There is a long article in The WSJ weekend edition, "The Next Conservative Movement," by Yuval Levin. Levin is a contributing editor to the National Review and the Weekly Standard. That, conservatively speaking, places him in the conservative camp, the faction of the GOP most in an uproar about a certain presidential primary candidate.Though he apparently is from the University of Chicago, the Ivy League Pedigree Disease is contagious. Probably the only time he spends in the real world everyday is when he commutes to and from his book-lined academic cellar. His writing style is a bit stilted, highly Latinate and punctuated with a heavy dose of the obligatory -tion words, nouns mostly abstract and meaningless, all too safe and common to the world of bureaucrats and political party apologists.
They sound good, at least to him and his pedigree. And probably look good to his eye on paper as well. Not to mention the Journal editors.They're a formula, a recipe supposedly for fixing things. They're the polar opposite for the declarative, straight-forward subject, verb, object. The real essence of honest communication. Billy hit the ball. He touched all the sacks on his way around the diamond.
There is no room for misunderstanding or error there. Nor for highfalutin, academic babble attempting to masquerade as prose. One of his criticisms of a current presidential hopeful is the candidate criticizes but offers no solutions.
The is not a new line of thinking. We run into it frequently. The point being one must offer solutions along with one's criticisms for his criticisms to be valid. That's the kind of half-truth academia and it denizens are noted for. But there are times when one has to realize there is a problem first before one can focus on possible solutions.
This is a form of shooting the messenger. In politics, apparently, one has to have solutions before taking office. Is that it, kind sir? Cite a president who has not been guilty of learning on the job including the current one who may make history books as the classic example of such.
And is a solution not a solution because you or I don't agree with it? We don't endorse or agree with building walls, xenophobia and such. But to a candidate who tossed them out there and to those who supported him in trumped up, phony primary elections, under the guise that their vote matters, they must see them also as solutions.
To make up for years of wasteful mismanagement of taxpayer money, one of the other candidates wants to tax us to kingdom come in the name of fairness and a whole gaggle of other abstracts. One of the excuses for such often cited is comparing us with what those in other countries pay. Why must we be compared with anyone? Who wrote that rule? We're suppose to be a sovereign nation.
We don't necessarily see that as a solution. But we understand many do. Are they correct? Is their answer a valid solution and that of anyone who differs not so? In the same issue in the Opinion section, Michael Barone, a well-know mouthpiece of the status quo GOP, writes this pathetic but telling paragraph. Barone's article is "Trump Can't Break the Republican Party."
It is generally agreed that the presidential nomination process is the weakest part of our political system. One reason is that it leaves the two great parties vulnerable to disruptive candidates--controversial political figures who threaten to reshape the party to which they have attached themselves.
Notice the terms disruptive, reshape, controversial,vulnerable. That should give you an idea about elitism, diversity of opinion, controversial, tolerance and a rock hard mentality to keep the status quo. Focus also on the "our political system." We thank the WSJ and the two authors for letting us see your real, exclusionary feelings.
The "two great parties," Barone sounds as if he stole that phrase from another WSJ GOP apologist. These are two essentially bankrupt parties that have served less than 25% of the population for decades. The numbers of people who don't vote anymore now rival the number of people who dropped out of looking for a job a long time ago, the ones the Fed don't want to accurately report.
Levin notes what is one of the biggest blabbed American secrets, this is a fractured nation. And indeed it is. It started out that way and little has changed. One has to forgive his pedantic pedigree leanings and realize he's speaking only to the GOP troops, not ordinary people who queued up in those primary voting lines to express their votes. Barone coughs up Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive movement failed to do-in the GOP. Teddy was s Democrat in bison clothing. He never met a government too big. Many of those who dropped out understand all too well what their vote actually means in a system governed by these "two great parties." The value is right up there with negative zero interest rates.
The other octopus in Washington, the Democrats, have not been able to do-in the GOP either after all these years. But it looks like they won't have to. Elitist statements like the paragraph noted above will do it for them.
A while back the CEO of BlackRock, a multi-billionaire, the world's largest asset management fund, publicly stated he didn't understand why everyone was so upset. To Mr. Barone and Mr. Levin we can say: "Welcome aboard," You three must know each other.
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