The Political Hat

     When someone is trying to sell you something—anything—the use of high pressure sales tactics is clear warning of caveat emptor. Between the urgency and pressure, the intent to to deny you a chance to think things through, or to act in a well considered way, in the hopes of the veracity of the claims are not examined and second thoughts not given time to form. This is true in politics as it is true in other aspects of life, from commerce to faith.

     The political message that certain things have to happen right now lest irreversible dire consequences happen if delay is brooked, is just such a high pressure sales tactic.   There is no further time to think, which begs the question of what it is they don’t want you to think about. The sentiment that things are so perilous that we must tear everything down and act without constraint in doing so, or not restrain ourselves in our fervor so as to preserve anything of value would otherwise be destroyed, is a sentiment common upon the fringe of the proverbial political horseshoe. In both cases, this need to dismantle a society so irredeemable that only complete reconstruction along the intelligent design of its core proponents is an idea common to the many revolutions that arose in Europe from the French Revolution through the Russian Revolution and onto the modern day call to fundamentally transform society. It is the fierce urgency of now that can brook no delay, no tempering, and no doubts.

     Don’t think. Don’t question. Just do.

     That urgency to act now with wild abandon, because that the advocates of such abandon seek to destroy and replace, justifies an act of collective self-defense without limit by the ochlocratic mob and those who seek to use them. Against this stands conservatism, which serves not as a proscriptive ideology to be implemented by any means necessary, but a descriptive one that serves as constraint on the ambitious, and also as the wisdom that serves as enlighten bad decisions some would rather keep in the dark.. The value of this wisdom can be clearly seen by the chaos and violence of the French Revolution as contrasted when well measured and considered reflections made against it.

     This is the urgency of those whose shibboleth is “do you know what time it is?”

     There is no clearer example of emotionally manipulative hyperbole to justify overturning everything, including its own well reasoned past understanding, than the once vaunted Heritage Foundation. Rather than a slow Gramcian march through the institution, the Heritage Foundation fell victim to a short bus drive of fervent revolutionaries—not of the 18^th Century American variety—but of a continental European type, which started with the French Revolution.

     It’s less “Spirit of ‘76” than the “Spirit of ‘48”. No wonder the need to obfuscate this by denigrating America as an “idea”, doing so makes it easier to sell people on replacing it with an idea that came from a foreign people in a foreign land without further shared history.

Continue reading →