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More post-election thoughts: the battle and the war — 47 Comments

1. I overheard a conversation about the election in which a person said, ‘I don’t want to vote for the wrong guy, I want to vote for the winner.’ How’s that for making up your mind on the rational basis of a candidate’s position? Maybe we ought to replace debates with a political version of Dancing With The Stars.

2. I’m not sure why Neo thinks there is a leftward march through the churches. (Particularly since she does not, so far as I know, go to church.) The hierarchs of the mainline churches are fairly far left, particularly on culture wars issues, and have been for some time, but those churches continue to lose members, so their cultural influence is steadily abating. Catholic and evangelical churches generally endorse policies that don’t always quite fit in a particular place on the political spectrum (after all, our kingdom is not of this world), but they aren’t trending left in any manner that I can detect. Also, many evangelical churches are and always have been determinedly apolitical. (Cue the same statement about the kingdom.)

3. One of the most potent powers of the media is the power to ignore. As an example, in 1991 I went to a family reunion in Hope, Arkansas. In Arkansas people made jokes about Bill Clinton. For example, How do you slow down a fast woman in Arkansas? Put a governor on her. The media ignored those jokes when Clinton was running for president.

4. One reason for the ascent of candidates like Sinema and “Beto” in the previously red West and Southwest is the rolling exodus of aggrieved, entitled leftists to Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico from deep-blue uniparty sh*tholes like the Bay Area. They don’t understand how and why their former locales got so unlivable, and so they take their crazy leftist politics with them. Last night a trendy socialist, aided by the rich white leftist diaspora (and probably some noncitizen voters), came very close to turning New Mexico’s 2nd district as blue as the rest of the state is becoming. It’s only a matter of time.

5. So. California Transplant to Central Florida… YES, Ron DeSantis whacks Mr. Open Borders socialist, Gilliam!!!! And, soon, Rick Scott will replace the Useless Bill Nelson.

   Yes, Repubs!!!

6. Catholic and evangelical churches generally endorse policies that don’t always quite fit in a particular place on the political spectrum (after all, our kingdom is not of this world), but they aren’t trending left in any manner that I can detect.</.i

   You don’t think the Pope telling Michael Moore that “Capitalism is a sin” is not leaning left ? The Catholic Church is deeply committed to illegal immigration, especially in California and Texas.

   I am a refugee from CA to AZ but by no means lean left. Some of it may be the tech jobs that are shifting and bringing along leftist tech workers. The shift in Colorado was probably nature lovers who listened to John Denver too much.

7. Neo, and the other commentators have hit the essential points:

   Number 1 for me is the education system. It all begins in the Education schools/departments at the college level. It is now standard that all potential teaching students have to pass a “fitness” exam. What this really amounts to is a a way to screen out those conservatives before they get too far in the programs. State universities are bad enough. At my small liberal arts college, the education department consists of 3 openly marxist faculty who have stated quite clearly that their job is to put teachers into the school system to foment the revolution.

   Number 2, “hearts and guts”. I can’t think of any other reason why here locally in Connecticut the voters keep electing the same people and supporting the Democrats. The state is on the verge of fiscal collapse. Yet, I’ve heard people say, “Well, I know John Doe, and he’s a good guy, so I’m voting for him.” Off John goes to Hartford and continues to vote for the same tax and spend policies that are ruining the state, and that the folks back at his home town complain about. But John is a good guy, so we’ll vote for him.

   Number 3, demographic shift. I’m originally from Denver. So I’ve seen first hand what the migration of the California locusts have done to that once very proud and very conservative state every time I visit family there.

8. y81:

   By “churches” I meant Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and reform Judaism (I suppose it’s also true of Islam, at least in the political sense but not the social sense). I meant the traditional churches—and in particular the mainline Protestant ones that used to be reliably conservative and are not conservative any more. The huge growth of vangelical churchess are a somewhat newer phenomenon compared to the older institutions such as Catholicism, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. etc.. Those older churches may be losing adherents, but they still have many many people, and what’s more the people are quite influential.

   For example:

   the mainline churches have maintained religious doctrine that stresses social justice and personal salvation. Members of mainline denominations have played leadership roles in politics, business, science, the arts, and education. They were involved in the founding of leading institutes of higher education. Marsden argues that in the 1950s, “Mainline Protestant leaders were part of the liberal-moderate cultural mainstream, and their leading spokespersons were respected participants in the national conversation.”

