Chest-thumping conservatism

Posted at Lucianne.com this morning, an article from American Thumper, I mean, American Thinker:

America’s Greatness
Will Defeat Obama
American Thinker, by William L. Gensert Original Article
Posted By: Desert Fox - 12/28/2011 6:52:19 AM
This century will be an American century, much like the last one. Despite what President Obama believes, we are not one nation among many, we are the United States of America, the greatest nation on earth, and the last best hope for humanity. The only thing standing between the United States and continued exceptionalism is the dreary delirium of Barack Obama, whose dismal socialist policies have been a spectacular disaster for the nation.

How about that? William Gensert believes that the only serious problems facing America come from Obama, and that if a Republican were in the White House our future as a nation would automatically be rosy. I thought that thinking Republicans and mainstream conservatives had abandoned such simplistic, partisan thinking, especially in the wake of the Bush years. Supposedly they had realized that Republicans have been part of the problem, as in the House Republicans’ support for the huge expansion of government entitlements under Bush. But no, American Thinker keeps posting articles by authors whose intellectual life as conservatives seems to have begun yesterday, and who thus believe that America’s decline began with Obama’s election, making any reliable progress beyond the kindergarten stage of conservative understanding impossible.

- end of initial entry -

JC in Houston writes:

This type of delusional triumphalism is mindboggling. For example, Gensert writes this about present day Russia:

With a negative birthrate, an aging population and a society that will soon be majority Islamic, in a few decades, they will be lucky if they can bury themselves.

Now make the following changes to the statement:

With a negative birthrate (of the founding European white majority), an aging (white) population and a society that will soon be majority Hispanic, in a few decades, they will be lucky if they can bury themselves.

I don’t see any cause for gloating.

LA replies:

He does point out correctly how the predictions in recent decades that various countries were about to become number one did not pan out, and that the same thing is likely to happen now with China. But the fact that other countries’ prospects have been hyped does not mean that America is not in serious trouble.

His sick gloating over the Islamization of Russia is a typical example of how American conservatives care only about America, are blind to any larger civilization, and thus blind or indifferent to civilization-wide threats, and blind to the fact that the threats elsewhere they are gloating over also threaten us. Gensert reminds me of Mark Steyn with his gloating over the Islamization of Europe.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

The headline reads, “America’s Greatness Will Defeat Obama.” Left unexplained is what happened to America’s greatness back in November of 2008. Did it take a vacation? Did we forget about it? And how did that happen if we were living under a non-Obama presidency, in fact a Republican one?

Deep mysteries to plumb there.

LA replies:

Your comment with its rhetorical questions about America’s mysteriously missing greatness (“Did it take a vacation? Did we forget about it?”) echoes the opening of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” parable in The Gay Science:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 28, 2011 10:39 AM | Send