In March 2011 I suggested that the Tea Party had become the intellectual antidote to the Left, which was never really that difficult. But it was not so much to tweak the Left that I wrote that as to serve notice to “some conservatives”, as I postscript’d in the title, who perhaps “hated Sarah Palin as a ‘type'” too much.
It seems I was prophetic, for it could just as easily have been #NeverSarah or #NeverHerman in 2012 as it was #NeverTrump in 2016, had the stars aligned themselves differently. It would have been the same actors, same symptoms, same elitism, just different candidate.
But thank God, it was also the same Tea Party, the same “the people” who never gave up on their quest to undo that unholy alliance in Washington that won out in the end after setback after setbacks.
Of course I want to crow about the phenomenon of Donald Trump, only, as I said when I first wrote about him over a year ago, I’ve had my worries about his carrying through. But this insurgency was never about him. While the Democrats and media are proclaiming the significance of Hillary’s candidacy, the first women to receive a major party’s nomination, Trump’s nomination signals an even greater political event in American history, only not because of what it portends, being America’s first candidate strictly from the private sector, but because of what it has swept away in the process.
In that sense, this event of Trump’s nomination is the equivalent of the nomination of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and the sweeping away of the Democratic Party’s (first) attempt to remove the American people from the political process by keeping the slavery system intact, from which the nation pivoted.
But I do want to crow about Donald Trump just a little because it allows all the little people who made him possible to poke a thumb in the eye of those “some conservatives” highlighted by apologetic to Ben Franklin penned by Bob Montgomery, at UnifiedPatriots, as his way of reminding the world that most of the finer scholars and intellectuals at National Review and other places are sadly still a slice or two short of a loaf at being “true” conservatives. As a fact, that genuinely is sad, by the way.
But those few, that band of poor irregulars around the internet have proved to be their betters at that single endeavor; representing the true meaning of that word, “conservatism”. It’s not our fault, but over time they’ve simply lost the key quotient in the Founder’s design… and someone had to plug the leak in the dike.
Since 2012 Mom and Pop conservatism has gotten much smarter while intellectual conservatism has been in a kind of tailspin, even resembling a flame-out at times. But because of the indomitability of a people who weren’t supposed to be able to hold a thought for more than a minute, much less four years, and even improved on it, they have outclassed a group of scholars who picked up a few idiosyncrasies along the way that fogged their understanding about the true meaning of their theology.
But the dam has held.
Hat tips: Trump’s 2015-2016 trail was blazed by Herman Cain in 2011-2012. Both are private citizen-businessmen with no prior political experience, which seemed to be the path-not-taken choice of the people to undo the maze of inside political relationships in Washington. The rising class of “professional conservatives” would never have considered such a political alternative…much like the political class of New York City could never consider revolution to be an alternative to their complaints with Three George in 1776.
It’s the lamentations and gnashing of teeth of the old political establishment, especially among the intellectual guardians, that makes Trump’s feat more than historic.
And Herman Cain can take much of the credit for why we are at this place, for Donald Trump did not create, nor did he mold nor even go out to missionize the people who just put him over the top in Cleveland. Herman was the harbinger of that event. Herman primed the audience to know what to look for, so, even after he’d been buried by dirty GOP establishment tricks in 2012, the people held fast, and knew Trump immediately when they saw him. Trump was a phenomenon long before the navel gazers knew he was even a threat, because we knew his “type” in 2011.
Mom and Pop Intellectualism
So I’m here to celebrate that aggregation of “just barely-above-average” citizen-intellectuals who lit the fire (Sam Adams) then kept the embers hot for five years, proving they still are the true repository of wisdom about the American theology, just as the Founders always knew. If ever any Americans have been steeled by the fire of deceit, treachery and loss it’s these irregulars who can now be certified as the unflagging guardians of the Constitutional blueprint.
So eat yer hearts out, National Review, you got better grades, and actually get paid, but you can’t hold a candle to our volunteers.
