Rod Dreher blames the Republican rank and file who voted for Trump for the coming "mess"

Reminds me of Rush Limbaugh blaming the so-called four million Republicans who stayed home in 2012 for Romney's loss.

Yeah, like it's all of a sudden a government of the people, by the people and for the people when we lose, but the rubes never get the credit when we win.

Meanwhile the guys with the microphones and the high profile blogs get off scot-free.

Here:

"[T]he bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess." 

Rod Dreher believes not only what he reads in WaPo, but also in The New York Times

Here, where Trump's latest accusers are out of the box "credible".

Commenter Bryan says:

I’m sorry Rod, but I feel compelled to say something that saddens me: I have lost respect for you over the way you’re covering this election.

The Rod Dreher snowflakes at The American Conservative are horrified by Trump's threat to appoint a special prosecutor

Here:

Baron Harkonnen says:

October 9, 2016 at 11:57 pm

By the way – am I the only one freaked out at the fact that one candidate threatened to jail the other if he wins? What are we in Zimbabwe? Yet another thing nobody cares about. It’s all normal now. It’s unthinkable. Trump is openly threatening to weaponize federal government agencies against political opponents. Disqualifying reason #812. B-b-b-b-b-ut Clin-ton!!!

As if the federal government hasn't been weaponized against Republicans and conservatives throughout the Obama administration to a degree never before seen or imagined.

"Conservatism" is exhausted, Rod Dreher calls for "new ideas"

In "Help New Ideas Arise on the Right".

I guess that subscription of his to The New Yorker isn't paying off.

And no matter what anyone says, he's not an utopian, he's not (a little obsolete usage there just for all you lovers of the modern out there).

Self-hating Hillarycon Rod Dreher repeatedly posts comments to his own article which call him hysterical and compare him to Andrew Sullivan

Here, in the magazine which pioneered the Obamacons.

Also I much liked the commenter who put him at the heart of Conservatism Inc. during the Bush presidency. Yep, he posted that one too.

Tens of thousands of homes are flooded out in Louisiana, but your president has to be a Republican before the news media give a shit

Rod Dreher can only wonder here.

Hey Rod! The media only care when the poor blacks get flooded out. You working and middle class people don't count. And you don't have an advocate in the White House. Brownie is only for the rich (and for the poor only on paper).

Romney won the Christian vote but lost the election by losing the NONES to Obama 74%-26%

So says Matthew Sheffield, here, with data for IA, FL, PA, VA, WI, MI and NH showing Romney won Protestants on average with 54% and Catholics with 53%.

The problem for Republicans is the growth of the non-Christian population, especially among the young:

"[T]he Godless Gap cost Mitt Romney the election".

The libertarian free-traders in both parties have killed the American middle class: Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama

From Patrick J. Buchanan, here:

The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

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I've checked Buchanan's math and he's exaggerating a bit. The total is precisely $9.5 trillion . . . if you go back as far as 1982 under Reagan, but you get the point.

The American Conservative is still a conmag

Oh yeah, like "relations" with Iran haven't been poisoned since the time of Jimmy Carter.

Another reason why "The American Conservative" isn't conservative

They didn't used to be "AmConMag.com" for nothing.

Seen here over the weekend:

"American democracy is rife with troubling inequalities, but calling it an oligarchy is a step too far."

This is the dingbat sort of stuff you expect people without any historical sense to say, not conservatives.

Alarums against oligarchy were already afoot in the debate over the constitution in 1787, whence these excerpts from Brutus to the New Yorkers:

[I]n reality there will be no part of the people represented, but the rich, even in that branch of the legislature, which is called the democratic. — The well born, and highest orders in life, as they term themselves, will be ignorant of the sentiments of the midling class of citizens, strangers to their ability, wants, and difficulties, and void of sympathy, and fellow feeling. This branch of the legislature will not only be an imperfect representation, but there will be no security in so small a body, against bribery, and corruption — It will consist at first, of sixty-five, and can never exceed one for every thirty thousand inhabitants; a majority of these, that is, thirty-three, are a quorum, and a majority of which, or seventeen, may pass any law — so that twenty-five men, will have the power to give away all the property of the citizens of these states — what security therefore can there be for the people, where their liberties and property are at the disposal of so few men?

It will literally be a government in the hands of the few to oppress and plunder the many. You may conclude with a great degree of certainty, that it, like all others of a similar nature, will be managed by influence and corruption, and that the period is not far distant, when this will be the case, if it should be adopted; for even now there are some among us, whose characters stand high in the public estimation, and who have had a principal agency in framing this constitution, who do not scruple to say, that this is the only practicable mode of governing a people, who think with that degree of freedom which the Americans do — this government will have in their gift a vast number of offices of great honor and emolument. The members of the legislature are not excluded from appointments; and twenty-five of them, as the case may be, being secured, any measure may be carried.

The rulers of this country must be composed of very different materials from those of any other, of which history gives us any account, if the majority of the legislature are not, before many years, entirely at the devotion of the executive — and these states will soon be under the absolute domination of one, or a few, with the fallacious appearance of being governed by men of their own election.

