Amerika

Republicans can choose either symbolism or function. The rank-and-file love the symbolism because it agitates and excites their audience into a frothing rage of self-righteousness, which brings in the donations and headlines and promotes individual careers on the Right.

The strategists love it because it seems to hit a plurality of the “Big Tent” of different beliefs — paleoconservatism, crunchy conservatives, Christian libertarians, classical liberals, roots conservatives, Evangelicals, Catholics — that make up the GOP voting audience.

As a result, we get a steady stream of non-issues like abortion, flag burning, transsexualism, and bringing Jesus/Israel back into the schools, but no one looks ahead toward the issues where we can make a positive difference and strive toward a more functional society.

Politics at this point has become two groups of monkeys waving their flags or gang colors, screaming about the irrelevant, while the country slides further down the cliff whilst on fire and emitting rainbow smoke.

Republicans do not realize that they get the most votes and capture the most moderates when they focus on function. People elect Right-wingers to make the trains run on time, or analogues thereof, and they are uninterested in religion and patriotic symbolism.

True, the people who are most involved with the Right seem to be easily bought by such things, but they are a relatively small audience. The Silent Majority wants stuff to work, and they are okay with breaking other stuff to get to that goal.

Irish hybird Kevin McCarthy and his merry band of stodgy conservatives had a chance to make a difference here: they could have held out until we had a balanced budget, i.e. were not spending more than we took in. That is what we need to bring back the value of our currency.

Instead we got a moronic compromise where the military budget actually took a hit relative to social programs for progressives, the IRS expansion was left mostly in place, and Leftists regained the upper hand.

When you wonder why conservatives under-perform, consider this: political correctness has removed everyone but liars. The primary goal of public conservatives is to avoid getting deplatformed for noticing the failure of diversity and socialism.

A sane budget would cut all of the entitlements that make up three-quarters of our budget and would downsize everything else. It would challenge affirmative action, legal protection for unions, and other disguised subsidies. This would be worth crashing the government for.

Instead, we are headed to default, mainly because our conservatives were so afraid of being controversial that they forgot to be conservative. We could never afford these entitlements, and now we are going further recklessly into debt to keep these unaffordable programs afloat.

Republicans made a big show of threatening a government showdown, and then made a big deal of fighting over a few billion here and there. They need to cut trillions. Until they do, our currency is going to keep losing value — “stagflation” — as it did during the Carter years.

Obviously the Left has an Achilles Heel, and it is for conservatives to stop reacting in pearl-clutching horror every time a Right-wing candidate speaks the blunt reality about race, ethnicity, class, and the socialist nature of entitlements and the debt cycle of tax-and-spend required to keep them going.

McCarthy knows that he will not take a huge political hit for this because Fox News and The National Review will carry water for him. Those are conservatives who do not believe they can win, so they want to lose with moral righteousness and die on the cross of civilization collapse.

If that ever changes — if enough conservative voters reject anyone but the militant realists — then and only then do we get out of this addiction to free money and the diversity needed to vote for it. That path leads to doom, but right now, no conservative wants to turn the wheel away.

Tags: budget, debt, deficit, government shutdown, kevin mccarthy