The writer of the following piece, The Flight 93 Election, offers a sizzling, blockbuster criticism of standard Republicans and pusillanimous conservatives of the last twenty or thirty years.
The author, basically says they are either "bought, sold, and owned" (corrupted by the way they earn their bread, the ones who work in the Washington, DC / bicoastal swamp) or simply gutless, chicken hypocrites who are not courageous enough to act on what they say they believe.. And therefore both camps are pretty worthless.
The author not only says, "Here's why #NeverHillary." He is really sounding a klaxon for the demise of America and doing it very eloquently. He's really saying that the liberal / progressive / socialist / Communist / Cultural Marxists (what's the f'ing difference??? . . . none, actually) will "wipe out" (in terms of government and culture) the conservatives and Republicans of every stripe after this election if Hillary wins.
Read this piece and you will know all you need to know for this election. -
The Blue Austin Conservative
The Flight 93 Election
@ CRB blog (Claremont Review of Books)
2016 is the
Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it
into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no
guarantees.
Except
one: if you don’t
try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is
Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the
cylinder and take your chances.
To ordinary conservative
ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are
never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative
intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all
human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit
that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things really be
so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and
yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration
of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!
Not to pick (too much) on
Kesler, who is less unwarrantedly optimistic than most conservatives. And who,
at least, poses the right question: Trump or Hillary? Though his answer—“even
if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is
unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and
inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—immigration, trade, and
war—right from the beginning.
But let us back up. One of the paradoxes—there are so
many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness
even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a
trajectory toward something very bad. On the
one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body
politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control
government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and
ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against
tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that
churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary
levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels
saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and
drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your
private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and
I’ll stipulate it.
Conservatives spend at
least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines,
conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other,
and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status
quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas
adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are
even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the
heart of our problems?
If conservatives are right
about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character
and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what
came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of
education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have
defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal
norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative,
enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if
they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government
and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they
are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in
the international sphere—if they
are right about the importance of all this to national health and even
survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a
cliff.
But it’s quite obvious that
conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of
urgency, of an
immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew
Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the
purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of
America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The
usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to
decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s
typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are
all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without
reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the
America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction,
immorality, and corruption? “Civic
renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a
cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to
achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact
itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a
more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest
abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment,
‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and
immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like
Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat
and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might
even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump
credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues.
Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he
will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of
Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I
expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative
intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.
Yet we may also reasonably
ask: What explains
the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that
Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that
they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like
Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest
themselves, but let us
foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.
Whatever the reason for the
contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To
simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to
insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is
incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe
that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not
necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically
impossible.
Let’s be
very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental
change needed, then you have implicitly
admitted that conservatism is wrong.
Wrong philosophically,
wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy
prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today.
Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with
conservative assistance. And, third, the
whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all
understand as conservatism.
If your
answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for
conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another
article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government,
another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly
accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that
civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that
leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.
They will say, in words
reminiscent of dorm-room Marxism—but our proposals have not been tried!
Here our ideas sit, waiting to be implemented! To which I reply: eh, not
really. Many conservative solutions—above all welfare reform and crime
control—have been tried, and proved effective, but have nonetheless
failed to stem the tide. Crime, for instance, is down from its mid-’70s and
early ’90s peak—but way, way up from the historic American norm that ended when
liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s. And it’s rising fast
today, in the teeth of ineffectual conservative complaints. And what has this
temporary crime (or welfare, for that matter) decline done to stem the greater
tide? The
tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our every—literal and figurative—shore
has receded not a bit but indeed has grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.
More to
the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years?
The answer—which appears to be “nothing” —might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t
been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in
charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been
tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its
own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising
“entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort
businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is
their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?
Only
three questions matter. First, how bad are things really? Second, what do we do
right now? Third, what should we do for the long term?
Conservatism, Inc.’s,
“answer” to the first may, at this point, simply be dismissed. If the
conservatives wish to have a serious debate, I for one am game—more than game;
eager. The problem of “subjective certainty” can only be overcome by going into
the agora. But my attempt to do so—the blog that Kesler mentions—was met
largely with incredulity. How can they say that?! How can anyone apparently of
our caste (conservative intellectuals) not merely support Trump (however
lukewarmly) but offer reasons for doing do?
One of the Journal of
American Greatness’s [JAG] deeper arguments was that only in a
corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is
therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to
consider the possibility that the republic is dying. That possibility, apparently, seems to them so preposterous that
no refutation is necessary.
