Sultan Knish/Daniel Greenfield Ping List. FReepmail me to get on or off.
Not your typical Greenfield analysis. Give it a read!
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Knock 'em if you like, but they've been successful at changing the terms of the debate. The old command-and-control liberalism is becoming outdated as we speak. Even the greenies are claiming they "accept the market."
And, of course, the heart of the Ron Paul faction is young folks.
[Yes, I know the government's still getting bigger...but you have to remember that the Progressives grabbed the consensus wheel when the U.S. government was still laissez-faire. Policy is a lagging indicator.]
The question remains, though: do social conservatives want to be revolutionary? Revolutionism, even in the mild sense meant by the author, is about as un-conservative as you can get. One advantage the libertarians have over social conservatives is that the former don't mind being called radical.
Revolutionaries are rarer. They are dangerous and explosive. Sometimes they are erratic. They are full of ideas, determined and unwilling to compromise. They rarely make good politicians, but sometimes they make very explosive ones. Find the political leader whom the rest of the party hates and can't wait to get rid of for his obstructionism and sabotage of the gatekeeper agenda, and you may have found a revolutionary.
The revolutionaries cannot transform this mess or turn back the clock solely through their elected office, but they can dismantle the power bases of the other side and they can support and help create counterbalancing institutions. But their most valuable contribution is a refusal to accept the consensus, they refuse to do business at the exchange price set for them by the left.
That's a long article. I thought I'd pick out what stood out for me. Gatekeepers or revolutionaries, which do we want?
Bump!
“Politics is based around a consensus. The left does not operate on a consensus, it is a revolutionary movement and it works by subverting the consensus and presenting its revolutionary position as the new consensus. All that is left for the politicians then is to affirm the new consensus. This has happened over and over again in the lifetimes of even the youngest person reading this article and the process has been accelerating lately because it s a revolutionary process.”
That, my friends, is very, very good.
The power of the left is not political. Its political power is the least of what it is. It leverages its cultural dominance to enforce a political consensus. It uses its grip on power through government and non-governmental institutions to impose regulations and laws that politicians from both parties end up signing on to. It is an establishment, an incarnation of the power and privilege of a fossilized ideology built to destroy the country, but leveraged to give its leading members and some of its base a taste of the really good life while the whole edifice of civilization slides down the cliff.
I think the goal posts of political correctness have been moved so that 'fossilized ideology' can now be identified as socialism and associated with our dear leader. Well, it's a start.
Exellent piece!
BFL
So Newt is a GateKeeper and Palin is a Revolutionary ?
...it was little more than a loincloth for the naked emperor already sitting on his throne and looking for the plebes to cry out for more chains.
Screw the chains. What we need is more....
I liked this article. Thanks for posting!