Presidential Election - Post Mortem IV

#6 replies to #4. Recall that #6 is our lone "liberal." It's only fair to give him the last word. 

I think #4 hit the mark. But he fails to acknowledge that he and his kind are part of the problem. White flight to the suburbs similar to red / blue state migration in which people move to areas so they can be near people that think and act like them has insulated people from really having to engage in debate with other people with differing views. Instead of being an example for minorities,  low-income people, and others, the middle and upper middle class have instead established their own exclusive hubs where outsiders with different social mores feel alienated. Instead of sulking about how dumb and gullible the overall population is becoming, maybe the right should take real action and send their kids to urban public schools, gentrify neighborhoods in transition, and participate in urban renewal efforts. But all we see from the the middle and upper middle classes liberal or conservative is an emphasis on the individual with less and less regard for the community. The result is already visible at DISD*. Largely abandoned by middle class families, DISD is left mostly with kids that come from uninterested parents and broken homes which makes it impossible to get good results. Couple that with a disinterest in local schools from an increasing number of singles in the community and the result is inevitable failure. If the right wants to lead nationally, they better start trying to lead locally in the big population centers.  Otherwise, the right is doomed to be a minority. And while they may be comfortable in their little "gardens," they won't be able to escape state and national policies that will affect them too.

#6  

    

*Dallas Independent School District 

#4 opines.

Election Post Mortem

Friday, November 09, 2012

12:33 PM

Very well said, #7. You basically described everything I would have said, and then some.   I'm always impressed that anyone can arrive at their own conservative opinion on matters in spite of the massive and accelerating onslaught of liberal culture and education that engulfs our younger generations.  It is difficult for our parents to understand just how extensive the rot in our institutions have become, that to think differently in any way from what one has been taught or exposed to in the media  should be considered almost miraculous.  Add to the fact that many of us work in professions or public institutions where the liberal mindset is dominant and intolerant of debate, and it's amazing that we've maintained our own sanity. 

As #7 and myself can attest, what's been going on in our schools growing up and what our cohorts have been consuming in media has now finally come home to roost in this election. Young people have been taught to think emotionally, praise narcissism as a noble act of being 'genuine' or 'real', and to be celebrated for just simply being instead of accomplishing something.  It's about you're identity, and who you can identify with, which means race and ethnicity matters more than actually solving problems and making everyone better off.  Voting thus becomes about who the candidate appears to you, rather than if he can actually deliver the goods with any competency.  The results of that kind of thinking can be clearly seen among the most destitute voting precincts  in this country:  crime-ridden, uneducated, vulnerable to outside shocks, and pretty much uncivilized. Look at Detroit, South-side Chicago, D.C., the Philadelphia wards, and South Dallas. They vote for people who look and act "like them" time and again, only for them to continue to be worse off and to be at the wrong end of the widening gulf of inequality.  The patronage system easily takes root among such infantile populations, where self-proclaimed "champions of the poor" turn their constituencies out to the polls (with a lot fraud involved) and then get their cut of the spoils from the party leadership, and their constituencies get some sort of meaningless freebie that often shackles them to a life of penury.  Then, when the occasional storm or hurricanes plows through, it is those very same people who wait around helplessly for someone else to rescue them, since they have never know how to do it themselves (if they did, they wouldn't be poor in the first place.)  These people are persuaded by symbols, and simple narratives that blame the other.  Their ranks continue to grow, and now they are making their impact felt on national elections.

