On December 5, before Obama took office, I posted the following which is only been vindicated by events since. I say again, the danger remains that the entire electoral and political system will have been so co-opted that there is no defense at the ballot box. Here is the post: (please pardon the length )
Reality check
With the passage of time conservatives will be tempted to accept the soothing siren that the election results were not so bad. After all, this was not our year, John McCain ran a singularly poor campaign, George Bush had created a poisonous atmosphere for Republicans, and we were swamped by the greatest financial crisis in nearly three quarters of a century.
Rubbish!
Take the telescope away and put the correct end to your eye. The truth is that McCain could not beat a man who was utterly unqualified for the office. Actually, he was a man flagrantly disqualified for the office by his notorious radical associations. The authentic war hero could not beat the most liberal senator with an extremely dubious pedigree. Yet Obama won because he became a national pathology. But he was able to attain Messiah status only because the ground was fertile and had been well plowed for him. While it is true that he would not be entering the White House were he not black, it is also true that the culture put him into the White House because he is he black. The elevation of the first Black man to the presidency, while historic, was a one-off historic event. Why the culture put him there is a far more portentous fact with ominous significance for conservatives.
Conservatives will commit a very grave and ultimately fatal error if they look exclusively to the mechanics of the loss for understanding. That is the path of rationalization and half measures. We took that path after ‘06 and it has given us ’08. Senator Santorum did not lose Pennsylvania because of his housing arrangements. Senator Allen did not lose Virginia because he said the word "Macaca". This time, the Democrats did not pick our lock on the old South because we failed to get out the vote. No, Senator Chambliss faces a runoff in, of all places, Georgia, because liberalism is ascendant and conservatism is in extremis. In all these instances Americans showed themselves not to be reacting so much to conventional political stimulus but showed they were thirsty to drink the Kool-Aid.
The bitter truth is that liberals have advanced their march and conservatives are in retreat everywhere. Conservatives have shown no offensive power whatever. We could not mount a realistic threat in any blue state. The rats, on the other hand, have driven deep into the heart of the Confederacy itself. Republicans in New England are literally an extinct species on the national level. Our money has dried up. Our leaders are discredited. Social conservatives are despised by fiscal conservatives. We are reduced to talk radio and a few conservative publications to get our message out and Democrats have made plain their plans to destroy the former and have even intimated a desire to control the latter. Driven out of public office, driven out of the northeast, on the run in the Mountain states, impotent in the rust belt, conservatives have no platform to stand on, no ammunition to shoot, no funds with which to re-arm and re-equip.
What happened in this election was not the result of miscalculation, or ineptness,-although they were there in spades and played their part as I have predicted and documented on these threads for more than two years- it was written on the wall years ago. It was only accelerated by the patrician, elitist indifference of the Bush administration. It was only aggravated by the mistakes of the McCain campaign. It was only precipitated by the financial crisis.
Conservative values are being swamped by a cultural wave. It is a testament to the commonsense of the American people that, despite generations of brainwashing by academia and the media, a more Americans still identify themselves as conservative rather than liberal. Take no false hope from this for our support which is grounded in the common sense of the American people is as vulnerable as were Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida, which states used to be full of people with common sense. The cultural marxism of the left is ubiquitous and relentless. It has not won its last electoral victory. It has only now attained critical mass.
We will not get 'em next time any more than we got them this time which is the time after the last time. Conservatism was not edged this time in a squeaker in which the young candidate sprinted past the old, the techno savy hacked the benighted, the well funded outspent the embarassed, the charismatic out shown the plodder, in this election Obama was carried as a bobber on a cultural wave. We were swept away by that wave and have not yet washed up on the beach.
The election dynamic cannot be understood in the idiom of political science because it was a pop culture phenomenon. Rather than consulting, for example, the usually savy Charles Krauthamer who does think it was a squeaker lost because of Saral Palin, who took away the "preparedness" issue, plus the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros, one might better consult Howard Stern to see the invisible forces which have finally birthed an electorate which does not think or react any longer according to the old rules. To stretch a point, Live boys or dead girls in bed would have made no more impact on Obama's favorabilities than Ayers or Wright - so much for the preparedness issue having the power to influence this electorate. The Kool Aid drinkers were hell-bent on Obama. The new culture was utterly impervious to facts but it did hunger for ecstasy, for a cosmic, transcendental political orgasm.
We are so yesterday.
