This past weekend, Sarah Palin, who is rapidly becoming the queen of the Tea Party Movement, endorsed John McCain for re-election to the Senate over his Tea Party-backed challenger. Let me re-state that – a politician popular among a certain ideological movement is backing a candidate for office that stands in opposition to everything that movement supports. Naturally, the conservatives are wearing holes in their carpets trying to figure out why oh why Caribou Barbie would betray the grassroots so:
Gov Palin agrees with Senator McCain close to 100% on foreign policy. She respects and likes him personally. She doesn’t blame him for the actions of some of his operatives during and after Campaign ‘08, and never believed it was his responsibility to play the roll of political Dad and discipline the other kids for her. She was and is quite capable of defending herself and charting her own course, and would have found it condescending and presumptuous for him to play protector.
Wake up and smell the moose chili, you morons! Sarah Palin is not your friend. She’s not the second coming of Ronald Reagan, but with boobs. She won’t save you. For all her bluster on “maverickness,” Palin is another establishment conservative, a Dubya-style hack who will sell you down the river just as easily. She may talk like a revolutionary, but her endorsements show where her heart really lies.
More to the point, the ascension of Sarah Palin within the Tea Party ranks exposes a fundamental flaw in this nascent movement. The Tea Partiers have unofficially endorsed as their top spokeswoman a character who is fundamentally opposed to what they stand for. And yet, this spokeswoman has become an integral part of the Tea Party, both for the greater national profile she gives the movement and the base she attracts. If left alone, Sarah Palin will destroy the Tea Party Movement from within, but if she is cast out, a large chunk of the Tea Parties will leave with her, a loss from which they will not be able to recover.
This is why the Tea Party Movement is tragic, and why it will fail. Tragic not in the modern sense, but in the Aristotelian sense. The Tea Partiers may succeed on a basic level. They may get candidates into office, and they may topple Obama and the Democrats totally. But even if they get into power, their revolution will die like all the failed conservative revolutions that came before. Did the Reagan Revolution succeed in defeating liberalism? Did the Republican Revolution of 1994 succeed? Well, if they had, we wouldn’t need a Tea Party Movement, would we? All those revolutions did was slightly slow our march to the abyss, and in the case of Reagan, introduced a loathsome new strain of thought that served to undermine America even further.
If we want to fight socialism and feminism, we need a new way, a way that is unburdened by fifth columns and phony populists. What that way is is for us to work out.
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The Tea Party Movement is a faux grassroots movement funded by establishment neo-con Republican donors, aimed at channeling the population’s outrage into something benign that they control. The average Tea Partier is simply not intelligent enough to grasp the finer details of policy differences or to see through the subtle sleight-of-hand nods to these establishment masters by people like Sarah Palin. That’s the ironic tragedy of the HBD/MRA biocon right – they need the backing of the average white person to succeed, but the average white person is simply not smart enough to be much of an independent or nuanced thinker, for HBD reasons. And if the HBD right does get our message across to the average white person, it simply becomes an easily ridiculed caricature.
Perhaps the best strategy is to target our own country’s smart fraction, to change the minds of a significant portion of the very establishment class that oppresses us with their greed and incompetence. Look at how much Unz has done, imagine what a few more people like him could do.
Damn, I’ll be deleting my draft of this article now.
But great articulation of this point. I think the Tea Party heads got into bed (not literally) with Palin because they wanted the media exposure. But that’s going to backfire because Palin isn’t a real conservative.
I find it amusing.. in a twisted way.
When given the choice of sharing your bedroom with three cobras or a skunk, most people would choose the skunk in hopes of taming it.
Politics is much the same way. There are no good choices because no politicians are who they seem. They all have dangerous or distasteful aspects to them.
If you really want to change the system, you will have to work outside of politics altogether. Reagan actually did postpone a lot of the devastation that we are now beginning to see coming. But that was decades ago, and the megalithic system of big government has learned how to neutralise any reforms that are meant to downsize the monster.
It is easy to attack Palin now, just as it was easy to attack Bush a few years ago. Everyone is doing it, so one may as well join in the chorus.
But a better use of time would be to actually work out a plan that would be effective. If the plan is good, others will recognise its merits.
Even Reagan was a big phat phoney:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard60.html
He also signed into law CA’s state income tax.
I’m still waiting for the Republicans to really do something meaningful on taxes, gun rights, and civil liberties.
Sarah Palin is of no use to people who want smaller, leaner, cheaper, less intrusive government. She appeals to social conservatives because she’s strongly pro-life, and as a country we lose track of the plot when abortion crops up in the narrative. If she were truly a conservative woman, though, she would have been at home taking care of her 5 kids and putting a lot more supervision on Trigger, or whatever the oldest girl’s name is.
