Conventional wisdom is that the election is a repudiation of Obama and his policies; Michael Barone says the rebuke is to Chuck Schumer, by way of Anthony Wiener’s Anthony’s wiener; still others insist that a social wedge issue, namely, repudiation of the re-definition of marriage, played an important role; and then there’s the Democrat party spokesperson Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who is telling us that NY-9 has always been a difficult district for Democrats to win, and that we shouldn’t take much of significance away from the loss.
For their parts, Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton see this as a rise of uppity, race-traitor Yids.
My own take is this: Obama and the left got their chance. And as was the case with Carter, the results of their policies are on full display — even as the legacy media does it’s best to spin, deflect, and cover for their boy king and his (largely successful, sadly) attempts to institutionalize democratic socialism in the very bedrock structures of the US civil society.
The question is, is all this repudiation — and it will spread, I believe — too little, too late? The trick, as the “progressive left” has long known, is to lie and wheedle and promise and pander in order to win power, then use that power to rework the very structures of government, by way of court stacking and judgment shopping, or bureaucratic expansion, or cronyism, or executive and/or legislative fiat — using the fluidity of language alternately to disguise, or justify, or defend just what it is their doing.
Obama has larded the bureaucracies with hard left activists. He and a Democrat supermajority forced through ObamaCare, which as his signature piece of legislation will fundamentally transform the US economy and restructure both the private sector health care and insurance industries while at the same time expanding the entrenched scope and power of government. He has emboldened his unelected Czars to rule, “nudge,” and otherwise coerce and control behavior by way of various social engineering programs and administrative rule making, effectively working us toward the soft tyranny of an ever more powerful Nannystate (and yes, I used the word “tyranny” even though the cool “conservatives” on Twitter like to make fun of such rhetoric; which I suppose is how we’ve come to have a Jazz Shaw representing the right, and a strong Romney candidacy being sold us in the wake of the 2008 McCain debacle).
Meanwhile, the Twittering establishment right seems concerned with nothing so much as finding that “electable” Republican who will appeal to the “independents” and “moderates” — 2010 never really happened, you see, or rather it did, but that was the country crying out for Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman or some other darling of Beltway kingmakers — and the closer we get to 2012, the more eager they seem to begin to marginalize the unwashed, uncouth crazies in the TEA Party, who fear vaccines and fetishize the Constitution and don’t understand just how important it is to get a Republican elected to office no matter what.
The mood of this country is one of reform. And we’ve never had a better chance to pit conservatism and classical liberalism as an ideological force for Constitutional principles, individual liberty, and a check on the federal Leviathan, against the Big Government status quo of the entrenched political class.
Those in both parties who are working to make you feel ashamed of your zeal, or extreme in your demands for a government that is supposed to be, by its very nature, yours — my suggestion is to tell them to fuck right off.
Because trust me: they don’t much like you to begin with. As any quick scan of a Twitter feed will readily reveal.
(thanks to Gary S)
You might think that when even the Establishment numbers guru Nate Silver (whose career arc, BTW, was from DailyKos to the NY Times) tells you that these elections look a lot like 2010 it might finally be time for the squishes to accept the truth: TEA Party policies and politics are the right thing for the country and the only way for Republicans to win.
Hope and Change.
With JG’s permission, I’ll drop this next bit concerning another Republican victory here. Mark Amodei, former Senate member in the Nevada legislature, just picked up a win as well and as expected, this is being heralded by the Republican establishment — at least tacitly — as a Good Thing.
Except:
Hell of a job, Republican.
Further, this is the attorney and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair who in 2005 destroyed the hopes and many say the rights of equal-parenting advocates in the state by first consulting with judges in private between Committee sessions and formal testimony — a likely violation of the State’s constitution concerning separation of powers — and then actually rewriting the bill to grant those family law judges enormous new authority to, at their whim, make the state’s misogynistic, federally-funded, corrupt, and profiteering divorce industry even worse.
In the best tradition of bending over for the left in some odd spirit of bipartisanship — which is code for how-can-I-profit-here — attorney Amodei then passed the rewritten bill out of Committee without further testimony. Its renamed facsimile is now law.
These are our Republican representatives, for better or worse.
Precisely.