As does, presumably, the
argument that the stakes in 2016 are—everything. I should here note that I
am a good deal gloomier than my (former) JAG colleagues, and that while
we frequently used the royal “we” when discussing things on which we all
agreed, I here speak only for myself.
How have the last two
decades worked out for you, personally? If you’re a member or fellow-traveler
of the Davos class, chances are: pretty well. If you’re among the subspecies
conservative intellectual or politician, you’ve accepted—perhaps not consciously,
but unmistakably—your status on the roster of the Washington Generals of
American politics. Your job is to show up and lose, but you are a
necessary part of the show and you do get paid. To the extent that you are ever
on the winning side of anything, it’s as sophists who help the Davoisie
oligarchy rationalize open borders, lower wages, outsourcing,
de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.
All of Trump’s 16
Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election
of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are
merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their
“opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from
support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective
bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives
Matter. They merely help ratify them.
A Hillary presidency will be
pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us
have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of
vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the
supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and
the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the
censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the
shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction
campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social
Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment
political opponents, the gaslighting
denial by the media, and the
collective shrug by everyone else.
It’s absurd to assume that
any of this would stop or slow—would do anything other than massively
intensify—in a Hillary administration. It’s even more ridiculous to expect
that hitherto useless conservative opposition would suddenly become effective.
For two generations at least, the Left has been calling everyone to their right
Nazis. This trend has accelerated exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right who really do seem to
merit—and even relish—the label. There is nothing the modern conservative fears
more than being called “racist,” so alt-right pocket Nazis are manna from
heaven for the Left. But also wholly unnecessary: sauce for the goose. The Left
was calling us Nazis long before any pro-Trumpers tweeted Holocaust denial
memes. And how does one deal with a Nazi—that is, with an enemy one is
convinced intends your destruction? You don’t compromise with him or leave him
alone. You crush him.
So what do we have to lose
by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks. But those
are going away anyway. Among the many things the “Right”
still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer
go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging
these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.
If you haven’t noticed, our side
has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but we do nothing
with them. Call
ours Hannibalic victories. After the Carthaginian’s famous slaughter of a Roman
army at Cannae, he failed to march on an undefended Rome, prompting his cavalry
commander to complain: “you know how to win a victory, but not how to use one.”
And, aside from 2004’s lackluster 50.7%, we can’t win the big ones at all.
Because the deck is stacked
overwhelmingly against us. I will mention but three ways. First, the
opinion-making elements—the universities and the media above all—are wholly
corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our
existence. (What else are the wars on “cis-genderism”—formerly known as
“nature”—and on the supposed “white privilege” of broke hillbillies
really about?) If it hadn’t been abundantly clear for the last 50 years, the
campaign of 2015-2016 must surely have made it evident to even the meanest
capacities that the intelligentsia—including all the organs through which it
broadcasts its propaganda—is overwhelmingly partisan and biased. Against
this onslaught, “conservative” media is a nullity, barely a whisper. It cannot be heard above the blaring of what
has been aptly called “The Megaphone.”
Second, our Washington
Generals self-handicap and self-censor to an absurd degree. Lenin is
supposed to have said that “the best way to control the opposition is to lead
it ourselves.” But with an opposition like ours, why bother? Our “leaders” and
“dissenters” bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left
sets for them. Fearful, beaten dogs have more thymos.
Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of
Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in
liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less
Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.
As does, of course, the
U.S. population, which only serves to reinforce the two other causes outlined
above. This is the core reason why the Left, the Democrats, and the
bipartisan junta (categories distinct but very much overlapping) think they are on the
cusp of a permanent victory that will forever obviate the need to pretend to
respect democratic and constitutional niceties.
Because they are.
[on the cusp of a permanent victory]
It’s also why they treat
open borders as the “absolute value,” the one “principle” that—when their
“principles” collide—they prioritize above all the others. If that fact
is insufficiently clear, consider this. Trump is the most liberal Republican
nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many
ways that National Review still hasn’t stopped counting. But let’s stick
to just the core issues animating his campaign. On trade, globalization, and
war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own
party, but of his Democratic opponent. And yet the Left and the junta are at
one with the house-broken conservatives in their determination—desperation—not
merely to defeat Trump but to destroy him. What gives?
Oh, right—there’s that other
issue. The sacredness of mass immigration
is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.
Their reasons vary
somewhat. The Left and the Democrats seek ringers to form a permanent electoral
majority. They, or many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie
that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only
through ever greater “diversity.” The junta of course craves cheaper and
more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention
from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form
of noblesse oblige. The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of
course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.” For the latter,
this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much
less cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic
Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of
their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise
zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally
reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened
anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. But that doesn’t stop the
Republican refrain: more, more, more! No matter how many elections they lose,
how many districts tip forever blue, how rarely (if ever) their immigrant vote
cracks 40%, the answer is always the same. Just
like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete
attack. More, more, more!