   Some mainline Protestant denominations have the highest proportion of graduate and post-graduate degrees of any other denomination in the United States. Some also include the highest proportion of those with some college education, such as the Episcopal Church (76%), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (64%), and the United Church of Christ (46%), as well as the most of the American upper class. compared with the nationwide average of 50%. Episcopalians and Presbyterians also tend to be considerably wealthier and better educated than most other religious groups, and they were disproportionately represented in the upper reaches of US business and law until the 1950s…

   Protestant churches as a whole have slowly declined in total membership since the 1960s…

   According to the Pew Research Center, mainline churches could claim 14.7 percent of all US adults compared to 25.4 percent who belonged to evangelical churches in 2014

   So, although evangelicals consist of about a quarter of the population, mainline Protestant churches still constitute about an eighth of the population, and that’s a lot of people. In addition, of course, there are Catholics, and the US Catholic establishment has moved more to the left as well. See also this for a chart.

   Also, being apolitical is the same as not opposing the Gramscian march.

9. Regarding the Catholic Church, the same organization that may say “Capitalism is a sin,” also says that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” As I said, they don’t fit quite that neatly on a right/left chart. And per neo’s chart, Catholic political affiliation matches the broader population, so they are not particularly leftist by that metric. Neo may know more about Reform Judaism than I, but I do know that the majority of Jewish children in NYC are Orthodox, not Reform, so any long march is not being led by the Reform leaders. https://www.jta.org/2012/06/12/life-religion/new-study-new-york-jewish-population-rising-increasing-in-diversity

10. “I have come to believe that most people do not vote by taking a good hard calculating look at the facts. Most people vote with their hearts and their guts, and their hearts and guts have a tendency to push them in a leftist direction.” neo

    Many years ago an old salesman cynically told me that people buy out of either greed or fear. At the time, I rejected that assertion but have since come to see the nub of truth it contains. I’d replace “greed and fear” with ‘desire and avoidance’ but perhaps that’s just semantics. A few years later, I attended a sales seminar in which they presented a study that had found that 75% of people make their buying decisions out of emotion, rather than intellectually weighing the pros and cons of a product or service. That applies to political decisions as well.

    But there’s another factor at play in America. We’re no longer a society with new frontiers that inherently offer new opportunities from which to build a new life. You can’t easily get a fresh start in today’s digitally wired world. Americans are in the place of those who stayed in Europe, rather than risk the new world.

    The tendency of today’s public toward embracing a leftist direction has a lot to do with the false promise of economic and cultural safety that socialistic ‘solutions’ offer. That’s very appealing to those for whom real risk is viscerally uncomfortable.

    Nor do those factors bode well for our future. Self-reliance takes a firm level of self-confidence and today’s educational system is producing self-deluded “snow flakes”. Today’s system of indoctrination instills not a confidence born out of achievement, which is the only real basis for confidence but rather a dependency upon government justified as their ‘human right’.

    “Number 1 for me is the education system. It all begins in the Education schools/departments at the college level.” physicsguy

    As neo points out, we have an indoctrination system.

    “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.” ? Abraham Lincoln

    “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Lenin

    Eastern Europe proves that Lenin’s assertion was false but only because the “equal sharing of miseries” and the reality of living under the boot of the elite disproves the collectivist mantra.

11. A few years later, I attended a sales seminar in which they presented a study that had found that 75% of people make their buying decisions out of emotion, rather than intellectually weighing the pros and cons of a product or service. That applies to political decisions as well.

    Another factor is seen in decision theory in which people are more likely to make a binary decision than to decide among more than two options. A study in The New England Journal a few years ago showed that patients with arthritis were more likely to fill a prescription if only one or two options were offered. If more than two options, they were far less likely to choose any.

    This was discussed long ago when I took a degree in health policy research after I retiring from practice.

    Thus is why, for example, car salesmen show you only one model and resist multiple choices.

12. Education is, indeed, the key, and the Left’s gradual, incremental, very patient Gramscian “march through the culture/institutions” has been infiltrating, subverting, and parasitizing Western society—it’s institutions, it’s culture, and it’s citizens—for two or three generations now, so that reversing this Gramscian infiltration and it’s victories, ridding us, as their host, of these parasitical ideas and reclaiming these institutions, will take the equivalent of house to house fighting, and will probably take a couple of generations to accomplish.

    Frankly, given how strong the Left’s current position is and all the intellectual territory they occupy, I don’t see how such a conservative Reconquista of our educational establishment and, then, of our culture can be successfully accomplished.

    But one thing I do know, and that is that, if Conservatives are to have any chance, Conservatives have to have a secure base—proof against successful assault—from which to launch and pursue such a generation’s long Reconquista effort.

    We need to have well and securely funded and committed Conservative institutions and people—perhaps a group of ardently Conservative think tanks and/or perhaps an educational institution like Hillsdale College to lead and carry on this Reconquista—but whatever and whoever we have, they must be animated by an almost religious zeal—the kind that can persist in the face of repeated failure, and over generations of effort—or they won’t be up to the task.

