The Future Belongs to Those Who Know What Time It Is
Do you know what time it is? The phrase, coined by the political strategist and Twitter warrior David Reaboi, means that one must understand the reality of the present and not act as if we are living in the past. This past week was a wake-up call for some conservative thinkers and politicians on this score. Two events the release of another conservative manifesto and a very early candidate forum for GOP presidential hopefuls that might seem only of interest to diehard political junkies actually showed how some conservatives still are acting as if they live in a world that does not exist. It is a world in which they can avoid difficult questions and repeat old answers that will allow them to appeal to some sort of neutral political ground. Because this doesn t exist, this untimely behavior is separating them from both conservative voters and the public.
The first event was the July 13 release of a new statement by a group of 82 signatories calling themselves Freedom Conservatives. Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles lays out a series of ten principles that they think can stand as a unifying statement for American conservatives in the way that the famous 1960 Sharon Statement did for an earlier generation of American conservatives. Most likely designed as a response to last year s National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles, it puts the emphasis on individual liberty, federalism, the need for fiscal sanity and a repudiation of the corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism that is making the basics of life so much more expensive in today s America. It is pro-immigration but allows that America has a right to secure her borders. It affirms freedom of conscience and religion. And it supports the traditional family as the best way to build our society.
So far, so good. There is not a lot to disagree with. But this is the problem. In an introduction to the document published at RealClearPolitics, John Hood of the North Carolina-based John William Pope Foundation wrote, We stress what we are for, not what we re against. But this is part of the problem. The original Sharon Statement was certainly for the same principles but forthrightly understood that there was an enemy: the forces of international Communism.
The idea that any political statement that does not identify what it is opposed to today seems dubious at best. As a friend texted me about the statement, It seems blind to the specter of debilitating nihilism all around us.
Yet Hood s introduction alluded to what he perceives as the real problems, presumably on the right: We offer real solutions to pressing problems, not utopian dreams or authoritarian schemes. If by that he means the small number of Catholic Integralists who are proposing a Catholic Church-State union, I m certainly on board.
via amac.us
The time is very late indeed, perhaps too late. I made remarks to this extent at a recent seminar at my small and formerly cute university, and outraged the token liberals at the conference. They seemed especially unhappy at my remarks about the Federal Reserve Board, which I don’t like much. But most of the conservatives were talking as if it were 1991 or so. Which it definitely ain’t. Of course by conservative, I mean liberal, and by liberal, I mean progressive to totalitarian. On all the key points, DeSantis is the man. Of course, he may well not be the nominee, and the opportunity, such as it is, will be lost. Then we will get to witness what a Republic looks like in its final decay, something I’m not looking forward to.