This is
insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization
that wants to die.
Trump, alone among
candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has
stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to
live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.
Yes, Trump is worse than
imperfect. So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman
to address the fundamental issues of our time—or, more importantly, to connect
them. Since Pat Buchanan’s three failures, occasionally a candidate arose who
saw one piece: Dick Gephardt on trade, Ron Paul on war, Tom Tancredo on
immigration. Yet, among recent political figures—great statesmen, dangerous
demagogues, and mewling gnats alike—only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely
saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them.
The alleged buffoon is thus
more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so
bitterly oppose him. This
should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only
further proof of their foolishness and hubris.
Which they self-laud as
“consistency”—adherence to “conservative principle,” defined by the 1980
campaign and the household gods of reigning conservative think-tanks. A higher
consistency in the service of the national interest apparently eludes them. When
America possessed a vast, empty continent and explosively growing industry,
high immigration was
arguably good policy.
(Arguably:
Ben Franklin would disagree.)
It hasn’t made sense since World
War I.
Free trade was
unquestionably a great boon to the American worker in the decades after World
War II. We long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. The Gulf War of
1991 was a strategic victory for American interests. No conflict since then has
been. Conservatives either can’t see this—or, worse, those who can nonetheless
treat the only political leader to mount a serious challenge to the status quo (more immigration, more trade, more war) as a unique evil.
Trump’s vulgarity is in
fact a godsend to the conservatives. It allows them to hang their public
opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far
greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can
be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults. That the Left
would make the campaign all about the latter is to be expected. Why would the
Right? Some—a few—are no doubt sincere in their belief that the man is simply
unfit for high office. David Frum, who has always been an immigration skeptic
and is a convert to the less-war position, is sincere when he says that, even
though he agrees with much of Trump’s agenda, he cannot stomach Trump. But for
most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also
happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?
Another question JAG
raised without provoking any serious attempt at refutation was whether, in
corrupt times, it took a … let’s say ... “loudmouth” to rise above the din of
The Megaphone. We, or I, speculated: “yes.” Suppose there had arisen some
statesman of high character—dignified, articulate, experienced,
knowledgeable—the exact opposite of everything the conservatives claim to hate
about Trump. Could this hypothetical paragon have won on Trump’s same issues?
Would the conservatives have supported him? I would have—even had he been a
Democrat.
Back on planet earth, that
flight of fancy at least addresses what to do now. The answer to the subsidiary
question—will it work?—is much less clear. By “it” I mean Trumpism, broadly defined
as secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy. We
Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through
stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of
unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be
restored.
But we can probably do
better than we are doing now. First, stop digging. No more importing poverty, crime,
and alien cultures. We have made institutions, by leftist design, not merely
abysmal at assimilation but abhorrent of the concept.
We
should try to fix that, but
given the Left’s iron grip on every school and cultural center, that’s like
trying to bring democracy to Russia. A worthy goal, perhaps, but temper your
hopes—and don’t invest time and resources unrealistically.
By contrast, simply
building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting
off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by
incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace. These
policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and
(we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle
classes of all races and ethnicities. The same can be said for Trumpian trade policies
and anti-globalization instincts. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down,
or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly
all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would,
at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly
smaller pie than to add one extra slice—only to ensure that it and eight of the
other nine go first to the government and its rentiers, and the rest to the
same four industries and 200 families.
Will this work? Ask a
pessimist, get a pessimistic answer. So don’t ask. Ask instead: is it worth
trying? Is it better than the alternative? If you can’t say, forthrightly,
“yes,” you are either part of the junta, a fool, or a conservative intellectual.
And if it doesn’t work,
what then? We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense
objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the
threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the
longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up,
collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since
nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other
three. Oh, and, I suppose, for those who like to pour a tall one and dream big,
a second American Revolution that restores Constitutionalism, limited
government, and a 28% top marginal rate.
But for those of you who
are sober: can you sketch a more plausible long-term future than the prior four
following a Trump defeat? I can’t either.
The election of 2016 is a test—in my view, the
final test—of whether there is any virtù left in what used
to be the core of the American nation. If they cannot rouse themselves simply to vote for the
first candidate in a generation who pledges to advance their interests, and to
vote against the one who openly boasts that she will do the opposite (a million more Syrians,
anyone?), then they are doomed.
They may not
deserve the fate that will befall them, but they will suffer it regardless.
