Eating the steak and damning the butcher
It may be that it came with the Baby Boom, or rather that cohort of the Baby Boomers whose reaction to Howdy Doody was to heave a molotov cocktail at him, those Americans who were born into the easiest lives since the Garden of Eden, by no doing of theirs, but whose reaction was a declaration of war on any and all who had planted their Garden of Eden. Their Year Zero was 1968, and for the Left in the half-century since 1968, it is forever 1968.
This is what President Trump is up against, as much as anything, what Republicans and conservatives are up against, what any American is up against who's not contemptuous of America, and what any inheritor of Western Civilization is up against who's not contemptuous of civilization: the man who's sheltered by his roof, while he damns the roof and every shingle and stick and nail in it.
It's a product of the ease of our 21st Century existence, a structural fault, and the logical consequence of human nature applied to easy lives. Any society in any age might produce an elite remote from their founding and building, remote also from the farm and the slaughterhouse on the messier end of their filet mignon, an elite with the luxury of forgetting how they came by their silken pillows and peeled grapes, and more than that of disdaining it. The peculiarity of our time and our civilization is the numbers: progressively since the Industrial Revolution life has got easier, a democratization of the lifestyles of kings, to the point where our great cities by now are crammed with untold masses with the luxury of eating filet mignon and indicting the butcher for murder.
Ours is an age of deferred mortality; lives as long as a century, and very few of us knowing very many who die before their times. The revolution in medical science which followed the Industrial Revolution has treated mortality, to where an average American aged 50 may expect not unreasonably to have something like half his life before him, albeit not the more sunlit half. Life is protracted so the stages of life all are protracted: protracted childhood, protracted adolescence, protracted emancipation, etc. And this deferring of mortality and reality cannot be expected to go without political and even religious expression.
That religious expression is atheism, the political expression 21st Century leftism: what man needs God who lives forever, and what use has he of a national defense or a system of finance wherein debts are paid, whose misspent youth ends when and if he pleases?
The great bulwark which is America's inheritance but which the rest of the West too much is wanting, is the peasant's sense and a constitutional system which is resistant even in this 21st Century to conceding the elite's veto of the peasant's vote. President Trump manifestly appreciates that America's peasants are its salvation, that the peasants demand a Peasants' Party, and that any party of the peasants is bound to win elections and determine the future.
"Elite" defined
I'm guilty as any conservative of the overusage of "elite", so I ought at least to define it. First and most an elite is a bien pensant, a believer in whatever it is that the Left happen to believe at a given moment, e.g., global-warming-ism and multiculturalism and federal-mandates-for-public-bathroom-accommodation-for-the-transgendered, etc., etc.
But an elite also is one of those people whose existence is set apart from the facts of life, whether by affluence or professional ivory-towering, or by the peculiarities of this 21st Century which produce such phenomena as the "professional student", pursuing some post-graduate degree in some indulgent, basket-weaving course till his hair recedes, all the while living sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll, with "vegan" shoes and a marijuana badge on his backpack.
An elite may be well-to-do and very often he is that, but it's not socioeconomics that determines the question of elite or not elite, only ideas and that existence set apart from the facts of life.
It may be that it came with the Baby Boom, or rather that cohort of the Baby Boomers whose reaction to Howdy Doody was to heave a molotov cocktail at him, those Americans who were born into the easiest lives since the Garden of Eden, by no doing of theirs, but whose reaction was a declaration of war on any and all who had planted their Garden of Eden. Their Year Zero was 1968, and for the Left in the half-century since 1968, it is forever 1968.
This is what President Trump is up against, as much as anything, what Republicans and conservatives are up against, what any American is up against who's not contemptuous of America, and what any inheritor of Western Civilization is up against who's not contemptuous of civilization: the man who's sheltered by his roof, while he damns the roof and every shingle and stick and nail in it.
It's a product of the ease of our 21st Century existence, a structural fault, and the logical consequence of human nature applied to easy lives. Any society in any age might produce an elite remote from their founding and building, remote also from the farm and the slaughterhouse on the messier end of their filet mignon, an elite with the luxury of forgetting how they came by their silken pillows and peeled grapes, and more than that of disdaining it. The peculiarity of our time and our civilization is the numbers: progressively since the Industrial Revolution life has got easier, a democratization of the lifestyles of kings, to the point where our great cities by now are crammed with untold masses with the luxury of eating filet mignon and indicting the butcher for murder.