    Is such a base on the horizon? Can such a base be created? I don’t know.

    Another approach is, of course, something akin to the “Benedict Option.”

    To create institutions and communities that physically remain in an increasingly immoral, decadent, and violent society—headed for collapse—whose members follow interior lives and beliefs that are opposed to and withdraw from that society.

    Or, perhaps—a la “A Canticle for Liebowitz” to actually physically retreat to out of the way places, there to create our own new communities and the equivalent of monasteries, to preserve the best of Conservative thought and Western culture, so that when the current decadent society eventually collapses, we can “re-civilize” it.

    Thinking outside of the box, perhaps Space is our new Frontier, and, if we can get perfected, functioning space transportation, environmental, and the other critical technologies needed to get out into the Solar system and settle in it’s hostile environments, perhaps somewhere “out there”—the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids—would offer a new place to stand, and to start over.

13. I also think that a lot of the appeal of Far Left Ideas and Socialism/Communism—however disguised—has a lot to do with the current pampered generation’s heavy propagandization, and their lack of historical knowledge and experience.

    If you don’t realize—in your bones, front and center, each and every day—that the common lot of 99.9999% of all human beings throughout our four or five thousand years of recorded history, and for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years before that, has been one of starvation, cold, incurable disease and disablement, violence, unending, brutal labor, their domination and plunder by the more powerful and aggressive, and a very early death.

    If you don’t realize just how precious, unique, and rare the America that our ancestors toiled so many generations to create is; the sun touched apex of a (relatively) sturdy pyramid that rises–due to hundreds of years of arduous sacrifice, ingenuity, and brutal labor by our ancestors–out of the common unstable, churning mud.

    If you don’t realize how incredibly fortunate you have been, to have been born an American in this day and age.

    If you have been taught that America is evil, tainted, and believe it.

    If you have never personally suffered from war, starvation, unceasing, brutal toil, incurable, crippling disease, and brutal domination and plunder, you can’t appreciate what we have here in the U.S. and, thus, tearing it all down probably seems like an idea worth trying.

14. Remember that most people work for large organizations (corporations, government) and feel relatively powerless on many questions. This was especially true on health insurance where it was not easily portable or available except in large groups. To most people the “pre-existing conditions” argument is effective in that they don’t think of it as a technical issue, but rather that if they are laid-off they will have no where to turn. This is true for many things. They are easily fooled by progressives promises to take life’s risks away. If you are a small business (like me) or self-employed, these risks are viewed more realistically. The more you can give people control of things via IRA’s, HSA’s etc and really make it practical to let them use them, the better it is for Republicans.

    otherwise it is easy to scare the voters.

15. The large scale contest between intelligence and ignorance might be a kind of awareness exercise program we have chosen for this lifetime. The challenge to exercise restraint and civility is a good one for all of us.
    We should all be productive to the extent of our opportunities, and cautious. The urge toward totalitarianism is strong on the left at this time. If the worst happens and they ascend to power again, heaven help us. They have shown a strong tendency toward vendetta and punishing opponents, with the mainstream media covering for them.
    Be safe.

16. CHA-RIS-MA. Sinema v. McSally, O’Rourke v. Cruz. This concept is not optional. It’s essential and you can’t ignore it. McSally doesn’t have enough speaking polish, and Cruz has too much and he doesn’t come off as real. I gave a bit of cash to Josh Hawley (Hooray Josh!), and had never seen or heard him until his acceptance speech. Boy, does he push his epiglottis like some caricature of a radio announcer. He really needs help too.

    It not just that the education system pushes neo-Marxist garbage, though it does and it’s very detrimental. It is also the general degradation in the teaching of the basics, as well as the more advanced material.

    Try talking about the effect of corp. tax cuts, or the cost of “free” healthcare to the younger products of our education system, and you might as well be discussing advanced quantum theory. Older people too, I suppose.

    Yes, it is the Catholic church as well. I quit going when they began preaching jury nullification from the pulpit, as well as organizing marches into gangland territory in a neighboring city (which neighbors a prison) to support all those poor people. And don’t worry, God will protect you from any bullets that get fired. Literally, a true story.

17. dirtyjobsguy:

    Agreed.

18. The more you can give people control of things via IRA’s, HSA’s etc and really make it practical to let them use them, the better it is for Republicans.

    But what about people who don’t want to have to make decisions like that, or don’t have the smarts to do so? Pretty sure most people would much prefer the old-time company pension system, for instance, over having to try to understand and manage their own 401Ks.

19. Ann, you’re right, a lot of people don’t, and probably shouldn’t. The financial behemoths like Fidelity, Vanguard and T. Rowe Price do have pretty decent products that will serve as alternative self-direction, however.