Here’s the thing: they want you to be ashamed and shut up because they know the damage that will be done once word spreads about the utter failure that is Washington, DC. As in any repressive regime, the leaders depend on the serfs not to share information with one another. Once people realize that they’re not alone in their beliefs, they feel more confident in speaking them aloud, and things just snowball from there.
The Left took over the schools so that we’d never be taught the truth. They took over the news media so that we’d never learn about the lies we’d been taught. The rise of ubiquitous personal communications and alternative news media means that those foundations are eroding, and fast. Take advantage!
I’ve seen it first-hand: during the 2008 campaign, I made many of the complaints and arguments that Jeff and the usual suspects here wrote about. My cow-orkers wouldn’t hear a word I said. But over the past couple of years, and especially since the 2010 elections, the arguments I make over the lunch table find an audience that’s more and more receptive.
And these are dyed-in-the-wool Minnesota Democrats.
Forget for a moment that our Presidential candidates mostly suck. Forget that our new crop of allies in Congress are stymied on every front by entrenched interests from both parties. The truth is, frustrated and angry as we are with the Establicans, our Democrat neighbors are even more pissed off at the Obama/Pelosi/Reid/Schumer/MSNBCNN regime. I’m not talking about the voter cattle here; I mean the standard blue-collar and professional liberals. The Joe Lunchpails. The tote baggers. The Whole Foodies.
Just as we were lied to about the first Thanksgiving, they’re lied to every day about the modern Tea Party. The Proggs have to maintain the fiction that we’re ignorant redneck selfish racist haters, because once the truth gets out — that we’re classical liberals who espouse personal responsibility and limited government — the game is over. At that point, the small businessmen and Main Street Americans that currently rally and march will be joined by the tote baggers who recognize just how much damage the Proggs and the Chicago machine are doing to our nation.
When that happens, we go from 20% of the electorate (impressive enough, regardless of what the pundits would have you believe) to 35% of the electorate, which is unstoppable.
Is it too little, too late? Perhaps. But when you’re not busy preparing for the shit to hit the fan, spare a few moments to spread the gospel. The more of us out there speaking truth to power, the quicker the snowball builds. It’s the cheapest, easiest way you can help win back the Republic. Don’t let them discourage you. Don’t let them silence you.
Excellent (and depressing) read. There really does come a point where the Left is so firmly entrenched in our Public (“kleptocratic“) sector, and has such an iron grip on our educational establishments (from the teacher-schools to the cradle), that one really is left to wonder if we even *have* a country any more.
Perhaps it’s America’s time to become the newer, more “perfect” Soviet union.
I’m hopeful that it won’t come to that, but I get more and more depressed when I look around me and see the kind of ignorant peasantry that our electorate has been reduced to. Mindless platitude is literally all we have any more.
And you’ve definitely pinned my sentiments w/r/t the left-wing drift of the “right-wing” movement in this one graph, Jeff:
So the question, as you’ve pointed out, becomes the more depressing one. Can we even stop the Sovietization of America?
I’m definitely looking forward to your continued writings on the subject, even though it’s going to depress the heck outta me.
There is a way to look at this as a “good” thing. With Obama’s numbers sinking even in the “safe” places the election of conservative majorities in both houses of Congress and winning the Presidency look more and more doable. In that case these entrenched progressive/left positions could be seen as roach motels, filled, and ready for disposal.
Considering how long it took Soviet Russia to break out of the mental programming brought on by its state education system, consider me pessimistic but hopeful that you are right. This election is about *far* more than Obama, I’m afraid. Our entire left-wing is essentially retreading the Communist Revolution here in America, and they’re doing it via our children (by way of our entire educational establishment, our entire entertainment industry, etc.) Even if “we” WIN the election, judging by the staggering amount of mental rot I see walking around on a daily basis — and granted, I am in a generally liberal area, but I see the same anti-American, pro-Hedonistic trends even in “conservative” areas now — I see NO HOPE of preventing our impending lapse in freedom.
(That could’ve used a paragraph break or two. Curses, foiled again!)
Did Waxman just use that old anti-semitic stereotype? Yes he did.
Waxman has also accused us of wanting to “repeal the 20th century.” It never ceases to amaze me that he manages to survive waking up in the morning, given his stunning lack of intellectual insight.
Whether or not it is okay to denigrate rich hook-nosed controllers of money depends on whether or not you are a Dem, geoffb.
I do not recall this Brian L person, but seems like an excellent addition.
