrong as Hell and he is too.
Let’s wait a few more weeks before we bury America.
After the five Marxists on the SC rule that we have no right to bear arms, Americans will be given the choice to surrender their weapons, get on their knees and be fitted for chains, or open fire.
You did request to be born in interesting times, yes?
Open a history book genius
Get the hell out of America, Princess. We kicked your sorry king-worshipping asses out in the 1700's and you have no goddamned place here any more. The last of your kind were whipped in the woodshed by President Jackson when the "landed" neo-aristocrats like yourself were made to spread'em and the anti-American restrictions on the franchise were repealed.
Any who fantasize about stealing the franchise from the People deserve no respect. You're not supposed to be here, pumpkin. This is Free Republic, not Enslaved Aristocracy.
Get out and stay out, Princess. You're not one whit removed from any other slaver.
No,actually I told my wife several times over the years that I was born about 150-200 years too late.
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