    There is one big problem with all of them, though: when markets go down a lot. I posted a chart from Hussman Funds on this thread’s sister thread that showed just how extreme the risk in our stock market is right now — the most in history. So any more self-direction options had better not be created until the next cycle gets somewhere close to its bottom! Or there will be a lot of assets lost and retirements damaged.

20. Ann,

    Most people do prefer safety to risk, especially when raised to be sheep. Sooner or later sheep get sheared because every generation produces a percentage of wolves and when the sheep buy into the lie that there are no wolves, only victims lashing out… then the sheep disavow their sheepdogs* and the fate of the slaughterhouse awaits. No need to accept this, Western Europe will in the not too distant future provide all of the confirmation needed. Only the willfully blind fail to see the handwriting on W. Europe’s wall.

    *The prevalence on the left of liberal contempt for our armed forces and civilization’s “thin blue line” demonstrate the truth of that assertion.

21. There are a lot of great points made in this thread.

    We’re no longer a society with new frontiers that inherently offer new opportunities from which to build a new life. You can’t easily get a fresh start in today’s digitally wired world. Americans are in the place of those who stayed in Europe, rather than risk the new world.

    The tendency of today’s public toward embracing a leftist direction has a lot to do with the false promise of economic and cultural safety that socialistic ‘solutions’ offer. That’s very appealing to those for whom real risk is viscerally uncomfortable. –Geoffrey Britain

    Singling out Geoffrey Britain’s because it said so much to me, in such a concise fashion. I agree, mostly; I am not convinced Americans are now the same as stay-behind Europeans, though. My question is, where will our society look for solutions when another damaging downturn hits?

    Socialism, then still young, was the choice in the ’30s after the 1929-32 Crash. But it has a history now, as you mention later on in that same post. FDR’s New Deal was our version of Russian communism and Italian Fascism. We were too independent a society then to embrace leftism further than Roosevelt took us.

    The thrust of most of the comments, and Neo’s concluding statement, is that leftism seems almost unavoidable. Yet we do now have this knowledge that free-market capitalism succeeded and left-wing utopianism failed in every form it was tried. Unless you think the Chinese version is still viable (though events in their finances may prove that wrong in fairly short order).

    Regarding the schools that have inculcated leftism and know-nothing curricula, there is an article that appeared today that is one of the most interesting I’ve read recently. The data on the pension crisis, which is most directly a consequence of the teachers’ unions, will shock people and I will give a couple excerpts below the link. But the most important aspect, I thought, was the key point that changes will occur as people learn the scale of the problem and make adjustments. We cannot forget how capable and inventive and practical a free-market society like ours can be!

    https://pjmedia.com/trending/how-the-looming-public-pensions-crisis-could-be-a-boon-for-religious-schools/

22. Excerpts from the Lewis Andrews article linked in a post above:

    ….
    the cumulative underfunding of state and city retirement plans which, according to the Stanford Institute for Policy Research, is now more than $6.7 trillion. Moody’s has recently calculated the pension hole of all U.S. localities as equal to the world’s fourth-largest economy, Germany.

    With a May 2018 report from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government showing that public pension funding in New Jersey and Kentucky is already at “high risk of insolvency” and that California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are not far behind, … with private sector workers owing much more to bail out public pensions than they have saved for their own retirements – [a bill of] $71,000 each according to Wharton School economics professor … — … every citizen will be sacrificing to cover it, whether directly in the form of new taxes or indirectly though municipal bond defaults and cuts in government benefits.

    … Manhattan Institute’s Josh McGee published a study of school spending showing that local districts nationwide had been quietly disguising the impact of delinquent pension contributions for nearly two decades. According to a Stanford University study, California voters have been shielded from the fact that teacher pension costs have swelled by 532 percent over the last 15 years, while instructional outlays grew by only 47 percent.

    [YET:] Like every financial reformation before it, the coming effort to prevent another pension hole like the current one will spawn a cultural surprise – in this case, an unexpectedly larger role for Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Hebrew, and other parochial schools in K-12 education.

    [Which, the author continues, will go on to produce better outcomes at much lower costs. Along with some of the higher values that religion can impart, versus the absence of same — if not actual negatives — that public and secular education has given our society.]

23. CHA-RIS-MA. Sinema v. McSally, O’Rourke v. Cruz.

    TommyJay: Was that the problem with those red state races? I don’t watch much video of politics. I had wondered.

24. And how many of the parochial schools’ teachers are in actually Education majors of some college or university? How many of the administrators are anti-left? How many of the parents whose children attend these schools hold the virtues of self-reliance, independence, and actual (not “social”) justice to be right up there with benevolence to be of supreme importance?