So Brian L., if you take your own reading of the underlying problem — for shorthand, let me refer to it as miseducation or maleducation — what is our path to reform, what our path to repair or to avoid instilling maleducation in the first instance, what, in short, is our means to escape the awful trap we’ve set for ourselves? And I ask this because I believe I agree with you from the start; because I fully agree that any quasi-permanent repair of our national political collapse is dependent on serious long-run repair of our educations as political or social beings.
Thanks, JD! I’ve been blogging at SnappedShot.com for five years now, but am pretty much a nobody anymore. Don’t mind me, I’m just another depressed citizen of ObamaLand, trying to get by from day to day. :)
I have hard edges.
I see Jeff G. posted on Waxman at the same time I commented.
He can’t help but wake up. He can smell the coffee all the way from Colombia.
So Brian L., if you take your own reading of the underlying problem — for shorthand, let me refer to it as miseducation or maleducation — what is our path to reform, what our path to repair or to avoid instilling maleducation in the first instance, what, in short, is our means to escape the awful trap we’ve set for ourselves? And I ask this because I believe I agree with you from the start; because I fully agree that any quasi-permanent repair of our national political collapse is dependent on serious long-run repair of our educations as political or social beings.
Sdferr — I don’t see any other way to resolve our maleducation except to start stripping our educational system to the bones.
The universities breed ignorant but strongly liberal teachers, but they are able to do so because of the massive government subsidies that these schools have received. The solution to that is to abolish public financing for university degrees completely, and roll back the state’s involvement in our upper education, a move that would hopefully allow the deadweight universities to begin actually failing for the lack of education that they’ve come to embody.
(Of course, this situation is beginning to show signs of remedy already. Given the government’s constant intrusion into educational financing, university rolls and tuition have both skyrocketed over the past 20 years, and yet people who graduate from said universities are increasingly (a) broke, and (b) fantastically ignorant. Businesses and parents alike have begun to notice this trend, and have accordingly begun to adjust away from the Ivy League elites and towards “lesser” but more educational schools. Or at least, that’s what I think I’m seeing out this way.)
As for our lower educational system, it is clearly broken beyond all repair. The Department of Education, with its Federal mandates and liberal indoctrination programs, should be disbanded immediately — as Reagan promised he would do way back in 1980. At the State level, control of education needs to be returned to the local county/town/city level, and individual county/town/city school systems be allowed to compete with each other for actual educational excellence. No central planning, no central funding. Each district MUST be allowed to succeed or fail on its own merit, with its own resources.
Alternately, we can take that one step further, and privatize the education machine completely, which would eliminate 90% of the property taxes that parents are currently forced to pay, freeing up that money to be invested in private local schools more suitable to the education of a free people.
Unfortunately, with the MASSIVE levels of brainwashing our country has been subjected to since 1963 w/r/t the “benefits” of “public” education, I don’t see either one of these suggestions happening, ever.
So I’m hoping that the revolt against the University system’s abject greed will deepen, and that will in turn encourage people to start thinking outside of the box about the assumptions they’ve taken for granted for so long. At least if that happens, there’s some hope of bringing things to the next level.
Otherwise, I am afraid that our nation is as toast as Jolly England is.
Say, Rep. Waxman, who mows your nose hairs? (Sorry. Jeff started it and I couldn’t resist.)
There sits the question of content.
Whereas most of your prescriptions look to processes or “systems” (not that I disagree with these mind you, though I haven’t analyzed them in detail just yet).
Henry Waxman is the father of Weekly World News’ Bat Boy. Which is no surprise; tourists gather at his nostrils every summer at dusk to watch the bats fly out.
Granted. I think it has truly been generations since Americans thought of themselves as “a free people,” at least in the same sense of the phrase that our Founders did.
jews are rabidly anti-gay marriage if the Prop 8 thing is anything to go by
Los Angeles Jews were more opposed to Prop 8 than any other religious group or ethnic group in the city.*
Whereas electric hamsters are simply rabid. But whatcha gonna do?
Here we could depend on the marketplace of discovery to deliver a content of choice in success, to the extent we manage to set people free to pursue a completely private schooling regime, I suppose. Why? Our rationale might be “well, we don’t claim to have certain knowledge of the proper content of education for all these millions of people (nominally free-men), any more than we’d claim to be capable of making their economic decisions from some towering central peak of economic knowledge”.
