Musings on the election

An email exchange this morning of interest.  A good buddy of mine is rather despondent about Tuesday's results, and I had tried some levity, which fell flat:

Not your fault I am not finding anything humorous today. I know you don't agree with [my] theory of US history but yesterday the 2nd Republic committed suicide and the 3rd was born. It will not be a republic long.

To which I respond:

Or, yesterday we finally got over a lingering bump in our road, that needed getting over, and it is, in fact, an opportunity.

All nations change over time, they have to.

And change usually concerns those most invested in stability (i.e., us conservatives).

The youth don't know any better, as their timeline is so much shorter (and that leads to their impatience, too), and we're reluctant to try new things unless absolutely forced, because we've suffered through some unintended consequences of change for change's sake, so there's always tension between the comfortable elders and the youth. 

There has always been resentment between haves and have nots, and that isn't going away regardless of who's in charge.

If Iraq hadn't improved and the economy hadn't imploded, it might have gone the other way.   But they did.

But the Republicans sucked at the game this time around.  In fact, they usually do.  Not because of bad ideas or no ideas (plenty of that, though, too, what with been-in-power disease) but because they weren't organized, disciplined, and motivated.  So they didn't just lose, they got beat. 

The Founders wouldn't recognize this place ten years ago, much less this week. I don't believe (with the exception of the Judges, where over time, the Courts have really expanded their power, (starting with Marbury v Madison) President-elect Obama is going to make ultra-huge changes - there are a lot of institutional things which will slow it up - as there was for Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. There is a lot of friction and inertia in the system.
 
More importantly perhaps, there is also this - as long as conservatives make our major foci military service and business, the people who make their major focus non-military government service, academia, and the law,  well, they are going to pwn us.

Because they're shaping the narrative in ways we aren't.

More simply - as the Evans-Novak Report put it:

This is the legacy of the Bush era: a Democratic President and overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress--propelled in large part by an unpopular war in Iraq, a GOP culture of incompetence, and a philosophic and ideological shallowness.

Emphasis mine.

Regardless, whoever won this election was going to find themselves having to make decisions that were going to be painful, in one way or another.

We aren't a nation of frontiersmen or hardscrabble farmers anymore, with an expansible border and cheap land to move to (let's not get into the Native American issue), and expanding our population by people who wanted that kind of oppotunity, and the freedom to exploit they didn't have in the turgid societies of Europe (and we got those who wanted to bring their failed revolutions herer, too).  In that regard we are more and more like Europe - we have a greater number of comfortable people, or unadventuresome people, a greater number of people who both want (and have accepted the conditioning) to be told what to do, as long as they have some bread and a circus for entertainment.

Oddly enough, smart immigration policy, if accompanied by judicious assimilation, rather than the establishment of unmoving ethnic enclaves, which is what Democrat politics and policies aim towards - a tossed salad, not a stew, if you will - that is where you can keep an infusion of entrepreneurial spirit alive, leveraging people's desire to be able to rise above the status of where they came from.

Interestingly enough, I see a lot of Democrat social policy (not all, but a good chunk) as aimed towards making it easy for people to stay in stasis, vice enabling them to move up.  Both parties have plenty of policy designed to protect their own elites, but a fundamental difference in economic outlook animates things - the Left proceeds from the mercantilist assumption that the economic pie is fixed, and that anything you get is obtained at the expense of another - hence their desire to take from those who have to give to those that don't, and that the elites have the answer about how to go about it.  The Right sees it from a perspective that the pie is expansible, and that a lot of little decisions generally sum up better than a few big ones.  Both sides, in their extremes, fail. 

Thus the fight occurs in the middle.  But the Right needs to do a better job of Gramsci's "Long March Through The Institutions" if we're going to make our ideas resonate with the younger folk.  And we have to change.

There is a *lot* of conservative impulses in the youth, the "millenials."  But they're also married with a greater level of comfort with diversity and tolerance than that attritbuted to the Republicans and conservatism.

This thing has run on long enough as veered off focus.

Discuss among yourselves, if you bothered to read this far...