Mind you, these are the same people who told us this was the most important election in our lifetimes, perhaps in the history of the Republic. But now that we've lost, we're apparently supposed to say "Ah, well. We'll getcha next time."
And here is where we part ways.
Two by Two
There are two kinds of conservatives: economic conservatives and social conservatives.When the Tea Party formed, it was formed from equal parts of the two. The fight within the party was over which one would win out. The Republican party stalwarts hated the Tea Party, but they hated the social conservative wing a lot more than they hated the economic conservative wing. Most of the major Internet libertarian and Tea Party bloggers have been economic conservatives, not social conservatives. So, the Republican stalwarts and the libertarian economic conservatives joined forces to give us ... Mitt Romney.
Social conservatives hated Romney, but we hated Barack more, so everyone held their nose and voted for Romney.
Well, not everyone.
As we found out Tuesday night, conservatives, whether economic or social, are in the minority. We are in round two of FDR's interminable reign. More on that in a bit.
What I want to focus on right now is the dissonance from the economic conservatives. We have, on the one hand, people like Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse - supporters of gay marriage, not particularly opposed to abortion, libertarian economic conservative types - who tell us not to worry.
And as Andrew Breitbart often reminded us, the most important battles must be cultural ones, because culture and media inevitably shape the political choices we make together.But when these people use phrases like "the most important battles must be cultural", they don't mean by the word "cultural" the same thing that social conservatives mean. We mean "no sodomite marriage, no abortion, no euthanasia, no contraception, return to Christ". That is not what the economic conservatives mean. By "culture," the economic conservatives mean "no socialism. no government control," i.e., they mean economic culture, not moral culture. As one economically conservative commentator so concisely put it:
That war must begin anew. And it begins now.
I’m not religious, and my political beliefs don’t rest on a religious foundation. Gay marriage (to pick one example) doesn’t bother me much. I did, though, find the various bizarre comments about rape from Republican candidates to be stupid and offensive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped to cost enough potential Republican votes to sway the election.We know how well economic conservatives are doing politically.
So, how are social conservatives making out?
Horribly.
To take one example, every exit poll in every state where exit polls were conducted showed majority support for abortion. Three of Sarah Palin's pro-life picks went down to defeat shortly after they announced pro-life sentiments. Given Palin's phenomenal success in picking winners, that's a substantive, significant loss. It is worth noting how the establishment Republicans reacted to these pro-life comments: repudiation, dismissal, abandonment.
Pro-lifers can mewl about how the majority of the population is pro-life. It may even be true on some level. But pro-lifers didn't show up to the polls. In fact, most people didn't show up to vote.
If pro-lifers won't vote against Barack Hussein Obama, pro-lifers won't vote. If pro-lifers won't vote for pro-life candidates, they aren't pro-life.
In short, we do not have a pro-life majority in any meaningful sense, no matter what the polls may say.
FDR Redux
I mentioned above that we are facing FDR redux. That has implications as well.FDR stacked the Supreme Court.
Obama will too.
He may replace as many as four justices in his second term. The new SCOTUS will make the Warren Court look like Jerry Falwell's ice cream social club. Gun control, homosexual marriage, pedophilia, bestiality, sharia law, speech censorship - the new SCOTUS will have 20 years to implement the left's agenda, and they will put that time to good use.
The moral culture, what's left of it, will be shredded.
Obamacare will rip the belly out of the American economy.
It isn't coming back.
FDR bought his majorities. He used tax dollars to put people on the dole, thereby buying votes. Once on the government dole, people were afraid to leave it. He reigned 16 years because he turned Americans into beggars. People stopped believing they could succeed on their own, create small businesses on their own, and regulations prohibited them trying. He controlled the culture through government regulation.
The battlefields of WW II destroyed FDR's beggar mentality. America's men learned, quite literally, to innovate or die. Those who couldn't innovate fast enough did die. Only the lucky and the smart survived. Many people attribute America's post-war dominance to her lack of competition in the world market, the fact that her factories were not destroyed. All true.
But there is something else. American casualties were not as high as that of Russia, Germany, Japan, Britain, or France. For America alone, the war killed off our lousy innovators without cutting deeply into the ranks of the superior innovators. For most other nations, the men who came back from the war did so in body bags, and were buried. For America, the men who came back from the war were alive, they were the ones who could think on their feet. These were the men who built the Apollo program, the electronic revolution, the age of passenger jets.
That generation is gone.
Obama's win demonstrates that the United States has again descended to the beggar mentality of FDR's America. But this beggar mentality has something new. This beggar mentality combines with the morality of the alley cat and the stray dog, the morality of the animal that eat its own children when hunger gnaws. This is the morality of the rich pagan elite, who gleefully kill each other for a chance at power.
For the entire life of the Church, there have been generations plagued by evil priests and bishops. Many Catholics, not just in this generation, but in many that came before us, have spent a lifetime waiting for bad priests, bad bishops to retire and/or die. Nothing else could be done but wait.
In this political situation, while white Catholics voted against Obama, Hispanic Catholics voted overwhelmingly for him. The populace, both Catholic and non-Catholic, has been beggared in both economics and morality, where the population affirmatively chooses murderous despotism, there is nothing to do but wait. Such a generation will have no children, of course.
The future belongs only to those who do have children, to those who manage to keep their children unstained by the muck of the rabid culture that surrounds them.
The wise man does not get into hand-to-hand combat with a rabid dog. If he lacks a rifle or a bow - and we lack both - then he just stands off in the distance, and waits for the dog's inevitable death. America will not survive this election in any recognizable form. At this point, we can preserve only the ideas she once stood for, preserve them in our children, and wait for the dogs to die.