    It seems to me that the best answer is home-schooling. If a particular couple can’t do the teaching themselves, perhaps they can find another family holding similar values, and find among the four parents someone who can manage to teach readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic. Perhaps they could scrape together enough to pay someone to tutor the kids part-time in the finer or more advanced points, or in subjects which none of the adults (or even the older kids) know much about.

    And, of course, there may be more like-minded families.

    After all, at one time in our own history there a lot of tiny rural schools which were really private projects of a group of neighbors. To the point that the men got together and put up a building, and the families offered room and board and a small wage to teenagers to teach the children.

    .

    As for church schools, for many years now they have been the choice for quite a few parents who don’t share the religious views but who do judge that the education would be better, and possibly the social climate as well. I know one Muslim lady who sent her kids to a Christian school because she and her husband judged it superior to the public schools available. And for a long time there have been waiting lists to get children whose parents weren’t parishioners, and often not Catholic nor Christian at all, into Catholic schools. (One example from 30 or more years ago was the Catholic school of St. Peter and Paul in the Chicago suburb where I lived — which by the way was not notably poverty-stricken nor uneducated.)

    .

    Times change. I can remember the national scandal of a mother in Michigan who wanted to teach her kids at home. No no no, we can’t have that! Send ’em to a proper school — it’s The Lawr! This was in the early ’60s.

    In those days they didn’t take kindly to the idea of homeschooling. In fact the fight over the issue lasted ten years or more, IIRC. And now in most jurisdictions I guess you can get away with it, subject (at least mostly) to some degree of oversight by The Authorities. Which I have the impression can include a requirement that the child pass some sort of test every year….

25. Kai Akker,

    In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries millions left Europe to get a new start in a new world. Currently there is no “undiscovered country”, which is forcing us to stay in a society at war with itself.

    “Yet we do now have this knowledge that free-market capitalism succeeded and left-wing utopianism failed in every form it was tried.”

    We on the right know this but especially the young support Bernie Sander’s delusions. Half of America voted for Hillary and, more than half voted for Obama… twice.

    The coming public union pension crisis will be an opportunity for the left to blame the greedy rich. Which for half of America will be accepted as factually true, since it supports their denial of reality. A denial of reality is an indication of an inability to cope with reality, thus it’s a given that they will double down on their delusions, as it’s their sole coping mechanism. All ‘isms’ of the left are in denial of reality, only the degree of denial differs.

    “We cannot forget how capable and inventive and practical a free-market society like ours can be!”

    Look to Venezuela for how collectivist movements kill capitalism’s golden goose.

    Sooner or later we’re going to have to start prosecuting the Left’s lawbreakers. Unlawful behavior without consequence encourages ever greater defiance of the law.

    Minnesota just elected Keith Ellison AG despite credible accusations of sexual abuse. Along with hijabed (and therefore pro-Sharia) Ilhan Omar to the House of Representatives, despite “reports that Omar has “faced allegations — soon backed by a remarkable amount of evidence — that she had married her own brother in 2009, and was still legally his wife.”

    “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.” Abraham Lincoln

26. huxley,

    I think I have a sensitive ear, maybe. McSally, who I love, rushes her speaking. She rushes greatly in mid phrase. I know a number of super smart Ph.D. scientists, and a few of them just can’t get the words out fast enough. It’s the kiss of death for a good presentation. And then the sentences don’t have the right inflections or enough inflection, because that would slow them down or take extra thought. McSally does that too.

    Cruz sounds like a preacher. That’s good in that he gets your attention and you hear every word. But he sounds like a preacher who is only interested in getting his hand in your wallet. It really does not sound authentic to me. Too rehearsed and practiced maybe.

    I haven’t spent much time listening to Sinema and O’Rourke, but they remind me of Bill Clinton playing saxophone on a late night talk show, or Obama. They are casual, and cool, enunciate clearly, and never rush their words. Sinema is young and massively well coiffed. The millennial version of the blow-dried politician. O’Rourke rolls around on a skateboard. How can you beat that? Thankfully, it can be done.

    I’ve often wondered if these super cool Dem politicians pop a half a Valium, a half hour before walking on stage. Or I could be all wet.

27. TommyJay: Makes sense. I have watched Cruz. While I admire his intelligence and mostly like his politics, I must admit he kinda gives me the creeps.

    I am still gobsmacked, as Andrew Sullivan used to say and probably still does, that Sinema could call Arizona “the meth lab of democracy” and be within a whisker of becoming Senator Sinema of Arizona.

28. On his post election show tonight Tucker Carlson made what I consider to be a very penetrating analysis of one of the major reasons the Republicans lost the House, and that was that Trump and Republican’s economic record and accomplishments didn’t resonate with a lot of voters.