Personally I can’t listen to her. She sounds so stupid and makes me embarrassed to have ovaries.
I give Palin a fair amount of credit for endorsing Rand Paul over establishment candidate Trey Grayson in the Kentucky Senate race. Keep in mind that Palin will have to win at least some moderates to get the nomination if she decides to run for President. McCain was able to wrap up the nomination early because he won big in delegate-rich states like California, New York and Illinois. Campaigning against her former running mate doesn’t help Palin in those areas.
[I understand why Palin had to campaign for McCain. That's why I call this a tragedy. - ed.]
McCain’s opponent, J.D. Heyworth really isn’t that credible. He voted for the massive prescription drug entitlement in 2003 that McCain voted against and he lost his seat in 2006 over ties to Jack Abramoff. That and his dog-whistling to the birthers would hurt him in a general election. I ‘m glad that Heyworth is running just because he forces McCain to vote like a conservative for a few months, but I wish that Jeff Flake had decided to run instead.
The Tea Party is not what you think it is. There is no real organization, or leader. It is instead the label on the broad movement by older Whites to roll back Obama’s taxes and regulations. The typical Tea Party member is a White woman age 52 who owns her own small business or is a professional.
Palin is an energizing factor, but won’t be running for anything and seems to be happy to be a budget Rush Limbaugh, making money.
What IS going to change is the bottom-up, take-over of the party organizing and committee parts, by the Tea Party, to enforce the over-riding concern of taxes, regulation, and economic growth.
The Tea Party is not a creature of the Repblican Party’s elite, it aims wholesale at replacing it, from the bottom up. It is the logical outcome of Dem-RINO policies aimed at taxing the White middle class out of existence, and the decentralizing power of the internet. It is the rough opposite of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a volunteer effort by mostly young leftist computer science students and the like who adopt supplicating attitudes of endorsing hard left female opinions. Empowered by a distributed internet. The Tea Party is mostly a female, small business owner and professional, decentralized outfit designed to roll back taxes and regulations and create growth. Empowered by a distributed internet.
No one knew who Bill Clinton was in 1991. Or 1990, for that matter. Yet he still casts a shadow. The likely Republican nominee will capture the Tea Party enthusiasm but not be of it. That is OK.
Things WILL be different, because we are OUT of margin, economic growth, security and safety, and half-way functioning Mexico, and so on. Questions that were kicked down the road like a can in the 1980′s have now come to be unavoidable.
Can the US take, with a collapsing Mexico, another 50 million Mexicans? Can the US afford universal health care that is law of the land, or should it simply kick out all the illegals and exclude welfare workers in “White Socialism” with the largest demographic voting itself goodies? Can the US afford to simply tolerate Iran and its nukes dictating Gulf oil production and world price of oil? Can the US tolerate anyone coming to the US, and indeed PC and Multiculturalism, given how technology empowers even tribes within Pakistan, itself a failed state and people? All the things that Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama tried to kick down the road are now coming to a boil.
There is ONLY one way to reverse the expansion of leftism in a way other than waiting for totally collapse, anarchy, and building anew.
It is very hard to do politically. But there is ONLY ONE WAY.
Are you ready? Here it is :
The Founding Fathers realized that voting rights should be restricted to people who only clear a pretty high bar of demonstrated responsibility.
In America, if only we could do ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING :
a) Restrict voting to people who have paid a certain amount of cumulative income taxes (similar to the social security system of credit accumulation).
b) Require a license to vote, that requires passing an exam. Hey, both drivers licenses and US citizenship are given out after passing an exam. The same should apply to voters. Lazy people won’t even bother, so that is good.
c) Hell, just raise the voting age to 25, and even that will slash the left, as it will totally undermine the place of the University in politics.
Just ONE of the following, would greatly shrink most of the problems we currently have. The Founding Fathers knew this, of course.
Now, a small-govt movement should aggressively propose one or more of these measures. When Democrats fight back with attacks of ‘racism’, etc., use that to expose them on how they “need stupid people in order to survive” or “will want to lower the voting age to 16 next”. COUNTERATTACK RATHER THAN DEFEND.
The thing is, about 70% of voters would agree with having a stricter standard of who gets to vote. It might even become a mildly prestigious thing (“Hey, I just got my voting license!!”).
This, my friends, is the ONLY way.
There is NO OTHER WAY.
I admire Palin’s enthusiasm and resiliency in the face of the relentless attacks on her. I give her credit for not slinking away back to Alaska with her tail between her legs given how the left has tried to humiliate her. Her rallying and defense of the Tea Parties is just fun to watch, as is her criticism of the “lamestream media”. It’s all entertaining. However, yes, I’m afraid she may be just another conservative who isn’t going to actually conserve anything except the status quo, lets say, if she did become President. Would she begin dismantling this massive bureaucracy piece by piece? Probably not. I want to see where she stands when and if amnesty gets started. That will be a litmus test for me.