These sorts of “results” would take a generation or two to work their ways forward however. Yet time may happen to be of the essence in our political salvation.
Then too, this path may ultimately result in outcomes we privately suspect to be the case a priori, based on a knowledge of what had worked in the past (as for instance, the education of the Founders as free-men themselves), itself having been discovered in a free market regime of education. So, why not bypass the time-lag and simply go to the well-founded older practice, augmented here and there with novel scientific discovery?
Or, we could begin with inquiry into what we believe necessary to constitute the education of free men, starting afresh in a sense, and work our way through the various opinions on this score to resolve in some indeterminate agreement? But given the sunken state of education with which we’re confronted already today, this option looks risky as all hell.
Mr. Darth it just seems possible that Mr. Redstate guy is barking up the right tree is all.
And thusly, you have described the source of my depression of late, which brings me right back to Square #1. :)
Yes, but . . . to put it bluntly: Goddamnit, we’re not going to stand for failure. So fuck depression. There’s work to do.
Aye aye, sir!
:)
Jeff — you may have a small number on you site — compared to previous periods.
However — “A few honest men are better than numbers.” Oliver Cromwell
‘feets, rather than hijack the thread. maybe you should go and ponder this photo for a while.
Let your imagination run free!
I think that one of the AttackWatchcom tweets is on the right track:
FACT: It’s a very difficult district for Democrats. Which one? Doesn’t matter
Here is the one valid Federal function regarding lower education: defining a national core curriculum.
It is a valid public interest that education across all states cover the same core syllabus.
It is politically doable to:
– Convert all Federal aid for lower education to vouchers.
– Set up a national Board of Regents that defines a core K-through-12 syllabus.
– Administer nationwide tests based on that syllabus.
– Eliminate the Dept. of Education.
Results:
Control returns to parents, who can choose any school that adheres to the core curriculum. They can also refer to test results to see how their child/school is performing. (In this context we recall how the lack of solid nationwide standards bedeviled NCLB and other programs.)
Private schools and school boards can add to the core program as they wish (Intelligent Design, anyone?)
To silence critics, there is rough “equality” in baseline funding – with the voucher probably going farther in economically depressed areas – and Republicans are seen as “doing something” instead of just “abandoning kids”.
Regarding higher education:
– Strip out all up-front subsidies and loan guarantees, as mentioned.
– To silence critics, provide a tax break for student loan payments – just like the tax break for mortgages.
This quickly eliminates the “Gender Theory in Napoleonic Literature” nonsense, since nobody will go into hock to study it.
And the cost of education will quickly drop when the buyer-seller relationship is unmediated by government subsidy.
No
fucking
way
There are all kinds of valid national public interests that don’t require the federal bureaucracy to be involved. They are served by, among other things, the concept of the Interstate Compact, or by state legislatures debating individually and then adopting uniform codes promoted by nonprofit entities. In such cases the federal government’s only role is judicially, as referee in the event of a dispute across state borders.
As for a national core curriculum, I say let nonprofit entities formulate and promote what they will, and let their ideas compete in an open marketplace of… something or other. The federal bureaucrat has no role whatsoever in education except at federally operated institutions like the military academies.
One of the commenters over at JOM (rse) is in the process of writing a book establishing that the national core curriculum currently being implemented is to ensure that socialism is the de facto outcome for the US and that the proles are to be educated this far and no farther (I’m holding my fingers about an inch above the floor). She has done massive in depth research and some really top notch investigating. FTR I will mention that I know her – she and I met at the David Horowitz Emory talk (the same day I met Bmoe last year), and she has some hefty credentials – used to be a top lawyer at one of the best firms in the Southeast til she retired for motherhood and to pursue this book. She has been meeting all across the country with top republicans and making sure they understand what is going on. Some get it, some don’t. However, more get it than not. Rubio put a shot across their bow today with a letter to Arne Duncan.
Link to letter.
Suggestions for thinking outside the box… who the fuck needs a formal structure when there are many resources on the web to teach kids today from k -16? Think Khan Academy and the many universities that are putting entire curricula on the net for free like MIT. MIT has just about their entire course catalogue on the net. Plus all the homeschooling materials that have been developed for parents to use. Also, my daughter’s school system has now put the entire high school curriculum into an online school so now you can graduate from our school system without once setting foot inside a proper classroom except end of course testing and some science class labs.