I’ve been casting about for days now trying to find a way to excerpt this wide-ranging, lengthy, and thoughtful tour de force from Sido and still do it justice. Best I could come up with was just to dive right in and get to swimming.

This post is something I started working on prior to the 2020 election which seems like a eternity ago, back when the outcome of that “election” was still theoretically in doubt. As we approached the “election” I could see the handwriting was on the wall and that Trump was going to “lose”, one way or the other. Gone would be even the pretense of a two-party system and I still believe that. The Afghanistan debacle, raging inflation, executive overreach, all of that stuff that is getting /ourguys/ into a frenzy right now? It will be forgotten by the 2022 election. My prediction right now is for some modest gains for the Dems in the House and likely a seat or two flipping in the Senate. The GOP has 20 Senate seats to protect in 2022 and the Dems only have 14. If the Left does grab enough to make a more solid majority, you can kiss the filibuster goodbye and that will mean the overreach and expansion we are seeing now will be recalled as the days of small government. 

With Trump gone, flawed and generally useless as he was, there is basically no one at the national or even state level who will represent heritage Americans. Perhaps we will receive the occasional platitudes but real representation? Not anymore. What passes for “conservative” politics in the future will be people like Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio and Richard Grennell. A far cry from the days of Goldwater and Buchanan. What will that look like and what will that mean for people like me and other White working and middle class Americans, the people who still make up the backbone of America but who are also resisting the push toward a new, comprehensive globalism? Already we are seeing the Republican establishment declaring that what is needed is more pandering to minorities, especially mestizos, once again leaving White voters taken for granted. We have no home and we have no friends.

What this means simply is that we will be political dissidents, opposed by and oppressed by the ruling class and without representation or even a voice on the national political stage. That might suck for a while but it isn’t all bad as there is a long and honorable tradition of political dissent throughout human history.

The thing that really brought me up short was the realization that yes, the aforementioned Haley, Rubio, et al are indeed a quite far cry from Goldwater and Buchanan—a much farther cry than Goldwater and Buchanan were from Washington, Jefferson, Adams, et al. One doesn’t have to expend a whole lot of what Heinlein liked to call “skull sweat” to see that this, in contrast to the usual order of things, is a distinction with one HELL of a difference.

From the Founding era of the late 1700s straight through to the heyday of Barry Goldwater in the late 1960s—and to a certain extent even up to the apogee of Buchanan’s career as a conservative office-seeker, a span of well over two centuries—there was still a readily identifiable philosophical thread connecting the generations.

But then, somehow, over the course of only two decades (in Buchanan’s case, a couple more than that in Goldwater’s, more or less), the pace of conservative (de)evolution kicked into high gear and slammed the pedal to the floor: self-styled “conservative” leadership underwent a bizarre transmogrification which created a new generation of pseudoconservatives which was wholly unrecognizable to those that had preceded it—alien creatures that not only the Founders but also Goldwater and Buchanan would find intellectually repugnant, nothing but a pale, shambolic imposture of its once-proud line.

That says a hell of a lot, not a word of it flattering to our present-day Lions of Constitutional Conservatism (a-HENH!)™. At any rate, be sure to read all of Arthur’s magnum opus; whichever name we dispossessed and disgusted Americans decide to adopt for ourselves, I think you’ll find the piece well worth your while.

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