All my life I have had to listen to the analogy of a pendulum to describe how our politics behaves. The theory goes each generation and each decade has its zeitgeist and after the culture swings to the Left, in the next decade or generation it comes back to the Right.
From experience I’d say there are several problems with this theory. The biggest one is that no matter how much the population wanted a rightward correction the Uni-party has blocked it pretty effectively for the last forty-five years or so. So even if there is some kind of periodic swing in popular political and cultural attitudes it’s never been allowed to influence real life. Instead, what we have seen is a ratchet effect where at worst nothing happens during conservative periods and during periods of liberal ascendancy things lurch horribly leftward.
And so, we find ourselves after almost half a century of forced radicalism living in a toxic environment where every part of society is ruled by laws and institutions that directly and indirectly damage our society. Our children are taught lies and left ignorant of useful knowledge. The relations between the sexes have been poisoned and families crippled. Relations between races have been sown with hatred and misinformation and our cities have become dangerous and mismanaged morasses of impoverished, lazy and drug-addled misfits. And one party pushes these policies strenuously to make these conditions universal and the other party allows them to succeed through sheer greed and stupidity.
And finally, finally in the last nine years one politician has admitted that all this is going on and has offered to help fix this. And he has been blocked by every power of both political parties and the permanent bureaucracy by any means available (up to and including assassination).
Now some people say Trump and his efforts are doomed to failure because eventually the Democrats will regain power and do whatever it takes to permanently block any further shift to the Right. These people are of the opinion that violent revolution is the only way to break free of the Left. These people go under various names. The Dissident Right seems to be the latest iteration for their designation as a group. They’re typically reticent to go into specifics when it comes to how the revolution will proceed. Maybe because they have no idea either. But from what I can glean they assume that at a certain point some braver souls will manage to draw a line in the sand and force a final break between some area of the country and the central government. Now recently there has been some talk about the opposite situation. Because of Trump’s deportation efforts the Left Coast (California, Oregon and Washington) have talked about seceding from the United States. Of course that would be the best outcome. I feel that the rest of the country would agree to this split and losing that much leftist population would leave the remaining states lopsidedly conservative and permanently governed by the Right.
Of course, the other portion of the Right (civic nationalists and the rest) hope that something short of secession could be achieved that would still solve all the dysfunction mentioned above. They feel that the naturally center/right nature of the majority of the American people could over time correct much of this mismanagement and correct our laws and institutions.
So those are the two futures that are currently imagined for our side. The third future is the Left’s current trajectory, leftist disaster.
I’ve lived for the last sixty plus years watching this battle unfold. In 2012 I became convinced that the whole thing was hopeless. Since 2016 I’ve seen reason to hope. If one man has been able to upend the whole Washington racket, I could believe that a coalition of people who want to fix this could succeed.
Now I didn’t say will succeed, but might. Currently I’m hoping to hang on long enough to see it happen in real time. Stay tuned.
