Very interesting take on what's been going on right now:
It’s not altogether unreasonable to see such numbers and conclude America is ending. But the good news is that America is not ending. What’s ending is the current political era — the New Deal/Great Society/military-industrial complex/foreign adventurism/Big Media reality — that we’ve been in since 1932. All that’s required to banish it is a Republican Party worthy of doing so. The following excerpt from The Revivalist Manifesto addresses the subject.
In 2015, a couple of months before Donald Trump descended that escalator and changed American politics in ways our political establishment has still not sufficiently processed, a historian named James Piereson penned Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order. It’s a very underrated piece and an excellent read, and what it details is something all patriots should understand about where we are as a country.
Namely, that we’ve been through most of the things that terrify us before, and we’ve come through them quite well. American society is flexible. It adapts. It flows past problems and makes them irrelevant.
America moves on.
Piereson’s book divides American history into three distinct periods, the last of which is coming to an end and causing the dislocation and rancor of the past several years. The eras he describes were born of major societal upheavals — Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, the Great Depression — which concluded with lasting institutional and cultural adjustments that set the stage for new phases of political and economic development.
Each of the eras Piereson describes was formed by the creation of a national consensus around a set of policies and cultural imperatives that informed the times, a consensus both major political parties generally wedded themselves to.
Piereson says, in fact, that it’s more accurate to say America has operated on the basis of a one-and-a-half-party system rather than a two-party system through most of its history, because the dominant party will set the agenda for a given era, and the opposition then has no choice but to adapt to the times and take on a “me, too” approach to its search for political power.
This piece goes on. Perhaps Democrats as an important force in this nation is spent and soon the Republicans could once again have their day to set the agenda just as they had post Civil War.
via Instapundit
1 comment:
It is too easy to write America off; our enemies have done that before, much to their dismay, we came roaring back and crushed them. Yes, we have problems in this country, and they need to be addressed. They are not necessarily the "problems" that the lamestream media focuses on. They are not always the fault of one political or social viewpoint or another. They are not conspiracies, nor are they the work of some sinister shadow anything. I remind all who read this that as President John F. Kennedy said "Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us. " (Berlin, 1963). We are still for many not only "the last best hope of Earth" (Abraham Lincoln), but remain "a city on a hill" (John Winthrop, 1630), blessed or cursed with our American exceptionalism, a viewpoint which welcomes freedom and individual work, and as later quoted and amended by President Ronald Reagan as "A shining city on a hill" that other seek to emulate. Our politics may be at the moment distasteful and dysfunctional, yet in due course the pendulum swings to and fro; there is word of a new political party being born by both Republicans and Democrats would seek a new course, just as the Pilgrims did to arrive here. Our Nation survives "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Shakespear, Hamlet), and continues to be the "New World, with all its power and might" (Winston Churchill), and the United States is not over yet.
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