New Left, New Right: Dumb and Dumber

Paul Craig Roberts, a chief economic advisor during the Reagan years, wrote the following in a column a few weeks ago: "The Republicans' policies have driven up the price of both oil and gold by 400 percent.... Republican deregulation brought about fraud in mortgage lending and dangerous financial instruments that have collapsed [sic] the housing market.... Republicans have run [i.e., ridden] roughshod over the U.S. Constitution, Congress, the courts and civil liberties.... The Republicans have put in place the foundation for a police state.... The neoconned Republican Party is the greatest threat America has ever faced."

Strong words. If you read Roberts often, as I do, you tend to apply subconscious earplugs as his intermittent tirades against Bushite neo-conservatives explode about you like fireworks. Yet the danger of such temperance is that one may not hear a genuine alarm--the boy may actually be crying wolf because he sees a wolf. I differ from Roberts mostly in my failing to see any antidote to these miseries in a Democratic administration and Congress: I find that proposition stunningly naive. Massive growth of the public sector and of the tax burden will plunge us even deeper into economic chaos. The Left-engineered PC movement on college campuses grimly prophesies a society-wide application of laws against "hate speech" and "behavior offensive to protected minorities" which will shred the Constitution to confetti. Republican imperialism abroad will yield to Democratic appeasement until Red China has a nuke aimed at every hamlet along our Pacific coast and the Arabic world gelds our economy by raising oil prices while occasionally massacring the occupants of schools and grocery stores on our own turf.

No, the New Left is not an antidote to the New Right. In far too many respects, the two are the same toxic brew. It is neo-conservative globalism, for instance--an extension of the Left's beloved diversity principle (no boundaries national, religious, ethnic, or moral permitted: only the decrees of the International Elite)--which has given Red China the wealth to buy up our debt and, very soon, to blow us off the map. Neo-cons aspire to thin out the seething masses with limited warfare and carefully directed pandemics: the Left prefers sterilization, abortion, euthanasia, and other strategies that do not disturb nesting cranes.

Like Roberts, however, I'm sick and tired of the phony Left/Right game--a tug-of-war without a goal line whose only objective is to keep the rope taut. No meaningful principles remain afloat in the current presidential contest, yet the two "sides" are just getting into the spirit of their playground antics. The ever-affable Sean Hannity is hyphenating away ("Bush-hater", "Holocaust-denier") at breakneck speed, while the lovely Laura Ingraham would not let Ron Paul finish answering a foreign-policy question after ascertaining that he had not visited soldiers in Iraq. Yes-no, heave-ho, left-right... and all of it without a center, an objective reference.

The media, meanwhile, fix their collective eye on ratings. It embarrasses me--as a conservative, an American citizen, and a human being--to see FOX News keep Fred Thompson waiting on stage until some man-bites-dog scoop from Devil's Arse, Montana, is worked in--and then, the next day, to be expected to watch some Hollywood bit-actor-turned-hack do his "Go, Sarah... go, Sarah..." routine as he rocks his interlaced fingers back and forth. (I have utterly no notion of the cultural provenance of this puerile choreography, though I have seen it often.)

We Americans lack gravity--and the new conservatives, especially, lack gravity. They seem to be spoiled-brat Wunderkinden--hijos mimados, enfants dorlotés--who insist that adulthood shall not take away they favorite toys. A casual lapse into foreign language, by the way, is instant ground for indictment-and-conviction as "liberal", and even "gay", to this generation of "proud American" punks. We must be loyal to the clique. We must use the clique's parlance (which usually includes spelling "clique" as "click"), watch the clique's movies (which always includes drawing exampla in a discussion from Caddyshack or Lethal Weapon rather than from Shakespeare or Dostoyevski); we must, above all else, vote for the clique's candidate for the clique's reasons.

If we are bloggers, we must write this week about Sarah Palin--about the horrible double standard, specifically, which the Left has applied to her maternal commitments. We are supposed to forget that neither candidate has any plan to secure our southern border nor any will to do so, that both are devoted to the notion of an ever bigger central government, that both favor stupendously costly environmental clean-up over a gradual restructuring of our cities and travel habits, that both are eager to dismantle self-sufficiency at the altar of global trade. We are to put on little hats, plant posters in our front yards, and chant "Go, Sarah!" or "Go-bama!" in the appropriate pop-cultural strophe/antistrophe.

I was mowing my front lawn yesterday with an old push-blade contraption, entirely man-powered. It saves gas, and I also don't like the sore throat I get after walking in a cloud of exhaust for an hour. It was my yard, my time, my sweat. Yet every time I appear in this fashion along the main thoroughfare in front of our house, some young white male is sure to decelerate, lower his window, shout "faggot" or "loser" at me, and then hit the accelerator. These are my people, my fellow mainstream Americans in whose superiority I am to take pride. They assume that because I am not burning gas, I am betraying the "conservative" ideal of using what I damn-well want and taking more by bayonette if I need to. (Gee... my spell-check can't even recognize "bayonette".) On the suspicion that I might be avoiding a combustion-engine because I love "green", I turn "gay pink".

Yeah, I'm sick and tired of this. I see little around me but invincible childishness--and I rue the day when my child will have to pay for our indefensible self-absorption and willful stupidity with the rest of my countrymen.