Ours is an age of deferred mortality; lives as long as a century, and very few of us knowing very many who die before their times. The revolution in medical science which followed the Industrial Revolution has treated mortality, to where an average American aged 50 may expect not unreasonably to have something like half his life before him, albeit not the more sunlit half. Life is protracted so the stages of life all are protracted: protracted childhood, protracted adolescence, protracted emancipation, etc. And this deferring of mortality and reality cannot be expected to go without political and even religious expression.
That religious expression is atheism, the political expression 21st Century leftism: what man needs God who lives forever, and what use has he of a national defense or a system of finance wherein debts are paid, whose misspent youth ends when and if he pleases?
The great bulwark which is America's inheritance but which the rest of the West too much is wanting, is the peasant's sense and a constitutional system which is resistant even in this 21st Century to conceding the elite's veto of the peasant's vote. President Trump manifestly appreciates that America's peasants are its salvation, that the peasants demand a Peasants' Party, and that any party of the peasants is bound to win elections and determine the future.
"Elite" defined
I'm guilty as any conservative of the overusage of "elite", so I ought at least to define it. First and most an elite is a bien pensant, a believer in whatever it is that the Left happen to believe at a given moment, e.g., global-warming-ism and multiculturalism and federal-mandates-for-public-bathroom-accommodation-for-the-transgendered, etc., etc.
But an elite also is one of those people whose existence is set apart from the facts of life, whether by affluence or professional ivory-towering, or by the peculiarities of this 21st Century which produce such phenomena as the "professional student", pursuing some post-graduate degree in some indulgent, basket-weaving course till his hair recedes, all the while living sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll, with "vegan" shoes and a marijuana badge on his backpack.
An elite may be well-to-do and very often he is that, but it's not socioeconomics that determines the question of elite or not elite, only ideas and that existence set apart from the facts of life.
The coming Republican Senate
In these United States the people vote in statewide elections for president, for governor, and for United States senator. President Trump on November 8 of '16 carried 30 of the 50 states, and it's 33 states now with Republican governors, so a fellow could be forgiven for supposing that the Republican majority in the United States Senate with its two-senators-per-state-regardless-of-population would be equivalent, something like 60 to 66 percent, but of course the Senate is only marginally Republican, split 51-49. That discrepancy alone ought to be cause for anxiety among Democrats, never mind that 10 of the 26 Democrat senators who happen to come up for re-election this November 6 represent those Americans who made a president of Donald J. Trump just 728 days prior.
A fellow could be forgiven also for imagining that those Democrat senators representing Trumpian states would go out of their way to vote with the president whenever they could justify themselves, and yet in a year no Senate Democrat broke with his party to vote with the president and the Republican majority on Obamacare or taxes or the Supreme Court: on any question worth bothering about. The story is that the Democrat minority leader has let it be known that any Democrat senator breaking with the party will be "primaried", that's to say, the offending senator will be stripped of funding and endorsement by the Democrat national and Senate committees, who between them will agree on a challenger in his primary election, and it will be that challenger who claims the funding and endorsements and in all likelihood also the nomination.
So West Virginia, to take the most conspicuous example, is represented in the United States Senate by a character who has voted the Democrat line in this Age of Trump on every question worth bothering about, despite campaigning as a conservative-to-out-conservative-the-Republicans, and despite that West Virginia is maybe the most Trumpian of the 30 Trump-voting states, Trump and his administration having saved the West Virginia economy, unilaterally and well within their first year, and the Democrat governor of West Virginia having declared himself a convert to the Republican Party, as the featured guest at a rally for Donald J. Trump.
Republicans in the House of Representatives with its representation-by-population came away from the general election of '16 with 241 seats of 435, and if anything the Senate ought to produce a greater share still for the party claiming 30 states in 50 for president and 33 governors. This unrepresentative representation must sooner or later be reconciled, with the consequent reordering of the United States Senate, and whether later or sooner we'll know the evening of November 6.
