Fight On, You Magnificent Bastard! Thoughts of A Clear Eyed David Horowitz . The Abandoned Blue Collar Class, "Atlas Shrugged" and Victimhood.

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This was sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader who read my own memo setting forth why I believed Trump can win a second term

It is well written, even passionately so, thus,  in a more angry mood,  buttresses my own feelings and what I tried to say in a more "collegiate"  manner. (See 1 below.)
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In my previous memo I printed this article in link form.  I believe the actual article needs re-posting. Why?  Because those who want to destroy America have, as their goal, creating animosity between the races by turning the tables on "whitey."

David Horowitz was once a radical who drank the left's "Cool Aid." Then he saw the errors of his ways, the illogic of their message and the destruction being caused by their policies  and converted. David is now an outspoken conservative and an excellent writer and thinker.(See 2 below.)
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Consistent themes of mine have been:

a) Progressives have abandoned the blue collar vote because the wealth, to finance campaigns, is in the hands of those who founded and run technology companies located in California and run by America's brand of oligarchs.

Buffet is not necessarily your "aw shucks"   friendly wealthy uncle. .

What is now happening in America was told by Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged."

b) The radicalization of The Democrat Party has now come full circle and the candidates seeking to ruin America are now running under their banner. It began with Wilson and Obama set the stage for their new crop.

c)  The Republicans Party is light years behind equaling the tactics and messaging of the radical left.  The Romney's of the world are too "silver spooned." Trump is more suited for the task ahead but, he too, has flaws that make him vulnerable to the mass media's bias and the desire on the part of a dependent and un-educated citizenry seeking to place blame and wanting a free ride.

What is happening to America reminds me of the story about the frog who was put in a pan of tepid water but over time the temperature was raised ever so slightly and eventually the frog was boiled.

I am, therefore, re-posting Victor Hanson's op ed. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)fight on, Trump --  

"You magnificent bastard"

A description of politics in the US since the mid-sixties.

Evan Douglas Sayet is a comedian and conservative speaker. He is the nation's leading conservative speaker, an in-demand Master of Ceremony for Republican events.   Sayet is the author of The Kinder Garden Of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks And Why He's Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss.   
 
He Fights   .       by Evan Sayet   

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #Never Trumpers) constantly ask me if I'm not bothered by Donald Trump's lack of decorum.

They ask if I don't think his tweets are "beneath the dignity of the office." Here's my answer: We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried propriety: has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.   

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don't find anything "dignified," "collegial" or "proper" about Barack Hussain Obama's lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.

I don't see anything "dignified" in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don't see anything "statesman-like" in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was "articulate" and "polished" but in no way was he in the least bit "dignified," "collegial" or "proper."

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the '60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they've fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one and the violent take-over of the universities till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety. With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America 's first wartime president in the Culture War.   

During wartime, things like "dignity" and "collegiality" simply aren't the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors.   Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. 

Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today.  Lincoln rightly recognized that, "I cannot spare this man.   He fights . . ." 

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting.  And what's particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel's, he's shouting, "You magnificent bastard, I read your book!"   That is just the icing on the cake, but it's wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, but  he's defeating the Left using their own tactics and that's what they really hate.

That book is Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals a book so essential to the Liberals' war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and   the subject of Hillary Clinton's senior thesis .   It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted. 

Trump's tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.   First, instead of going after "the fake media" -- and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, Trump isolated CNN.  He made it personal 

Then,  just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as "the most powerful weapon of all"   ...   Most importantly, Trump's tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. ... They need to respond.  This leaves them with only two choices. They can either "go high" (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.  The problem for CNN (et al) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve.   

It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.     Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama's close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright's church.   Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration's weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration's cover-up.   

So, to my friends on the Left and the #Never Trumpers as well do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be "collegial" and "dignified" and "proper"?   Of course, I do.  These aren't those times.  This is war.  And it's a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years. 

So, say anything you want about this president  -- I get it -- he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times.   I don't care. I can’t spare this warrior. He fights for America!  Fight on, you magnificent bastard!

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2)

“WHITE SKIN PRIVILEGE” – A RACIST IDEA

We are facing a totalitarian threat in the Democratic Party

By David Horowitz

The hottest political fad in America today is “Get Whitey.” Across the country re-education sessions are routinely held in businesses, professional offices, medical schools, universities and even kindergartens, whose purpose is to teach the “un-woke” about the evils of “white privilege,” and make the whites who participate uncomfortable about their skin color. The bottom line in these sessions: Whites need to own up to the fact that regardless of their intentions, beliefs, behaviors or status in life, they are elite participants in a racist system that oppresses “people of color,” and are so merely because they are white. But discrimination on the basis of skin color has been outlawed in this country for more than 60 years. Therefore one might reasonably ask, “WTF is white skin privilege”?

