If you’re ready to burn down the world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.
You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.
Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing “Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands today.
If you think that Trump will be a conservative, in any way, you’re deluding yourself.
I share many of the New Urbanist ideas for cities, but I can’t cast my lot in with the group because they are screwball-daft when the subject of cars comes up, and will entertain any inconvenience as long as it’s anti-car. I don’t want to ride a got-damned bicycle to work. Most people don’t. Period. So you have to force them out of their cars into something else. If a neighborhood is made sufficiently inconvenient for cars, some will adapt, and some will find a home in a placewhere they can have a car. That’s your choice. If you stay, fine; glad you’re happy. If you go out into the far-flung exurbs because you want to drive, and are willing to endure a few inconveniences, then fine; that’s yhour choice. You’d think the Critics of Everyone Else’s Choices would be happy that people are living far out and taking the train in, but no, a fresh new horror has revealed itself as people continue to show the depthless roiling stinky-pitch of their hearts:
While city planners generally welcome transit hubs to their community, they are concerned that, if improperly located, the stations will actually increase sprawl by encouraging people to drive to rail stations instead of walking, biking or taking the bus.
As for the other option, do not believe it is necessarily survivable. A Clinton Restoration will be very much like the Bourbon Restoration in France, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Hillary will use both the legal and illegal powers of the Presidency to systematically dismember the American Right, seeking to use her term(s) in office to permanently cripple its ability to block the social-justice warriors’ agenda. She undoubtedly looks on Obama’s weak and easily distracted measures with contempt. The use of the IRS to attack right-wing institutions was fully uncovered during the Obama administration without effective consequence. Therefore we can expect it to be used much more consistently and systematically under the Clinton Restoration. A number of measures will be used to permanently handicap the Republican Party, such as Puerto Rican statehood and, possibly, the abolition of the Electoral College, allowing corrupt urban machines to flood the ballot boxes with the votes of the Deceased-American demographic. The FCC will be used to muzzle conservative media and a progressive majority on the Supreme Court will erode all ten Amendments of the Bill of Rights.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, the silver lining of a Trump presidency is that it might finally stir some sense in the Congress of its Constitutional prerogatives.
But I’d still prefer that it doesn’t come to that.
As I’ve repeatedly said, I totally get the anger. These are people I grew up with in Flint, and I know them well and the “elite” on both sides of the aisle have shat on them repeatedly, for decades. But the tragedy of this desperate search for authenticity is that it has resulted in them being taken in by a confidence man.
When people ask why college tuition is so high, defenders of the higher-education system point to things like “Baumol’s cost disease” (costs in industries without much productivity growth tend to rise, because they have to compete for labor with more productive industries) and declining state contributions to public colleges. No doubt these play a part. But this cannot explain the vast upgrades in college residential amenities that have taken place in the 20 years since I graduated from college, when a student union and some ivy on the walls was about the best you could expect.
But of course, our parents were paying for it, and they didn’t care whether we had a swimming pool. A certain Spartan element was supposed to be part of the ritual of college attendance, just as it had been when they were in college. What changed? I suspect the answer is that rising tuition, and the increasing reliance on student loans, has placed more of the financial responsibility into the hands of students. And the students shop for colleges based on … well, about what you’d expect when you give tens of thousands of dollars to 18-year-olds and ask where they’d like to spend the next four years.