The conjunction of the massive thread at VFR about secession with the thread at The Thinking Housewife on the photo of Hillary and Obama en route to the OK Corral has prompted a thought that pertains to both threads equally. To wit: The Emperor has no Clothes.
The whole discussion of secession, while fascinating and probably necessary (in the same way that it was necessary in the early 60’s for the thinkers at the Hudson Institute to think about how nuclear war would actually work out in practice), is I think premature. Why? Because at this the moment of their greatest apparent power, the leftists are, as Obama said truly of the incipient Obamacare legislation, standing at the precipice. Over the last 150 years, the left has erected a new, improved version of the gnostic Tower of Babel, built this time not of stone but of sheet rock, lathe, plaster, duct tape and baling wire, and painted all nice. It’s a Potemkin Babel. And Obama & company are perched there at the top of the immense cardboard ziggurat. With Obamacare they have added a huge new story to the structure, and it now teeters at the point of collapse.
Truth is immensely strong, falsehood inherently weak and self-devouring. The left is more vulnerable to collapse than it has been since it got started. We should not yet quail before its might, and while we must understand our alternatives, we should not yet retreat to a redoubt in the conservative states. The left has exhausted itself, impugned its credentials as the party of the people. Their most recent victory was Pyrrhic. We should attack, now more than ever. How? There are three fronts.
First, there is the straightforward electoral counterattack already underway. The conservative electorate has never been so aroused. This will be a blood bath: let’s go happy to this fight!
Second, there is the attack on the philosophical and moral foundations of the liberal edifice. The League of Vile Sycophants—and, yes, our fellow conservatives, however heterodox they may be on one issue or another—should keep hacking away at the pillars: atheism, feminism, egalitarianism, nominalism, gnosticism. These doctrines are the oldest part of the structure, where the cardboard walls have most eroded away, revealing the corroded piers that undergird the whole corrupt building. We must hack, and hack, and hack.
Third, we must laugh. This is where the photo comes in. We’ve elected an administration that makes the would-be Dukakis administration look like titans of statesmanship and sagacity. McGovern, Kerry, Mondale, any of them would have been more credible, and good. But Obama? The Emperor has no clothes! It’s the greatest joke in history! And who will laugh with us most readily? The children of the Boomers. The children of the generation that has inflicted most of this absurd unreality upon us, and has made PC lies the ruling orthodoxy. They young are built to rebel against the ruling orthodoxy, and since the Boomers are the last generation one could expect to devise convincing and efficacious rites of passage into whole-hearted, mature credence in their self-refuting positions, their children are poised to rebel against the morally bankrupt Boomers with great ferocity. If we laugh at the Naked Emperor, more and more of the children in the crowd will laugh with us. Those children are already moving away from earnest mealy-mouthed PC platitudes by the million, in favor either of full-throated nihilism (which will mostly vanish as soon as they have kids)(it is not that uncommon, here in Berkeley, to see two young nihilist parents adorned with tattoos and piercings, garbed in black, holding hands with a four year old girl appareled as a pink ballerina, complete with ringlets and spangly purse) or of traditional Christianity.
The revolution is already happening. The generation that enthroned permanent rebellion is now itself facing rebellion. Everything they are doing is a desperate holding action, a last-ditch attempt to keep the whole Rube Goldberg contraption creaking along till the next election. It’s doomed. Global warming has been revealed as a fraud. Obamacare is not going to work, even if it survives the next two elections; it is going to be a disaster. The left has revealed its true, tyrannical nature. Even the Washington Post today editorialized against the administration’s unprecedented control of the press. 25 percent of Tea Partiers are registered Democrats. The Great Unraveling has already begun.
What then will we as a culture do, when we all come to see that the Emperor is naked, and his fortress made of paper? What will we do when it becomes widely understood that the socialist edifice is built of lies, founded on sand, unfit to weather the merest squall sent down from heaven by the nature of reality? We can sweep it all away, just as the Soviet Union simply … vanished. Some of the legal steps proposed in the threads on secession—repudiation of the latter Constitutional amendments by conservative states, their refusal of Federal funds, their refusal to enforce Federal laws (a tactic pioneered by my own city of Berkeley, in re immigration)—could suffice to effect the dissolution of almost the whole Federal behemoth, simply by operations of law. Think of it: the Income Tax could be gone in a matter of only a few years. These sorts of things do happen. Think of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We must think big.
D. from Seattle writes: