The Great Debate

WASHINGTON -- Here I am on the campaign trail, frenetically promoting my book, "The Death of Liberalism." I appear on scores of radio interviews, in and out of the studio. I appear on Fox News and C-SPAN. I hardly have time for dinner, but it could be more demanding still. I could be invited to appear on mainstream media, as it is still quaintly called. Yet I am not. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC do not call. I, the editor of a major magazine from the right that has been around for 45 years, have written a book arguing that a major political ideology, Liberalism, is dead, and no one in the mainstream media seems to think it merits even a spitball. Things have changed even more than the mainstream media knows.

Thirty years ago, when I came out with a book, all the above networkS -- at least all the above networks that were then in business -- would have me on. They thought I was crazy, but they would have me on. Through all these years, my views have not changed or radicalized. They remain pretty much fixed, though possibly I am a little bit more liberal. I am more tolerant of sexual diversity. I have flipped and oppose capital punishment. I am open to reforming the criminal justice system to treat nonviolent crime differently from violent crimes. But today, the mainstream media is alien country to me. I cannot get in even with a green card. Three, possibly four, presidents have been my friends, but I remain persona non grata with mainstream media, especially when I talk about politics.

The voices of conventional mainstream media never tire of mawkishly saying that something has changed in America. In this I agree with them. Yet as my hordes of publicists spread out through medialand, tempting the personages with appetizing morsels of my thesis, only the conservatives bite. The Liberals turn a stony face. In 2009, when Sam Tanenhaus came out with a book titled "The Death of Conservatism," they clapped their hands, though there was no evidence in the book to support its thesis, and a year later, on October 19, 2010, as the conservatives were about to have their mightiest victory in decades, the unfortunate Tanenhaus came out with a second edition now in paperback!

Today, of course, the mainstream media bewail how polarized the political landscape has become. They fret over the violent language, the dirty tricks, the lack of dialogue. But what they are fretting about is that there has over the past thirty years appeared a point of view that disagrees with the serried ranks of Liberalism. It is the point of view held by 42 percent of the American people. It is the point of view that has dominated politics since Ronald Reagan's election and gained emphasis since President Bill Clinton threw up his hands and said, "The era of big government is over." It was in retreat in the last years of George W. Bush and perhaps the first six months of President Obama, but now it is again dominant. It is also a perfectly respectable point of view.

As I continue on my campaign, I am increasingly aware that what has changed in the country is mainstream media. They are less hospitable to conservatives. They act like a political party, an especially partisan party. Conservatives have emerged in media to express their point of view on major issues of the day. This is diversity of opinion that the increasingly partisan mainstream media cannot countenance, and so they say it is shocking. It is incendiary. It is closed-minded.

Actually, one of the rare figures on television or radio that strenuously works to include both the left and the right in debates is -- prepare yourself -- Sean Hannity of Fox News. He really works at it. He airs people who disagree with him and he lets the left and the right have at each other. As for mainstream media, if it airs a debate between the left and the right, the person on the right is usually a critic of the right who feigns a therapeutic message for conservatism, say, David Frum, a man with no standing on the right.

I say wherever I go nowadays that Liberalism is dead. One piece of evidence is mainstream media. It pretends the dominant political view in the country, conservatism, does not exist.

I would not say that liberalism is dying, but that, as it has spread, it has become decadent and rotten.

It has been an interesting path, indeed. At the very start of the 20th Century there were “foolish progressives” and anarchists, what today we would call liberals and radicals.

And yes, even back then there were what could be called RINOs, think of them as being called “fiscally conservative but socially liberal”, though they were not particularly fiscally conservative, either. So similar that under the blanket of “progressivism” could fit both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Anarchists were radicals, mostly foreign immigrants, who just craved the chaos of “perpetual revolution”, bitterly hating just about everyone.

Then when the Russian Revolution happened, replacing the briefly democratic regime that had overthrown the Czar, American leftists and liberals rejoiced: finally they had a laboratory for their endless social policy schemes, most of which in retrospect were ridiculous.

And Lenin tried every one of them. Truly a “Hopey-Changey” kind of guy. This included “free love”, letting children educate themselves, abolishing Russia’s German bureaucracy, seizing private land to turn into communal farms, etc., etc.

None of it worked. To his credit, Lenin reversed himself on almost all of it, brought back capitalism, instituted tough, European style school discipline, brought the entire bureaucracy back a week after firing them. And things were starting to improve when Lenin died, and Stalin took over.

Well, Stalin fouled things up so royally that even most of the American left had to hold their nose. But by then there were new “hopey-changey” ideas being tried out in Europe, which were not socialist, but were national-socialist, that the US left decided to try out.

The left really embraced fascist economic policies for a while, until they stopped being trendy for obvious reasons.

Things settled down for a while for liberals and the left, but their postwar schemes had become caught up in socialist-democracy and the welfare state, seen as the first stages of internationalism, which they had craved since Wilson’s League of Nations and later the United Nations, both of which were intended to eventually become the world government.

JFK was supposed to get the ball rolling for this in the US with the ‘Camelot’ fantasy, but only with the political tide that came with his demise did the left have the clout to force the welfare state under LBJ.

While this was satisfactory to the liberal wing of the Democrat party, it resulted in a split between them, the Mensheviks, and the violent, revolutionary, anarchistic, radical left, the Bolsheviks, that did not want to create, only destroy.

The first sign of this split was at the DNC in 1968, in which the liberals still won out. But by 1972, the radicals had taken over and forced the liberals out, thus making the Democrats a truly radical party, with the liberals as the minority, the more sensible ones becoming DINOs.

But the radicals have a serious predicament on their hands. For a strong part of their philosophy is that children should be radicalized, yet at the same time be denied knowledge, history, and intellectual substance. And the radicals were far better at promulgating ignorance and incompetence than they were at creating radicalism among the young who are well fed and even spoiled and lazy.

So failure is their destiny, as best seen in a banner being carried by a group of feckless youths at one of their parades.

“Abolish Capitalism And Replace It With Something Good!”

Compare such failures with children raised by conservatives, who have disciplined learning, moral stability, purposeful focus, and believe in hard work and self-sufficiency.

Natural selection at work.

So, does liberalism collapse?

I used to think this too. In a state of nature, Liberals would be killed in a second. But it turns out there are two states of nature. One, known as a K-selective state of nature favors fitness due to it’s competitive nature. Individuals must demonstrate merit to acquire resources. There, Conservatives do dominate.

But then there is the r-selective state of nature, where every defective’s Darwinian success depends upon merely being able to produce as many defectives as possible. Resources are made availabel to everyone, regardless of inability or defectigveness. It’s sort of the Idiocracy state of nature. And there, Liberals are more adaptive than Conservatives, and more successful. This is why Liberalism never dies, it merely cycles.

This is why Tyrell is as wrong as the guy he’s laughing at. Liberalism will endure, and become more fetid, right up until the collapse. At that point, things will turn K-selective, and they will rapidly disappear as comptition culls the untrustworthy and cowardly.

Check the front page of my site, if you’re interested in why Liberals evolved.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com

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