What on Earth is going on? We have GOP congressmen quitting early. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) resigned last week, and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) resigned the week before. Then there is MTG trying to blow up the House of Representatives with a motion to vacate the chair. Can you spell chaos?
And over in Britain, UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos is one of the mourners at the graveside of the Conservative Party. Oldest political party in the world: blah, blah, blah. In the current YouGov poll, Labour is on 44%, the Conservatives are at 19% and the populist Reform is at 15%.
I don’t know what to think, but at American Mind Carson Holloway notes how our liberal friends are obsessing over a new generation of rightist authoritarians. But they have nothing to say about the curious transformations on the Left. Used to be the Left was anti-war. Now they are all in on color revolutions and ground wars in Eastern Europe. They used to hate the CIA with a passion. Now they expect the “intelligence community” to help social media track down and deplatform “disinformation.” Can you spell “authoritarian?”
It’s at confusing times like this that humans need a good confident narrative to point fearlessly into the future. That’s what Marx did for his generation in the chaos of mid-19th century potato famines and revolutions. Everything was going wrong and the workers were going to be “immiserated,” he told his dispirited readers. There was only one thing to be done: give us educated guys unlimited political power and we will create Heaven on Earth.
Now, I have my own Narrative of the Story So Far, and I think my Narrative beats Marx on all points. To start with, it is much more fun! Here goes.
Back in the day, the newly educated class, gorging on books printed in the Gutenberg revolution, decided that the world had to change. Dumb aristocrats in silk breeches should be replaced by educated, logical, rational educated men that had read their Locke, Hume, Descartes, and Rousseau. And they did it! In the U.S. and Britain the new order worked like a champ, but in France and Germany not so much. Experts agree that Nietzsche was to blame, because he was “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual.”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s foolish life and realized that educated women needed to be liberated! And in the aftermath of winning a couple of world wars, it was time to rescue Blacks from Jim Crow. Then it was time for gay rights, 700 homophobic years after gay King Edward II had been deposed by his homophobic Queen Isabella and her homophobic lover Roger Mortimer. And transgenders!
At some point Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling decided she had had enough of The Boys in the Bathroom, and so a Commoner Rebellion of angry rural whites and Hispanic roofers came together in an insurrection to topple the tippy-top educated class and create a society fit for orphans that had spent their formative years sleeping in misery under the stairs.
See what I mean? This Narrative game is not that hard.
But the future will not be conservative. If you’ve read Roger Scruton’s Conservatism you realize that conservatism has always been a tentative complaint about the latest lefty enthusiasm.
Conservatism 1.0 was a complaint about the political revolutions of the 18th century when
conservatism arose as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in communities that were being reorganized by a purely political law.
Conservatism 2.0 was a complaint about socialism when
it was no longer against liberalism that conservatism was defining itself, but against socialism, and in particular against the socialist conception of the state.
Conservatism 3.0 is the present where conservatism
has become the champion of Western civilization against its enemies… political correctness… and [Islamic] religious extremism[.]
Not so much in Britain, according to Aris Roussinos, where the Tories are helping revise and extend the wokist state.
I honor Roger Scruton as a thoughtful and a wise conservative, but the Age of Conservatism is over.
Enough already. Let’s have a government of the Commoner, by the Commoner, for the Commoner. And, in demonstration of the astonishing tolerance of Commoners down the ages, the new regime will fund tippy-top educated non-binaries in their never-ending studies to determine how many genders fit on the head of a pin.
Who are these Commoners? Just ask Salena Zito.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Jean-Victor Schnetz
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