This is really the last chance for the unloved Republicans. If the party establishment is sufficiently dimwitted to see November 2nd as the restoration of the 2004-2006 GOP, they will be setting up the conditions (as Rush has already argued) for a serious third-force challenge in 2012. That would be less convulsive than a remoter though still possible scenario: If the Democrats manage to hold onto power by openly funding spoiler candidates, they would be discrediting the entire electoral process, and setting up pre-revolutionary conditions. In other words, it would be very easy for both parties to confirm the suspicion of a very disenchanted electorate – that the system no longer allows for serious course correction.
And, without serious course correction, America is doomed. It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does – from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. “Declinism” is in the air these days, but for us full-time apocalyptics we’re already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the world’s largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy. Everything that can be outsourced has been – manufacturing to by no means friendly nations overseas; and much of what’s left in agriculture and construction to the armies of the “undocumented”. At the lower end, Americans are educated at a higher cost per capita than any nation except Luxembourg in order to do minimal-skill checkout-line jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology. At the upper end, America’s elite goes to school till early middle age in order to be credentialed for pseudo-employment as $350 grand-a-year diversity consultants (Michelle Obama) or in one of the many other phony-baloney makework schemes deriving from government micro-regulation of virtually every aspect of endeavor.
Oddly, it's the gaming the third parties that frightens me the most. Any of the other things can be remedied with enough effort, but if the American people think that the system is rigged, then 1776 will look like a, well, tea party and the only safe investments will be in gold, tinned food, and guns. And I don't just mean for Americans. If the United States falls, civilsation falls with her.
2 comments:
I see a generational thing operating here. It is the generation that grew up after the war, that ran away from Vietnam, played hippie, then put on bell-bottom trousers and porn star mustaches and got all involved in the occult in the 70s, that is now running things. The generations that came after that one (no, they were not, personally, the end of history, as they seem to think), are my generation and now the generation of the children of my generation. My generation was raised on "self-esteem", and maybe laughed at this (we did at my high school, anyway); the next generation may be taking it seriously. It is the self-esteem generations, along with the professional idlers in the unions, who got H. Husseinovich elected.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the people who take the good life so much for granted, do when the bill comes.
A minor--albeit somewhat ugly--historical note:
The last time a Third Party achieved mainstream success in the American political system, one of the results was a devastating civil war that that's still on record for killing more Americans than all of America's other wars combined.
(Well, then again, the FIRST time a Third Party displaced one of the mainstream parties, nothing terrible happen, so...maybe there's no reason to worry too much....)
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