I understand the loyalty angle in her support of McCain, but I still couldn’t help but feel gravely disappointed. That’s why I’m not developing an attachment to Palin, because I think she is going to let her supporters down eventually, once all the hype dies down. Palin may not amount to anything other than political entertainment. We’ll see.
“If we are to fight socialism and feminism, we need a new way …” Consider three translated quotes from Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night”:
(a) I warn you when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.
(b) The truth is an endless death agony.
(c) We’ve no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees.
Does it occur to you that socialism is merely Gates and Buffett supporting Obama? Does it occur to you that Obama is merely Mugabe Mediachristophanes? Does it occur to you that the mulatto and the Muslim are the second-rate successors to the capitalistically/socialistically/hedonistically ordained chimpanzee-ification of Western civilization?
a) Restrict voting to people who have paid a certain amount of cumulative income taxes (similar to the social security system of credit accumulation).
The best idea, the people who pay the bills should get to make the decisions. But Obama still won 49% of people making $50,000 or more.
b) Require a license to vote, that requires passing an exam. Hey, both drivers licenses and US citizenship are given out after passing an exam. The same should apply to voters. Lazy people won’t even bother, so that is good.
Would be the least effective. Other than those who didn’t graduate high school (who were only 4% of voters), there isn’t a huge difference between levels of education and voting patterns. In fact, Obama won 58% of those with postgrad degrees and did better among college educated whites (SWPLs) than he did among non-college educated whites (proles).
c) Hell, just raise the voting age to 25, and even that will slash the left, as it will totally undermine the place of the University in politics.
Under-25 were 10% of the voters and voted for Obama 2 to 1. So the net gain was about 3 points for Obama, he still wins the election without them.
1) You are wrong about Regan. Regan really did quite a bit to remove government regulations on the economy and he made major conservative changes to the tax structure.
[I said he slowed the progress of liberalism. If he had stopped it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And Reagan's reforms arguably did as much harm as good to the social fabric - the "loathsome new strain of thought" I mentioned. - ed.]
2) Feminism has nothing to do with economic liberalism in this country. That is FACT.
[This post wasn't about feminism and mentioned it only in passing. Certainly not worth devoting a paragraph to.]
Nearly all of the progressive tax structure and legislation in the US stems from the FDR era. The country was never more fiscally liberal than it was during the great depression and WWII. Fannie Mae, Social security, welfare etc mainly are outgrowths of FDR policy (and slightly furthered during the LBJ era) Though FDR had the overwhelming support of both genders, he actually had more male support than female support by percentage.
[True, but if women didn't have the vote, would he still have won? I don't think so.]
Regan has been the only president to make major reversals to FDR era policy and he won the largest number of women’s votes in both elections though men were slightly more prone to voting for regan than women.
[But wait, with FDR you were talking percentages. With Reagan you're talking numbers. Don't shift the goalposts. Protip - raw numbers are meaningless because of population increases.]
“[True, but if women didn't have the vote, would he still have won? I don't think so.]”
You don’t think so? You are most certainly wrong. FDR won the overwhelming majority of the male vote, more than he won of the female vote (63% of men and 57% of women in 1932). In his second election, FDR’s opponent won *8* electoral votes. Explain to me how the absence of a female vote could recover several hundred electoral votes.
“[But wait, with FDR you were talking percentages. With Reagan you're talking numbers. Don't shift the goalposts. Protip - raw numbers are meaningless because of population increases.]”
I am speaking in percentages both times (and don’t kid yourself. of course I know the distinction between percentages and absolute numbers). In the US, women were more fiscally conservative voters than men until the mid 1960s and the difference did not become significant until 1976 with Carter. Basically, it was only after the abortion issue that women became left leaning in the US. From 1920 to the 1950s, women were strongly republican leaning. FDR new deal and LBJ great society were overwhelmingly the products of male enthusiasm, and those are the foundation of our modern welfare state.
Sorry, Ferdinand. Data doesn’t lie. Men voted the welfare state into existence- a lot more than women did. In addition, the only reason the UK is not as socialist as the rest of Europe is that women were so strongly conservative for so many decades that they kept the conservative party in power. If not for british women, the UK would operate like Sweden.
Fem is right, up until 1980, the gender gap largely didn’t exist.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/2884/big-gender-gap-distinguishes-election-2000.aspx
Sparks, thanks, I used your info in my recent post.
Ferdinand, I wrote a more detailed post in response to you.
http://feministx.blogspot.com/2010/04/women-and-welfare-state.html
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