It Will Get Better
Posted on | September 3, 2011 | 19 Comments
by Smitty
Mead:
It is fun to curse our leaders and throw stones at them, but we should realize that cursing politicians will not create answers where none exist. Sometimes, cursing politicians is a way of whistling in the dark; by grumbling about how stupid and inept they are, we reassure ourselves that answers really do exist and that if more competent people were in office our problems would all be solved.
I’m not sure that’s true. I do think our politicians are getting it wrong: too many on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to shore up the blue social model rather than thinking about how to move beyond it. But in fairness to them, what comes next is not so clear.
The economic impact of the internet has been to wreck the middle man, most recently, Borders.
By breaking the grip on communications enjoyed by the Ruling Class, the internet is exposing and claiming nanny states the world over.
Some are retreating into fascist religious expression, particularly the neighborhood from which I write.
In the West, the Ruling Class is so used to bribing the people of today with the wealth of tomorrow that they lack all courage to do what’s necessary. When a Perry states the obvoius, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, it’s seen as some raging blasphemy. And it’s hardly a start.
Sorry, Paul Ryan: the Roadmap, while a noble effort to save Holy Progress, is mostly a fool’s errand. The Progressive Era is toast. What is called for is a top down scrub, and transition plan away from the centrally managed system, in favor of one that respects liberty and rewards initiative. Sure, the transition will have to respect the dupes who’ve been worshipping the Golden Calf of Progress the last century; folks under 50 (e.g. me) are going to have to step up and take a haircut. For all our Ruling Class has been pissing down our back and telling us it’s raining these years, the lying swine, they’ll find a surprising maturity in the American populace. You know, the common folk who ran the better part of a million people through the Mall last year and left it cleaner than they found it.
We’re going to have a painful few years, while we get through the trough on the economic sine curve. TANSTAAFL, though we’ve behaved as though Heinlein was wrong for quite a while. The crucial thing at this point is to locate and support the sober leadership necessary to get us off of the road to serfdom, and headed back toward our birthright of liberty.
Don’t know or care who that leader is. Cain? Perry? Bachmann? Palin? McCotter? Santorum? Who cares? As long as they are not a Ruling Class tool, it’s fine by me. Reducing the Presidency from a cheap personality cult and back to a simple, Constitutional executive is what matters. Leave the despair to the Ruling Class worms and their sycophants, say I.
It will get better.
Comments
19 Responses to “It Will Get Better”
September 3rd, 2011 @ 5:24 pm
It seems to be the big grievance in the world is govorment, we have too much of it everywhere. It imposes itself in too many destructive ways.
While the social security issue seems to be a huge stumbling block, welfare is overlooked. There should be NO welfare unless we can afford it.
Consider the blacks who suck up most of the varieties of welfare & Special privelges are the most crime ridden, lowest educated, least patriotic, highest drug user…what good has it done them? Destroyed them instead.
Govorment. Reduce them till yopu have to use google to get there address.
September 3rd, 2011 @ 6:17 pm
There are simple answers. And they have been implemented in the past and will be in the future. A voting majority in Obama favorable states don’t know what it takes for food to show up in their stores. As food gets harder to get new leaders will emerge and the current group will fade away or be pushed out.
September 3rd, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
September 3rd, 2011 @ 6:35 pm
Walter Russell Mead has written several interesting, even insightful critiques of the “Blue Social Model” but alas he still misses the point. What he consistently fails to grasp is that the “Blue Social Model” never actually worked. At best it merely functioned. It’s repeated failure to produce the goals it was designed to achieve only served to force it’s proponents to repeatedly double down on stupid. What Mead seems unable to see is that it’s not just that the model is no longer tenable but that it’ proponents aren’t either. His idea the Bolsheviks who created this monster can be part of the solution or even allowed to have input on how to reduce or dismantle it is simply incorrect. Hounding Progressives from every nook and cranny of our economic, political, social, religious and cultural of societal fabric is merely the beginning of the solution. He seems to cherish the hope that there can be some sort of Progressive reformation. This idea is as preposterous as the notion that if encouraged and supported “moderate Muslims” can effect an “Islamic Reformation” making Islam the “Religion of Peace” they keep insisting it already is. This is impossible because the majority of Muslims and Progressives are incapable of and indeed are forbidden to, critically examine the basic tenets of their belief systems. Like Islam, Progressivism is doomed to follow it’s downward arc into slavery and darkness
September 3rd, 2011 @ 6:55 pm
Yeah, a lot of people will suffer when the JIT model of supplying stores becomes untenable because of wide spread natural disaster, civil disorder or a major strike by truck drivers.
You already see it when there’s even a hint of a major storm on the horizon…store shelves become bare very quickly and stores and their suppliers can’t keep up with demand.
September 3rd, 2011 @ 7:13 pm
BRAVO. Great post.
Paul Ryan is a Ruling Class (he always supports Boehner’s schemes) pseudo-conservative who has a really good media image machine. His so-called 10-year plan is as convoluted as it is ridiculous. Want a balanced budget? Cut $800 billion from two years running.
But Ryan is a Ruling Class “conservative” who’s been in D.C. so long that he won’t just make big funding cuts to stuff. Except the military, which is always on the chopping block–it’s how Newt & Co. “balanced” the budget in the 1990s.
TANSTAAFL is impossible for the Ruling Class to understand. They’ve been gorging themselves on someone else’s dime for so long, they actually do believe in Santa Claus, easy money, and free lunches.