    Carlson went on to explain that, while politicians in D.C looked at the stock market, GDP, and employment numbers, and thought that they had a winning record and message, these accomplishments did not impact a lot of ordinary Americans—especially young people in their prime family formation years, who are just starting out, very likely do not own stock, and who are not business owners who can very readily see how they are benefiting from this newly revitalized economy.

    These young people—who, cliché or not, are, it is true, “the future of our country”–don’t see any of that; economic statistics are likely meaningless to them in their everyday lives and experiences.

    Carlson went on to say that this main, unheralded and neglected crisis in the U.S.–a crisis that has profound, widespread, and over arching effects—one that needs to be urgently addressed, is the fact that, at ground level, our economy is such that far too many young people today, often saddled with staggering amounts of educational loan debt, cannot afford to get married, cannot afford to buy a car or move out of their parent’s house and pay for their own dwelling, and cannot afford to have children.

    It is crystal clear that—if not remedied–this state of affairs will have a whole host of major, deleterious effects on our country, it’s character, it’s strength, it’s social cohesion, and it’s stability.

    Thus, says Carlson, Trump’s and Republican’s message and programs should not just be targeted at Wall Street and Main Street, but should also be urgently directed at fixing this particular and ominous problem.

29. Spoke too soon. Dem in NM 2nd just pulled out a squeaker. NM is now a blue state — governor and entire congressional delegation.

30. Snow on Pine: Overall I agree with Tucker Carlson that young people have a tough hand to play. I don’t envy them.

    But in the past 12 months I’ve been struck by all the “Hiring” signs I’ve seen around town. Before such notices were as rare as whooping cranes. Beyond my anecdotal evidence the employment statistics are amazing. I can’t believe young people aren’t noticing these improvements. A whole lot more people are now working and others got the chance to take better jobs.

    It won’t resolve their college debt any time soon or buy them a house in San Francisco, but it is more than they saw under Obama. I’m more inclined to say, as others have said, it’s the leftist indoctrination the young have received and not thought through.

    I was a young leftist during the 70s and 80s, fairly prosperous times on balance. Yet I assumed the whole system was rigged to grind people down. I was shocked in the 90s when I managed to cash in my stock options without being screwed out of them.

31. Molly G: So Xochitl Torres Small won the 2nd. That’s two miles south of my current abode. Don’t know much about her except she’s left and is pretty dynamic.

    I worry about how blue New Mexico is. But I was born here, I have family here and I have more family retiring here. Not that family is an unmitigated boon…

    So far, even on the UNM campus, the Blue isn’t too oppressive.

32. huxley on November 7, 2018 at 9:58 pm at 9:58 pm said:
    TommyJay: Makes sense. I have watched Cruz. While I admire his intelligence and mostly like his politics, I must admit he kinda gives me the creeps.

    I am still gobsmacked, as Andrew Sullivan used to say and probably still does, that Sinema could call Arizona “the meth lab of democracy” and be within a whisker of becoming Senator Sinema of Arizona.
    * * *
    The people who vote for Democrats assumed Sinema was always talking about the Republicans.

33. In re the leftward march of many churches, this article has some insights.
    It’s not particularly well-written, but the gist is clear.

    http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/06/oppose-trump-racism-youve-got-rethinking/

    In general, even churches with heavily conservative theology and historic culture are full of left-leaning members (for the Gramscian reasons Neo mentions), so even if you don’t get Democrat talking points over the pulpit, half your congregation still votes that way.

34. A lot of good comments on this post, but I’m picking on Snow tonight:

    Snow on Pine on November 7, 2018 at 4:28 pm at 4:28 pm said:
    “Or, perhaps—a la “A Canticle for Liebowitz” to actually physically retreat to out of the way places, there to create our own new communities and the equivalent of monasteries, to preserve the best of Conservative thought and Western culture, so that when the current decadent society eventually collapses, we can “re-civilize” it.”
    * * * Sometimes I think I understand the reason the Essenes retreated from Jerusalem.

    Snow on Pine on November 7, 2018 at 4:56 pm at 4:56 pm said:
    “I also think that a lot of the appeal of Far Left Ideas and Socialism/Communism—however disguised—has a lot to do with the current pampered generation’s heavy propagandization, and their lack of historical knowledge and experience….If you have never personally suffered from war, starvation, unceasing, brutal toil, incurable, crippling disease, and brutal domination and plunder, you can’t appreciate what we have here in the U.S. and, thus, tearing it all down probably seems like an idea worth trying.”
    * * * The ignorance is a deliberate part of the propagandization…I used to think that now I understand why God was always beating down the Israelites when they got out of line, but now I wonder if He didn’t just step back and let them destroy themselves.