Here’s my politically incorrect answer: White skin privilege is the gift of being the only racial/ethnic group on the planet which it is okay to single out for abuse. Indeed, handing out such abuse is obligatory for all who regard themselves as “woke,” and aspire to create a brave new world of “social justice.” This is a category that includes the media, the popular culture, the educational system and such racist shapers of public opinion as Don Lemon, Joy Ann Reid, Joy Behar, Brian Stetler, Rachel Maddow, the editorial boards and reporters of the NY Times and the Washington Post, and their clones, and the Democratic Party.

 “White privilege is the privilege of being regarded as untrustworthy, prejudiced, and blind to the injustices one’s whiteness allegedly inflicts. White privilege is the privilege of being damned for alleged crimes like “Stop and Frisk” laws, and also the often imaginary crimes of one’s often alleged ancestors. Thus it is fashionable in today’s politically correct culture to seek reparations for slavery from Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves, were not even in the country at the time, and were oppressed themselves in ethnic and religious ghettos across the globe. Reparations for slavery are also sought from the descendants of Union soldiers who gave their lives to abolish slavery. Facts are irrelevant. It’s all about skin color.

Thus white skin privilege is the privilege of being held responsible for slavery when white America accounted for less than 1% of the African slave trade globally, which was mainly run by “people of color,” while white America led the world in abolishing slavery, an institution which still exists in non-white Africa today.

White skin privilege is the privilege of being scapegoated for every failure of “people of color” who are unable to take advantage of the opportunities America affords to all races, and in particular to the majority of African Americans who have successfully made it to the middle class.

 Our country is now facing a national political crisis over borders because of the poverty and oppression caused by the corrupt politics and leftist economies of Central and South America, which have prompted their citizens to break into our country illegally. Conditions in the resource-rich southern hemisphere are so bad that 20 million of its residents have already broken the law to violate our sovereignty, bankrupt our social services and educational systems and fill our jails. According to the left, to seek a wall to stem this flood is white racism - or, as a top Democratic strategist put it recently, “Building a wall says, “If you’re brown turn around.” Such twisted logic would also provide an excuse to open our borders to the world’s Islamic terrorists who are also brown, and have killed hundreds of thousands of mainly brown victims since 9/11.

Here is how the social justice website, Tolerance.org, which is run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains the invisible powers of “white privilege” to its target audience of K-12 teachers: “It seems logical that a person should have the chance to prove themselves individually before they are judged. It’s supposedly an American ideal. But it’s a privilege often not granted to people of color—with dire consequences. For example, programs like New York City’s now-abandoned ‘Stop and Frisk’ policy target a disproportionate number of black and Latinx [sic] people.”

Stop and Frisk was originally a New York law enforcement policy designed to make random checks for concealed weapons, and thus to prevent potential armed robberies and homicides. It was instituted by conservative Republicans and subsequently “abandoned” by leftwing Democrats as “racist.” To make Stop and Frisk a racial issue, its opponents inevitably left out its specifics, including the profiles of individuals whom the police target for searches. Like all “analyses” promoted by identity politics enthusiasts, the Tolerance.org explanation eliminates details like the motivations for the policies, and the characteristics of their applications. It thus obscures from view all the actions of individuals that might account for the disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics affected, in order to focus on the invisible but sinister oppressor, “white skin privilege.”

In reality, the selective nature of the policy was dictated by the fact that 98% of the homicides in New York are committed by blacks and Hispanics. Blacks constitute only 23% of the city’s population buy they commit 70% of the robberies, while whites are responsible for 4% of the same. In other words, the Stop and Frisk policies that discover “disproportionately” concealed and illegal weapons among blacks and Hispanics have an explanation that is behavioral not racial. So-called white “privilege” is a mirage. The fact is that whites are only 3% of the homicide problem and 4% of the robbery problem. Therefore, law enforcement officials are wise to be less interested in them. On the other hand, more than 90% of the homicide victims of blacks and Hispanics are other blacks and Hispanics. So “Stop and Frisk” should really be seen as a privilege for the black and Hispanic communities who are the potential targets of lethal criminal behavior, and therefore favored for protection. Or were until the left, led by the radical mayor of New York ended the practice.

