Those who’ve made their way into the counterculture must admit that seeing the Left-Right dichotomy unmasked as kabuki theater was one of the hardest pills to swallow. With the exception of the Zoomers, every living generation of Americans was conditioned to support the Red Team against the Blue Team or vice versa. Learning that Team Red was long ago paid off to take a dive came as a shock.
Learning that Republicans are the electoral version of the Washington Generals, paid to take a dive against the Democrats’ Globetrotters, naturally raises the question of why. Pulling that thread unravels the whole sham of Conservatism and Liberalism as opposing ideologies. Liberalism attempts to enshrine freedom as an absolute divorced from objective good. Conservatism accepts the same basic premise but adds sundry temporary restrictions based on taste and social mood.
Astute readers will spot the fatal flaw intrinsic to all Liberal ideologies, including Conservatism. Establishing personal freedom as the ne plus ultra of human action precludes any possible limiting principle on self-expression. Taking away objective value reduces everything to a matter of preference.
We see this dynamic at work in the common internet straw man which reframes a moral claim as opposition to “something you don’t like.” It’s a clumsy substitution of an arbitrary preference statement for a value statement, but most people are so mired in Liberal assumptions that they fall for it. That’s how moral idiots reframe opposition to pedophilia as curmudgeonly hating on just another form of self-expression.
And it works, because by accepting the Liberal moral frame, Conservative objections to any exercise of personal freedom are automatically rendered arbitrary.
The pedos over at the Lincoln Project seem hell bent on proving Conservatives are just slow members of Team Shitlib. Their tiki torch stunt is what you’d get if Woke Cultists with a time machine tried to blend in at a 1950s Klan rally. But that’s essentially how republican Boomers perceive the Culture War.
Unfortunately, that conditioning runs deep. A phenomenon that’s been creeping into dissident circles lately is the sad spectacle of formerly redpilled folks falling back into Liberal modes of thought. A lot of these guys came out of Libertarianism during the Trump years, so their backsliding is understandable, even though they should know better.
Trump’s failure to achieve much of anything may have driven many Ys and Xers into a form of nostalgic despair. Perhaps they’re convinced that if they spout the same Barry Goldwater quotes they used to in high school civics class, Ludwig von Mises will appear and set the clock back to 1995.
It’s magical thinking fundamentally no different from the cargo cultism of the Left. Like religious converts with buyers’ remorse, relapsed Libertarians think that reciting the old formulas and performing the familiar rituals will deliver them into a promised land where they can homestead–and probably grow weed–far from the watchful eye of Big Government.
Of course, Big Government is no less an amorphous bogeyman than White Privilege. The former results from primitive speculation on cause and effect applied to the observed reality of the government perpetrating evil. “The government does evil. The government is big. Therefore big government is evil.”
What you never hear from Libertarians is precisely what “Big Government” means. Nor do they propose any realistic means of making it smaller. They closest they come are pie in the sky allusions to rolling federal spending back to 1995 or 1985 or 1955 levels.
All of this is just smokescreen for the fact that government’s size isn’t the source of our woes. It’s hard to think of bigger governments, in the sense of the scope of government power, than monarchies. Yet not even the most tyrannical king would seriously entertain the notion of replacing his subjects wholesale with a foreign people. A king ruled a nation, which was a large extended family. He had skin–and blood–in the game.
The scourge besetting the West arises from the fact that our leaders no longer have the least thing in common with us. The democracy hailed by the Lincoln Project has enabled the ruling class to insulate themselves from all accountability for their actions. After all, their logic goes, you voted for them, so you deserve the blame for their misrule.
It’s not the size of the government that counts. It’s the quality of the people in it and their degree of attachment to their constituents. Our corrupt oligarchs won’t voluntarily part with one iota of power anyway, so the solution to the size and malice of the government is the same.
They seek to replace us, so we must replace them.
I was anticipating a Yugoslav-style dissolution, but America will probably just fade like South Africa. At least the Texans know what happens during “load shedding.”
That wasn’t fun, to say the least. Losing power and water at the same time is a recipe for pain. We were only out for 36 hours, but others were in a tough spot for much longer. It was a sobering thing, bordering on spooky, to see whole neighborhoods without power. All the basic prepper stuff applies – potable water for drinking, non-potable water for basic hygiene, stored food, batteries, layers of blankets and clothing for the winter, books and games for children of all ages, some means of self-defense – but with the added note that some of that food needs to be ready to eat in the dark, in the cold, with no cooking. More importantly, you’ll need healthy relationships with friends and family, because people who can’t live or work together in good times will surely fall apart in bad times.
A space sim called Freelancer almost predicted your state’s future. In space America, the Texas system experienced a dark matter storm that wiped out the off-world infrastructure, and Planet Houston was left a crime-ridden craphole with few opportunities to earn a living apart from piracy and bounty hunting. Xenophobic terrorists known as the “Xenos” were also kept in a separate prison station from the rest of America’s criminals, because they always got into fights with the Spanish* drug runners and habitually recruited the other American criminals.
*Space Spain was represented as a pair of pirate factions known as the Corsairs and the Outcasts. The Outcasts made their living off of an evil, cocaine-like drug that altered the user’s DNA.
The preppers were always going to be proved right. The only question was when.
There’s definitely been a consistent narrative against prepping. Many people I know think it is ridiculous to even have basic supplies for a few days. Despite this being Minnesota, where it is very possible that snow might shut down roads for a few days in the winter, or a tornado might shut down power for a few days in the summer. Or, you know, the threat of stuff not being in stores due to supply chain issues.
It’s to the point where I think that asking about whether someone has supplies might be one of the quickest ways to determine NPC status. If they say yes, or that they are working on it, or that it’s none of your damn business, they aren’t. If they look at you like you’re crazy and ask why you would stock up when you can just go to the store, NPC confirmed.
How do they feel about testing the shut-off valves for their incoming water? If I’m able to kill my water supply and drain my pipes before they burst during a winter power outage, will they see me as a crazy conspiracy theorist?
The most Lolbertarian statement I have ever heard came from a zoomer streamer who said, “The government’s only job is to protect us from itself.” I guess anything more than that is “Big Government”.
Exposing those guys’ arguments is as simple as giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
Just ask, “By what metric do you measure the size of government? How much is too much?”
I imagine that a lot of those in power would agree with Job Trunicht: “Someone like me can hold power and make others live or die as he likes. If that isn’t a flaw of democracy, then what is?”
Any club that would have Lindsay Graham as a member is clearly not worth joining.
Tying into both Kabuki and the White Pill/Black Pill rollercoaster, I’m seeing a lot of conservatives acting as though Virginia being called for Youngkin means that the Biden Administration is now crippled, that “conservative principles” will be implemented once again, and that voting fraud was limited to 2020 (or maybe just to elections involving Donald Trump.)
There’s nothing wrong with being happy about minor victories, as long as you recognize that they are minor. But the republican modus operandi is to say “now that we started winning, don’t worry, everything is going to be right again. (Just ignore the fact that we’ve said this 50 times in the past and every single time our winning streak did not go on long enough to even get us back to where we were before we lost.)”
A McAuliffe victory would have been better for America in the mid-long term. Now the ruling Obama faction has disposed of a leftover Clinton stooge in favor of a Bush stooge. Meanwhile, normies who were on the verge of waking up have been lulled back to sleep.
Many of the normies are hoping for that one thing to happen that will magically make it “Morning in America” again, and more importantly, mean that they won’t have to do anything themselves and won’t actually have to face the life-and-death struggles that are coming.