    Snow on Pine on November 7, 2018 at 10:23 pm at 10:23 pm said:
    “On his post election show tonight Tucker Carlson made what I consider to be a very penetrating analysis of one of the major reasons the Republicans lost the House, and that was that Trump and Republican’s economic record and accomplishments didn’t resonate with a lot of voters.”

    * * * The accomplishments might resonate more if they actually knew about some of them (pointing back to the ignorance & propaganda discussion), or if they knew enough history to see how badly things could go if they didn’t stick with conservative principles.

35. Speaking of ignorance and propaganda….
    https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/11/07/white-house-suspends-press-pass-for-cnns-jim-acosta/

36. The people who vote for Democrats assumed Sinema was always talking about the Republicans.

    AesopFan: That sounds about right, but so wrong from the way things once were.

    In the goodle days liberals knew better than to insult their fellow citizens even if that’s how they really felt in their hearts.

    John Hartford, “Back in the Goodle Days”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcF0SY0m3sU

37. To Julie near Chicago: Do you think home-schooling could ever be a practical answer for the scale of our society?

    To Geoffrey Britain: But we are not Venezuela. We have an enduring Constitution and a tradition of the rule of law. Don’t lose the faith.

    All the craziness of the past few years reflects the extreme of the cycle we’re in, and the significance of that cycle — it’s a major one, no doubt about it. I think the flotsam and jetsam will fade when times are harder. The easy leftism will go the way of buggy whips. History tells us that’s all that is.

    But what the government will try to do when that day comes, who can say. We tried socialism in the ’30s. In the ’60s-’70s, the government inflated its way out, saddling everyone with losses. Since 2000, the Fed has rigged the markets. There is a price that has to be paid for that.

    I agree that we must prosecute the lawbreakers, the vast majority of whom are Democrats like the Clintons, the lawyers behind the Kavanaugh smearing, and the Wasserman-Shultz corrupted espionage players. It will look like vengeance or politics, but without the equal application of the laws, this society will be sunk.

    I don’t think we’re sunk. Just in for a tough time.

38. To Geoffrey Britain: But we are not Venezuela. We have an enduring Constitution and a tradition of the rule of law. Don’t lose the faith.

    Actually, from 1959 to 1989 Venezuela had just about the most congenial political order in Latin America – second only to Costa Rica. It’s problems are testament to the effect of natural resource bonanzas on elite behavior and public expectations.

    You have 20 Latin American countries (of which one is a dependency of the United States). Run down the list to locate one for which the quality of public life has demonstrably declined since 1975 and you find two: Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Everywhere else there’s been improvement or at least a satisfactory stasis. (Most Latin American countries have a terrible problem with street crime; not sure if it’s better or worse than it was forty-odd years ago).

39. “I used to think that now I understand why God was always beating down the Israelites when they got out of line, but now I wonder if He didn’t just step back and let them destroy themselves.” AesopFan

    “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, All right, then, have it your way.” C.S. Lewis

    I would update Lewis by asserting that there are two kinds of people; those who however reluctantly accept reality and those who think that reality is whatever they want it to be.

    My former brother-in-law has said that “there are two kinds of people in the world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t think that…” 😉

    Art Deco,

    While things ‘may’ now change, I would add Brazil to Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Brazil’s President-elect Jair Bolsonaro election was a reaction to the mess Lula had made of things.

    The entrenched oligarchy/deep state/political establishment is ‘resistant’ there as well: “Bolsonaro faced the first setback in his plans to reduce the country’s massive deficit on Wednesday, as the Senate approved a 16 percent pay rise for the judiciary against his wishes.”

40. AesopFan said: “[E]ven churches with heavily conservative theology and historic culture are full of left-leaning members (for the Gramscian reasons Neo mentions), so even if you don’t get Democrat talking points over the pulpit, half your congregation still votes that way.”

    That’s basically right, in most of the churches I have attended. (Probably a little more than half in most mainline churches, a little less in most evangelical ones.) Half the population votes Democratic, and our church is a house of prayer for all people, so we would expect that half our members would vote Democratic (which is not at all how the Yale faculty votes.) But the growing churches (including Orthodox Judaism) contain no Gramscian long marchers, and the shrinking ones (including Reform Judaism) will not rule the future.

41. 1. One of the best issues for Republicans is school vouchers. Parents are aware of the indoctrination – and with the election of Trump, they know that they are not alone.

    We have seen the voucher issue used successfully to break the Dem’s stranglehold on the African American vote.

    Much of the needed cultural rollback could be accelerated with a system of Federal vouchers for education – which is simply a different way of distributing the money already doled out by Washington. Add a national Board of Regents and you have something lotsa parents would appreciate.

