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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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).