Most examples offered by proponents of the “white skin privilege” scam depend on attributing all disparities between races to “systemic racism”- a practice outlawed by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 - rather than to the habits, attitudes and actions of individuals. For example, the Tolerance.org article tells us, “the ability to accumulate wealth has long been a white privilege—a privilege created by overt, systemic racism in both the public and private sectors.” Tolerance.org doesn’t identify any overt racism or racist acts (which are illegal under American laws) or examine any of the individual behaviors that lead to wealth accumulation. It would be news to Oprah Winfrey, daughter of a share cropper, raised in segregated Mississippi, whose net worth is $2.9 billion, or billionaire basketball player and TV host, Shaquille O’Neill, or hip hop mogul, clothing magnate and outsize celebrity Sean “P. Diddy” Coombs or Snoop Doggy Dog or any of the many blacks who have managed to accumulate tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in a single lifetime.

Seventy percent of black children are born out of wedlock thanks in part to a welfare policy inflicted by leftists on America’s poor that cuts off benefits for homes where a father is present. All other factors being equal, including race, a child raised in a single mother household is five to six times more likely to be poor, than a child raised in a household with two parents. But facts like this are generally excluded from the “studies” that claim the wealth gap is intractable. “Inherited wealth” is often invoked as an insuperable advantage – a privilege that allegedly whites alone can take advantage of. But 70% of all millionaires are first generation millionaires. In other words, they earned their deserts, and did so in a single generation. 

“White skin privilege” is not only a racist term, but part of a totalitarian ideology - identity politics - which erases the individual in favor of collective identities based on race and gender. It warps language to conceal the facts that refute its claims. Thus “white skin privilege” is an Orwellian construct to scapegoat whites who in reality, and in alliance with minorities, have created the most tolerant and inclusive society in human history.

The adjective “undocumented immigrant,” for example, is a form of Orwellian DoubleSpeak designed to suppress the fact that millions of aliens have violated the nation’s laws, circumvented its citizenship process and stolen places that belong to those applying for entry legally. It is part of the left’s efforts to eliminate the concept of citizenship along with the obligations it entails in exchange for the rights it bestows.

Similarly, the term “under-served communities,” universally used by colleges to provide privileges on the basis of skin color, suppresses the truth that these privileges are only necessary because the beneficiaries are unable to qualify under the same standards as required of others. In other words, to obscure the fact that nobody is under-serving these communities and the privileges are racist in intention and result. No one in his right mind thinks that the admissions staffs at America’s liberal colleges are excluding minorities for racist reasons. Especially not when the same colleges are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to seek out and recruit qualified minorities. The only reasons for the subterfuge “under-served” are to suppress the fact that the applicants are unqualified and then to create the fiction that minorities are “marginalized” and “excluded” by … whitey.

America is at a crossroads. The progressive left has embraced a racist doctrine in which white people are the villains. Equally disturbing, the left has embraced a totalitarian doctrine that erases the individual – the cornerstone of America’s revolutionary idea that all human beings are equal in the eyes of their Creator, and should be judged according to their merits and not on the basis of their skin color. Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party has formed a “resistance” against a duly elected government that seeks to defend America’s core principles of individual freedom and individual accountability - or are constantly calling for its overthrow?

David Horowitz is the author of the forthcoming book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, which will be published by Humanix Books on February 19.

ABOUT DAVID HOROWITZ

[For Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov's essay on David Horowitz's life and work, click here.]

David Horowitz is a conservative thinker and writer who has authored dozens of books over the course of his lifetime. He began his political career as one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and served as an editor of its largest magazine, Ramparts. As described in his bestselling autobiography Radical Son (1997), Horowitz was forced to confront some difficult truths about the political left after a close friend of his was murdered by the Black Panthers, and ultimately found a political and intellectual home as a conservative activist. Well-known conservative author and economist George Gilder described Radical Son as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”

In 1988, David Horowitz founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center (originally named the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), a not-for-profit organization located in Sherman Oaks, California. The Center’s mission is to defend free societies such as America and Israel, which are under attack by totalitarians both religious and secular, domestic and foreign.

Through his work at the Freedom Center, Horowitz has fought many important political battles including exposing the deadly intentions of adherents to radical Islam and their stealth jihad in America, challenging left-wing indoctrination in our nation’s K-12 public schools and universities, and advocating for colleges to withdraw funds from terrorist-affiliated campus organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Horowitz is a frequent speaker at colleges and universities across the nation.

Horowitz’s many published works include The Art of Political War And Other Radical Pursuits; Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left; The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America; Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion; and The End of Time. His most recent political work, Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, spent ten weeks on The New York Times’ best-seller list. His complete bibliography may be found here.

