Did you attend the funeral? No, neither did I- too busy trying to keep financially afloat in this current crisis. Alas, I didn't even send flowers. Perhaps I can do a virtual visit; anybody got the website of the funeral home?
"Conservatism as we know it is dead. Its last bastion of power, Washington, is being overrun as we speak, in a blitzkrieg operation fueled by popular panic and led by a charismatic field marshal. To the extent conservative ideology survives the onslaught, it will be as a guerilla force, making its presence felt on web sites and radio call-in shows but never in the corridors of real power" - Jonathan Kay, American conservatism, R.I.P.
Kay continues,
"As well as being a disastrous moment for American conservatives, this is also an epic turning point in the history of western ideas. Since World War II, the welfare state has made steady gains almost everywhere in the West, with the result that just about every form of risk known to mankind — from sickness, to unemployment, to poverty, to childbirth, to old age — has been socialized. Only in the United States had individuals been left reliant (if only to a certain extent) on their own values and wits. That lone exception to the global nanny state is now gone — the victim of a housing debacle that demonstrated that middle-class homeowners are too stupid to manage something as basic as a monthly household budget, just as Wall Street's brain trust is too dumb to operate an unregulated financial market. Condescension, after all, is the mother of socialism.
Who would have thunk it? From the 1980s onward, conservatism was supposed to be America's muscular ideology, as opposed to the soft liberalism peddled by the nation's elites. Instead, U.S. conservatism died with a whimper — a venerable creed knocked out for good in the space of just five recessionary months."
So then, when we hear the blow hards at the conservative convention this weekend, we are only listening to the eulogy? I kinda thought so, although it was rather amusing to listen to. Where is the dignity that ought to be at such a solemn occasion as a funeral? Must be a LIBERAL conspiracy!
Amen.
