Um, excuse me, America was founded by people who had given up . . .

. . . on England, and on Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the rest.

The libertarian impulse to go Galt, to run away, is a feature of America, not a bug, a built-in self-destruct mechanism which went off most spectacularly and destroyed the root in 1861.

The rest of the plant has been withering and dying on the vine ever since, overtaken by tenacious weeds.

Freedom for Christian religion combined with plenty of Lebensraum, home country memory, and time made it seem otherwise in the face of the steady decline, but here we are with Scylla and Charybdis for choices come November 2024.

The Declaration of Independence was a repudiation of politics. Two thirds of the country was not down for the struggle. Secession was a repudiation of politics. There was resistance to military conscription everywhere, but especially in the Confederacy. We were content to let the world burn for more than two years before the Japs forced our hand on December 7, 1941. We have right now the unthinkable European land war in its 20th month and sports is what trends on Twitter day in and day out. Mao killed by the tens of millions during The American Century. Americans quietly go to church every Sunday while tens of millions are aborted. It all began with migration, the most basic form of repudiating politics.

We do not need, in short, to relearn to think politically. Most of us have never thought politically in the first place. Apolitics is our politics, but this horror vacui is why the left seems to have won and why we hate them. We hate politics. As polarized as we think we are, as rigged as our politics is, 100 million eligible Americans still did not vote in 2020.

You do not get political blood from this turnip.

Ultimately, nothing could be more un-American than to give up on America.

The American idea, alas, is precisely to stay out of it. 

Here. 

Against the Black Pill

David Azerrad, Chronicles

NY Gov Hochul brings her son Bart to the Statue of Liberty

 

Peggy Noonan sees a lot of inauthenticity out there

 But what else would you expect from a nAtIoN oF iMmIgRaNtS?

 

Peggy is nothing if not the quintessential American who hates everything "stuck in the past", creepy or no. "Someone needs to make it new".

 

America’s Longing for Authenticity

Contra Matthew Rose: It's kind of hard to ask a nation of immigrants to be loyal, who are here because they are by definition disloyal

... what is needed is loyalty to one’s nation and people tied to, and measured by, “truths that transcend them".

If, with the Pope, the nation is properly viewed as a natural human community, there is little either natural or communal about this one.  

America, sorry to say it, was doomed from the start. We are a nation of treasonous bastards.

And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.

More.

Rush Limbaugh dead at 70, FOX obituary includes famous "preamble to the Constitution" blunder from CPAC 2009

Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio pioneer, dead at 70 :

"We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness."

The mistake is fairly typical, both of Rush, and of Rush's audience the Baby Boom for whom basic knowledge of civics had long been in decline. For Rush, and for them, conservatism was always more aspirational than actual, often conflating present perspectives with historical realities.

An example is the Straussians who in our time explicitly argued for the unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, giving Thomas Jefferson's more revolutionary, Enlightenment-tinged views in the former too much sway over the interpretation of the latter.

The irony of that fusionism was always that Jefferson sought for the United States "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them", not the "exceptional" American position touted by Limbaugh as an heir of America's post-war position of global domination.

The Constitution's preamble expressed a matter-of-factly self-interested goal, "to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", a country of Americans, by Americans, and for Americans, not a nation of immigrants, by immigrants, and for immigrants, not a nation of heroes marching forth in search of monsters to destroy. America's founding was above all modest, which is perhaps the surest indicator of its inherent conservatism.

If Rush Limbaugh slaughtered the important details on a regular basis, what made the show so enjoyable was the entertainment, which largely came from the sheer pleasure Rush derived from doing it and communicating it, "having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have". If nothing else, Rush Limbaugh was a conservative of enjoyment, and who doesn't want to be around people having a good time? It is one reason for Rush's tremendous success in a career spanning more than three decades.

Students of conservatism might think this a whimsy, not to be taken seriously, but no less a figure than Russell Kirk devoted a chapter to such conservatism in his "The Conservative Mind". Rush himself, from time to time, in his own non-academic way had observed how liberals are not funny and don't have fun, and in this he was on to something. Generally speaking conservatives possess contentment to a far greater degree than do liberals, derived from a judiciously formed view of the self as sinners saved by grace. It is a freeing thing which allows people to accept things as they are, even as God accepts sinners as they are.

Of course in the post-war there has been a tremendous amount for Americans to enjoy, to the point that we have become completely distracted by this. One may rightly say we have overdone it, and that enjoyment has frankly become conservatives' Achilles' heel. It has produced a myriad of problems, not the least of which has been a failure to reproduce, inattention to religion, and a proclivity for the easy politics of the executive where we look for one man to save us. As America was not built by Protestants enjoying religious entertainments and all-you-can-eat brunches on Sundays, it will not be recovered, if that is still possible, but by serious, religious people who work hard, deny themselves, and save.

Rush Limbaugh was an optimist about America because he still believed there were enough individual Americans remaining who exemplified the old virtues. America's future will depend on Rush having been right.

When George Washington warned America in his Farewell about entangling foreign alliances, he meant Ukraine

The political divide in this country is in part characterized by those fanatics in both parties who have wanted to bring Ukraine into NATO, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and the cooler heads who realize NATO on the doorstep of Russia is a provocation.

That's what this is really all about.

Trump once represented the latter group, but of course he's a nincompoop who can barely string two coherent sentences together about anything. Don't expect that to change anytime soon.

The political divide is also characterized in part by those who insist America is a nation of immigrants and by those who insist on assimilation. The immigrant side unfortunately brings all the quarrels and divisions of the home countries onto American soil, which disturbs domestic tranquility.

Time for ya'll to follow our first president on this.

 

A nation of immigrants is a nation officially committed to cultural appropriation

. . . heh heh.

Trump's Chair of the Council Economic Advisors, Kevin Hassett, wants to DOUBLE the number of immigrants into the US

David Bossie: An ‘America First’ immigration policy looks like this [no, it doesn't, Mr. Citizens United]:

As President Trump’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Kevin Hassett pointed out in a 2013 paper for the American Enterprise Institute, the United States could add half a percentage point to economic growth by doubling the number of immigrants it lets into the country, especially if they come on employer-sponsored visas. President Trump’s chief economist continues to make the case that "for a country that has long thought of itself as a nation of immigrants, the U.S. falls far behind almost all the other countries in the number of immigrants it admitted relative to its population size.”

Peggy Noonan is blind about conservatism

Republicans Need to Save Capitalism:

I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism.

Weary sighing acceptance? Try the eager jubilant over being given free reign to exploit man's fallen nature capitalism.

Reagan "conservatives" preached that the Reagan tax cuts and free-trade would usher in a period of investment at home, in a word, that if you just let people have more of their own money they'd know what to do with it and they would do the right thing.

They didn't.

"Conservatives" exported our jobs and invested abroad, creating middle classes in poor countries where there were none before, at the expense of the middle class at home. They drove the opening to China, enriched it and created a monster which now robs us blind and threatens world peace. The libertarians have sold China the rope the communists hope to hang us with.

If Republicans and conservatives had properly understood human nature they wouldn't have made this mistake. The doctrinaire among them showed themselves to be liberals, not conservatives, possessed of a foolish optimism based on the idea that people are basically good. They are not. People do what's best for number one, as they always have. Screw thy neighbor, and thy country if necessary. Are we not a nation of immigrants?

Only conservatism with its roots in the transcendent moral order has been able to curb this false individualism and mistaken enthusiasm. Both were routinely attacked in church in former days, but nobody seems to go there anymore, and when they do go the preacher turns out to have joined the wrong side.

The "conservative" rubes out there still believe this stupid myth of libertarianism, while the billionaire class of both parties which got rich off it only hopes they continue to do so.

They care about nothing but themselves and their right to privacy, the penumbra of our collective deviancy.