I’m as vexed as any moderate/conservative to see the state of the nation right now. The first anomaly is that there really are no moderates anymore and I use that term just to differentiate from the masses flocking to the fringes. But such is our polarized time that all of us have been forced and dragged across the political spectrum by the excesses of the opposition. So be it, I am squarely conservative, and my opposition are not even fighting for the same nation anymore. Instead, they’re inspired by Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Russia, and Chinese autocracy. It used to be an expression but now is a literal aspiration. Actually, those aspirations may be overblown, as pure stateless anarchy is the stated goal of some. Traditional liberals are now hopelessly as passé to their radical peers as mainstream Republicans of a generation ago.
Conservatives are now holed up in their own ‘Helms Deep’ as the orcs of anarchy fling the heads of the fallen and even their own breed over the assailed wall. ‘Woke’ is mainstream. Demographics that both envy and hate suburban comfort consider a Rolex grabbed out of a smoldering storefront, ‘success’. What’s worse is that far too many elected have conceded this in agreement. How perverse.
I couldn’t escape noticing the irony of touring a town main street where the ‘wokeness’ wafted off of the young, white, pierced, and slogan’d shoppers and shop keepers, with all of their woke merch, all the while, their brethren of homeless and color milled around the open public spaces and sat outside tiny un-airconditioned homes a few blocks away. Looking a little hungry truth be told.
Youth – I use that term figuratively – are angry. I understand that they can’t get the job they want, have $60k in school debt, even have little interest in getting laid at this point, but that the practice of objection feels hot to their overstimulated selves. The poverty of the perpetual underclass feels like virtue to them; therefore, they emulate it, worship it, celebrate it, seek it; it’s music, vocabulary, fashion, habits, and outcomes. The underclass is a fetish of the well to do white.
Sure, Trump comes with his objectionable qualities, many of them, but let’s be frank here, the dominating alternatives are not what you’d want to leave to your children. ‘Mainstream’ progressives are an idiot lot, forgetting that all modern revolutions passed through their sorry lots, kicking them to the side. Revolution is ceded to the lowest common denominator. That’s true whether it’s far right or far left. While the seething left paints Trump this color, that is not really the case. He’s only a narcissistic worldly Norman Rockwell, not the ‘Hitler’ that they make him out to be. Would that progressives had read history before they burned those books. They’re about to live it.
We may or may not make it through this election cycle, I don’t yet know. Electoral politics is a mine field and this year there are too many new untested variables; pandemic, mail in fraud, fake polls like 2016, and especially smug youth that equates a firecracker in a protest the same as a vote. We’ll see. The party of ‘free stuff’ is very close to winning but if they do, it’ll be a very – short – party. If they don’t make it this time, look for the next. By 2024, the old guard will be quite dead and millennials are entering their prime. Even numbers of them with conservative upbringings are drifting ever so slowly left.
The future is demographic realities, not persuasion, not even what used to be called pocketbook issues. Who is alive, who votes, who are not the great class of gullible.