If you haven't already had read it, let me recommend George Packer's piece in The New Yorker on the "fall" of conservatism. He weaves together a thousand threads of the story in a way any magazine writer knows is terribly difficult to pull off. For the article Packer had a long conversation with Pat Buchanan, who, for the younger folks among our readers, isn't just a vinegary TV right-winger with a punchy turn of phrase. Buchanan is a very important figure in the last half century of American history -- for the forces of darkness perhaps, but important no less for that.yes boys and frogs, THAT Kevin Phillips, ( the Political Commentator ) the guy who had authored 'the republican majority' and has recently done American Theocracy as well as Bad Money.
Buchanan gave Packer a copy of a confidential memo he wrote for Richard Nixon in 1971. ("A little raw for today," he warns Packer.) The memo is about what Buchanan and his Nixon aide colleague Kevin Phillips called "positive polarization," ways to divide the country for political advantage. Some of you will remember the key line that Buchanan ends on because it's quoted in Jonathan Schell's magnificent 1976 book, Time of Illusion. The aim, wrote Buchanan, was to "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."
[ cf Taking the Long View (URL in original) ]
What if there was still time to turn it around and allow America to be a nation again, a republic again, a leader of the 3rd World against the European Colonialists....
Ok, so it may be a bit late for the later, but what if we were to step back into the actual flow of the actual american history that was actually lived by actual americans?
This is Memorial Day Week End, it was SUPPOSE to be about Making the Memories of The ACTUAL Players a real live memory, and not merely one more excuse for one more marathon showing of some TV series about how america could have been if it had been the america that would have been freed of evil liberalism, and the sort of God Hating America Bashers who forgot to indicate in the US Constitution that we all of course accept the divinity of Dubya as the Argument From Intelligent Design Demanded....
Yes boys and otherPerKinOfQuestionAbleVotingAndContra
So there are a whole bunch of folks out there who clearly need to be taking at least More than One more look at the long run of it all....
WHY? you ask me.
Because I HATE to have to organize cover fire as we move someone up to secure the potable water...
And given my druthers, I would prefer the sort of Ideological Banging that made the Federalist And Anti-Federalist writings the very pinacle of the secularist free thinking writing that STILL carries a punch.... And with any luck, americans may want to recover parts of their history, and actually honor their 'glorious dead' - without the irrational need to just keep on making more of them...
Maybe we can step away from the other prospect of unpleasantry as the Empire Collapses - since those tend to be really Nasty Affairs... and for those who have probably never looked up, or Done The Google For Sir Oswald Mosley you may not want to visit that part of the street, as you might find unpleasant issues that will muck with the american mythologies about Winnie...
But that really is another country's set of issues on that side, and I would prefer that we could find a way to avoid, well, repeating the Anglo-French "Suez Canal" fiasco .... and a whole bunch of other bits of 'the battle for algiers' as we try to make America Merely American again...
So why not start by stepping back and taking a long look...