September 3rd, 2011 @ 3:21 pm
[…] excellent essay from our correspondent in the Afghan theater that’s worth excerpting in full; It is fun to curse our leaders and […]
September 3rd, 2011 @ 9:10 pm
Mead is wrong. The answers are found in (non-revised) history. Every society that had most/all/more than the current blue state model required dedicated bodies of slaves to generate the economies; and each fell to blood-lusty barbarians.
Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, Byzantium, Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Empire, France, Russia, China again, and on and on it goes. Each one had a dedicated leisure class of unemployed, a dedicated worker class of slaves (in America the 50% who pay their taxes), and a small dedicated class of uber-rich folks who claimed political power as their right (the certified class) who despotically pitted the despite of the leisure class against the despair of the slave class.
America and western Europe: the question is who are the blood-lusty barbarians who’ll do us in, not if.
September 4th, 2011 @ 12:35 am
I’m trying to remember who the last simple, Constitutional President was. Taft, maybe?
September 4th, 2011 @ 1:28 am
Right. The blue model never worked, but it took 70 years for it to consume enough wealth and cause enough disfunction that the effects became clear. It’s like a benign tumor – at first, it’s small and maybe isn’t even noticed. After it grows awhile, it may be seen as an unsightly bump which still doesn’t impact the host very much. But if ignored, it may at some point grow to the size of a basketball at which point it hampers the daily functioning of the host. Some may grow to the size where the host can’t get out of bed anymore. That’s almost at the point we’re at now.
September 4th, 2011 @ 2:35 am
Smitty: From what I’ve seen of your commentary, you (and most of your
fans) like to use the term “Ruling Class” over and over again in your
little screeds, together with attacks on what you call “progressivism”,
which seems to be defined as “anything in society I don’t like”. All I
see in your comments are the whines of some crank who complains
over and over again about the actions and lifestyles of people who have accomplished more in life than you have. In other words, class resentment in right-wing garb. How sad.
By the way, you’ve mentioned you are in the military and live in
Northern Virginia. In other words, you are a guy who’s lived off of the
benefits of the Big Government and its functionaries that
you decry and that you make condescending remarks about. Typical.
September 4th, 2011 @ 3:25 am
Shorter somefeller: “I identify with the Ruling Class because I think I ought to be Ruling, despite the fact that any society that adopted my ideas would quickly descend into a perdition of Dantean proportions.”
What, too long?
September 4th, 2011 @ 3:34 am
“What, too long?”
No, just inaccurate and not very clever. Better luck next time.
September 4th, 2011 @ 12:59 pm
Hey there little feller, wake up on the wrong side of the bed or what? Our Smitty is busy serving our country in the Afghan theater right now. He’s many thousands of miles from his wife and newborn son.
What have YOU done to serve someone else besides yourself?
Resentment?… How about righteous indignation that some people who got into politics seem to have forgotten that the purpose of serving government is to serve the people, not see how much wealth one can steal from the American taxpayer.
And if you don’t think there’s class warfare in this country right now, then perhaps you’ve had your head under a rock. Obama and his minions are busy pitting the few haves against the many havenots everyday. Listen to the rhetoric of the Congressional Black Caucus for an example of this.
This government, in fact government for the last hundred years has been stepping on the Constitution and trying to grind it into dust, especially the Tenth Amendment.
Instead of excoriating Smitty and others like him, you should be thanking them and praying for their safe return to their families.
September 4th, 2011 @ 4:43 pm
Shorter somefeller, volume 2: “I know you are but what am I?”
September 4th, 2011 @ 6:42 pm
The ruling class is dominated by, but not exclusively composed of the left.
We don’t like “Progressivism” because progressive is merely a term that the Bolsheviks chose for themselves in order to deceive the unwary or stupid. They are the number one threat to humanity and whether they’re called or call themselves Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Social Democrats, Bolsheviks or Khmer Rouge, in the end they are all the same, merely different points on the same arc leading ever downward into darkness and slavery.
Fear not however, for there is plenty of room on our list for movements and people we don’t like. Congratulations.
September 4th, 2011 @ 7:58 pm
It’s amusing to see you mention Bolsheviks and Socialists in your rant, considering the fact that the class warfare rhetoric here is coming from your side. The grumbling about the Ruling Class one reads here sounds like the sort of thing one would have heard in a cafe in a not-very-nice part of St. Petersburg a century ago.
Anyway, it sounds like you’re spending a lot of energy on this fighting the Ruling Class thing. Maybe instead you should spend some of that energy on more useful things, like going back to school or doing a better job at the office. Maybe then, you might become a conservative who amounts to something in life and doesn’t spend his time dreaming about the day he’ll get back at those dastardly people who never invite him to their parties.
September 4th, 2011 @ 11:02 pm
Jump to conclusions much?
September 5th, 2011 @ 12:31 am
Lil feller, it seems like you don’t pay attention to the news much.
Tea Partiers can all go to hell…Maxine Waters, progressive leftist Democrat
The Tea Party wants us all to hang…Andre Carson, progressive leftist Democrat
Tea Partiers are terrorists…numerous progressive leftist Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden.
So all the class warfare rhetoric is coming from our side, huh?
What you fail to understand is that Conservatives are against class warfare and are for personal responsibility. This administration, the one that was supposed to narrow the racial divide has instead, widened it to proportions not seen since the early sixties.
Race hustlers and race baiters like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Jesse Jr., Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, etal. have continually flashed the race card at every opportunity. And they are finding out that it’s way overdrawn. Payment is due and the interest is high.