    This would also be a teachable moment for host of conservative talking points – big gov vs. leaner solutions, personal choice, etc. Which brings us to:

    2. The Left’s indoctrination includes a heavy emphasis of personal choice and freedom. Smart conservative messaging can leverage that to point out that the Dems are now the Inquisitors and regimenters, pigeonholing people and limiting their freedom through Leviathan. This was the dynamic in most cases when conservative views successfully broke through – “will the government force YOU to ‘bake the cake’ or are you free to work for who you want” was a claim that cut through Leftist labeling and reached a lot of not-very-religious people.

42. and their hearts and guts have a tendency to push them in a leftist direction.

    That is certainly true. There was a proposition on the ballot this year to expand Medicaid coverage, and I was certainly tempted, but voted against it. Why? Because it was an end run around the legislature, who were certainly better informed of the complications relating to federal funding and the state finances. It isn’t as though the legislature was mean, or didn’t want to deal with the problem, they did, but it is complicated. However, making that sort of judgement requires looking beyond immediate feelings, and I don’t expect young people, or even many old people, to do that.

43. On Capital Hill, some 15-20 years ago, many legislators were all agog at the “Canadian model” of health care.

    It was the new shiny object, and many believed it to be far superior to our existing health care system; for them it was a/the system that we here in the U.S. should strive to emulate.

    But, a lot depends on what you want to believe.

    There were glowing reports by high profile public figures about the virtues and efficacy of the Canadian version of socialized medicine and, on the other hand, I have read several anecdotal reports from actual Canadian participants, over the years, about its many failings–one example of anecdotal evidence that struck me was by a Canadian complaining about months long waits for appointments to use rationed major diagnostic tools like MRIs and CAT scans (only one machine allowed per couple hundred square miles or some such); a situation that forced the Canadian health care system participant, from a sparsely populated outlying area, to drive hundreds of miles to make an apparently precious, hard-won 2 A.M. appointment to get access to the machine.

    So, what is the truth of the matter?

    Is Canada’s socialized medicine generally good, or is it bad?

    Several decades ago one might have taken whatever was reported in newspapers, magazines, and on the TV as fact, as the Gospel truth. However, after our collective experiences observing the MSM over these last few decades, now, not so much.

    The MSM obviously having abdicated it’s role as the purveyor of straight, objective, even-handed, honest, complete, and accurate news, it seems that today, unless you are actually able to be on the ground in Canada, and able to observe, first hand, Canada’s socialized system of medical care in operation, you can’t really know for sure.

    And, unfortunately, this same situation would apparently apply to just about everything today, since if you really need to find out the truth about some thing or some situation in our highly politicized climate, where virtually everyone (at least on the Left) has a political agenda, and where everything has a political twist, you cannot depend on the MSM.

    If you really need the information, you have to go and see for yourself.

44. Make that “Capitol Hill.”

45. Snow on Pine on November 8, 2018 at 2:29 pm at 2:29 pm said:
    On Capital Hill, some 15-20 years ago, many legislators were all agog at the “Canadian model” of health care.
    * * *
    AesopSpouse works in the medical device field (dialysis machines and the like; you know, the things Obamacare TAXED to reduce the cost of health care).
    Anyhow, at a recent business conference, some Canadian attendees were talking about the problems with their national system.
    It wasn’t making good vibes.

46. Neo: Paul Watson maintains that the liberals are stuck in believing that THEY are the “counter culture”. He points out that they are now the dominant culture and that youth, instead of believing the indoctrination, will shake it off. The current crop of post-teens is possibly lost, but from this point on, we may well be raising the most conservative bunch since WWII. And some things are on the side of what he says.

    1) Youth tends to try and strike out on its own.
    2) Youth also likes to shock their parents
    3) The crop that is reaching 18 has done so in the specter of both the Great Recession AND 911 — ass backwards from the Depression and WWII, but both quite arguably represent formative forces in the way those kids look at the world.
    4) A generation that wants to be different from the one that came before it — to have an identity of its own — pretty much HAS to become conservative to be different.

    I just hope things hold together long enough for them to get some power.

    One GOOD thing, is that we’re pretty much teetering on, if not past, the point where the government can truly “ban” personal armaments. All they’ll succeed in doing IF they get laws passed (and we now have a SCotUS that’s likely to reject THAT) is to drive them underground.

    We also have an entire cadre of retired vets who are intimately familiar with every guerrilla tactic there is, if push came to shove.

    I dunno. “We live in interesting times”, as the apocryphal Chinese curse goes.

47. “We also have an entire cadre of retired vets who are intimately familiar with every guerrilla tactic there is, if push came to shove.”

    The biggest problem there is that, although the military rank & file, non-coms and lower officers skew conservative, the upper brass and enough of the others are also infected with the leftist indoctrination that things could get really dicey.
    Also, as we have seen this week, PTSD introduces a whole ‘nother wild card.

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