Posted under Culture & Politics
It’s a truism of paleo thought that one cannot influence politics without influencing culture. I still believe it to be true I but I can’t help but wonder over the past 40 years when the Right has won many victories at ballot box that outside of a few isolated instances, the culture so tilts to the left that some conservatives of we know well are looking to make their homes abroad regardless who wins in November.
I will say this, even if Romney somehow won it against someone than pro-Romney or any kind of agenda Romney is supporting. Romney is essentially a nothing candidate, more or less a fallback taking advantage of once again of divided loyalties rather than asserting a triumph for a particular agenda. It would be a backlash vote, just as 1968, 1972, 1988, 1994 and 2010 were backlash votes. There really hasn’t been a positive vote for any kind of conservative agenda since the period 1978-84 and until candidate comes along with a visions to for for something rather against, then it’s probably a given a negative attitude isn’t really going to resonate throughout the larger culture. Indeed, voters in those backlash campaigns were exactly voting for traditionalism as so much against what they though were its enemies.
But culture continued on oblivious to the election returns. So long was someone was buying tickets or paying millions for the art work or watching what was on the tube, they responded accordingly.
I think Pat Buchanan summed it up well: Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories.
Matt Weber on 02 May 2012 at 8:36 pm #
I would never leave the country, not before retirement. I don’t think any of the annoying things about America are really specific to here. Every country gives off sort of a propaganda version of itself to foreigners, so we think that Ireland is all stony fields and lively pubs, France is basically a country-sized Paris, and Italy is Tuscany. Even if you’ve been there, the propaganda still affects you. But we know America, and we know the good and the bad of it.
But I think Fleming diagnosed the problem as conservatives just not being very serious. We talk a big game but our actions give the lie to it, in practice we don’t really want to fight for anything. Maybe we’re afraid of losing and prefer the lost cause mythology. Maybe we’ve just given up and don’t want to actually change anything as a sort of schadenfreude.
I think we’re also disaggregating. The divisions–black vs white, pre vs. post 65, red state vs blue state, cosmo vs provo–are all getting worse by the day and no one even seems to care to change that. It’s funny when something is accused of being unamerican. How can you tell when something is unamerican when no one seems to know what is American?
Sean Scallon on 03 May 2012 at 12:25 pm #
You’ve made some very good points.
roho on 07 May 2012 at 1:54 pm #
“Leaving America” is a pretty severe elitist thought…..How many have that option, and as the Patriots told the Loyalist headed to Canada, “Fine, be gone with your arse!”…….Half of our problems are Mexicans that ran away instead of fixing their own country.
Comon sense is no longer very comon, and comon sense is what’s needed. The once large US middleclass needs to drag both the elitists and welfare intitlement babies to the guilitine simultaneously! There are a lot of Wall Streeters that should be told, “Don’t come back!” and some others told to “Work or starve!”
Balance.