Together with his friend Peter Collier, Horowitz authored three bestselling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son 

Horowitz is also the author of the recently-completed series The Black Book of the American Left, a nine-volume collection of his conservative writings over the past several decades, organized by topic, that is the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda.  (For information on The Black Book of the American Left, here).

Horowitz's forthcoming book Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America will be published by HumanixBooks on February 19.

[For Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov's essay on David Horowitz's life and work, click here.]

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3)

The Progressive Race to the Bottom Abolishing ICE, offering ‘free’ college to all, raising taxes to 70 percent. ... Will the somnolent GOP take notice? By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the citizen poor. Civil rights were defined as equality of opportunity for all. That party is long dead. An updated Hubert Humphrey or even Bill Clinton would not recognize any of the present “Democrats.” Even the old wing of elite liberals is mostly long gone, with its talk of legal immigration only, opposition to censorship, pro-Israel foreign policy, let-it-hang-out Sixties indulgence, and free speech. It was superseded by grim progressives who are not so much interested in a square, new, or fair deal for the middle classes, as an entirely different deal that redefines everything from the Bill of Rights and the very way we elect presidents and senators to an embrace of identity politics as its first principle. Indeed, we are currently witnessing a quite strange series of North Korean–like reeducation confessionals, from repenting erstwhile liberals and now presidential hopefuls such as Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand. They and other would-be candidates parade before show cameras to apologize for their prior incorrect heresies, including their erstwhile support for drug laws, tough sentencing, and border enforcement. The subtext of these charades is that 28-year-old socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (who won her Democratic primary with 15,897 votes and with that victory an assured congressional seat in a gerrymandered Democratic district) is the new Robespierre — warning that the earth as we know it will end in twelve years, ICE must be disbanded, all student debt abolished, wealth taxes levied, and Medicare provided for all. And her political guillotine awaits any progressive with lingering stains of the Ancien Régime. Presidential elections are now to be seen by the Left not as the end of a four-year political cycle. Instead, they are the beginning of an any-means-necessary, existential effort to reverse the proverbial will of the people and to remove or delegitimize the president. From now on, if the Left loses, then everything is in theory on the table: seeking removal of the victor by warping the Electoral College vote; or suing under the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, or the 25th Amendment; or cherry-picking federal judges to block presidential orders; or using the Congress to impeach the president; or unleashing a special counsel for years of investigation. In other words, we are in a revolutionary cycle in which the old idea of Democrat or liberal is being superseded by progressivism — and then going well beyond even that. The new generation of Democrats no longer resents “socialist” as a right-wing slur, and “Communist” may well go through the same rehabilitation. The new, new Left questions not the operation of American democracy but the very premise of American democracy. When the selection of the Senate leads to something abhorrent like a counterrevolutionary majority, then the Founders are proven wrong after all, and senators should not be apportioned two to a state but by population at large. The Electoral College should be ended entirely, to reflect the reality that America is the urbanized corridors of the East and West Coasts where the right people live. The Bill of Rights, especially the First and Second Amendments, is considered an impediment to social justice. What explains this accelerating transformation of so many liberals into progressives, and so many progressives into hard-core leftists, socialists, and who knows what next? The reasons predated Trump Derangement Syndrome. Money, lots of it, matters. The left-wing approach to billionaires has radically changed. Aside from the rhetorical boilerplate about robber barons and the need for an income-tax rate of 70 percent, in reality the hard Left has partnered with the nation’s richest. The new big fortunes of America are now mostly in high-tech, media, and finance, not in the old conservative and muscular corporations centered in farming, manufacturing, or oil and minerals. And the new zillionaires are left-wing, and they are activist: Bezos, Bloomberg, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, the Google and Apple teams, Soros, Steyer, and a host of others. Through grants, foundations, purchased media, and super PACs, astronomical amounts of money flow into federal, state, and even local midterm election campaigns, and into voter harvesting and issues from global warming and late-term abortion to open borders, gun control, and identity politics. The 2018 midterms were a mere precursor of things to come. The new mega-wealthy envision an America in a way that satisfies identity politics while exempting their own monopolies, trusts, and billion-dollar fortunes from the ramifications of their own ideology. Unencumbered by personal consequences, they pursue boutique agendas — sort of like a few of the White Russian aristocrats who hoped to continue on by subsidizing and supporting the Bolsheviks, or the Jacobin bigwigs of the French Revolution who thought they could guide the deserving rich people into the national razor. In such a bizarro world, there is nothing wrong with tech employees forced to sleep in their cars near Silicon Valley monopolies -— as long as the owners wear T-shirts and flip-flops