(Warning: This is an Überpost. Get a beverage and get comfortable. Maybe use the bathroom first.)
“Political tags such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” – R.A. Heinlein
So, we just had the mid-term elections, and regardless of how you feel about it how it was accomplished, the Left took the prize. Prizes. Pretty much all of them. Things are going to suck the next couple of years, and then… we’ll see what happens.
But the Right didn’t throw a tantrum. No screaming into the void, no rioting, no looting, no arson, no property damage. We’re just hunkering down waiting for the inevitable fallout.
We’re good at waiting. We have so much experience at it. Almost as much experience as we have at being disappointed by Republicans.
I’ve been writing about politics for well over twenty years at this point. I’m coming up on the 24th anniversary of this blog in another six months. I’ve taken the time to go back and re-read some of the posts and comments here while I was looking for specific quotes and excerpts, because this election has triggered me. I’m 64, about to turn 65. I didn’t really start waking up politically until I was 32 years old. Do the math.
I’m still two full years away from being able to collect on all that Social Security I paid into over the last five decades. Because of my health and the status of that particular Ponzi scheme, I know I’ll never see even a significant fraction of what I paid in, but I intend to collect what I can while I can. Point is, what’s coming politically isn’t going to have too much of an effect on me. (Unless, of course, it does.) One way or another, I’ll be dead before it hits full stride. I posted on Facebook back in 2019, “I used to think I’d die before 65 – and I damned near did it at 56, but now I think I’m going to live long enough to watch Western Civilization descending into something that makes the Great Depression look like a trip to Disneyworld, complete with resurgent lethal infectious diseases, ethnic conflict, mass starvation, the whole enchilada. Who needs a zombie apocalypse when we have an insane population?” Prophetic, huh?
It will affect my grandchildren, currently 26 and 27 years old. My grandson just signed up for the U.S. Army. He reports for Basic in February for a six-year stint. I hope it’s not a mistake. My granddaughter is a public school teacher, who supplements her meager income by being an assistant manager for a Subway franchise in her copious spare time. (That’s sarcasm.)
I’m concerned for them because that which cannot continue forever, won’t, and what we have in this country is an unbridgeable ideological divide. As another blogger put it many years ago,
This is a conflict of ideologies…
The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.
At the moment, that contingent is embodied most virulently by the “American” Left. This is the movement that still sees the enslavement and “re-education” of hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam, and the bones of millions used as fertilizer in Cambodia as a victory. This is the movement that sees suicide bombers as Minute Men, and sees the removal of a brutal murder and rape machine from power as totalitarianism. This is the movement that sees legitimately losing an election as the imposition of a police state. This is the movement that believes in seizing private property as “common good”. That celebrates Che Guevara as a hero. The movement who’s highest representatives talk blithely about taking away your money and limiting your access to your own homestead for your own good. The movement of disarmament.
The movement of the boot across the throat.
Think about it. When was the last time that you were able to engage in anything that resembled a discussion with someone of the Leftist persuasion? Were able to have an argument that was based on the premise that one of you was wrong, rather than being painted as Evil just because you disagreed?
That was from 2004, long before Trump was on the scene. He was talking about the re-election of George Walker Bush. (Remember Bushitler?) Read the whole post, but wait until you’ve finished this one. Nothing’s changed for the better.
Former Virginia State Delegate Nick Freitas reiterated this point recently:
Now that the Left has won majorities in the House and Senate, and will most likely control a majority of the State governorships and who knows how many Attorneys General, their agenda will be out in the open. I think over the next two years their mask, never too tight to begin with, will fully drop.
The Left is angry.
Senator Melissa Slotkin wants to prosecute Trump staffers as a warning to anyone who supports Trump.
This woman, Shelley Kates Headen, won her North Carolina state government race. Here she is standing in front of a couple of the crematoria ovens at Auschwitz, smiling:
Breitbart claims that what she actually said in the Facebook post was: “Visiting Dauchau Concentration Camp in Germany… This is where Trump supporters belong.”
Keeping in theme, Leftwing Journalist (but I repeat myself) Amanda Marcotte:
She’s mild by comparison, but I wonder what “de-Nazification” plan she envisions? Does it involve creamatoriums? But wait! There’s more! Check out these harpies:
This guy wants to arrest Elon Musk and put him to death:
He went so far as to brag about taking a crap in the passenger seat of his personally-owned Tesla before selling it. He’s a college professor at New York University. And if you want to spend some time on X (or if you have the stomach for it, Bluesky) you can find hundreds of people calling for the deaths of Trump supporters, the nationalization of all of Elon’s businesses, prosecution (or worse) of anyone who ever bought a MAGA hat, etc.
You know: tolerance, inclusivity, understanding.
Of course there’s talk, once again, about Civil War. I’ve written about it a lot, myself, over the years. It may happen. ¯\(ツ)/¯ It won’t work, not like people hope it will. It won’t “restore the nation,” it will end it. Whatever remains will in no way resemble our Constitutional Republic. The reason?
Philosophy.
Billy Beck, many years ago explained.
Here is the central problem surrounding what you people are talking about:
There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy underpinning it. Everybody’s pissed off, but you all have your varying degrees of what you’ll settle for.
Read that link, all the way to the end.
Two hundred and fifty years ago when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they had a common underpinning philosophy, one shared with a significant plurality of the population. To be sure, they didn’t all walk in lockstep about everything, but the basics had been laid out the previous year by Thomas Paine in his bestselling Common Sense, and expressed well in the Declaration. Everyone knew why they were fighting, and agreed with the necessity. Everyone understood what losing meant. And while they weren’t sure what winning would entail, they were hopeful that the results would be positive for the new nation.