The more I reflect on this subject, the more firmly am I persuaded, that the representation is merely nominal — a mere burlesque; and that no security is provided against corruption and undue influence. No free people on earth, who have elected persons to legislate for them, ever reposed that confidence in so small a number. The British house of commons consists of five hundred and fifty-eight members; the number of inhabitants in Great-Britain, is computed at eight millions — this gives one member for a little more than fourteen thousand, which exceeds double the proportion this country can ever have: and yet we require a larger representation in proportion to our numbers, than Great-Britain, because this country is much more extensive, and differs more in its productions, interests, manners, and habits. The democratic branch of the legislatures of the several states in the union consists, I believe at present, of near two thousand; and this number was not thought too large for the security of liberty by the framers of our state constitutions: some of the states may have erred in this respect, but the difference between two thousand, and sixty-five, is so very great, that it will bear no comparison.

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Can anyone today deny that Brutus' warnings were wrong? He has been entirely vindicated by subsequent events, which we call a precious American history but he would have called a mockery of the original vision they had for the country. Yet Brutus, already horrified in 1787, would no doubt have been struck dead on the spot were he still alive in the 1920s to have witnessed this long-standing paltry representation further prohibited from growing and frozen at 435, the number we still have today. And instead of the 10,000 representatives we should have in Congress, we have 10,000 registered lobbyists instead.

No, the seeds of our present discontents were sown at the founding, but today conservatism is so unthinking and emotionally reflexive that it only means to preserve the baby in its dirty bath water while chiding the nursemaid for sensibly wanting to drain it.

The Moneybags Behind The American Conservative Comes Out For Higher Minimum Wage In California!

Proving once again that the word conservative often has little to do with free markets, the moneybags behind The American Conservative until March of this year has seen Governor Jerry Brown's California minimum wage of $10 and raised him $2!

The New York Times reports here:

The Massachusetts State Senate approved a measure last week that would increase that state’s minimum wage to $11 an hour, far more than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum. Hoping to reduce low-wage workers’ dependence on government aid, a conservative billionaire in California, Ronald Unz, is backing a referendum to raise his state’s minimum wage to $12 — even more than the $10 minimum that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law in September. And on Tuesday, officials in Washington State announced that voters in SeaTac, a Seattle suburb, had approved a referendum to establish a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the 6,500 workers at the international airport there. Also this week in Maryland, the Montgomery and Prince George’s county councils voted to raise the minimum to $11.50 an hour by 2017.

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Moonbeams everywhere.

The Founders Got Many Things Wrong, Especially The Role Of Their Own Rationalism

Here:

"American politicians and those who serve them think that they’re ducks, and although they aren’t, they are likely to continue to quack ideologically. [I]t is doubtful that a non-ideological politics, which emphasizes both the limitations and the necessity of political activity—the need for real consensus, the need to address actual not 'potential' problems, etc.—could succeed in the United States."

Not to mention the rise of political factionalism, the declining influence of religion and morality, and the power of parchment.

Buchanan's "The American Conservative" Isn't Conservative

Pat Buchanan's "The American Conservative" isn't a conservative magazine. It never has been, and isn't now. It's editor has endorsed Obama in 2008 and voted for him. That's when I stopped reading. For all I know, he voted for him in 2012.

Now the magazine publishes an article by Mormon Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and one time presidential candidate, advocating gay marriage. That makes perfect sense, since Mormons have never subscribed to Christian monogamy except by force of federal intervention. Yes, federal intervention. Utah statehood depended on Mormon renunciation of plural marriage at the dawn of the 20th century. Now here comes a Mormon telling us to redefine marriage once again.

Pat Buchanan should be ashamed of himself.

TAC Analysis Of Montana Senate Race Never Mentions Libertarian Spoiler

Michael Tracey for The American Conservative here spends zero time contemplating how the Libertarian Party candidate easily spoiled the race for the Republican by bleeding off his votes, thus electing the Democrat to the US Senate in Montana.

Criticizing libertarianism at TAC evidently conflicts with the program.

Fear Not America! Obama Will Not Succeed With Transformation, Even If He Wins!

Albert Jay Nock, American, here:

Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. ...

Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers.

The Origin Of Our Enemy, The State

Albert Jay Nock, 1927, here:

The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes — an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.

Albert Jay Nock Prophesies Abortion On Demand in 1927

Here:

Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. 

Albert Jay Nock, Detective of Fascism in 1927

As reproduced from The American Mercury, here:

"[T]he primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime . . .."

How One Conservative Voted Against Materialism And The Imperial Presidency In 1976

From Bill Kauffman, here:

[T]he Port Huron Statement, and SDS, emphasized the core principle of decentralization, of breaking overly large institutions and even cities down to a more human scale, “based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society.”

“We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things,” declared the authors. The line might have been written by another Michigan lad, Russell Kirk of Mecosta. Kirk was no New Leftist, though he did later befriend—and in 1976 voted for—Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate of the 1968 Democratic primaries, the distributist-inclined Catholic intellectual who befuddled his conventional liberal supporters with talk of a salutary “depersonalizing” of the presidency, of reducing that office to its constitutional dimensions, shorn of the accreted cult of personality.

Justice Stephen Breyer, Secular Humanist: We'll Decide What's Enduring

Man the measure of all things:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution that preserved not enduring values but specific eighteenth-century thoughts about how those values then applied?”

-- Justice Stephen Breyer, Bill "Depends on what the meaning of is is" Clinton appointee, quoted here

He might as well have said:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution archaic Hebrew narrative that preserved not enduring values but specific second millennium BC thoughts about how those values then applied?”

Hmm. Why would they?