Nostalgia can be a hell of a drug. One of the points your humble author has emphasized is how the Left works sub rosa and doesn’t work openly until they believe they have fundamentally transformed society enough and the Overton Window is right. Most people don’t notice this because the fundamentals are changed so slowly, it’s below the threshold of being able to notice. But once those fundamentals have changed than the overt changes will not only be made but also generally be accepted, give or take an overreach from time to time.
There has been not only resistance or even constraints against the Left, but also reversals by the conservative intellectual movement in America that have resulted in more Right-leaning and conservative stances than generally existed even in the vaunted early Cold War era that many people nostalgically remember. It is also true that that societal ablative armor shielded people from experiencing the myriad things in the past that were comparably as bad if not worse. They were insulated from change and remember only the positive while they dwell on the new negative.
The adage that there is much ruin in a nation is quite consistent in societal norms being ablative armor that insulates the superficial observer from those fundamental transformations occurring outside of most people’s daily lives. But that ablative armor for many has worn thin and what is normal for younger people who never knew anything else is devastating in its disastrousness to those who are suddenly seeing the changes that had already taken place.
One such sentiment of doom and deaf falcons ignoring mute falconers was posted by William A. Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection.
Your humble author posted comments to that article that explains the view noted above. This is not sudden and the long game continues, as does the long struggle to renew what we have and may still conserve.
“A lot of “old man yells at cloud” energy combined with some rose tinted glasses here. Plenty of things were just as bad if not worse. The only difference is that society’s ablative armor has worn thin enough for normal people who are old enough to notice how much things have changed.
“The Left has been at this for a century or so. The Frankfurt School laid much of the groundwork back in the 1930’s which itself built upon “intellectuals” from as far back as the late 19th century.
“Leftist though has been in the drivers seat since then. They have claimed the fundamentals and slowly changed the foundation without disrupting the façade. Now, though, that façade no longer has the foundation it once had. Sadly, some feel that that façade is the foundation and are willing to burn it all down on the assumption that their beliefs will automatically be the ones to rise from the ashes.
“Things have been bad and in ways worse in the past. Back in the ’70s soft-core kiddy porn was legal (and hard-core legal in Europe) with celebrities openly keeping underage sex slaves. Homosexuality was legalized. Drugs were even more abundant an openly popular. Abortion was supported by Protestant churches and almost everyone else. Elsewhere, the welfare state ran rampant. Tax rates were >70%. People still accepted “experts” would meritocratically run things. Lawyers everywhere knew that the 2nd Amendment didn’t apply to individuals and gun control was the conservative position with Chief Justice Burger being picked because he was thought of as conservative.
“Heck, even that was better than the early Cold War in the late ’40s and early ’50s. People expected armies, including the U.S. to be under the control and direction of the U.N. Self-selected leaders and intellectuals were expected to efficiently run society for people.
“Heck, even back in the 1930s people expect the future to be like the H.G.Wells movie ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’.
“But none of that interfered with people’s superficial sense of normalcy, and people look back with rose tinted glasses.
“It was the conservative intellectual movement that first offered a countervailing argument that they fought to just make discussable. They have slowed down this tsunami and even pushed back successfully. The stunning reversal of gun rights in the past half-century is testament to that. As is skepticism of intellectual experts and European-style welfare state that was developing.
“But what we are seeing now, particularly amongst the ‘fighting’ crowd, is a reaction to the superficial loss of normalcy, and not the underlying foundational swap. Rage all you want, but without the lowly fight for the fundamentals out of the limelight, any superficial victory is, well, superficial (at best).
“We can fight for those core fundamentals so that whatever may come in the future is good, or we can fight for the superficial and try to hold onto that sense of ‘normalcy’ by jumping around in a desultory manner trying to fight disparate myriad threats made perpetually manifest.”
Such people who were so rudely awakened from their sleep under their ablative blanket often assume that theirs is still the universal norm and that to win it back they but have to stand up and blame changes on those who haven’t even though those so blamed have, as noted above, have not only over decades resisted and constrained, but even reversed.
“No, the Left did not take over because they overtly ‘Fight, FIGHT, FIGHT!!’ They did it through the slow march of institutions and slowly tweaked things sub rosa. They did not directly attack the consequences of those fundamental, but left the façade while they were changing those fundamentals from what supported that sense of “normalcy” people had into new fundamentals which were conducive towards something else. It isn’t until society has already been hollowed out that they knock down the façade and let a new normal that better fits in with their clandestinely build fundamentals.
“What they’ve done with same sex marriage is an example of this, where people who don’t want gay/lesbian couples to be able to marry are seen as the weirdos who aren’t normal. And those fundamentals that they destroyed can not be rebuilt by “intelligent designers”. since they grew organically over centuries if not millennia.
“Protect, defend, and slowly rebuild what pillars of society remain of those fundamentals. Focusing on the superficial isn’t ‘fighting’, it’s helplessly flailing about.”
Things change and the past can not be regain, nor can it be build by those (un)intelligent designers. But the fundamentals can be conserved and from that remnant be reborn like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