Some of us predicted this calamity two years ago, even before the midterm elections. I even listed then most of the states we would lose today (I missed North Carolina-who knew it would be this bad?). We sensed something was going terribly wrong; we knew we were terribly vulnerable, we knew that our spending and venality were making us more vulnerable. We understood that Katrina was bungled and made us look incompetent. But we thought all the setbacks were confined to a few identifiable issues and personalities, like the president or Brownie. We sensed our vulnerability but we expressed it in terms of demographics and other language of political science. We even knew that the media and academia are changing the rules on us. We could not have been expected to predict two years in advance exactly what the precipitating factor would be-in this case Obama's melanin count-but we knew we were destined to go down. In other words, we still don't know what hit us and we don't have the tools, the idiom and, in many cases, the felt need to find out what hit us and fix it before we go down again.
Conservatism is facing an existential crisis.
Make no mistake, Rahm Emanuel is not ramrodding Obama's administration because he is devoted to good government. These guys fully intend to exterminate conservatism and to eliminate the individual liberties which it defends. They want to do that because they want to impose their vision of the world. The American nation is the greatest stumbling block to the world vision. The Constitution is the bulwark of the American nation. The Constitution is defended by conservatives with their pesky values. Conservative values champion the individual. Rights of the individual are repugnant to their collectivist vision. For the first time in the nation's history, Americans have reason to believe that their President-elect would cheerfully dismantle our constitutional republic and sell out our sovereignty to One World leftists.
Can you imagine the reaction to what I had just written as it would appear in an establishment political magazines like Time, Newsweek, or The New Republic? They would gleefully hold these words up as solid evidence of the hate and paranoia which dominates the right. My anxieties would be dismissed as the ravings of a paranoiac. I hope, frankly, for the good of my country and my children that every one of those "ravings" proves unfounded. But suppose they're not misplaced, suppose Obama is exactly as his history, his associations, his writings, his unguarded public utterances, tell us that he is: a Saul Alinsky communist, a radical, dedicated to the dismantling of the American Constitutional Republic?
What is the upside in believing that he is not what I fear he is? Will we get a better government out of him? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is the downside in not believing that he is the man I fear he is? The loss of our country, our freedoms, decency for our children. Which is a more prudent choice?
What is the likelihood that Obama could succeed in mortally damaging our way of life? I know of no American institution in government, with the possible exception of the United States Senate where perhaps 40 Republicans could be cobbled together to wage a filibuster. I have little confidence in the court and its current configuration and I can't believe it will go anywhere but farther to the left. Outside of the government, talk radio and the rump of the Catholic Church and the embattled Christian conservatives might hope to mount a significant defense. Throw in the National Rifle Association and a couple more and you've about exhausted the list. Can Barak Obama, Rahm Emanuel and the rest of them actually pull it off? There is not much to withstand them. Do you think the results of this election and the election in 2006 warrant us in believing that we will stop them in the next election? Which is the more prudent answer?
So it is not only conservatism but our God-given patrimony which is under existential threat.
It is imprudent to remain willfully oblivious to the threat. It is prudent to take steps as drastic as the threat if the threat is potentially mortal. We cannot balance the severity of risk against the probability of risk because no one can truly know the source of risk, the heart of Barak Obama. A prudent man will consider the severity of the risk even though the probality is unknowable. A prudent man, a prudent conservative man, will acknowledge the danger.
Part of that danger is the new cultural element which has been insinuated into American politics. It is a chicken and egg situation. The politics of The Frankfurt School has spawned a cultural marxism which has infected our corpus like a virus. It supplies the intellectual rationalizations for modern "progressivism". Saul Alinsky is but a link in the chain from The Frankfurt School through Bill Ayres to Barak Obama. Politics founded The Frankfurt School which shaped the culture which spawned, nurtured and indoctrinated Barak Obama who in turn has won this election. The circle is closed.
This represents a danger on several levels. First, if the other side contrives the victory over conservatism it will not be just a note to political history, it will emphatically include cultural tyranny. Second, it means that our paradigm, our epistemology, does not equip us to either understand this election or win the next. If, as I believe, our society has reached a cultural tipping point which spills over into the political, we are way out of our league. How can we confront and deal with the danger we do not understand?
The very strength of conservatism, and its very nature, especially its faith in the eternal and His inextinguishable verities, leaves us vulnerable in the short-term. The problem is, Barak Obama and Rahm Emanuel probably do not intend to grant us the long term.