I agree with Papa that the U.S. is sliding inevitably in decline, as all great civilizations at some point must, simply because human nature succumbs to its primordial flaws at some point.  The American constitutional republic was founded on a reserve of the best enlightenment human virtues, which can only last so long before the sin of envy takes over. Class warfare, making fun of a candidate's professional success , accusing him of not caring because he'd rather not talk about it out of personal modesty (even if he donates 40% of his income to tax and charities)--it's all influenced by envy, and even the most intelligent people in our own forum are prone to thinking enviously.  Only they rationalize their envy by claiming that it's driven by their own personal compassion. Sure, whatever.  You're only giving the disadvantaged even fewer advantages by giving them some small tangible benefit while robbing them of their ability to take care of themselves.  And then you go back to your own cushy life with your cushy friends talking what a great person you are because of your compassion.  I've seen this time and again with many of the people of gotten to know in my life, and it makes it so difficult to want to care about them all that much.

As my wife can attest, I don’t like Facebook much anymore, since I'm constantly appalled by my so called 'friends' spouting things that are so contemptuous of all the things that I value in my life.  I've shut the TV off most nights, since most shows have ceased to entertain  so that they can instead spend more time instructing us on this topic or that.  Nothing's funny, everything seems contrived when I turn the TV on.  The prevalence of politics in our media has gotten so nauseating that I can only watch the most boring and neutral stuff, even if it's completely unimportant (sports, home improvement shows).

Papa is totally justified in his concern for the fate of his kids and grandkids as the U.S. embarks on its road to some form of statism. Life in general won't be easier than for previous generations, but the pain will not be inflicted equally among all people.   Those that are smart enough to take advantage of the system will thrive, never mind the obstacles put in the way.  For these people, obstacles for others are their safeguards.  Those that have exceptionally marketable skills in the knowledge economy will do fine, since their value in the global marketplace is so high that they can easily afford to pay whatever taxes coming their way.  They have earned the luxury of thinking abstractly, and think little about imposing their idealism on others who are not as smart.  They are what Joel Kotkin calls the new clerisy, with a whole class who in their relative material comfort consider their primary role as championing a certain kind of social morality consisting of a cocktail of environmentalism, social justice, sexual rights, abortion, and chiding those who choose not to follow because it damages their livelihood.  They are less and less entrepreneurial, since they tend to live by the rule that as long as they follow everything they are told, go to the right school and follow the right career path, they will be awarded with bountiful riches and prestige (sounds kind of like France).

Your kids are smart, and work in the knowledge businesses that will keep them in demand. Your grandkids will do fine, though they will be paying a lot more taxes, and hopefully they will also join the upper ranks of the knowledge economy and they will  have been nurtured by stable and educated families, something that is no longer a given these days for much of the working classes. Although we would like to expose our kids to people of all walks of life, how we live now and how we will live in the future makes it more difficult.  Simply put, the smart and not so smart have been sorting themselves away from each other over the years at an accelerating rate, and nowadays it is easy to live one's entire life among people very much  like themselves, with nary a contact with anyone outside of this bubble.  Charles Murray's Coming Apart: the State of White America makes this very clear.  Social cohesion has continued to fracture along cognitive lines (read Murray's Bell Curve, and right now, a new kind of aristocracy is ascendant, while our dependent serf population continues to expand.  Enguerrand is right, this growing class of mindless serfs constitute the new "silent majority", even as their lot in life continues to decline (African Americans) or  plateau (Hispanics), especially under the economically clueless leadership of Obama.

Following the political developments of the day has become too depressing, even stressful, and it convinces me that I should tend to my own garden instead.  I am more engaged on what goes on in my community, be it at city hall, the church, and my kids' schools. I continue to do things with my local professional group, where my contributions are valued and I have more control over the outcome I  favor.   I try to find situations where political partisanship is off limits, and instead talk or do things that anybody could agree on (that's why I don't like to talk politics at the dinner table much). I find more fulfillment in my creative endeavors than who wins this or that political race (though it's always a good day when a Republican wins a seat somewhere, and I'm grateful to live in a place that is well governed by people who agree with me, even if most of them will never see eye to eye on matters relating to art). And that's the lesson for me in all of this: though the majority of the nation may vote according to their self-serving interests, as long as I live according to "conservative virtues", I'll be more content and better off than those people anyway.