and rail at Trump in internal memos. The media are not just becoming left-wing (they’ve always has been); they’re no longer even a news-gathering operation. Reporting is synonymous with editorializing. Fake news — whether the latest BuzzFeed myth or the Covington charade — is simply a word for thirty somethings who believe that they have a duty to promote race, class, and gender agendas that they were spoon-fed in college. They too often define accuracy as the higher Truth that transcends the fossilized idea of truth predicated on obsolete ideas such as evidence, facts, and empiricism. In terms of electronic media, the way the news is delivered through Twitter, Facebook, and Google is itself massaged to censor, aggravate, and impede conservatives and conservative thought. Orwellian selective censorship, the warping of Internet searches, and the banning of political opponents insidiously magnify progressive influence, and to such a degree that leftists are now the biggest defenders of monopolies and trusts, given the power that accrues from them to progressive causes. We are also reaping the fruits of the new university run by hard-core leftists who have indoctrinated a generation with progressive envy and anger, while offering them little education. The resulting ignorance and arrogance make a lethal combination. Professors now in their late sixties can remember old-fashioned liberals of the 1970s and 1980s whose politics were incidental to their professional expertise, but there is now almost no one left in the academy who recalls such dinosaurs. Instead, after the early 1980s, now-tenured progressives sought to produce leftists who took over and produced socialists. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a valuable reminder of how university education results in self-importance coupled with witlessness. The Obama presidency also proved a watershed. It convinced Democrats that a leftist could win and move the nation radically leftward (“fundamentally transforming the nation”) by executive orders, court decisions handed down by activist judges, and the force of popular culture. In a mere eight years, formerly debatable issues such as gay marriage, planet-threatening global warming, and transgenderism in the military became boilerplate requisites of Democratic politics. Obama moved the goal posts far to the left, to such a degree that leftists today now consider the left-wing Obamas almost quaint. The new socialism is also attributable to ten years of anemic annual economic growth below 3 percent, massive student debt, open borders, changing demography, and radical new approaches to marriage and home ownership that have radicalized the younger electorate. Young people have the patina of affluence, with an array of electronic appurtenances and lifestyle choices, but not so much else when it comes to finding good jobs, affordable homes, and freedom from debt — especially tragic when so many got so little from the university in exchange for their borrowed money. As a result, millions of young people have redefined adulthood as prolonged adolescence in “Life of Julia” and “Pajama Boy” style. Urban hipsters, hook-up culture, childlessness, and studio apartments have replaced the traditions of marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership before 30. Among today’s youth, one’s twenties are consumed with student debt and urban sybarite singleness, not changing diapers and patching the roof or refinishing the kitchen table. Republicanism itself has so often failed to offer a viable economic and culture alternative, as well as a muscular and combative defense of traditional American values and tradition — at a time when globalism rewarded winners and punished losers. At the national level, the top echelons of the Republican party reiterated country-club shibboleths like “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” and marginalized social conservatives and populists as near rubes who objected to the gospel of creative destruction. Republicanism at the presidential level was caricatured as a silk-stocking, country-club cutout of the 1950s, even as its expanding base at the local and state level was working-class. But even more important, solid presidential candidates such as John McCain and Mitt Romney campaigned as Marquess of Queensberry Republicans, as if they would rather lose nobly than win ugly. And so they did just that — lose — whether by McCain’s ruling out reference to the virulent anti-Semite and racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s inspiration personal pastor, or by Mitt Romney’s allowing moderator Candy Crawley to hijack the second presidential debate and hand it to Obama. Such laxity was not seen as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but rather as weakness deserving of contempt by the many voters who have no ideology other than wishing to be cool and on the winning side. Progressives brilliantly exploited the idea that a Republican blue blood would say or do almost anything — or sometimes say or do almost nothing — to avoid being libeled as a racist, sexist, homophobe, nativist, or xenophobe. Mushy Republicanism also did its part in giving us the present-day hard Left and the likes of new congressional representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who apparently believe that anti-Semitism and racist demagoguery have lots of upsides and no real negative consequences. In the Covington farce, all too many conservatives jumped the gun to establish their liberal fides, perhaps out of fear that they’d otherwise be tagged by the Left as abettors of “white privilege.” The bad news is that conservatives will likely increasingly be outnumbered, outspent, and out-organized unless they are shocked out their somnolence. The quasi-good news is that the hard Left is unapologetic that it is the hard Left, not just bankrupt in its ideology in a world where socialism has demonstrably wrecked entire countries, but also predictably hypocritical and cynical, given that leftists are now really the party of the rich — and without much empathy for the deplorable and irredeemable middle classes.

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