Barely more than a couple of hundred visit our sites every day, but around the country there are many more just like us, some friends, and some friends we haven’t met yet, who provide serious insight, analysis and a sprinkle of God-and-Country warm-hearted patriotism, that make the scholars gag, but still choke up Americans in fly over country…the people who are still for whom the Constitution was written.
“And the common people heard us gladly” (a restatement of Mark 12:37).
These hayseed writers instinctively saw what our best and brightest could no longer see, in part because they had gone from “professing conservatives” to “professional conservatives”, i.e., hirelings, Hessians, mercenaries, call them what you may, but having been seduced by cheap corporate perfumes they could never capture Bill Buckley’s, James Woods or Bob Montgomery’s nose…for they had all acquired their fortunes, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, at something else.
Many (not all) writers at National Review seem to have lost all memory of why they had taken employment in The City in the first place, i.e, to defend those hayseeds in the country, only now we have a generation who very clearly finds it more profitable to goddam them instead…no better than the Leftists who also find ruling over the mob much more profitable and satisfying.
It all comes down to a point of view, and it seems this insubordinate rabble in arms called Tea Party has captured the point of view of the Founders just as conservatism’s intellectuals lost it by the side of the road, thus rescuing America.
I have to pause here to speculate why they did that, for it involves sciences few political intellectuals every entertain.
One of my favorite metaphors from the early Christian Church was the rise of the Gnostics, who were Greeks. Gnosticism “knowledge”, which as every Oklahoma Sooner fan knows, is what that “N” stands for on Nebraska football players’ helmets, is taught in upper division college courses as history, philosophy and theology, but is never taught (to my “nowledge”) as being rooted more in a very specific cultural science, namely, class and elitism, which every anthropologist understands.
You see, Gnostics saw many wonderful virtues in the teachings of Christ, but simply could nor bring themselves to accept a path to revelation, wisdom and salvation that a simple mud-dauber in a Hebrew village could also follow. So they drew up their own path to heaven that didn’t include the hoi polloi. Thomas Jefferson did the same when he cut and pasted the New Testament into a book more to his liking (the Jefferson Bible), only Tom made this Bible for himself. He never tried to start a sect with it. And therein lies the difference between a personal ethos and a doctrine.
This essay is dedicated to the writers at National Review, almost all of whom we admire muchly. When they speak to topics of political and philosophical depth I don’t think anyone can out-think them. I sure can’t. And no one can touch their sting when attacking the Left, except of late, to wonder why they seem to hate Trump more…unless he personally threatens them more. On one level, I understand this, have been a corporate insider. But on the other, I find it unforgivable, considering the commission they claim to have handed down from the Founders. Donald Trump has not only revealed a dark side, but worse, from the Founder’s point of view, a vacant side.
Everyone here is educated, only, as I’ve stated elsewhere they turned professional at things other than scholarship. A more common sense crew you’ll never find, and you already know my admiration for that world “common”. But we can all tell a horse from a mule. Used to be there were only “professing conservatives”, and it was that halo that gave conservatism its cachet. The gold standard of conservatism was that it’s bearers could afford to feed himself without it. The circle of celebrity held by Buckley, Rusher, Kirk was a very small circle indeed, and the payment they received as conservatives was not in satisfaction for that celebrity.
It has always been true that not needing the money or celebrity is the key ingredient to public service, and modern conservatism since William F Buckley.
Now you find that almost exclusively among our little band of brothers and sisters, self-educated retirees, and gobs of experience in humanity that even the sainted George Will and Bill Kristol can’t claim…but Ben Franklin, the Adams boys, and Tom Jefferson could, all because they also enjoyed the ale house, and they had eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to pay attention to the larger world them.
It seems, then, the rule has been established that the super-educated hireling such as found roaming the internet these days (mostly one dimensional lawyers, Gad) is lesser in quality that the low-born, mature, experienced, self-educated Mom and Pops who drove Donald Trump to victory.
James Madison, meet your children.
RESOLVED: Donald Trump proves the Tea Party to be the better judge of candidate horse flesh than any alternative selected by Mssrs Will, Kristol, Erickson, Golderg, or the staff at National Review, et al.
Now, if you disagree, please, hire a hall, and “Laisser les bons temps rouller.”