We no longer have that. Ayn Rand in her 1974 speech to the graduating class of West Point explained the necessity of having a coherent, logical personal philosophy, first by explaining what philosophy is:
Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible.
She goes on to explain the four branches of Philosophy:
• Metaphysics – the study of existence.
• Epistemology – the theory of knowledge, which studies the means of cognition.
These are the theoretical branches that lead to the practical applications:
• Ethics – the code of values that define an individual’s choices and actions in the world, and in relation to other people.
• Politics – the definition of the principles of a social system, in short, how societies should be organized and governed.
Ethics are the rules of a society, what is and isn’t acceptable individual behavior both towards members of that society, and those outside it. If you haven’t noticed, the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics of Western society have been under constant assault for several decades now and have all but vanished from sight.
It’s not like the Other Side has a cohesive, logical philosophy, either, but what they do have is a shared ideology. What’s the difference? Philosophy, again, is a way of understanding the world and how it works. Ideology is a system of beliefs about how the world should be. A coherent, logical philosophy recognizes the world as it is, accepts it and works with its restrictions. It produces an ideology based on reality. But ideology in general? It doesn’t matter if it’s completely bass-ackward from reality. Rand explained:
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational conviction–or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.
But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define you philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation–or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
The Founders had a philosophy that worked, that inspired ideals like “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The Founders thought all that self-evident, but no one before them had ever set out to build a government based on it. Our ideological opponents on the other hand?
This is why Socialism fails, every time. Because no matter how beautiful that idea is, it’s false. Human beings don’t think that way. They never have, they never will, and any philosophy based on that false idea will fail. It produces “logic” like this:
Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus – no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil. – Matt Walsh
Even Karl Marx understood that a new type of human was needed to make his ideology work, he just thought that they would be created by that system. When that didn’t happen after the 1917 Russian Revolution, an entire school was created in 1923 to understand why: The “Institute for Social Research,” later referred to as “The Frankfurt School” when it relocated from Frankfurt, Germany to Columbia University in New York in 1935 (ironically enough, in order to escape the Nazis). The conclusion they drew was that The New Soviet Man was a prerequisite for Socialism, and they set out to change Western Culture to create him. @Ambre_Emeraude is an example of their efforts.
The Frankfurt School has been successful. Not in creating New Soviet Men, but in what Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov described as “de-moralizing” the West.
That was in 1984, and he said it had already been in operation for three generations – 45+ years. If you haven’t seen the entire interview, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Forty years further on, and we have what happened Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026.
So the Left has a shared ideology. I wrote about it extensively in my 2017 post The Death of Civility. Please do read that, but I want to excerpt a piece of it here. A since-removed Reddit essay was published shortly after the 2016 election, titled “Why Hollywood is really freaking out over Trump.” I made this a Quote of the Day:
Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it’s got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.
Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.
The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don’t go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you’re on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.
Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel’s voice whispering, “You’re right, you’re better, you’re winning.”
It’s literally true. For the Left, Politics is their religion, and Power is their God. They are the people Heinlein warned about – the ones who want people to be controlled, and more precisely, they’re the ones who want to do the controlling. Heinlein expanded on this a little later in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: “Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.” But in that “Why Hollywood is freaking out” piece, the author continued:
Red Conservativism is a business, selling a set of political products. They don’t make you feel good, they don’t appeal to your morality or your spiritual sense of self, but sometimes you really NEED one of their core products like security, jobs, or national defense. Their appeals to “freedom” and “family values” ring hollow these days, but when people are flying planes into buildings, you need a strong member of Conservatism, Inc. in the big chair.
And when it came down to the things that really mattered – welfare, Medicare, Social Security, and foreign policy, you knew Red Team couldn’t really do anything Blue Team didn’t approve of, or the Blue faithful would kick them out of office next time.
But Donald Trump didn’t sign that contract. And Donald Trump didn’t win by selling the same old conservative products. Donald Trump started his own religion, and he won a religious victory.
The Blue Church is panicking because they’ve just witnessed the birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian crap they defeated back in the ’60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.
For the first time in decades, voters explicitly rejected the Blue Church, defying hours of daily cultural programming, years of indoctrination from the schools, and dozens of explicit warnings from HR.
We’ve been trained since childhood to obey the pretty people on TV, but for the first time in decades, that didn’t work.
Donald Trump won because flyover America wants their culture back, and Blue Team has not been rejected like that before.
The younger ones have grown up in an environment where Blue Faith assumptions cannot even be questioned, except anonymously by the bad kids on Twitter.
But now the bad kids are getting bolder, posting funny memes that make you laugh even though John Oliver would not approve, like passing crude dirty pictures under the table in Sunday School.
Meryl Streep is panicking because for the first time voters have rejected HER, and everything her faith has taught her to believe.
There is a new faith rising on the right, not an explicit religious faith like long-dead Christianity, but a wicked kind of counterculture movement. We laughed at the hippies in 1968, but by 1978 they were teaching in classrooms and sitting behind school administrator desks.
Where will the hippies of 2016 be sitting after eight years of Trump?
Well, we have that answer now: carrying out a religious war. Unfortunately the Red Church didn’t begat an equally dedicated following. Because the Red Church has to draw from the OTHER group Heinlein mentioned – the ones that just want to be left alone.
One of the readers of this blog, Oren Litwin, left a comment long ago:
If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.
Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.
This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.
Read the comments in that link.
The aforementioned Billy Beck:
Carol Ann Rand, of the Georgia Libertarian Party, once pointed out to me that the commies have it all over us when it comes to organization, because they’re the ones who are built for “unity”. “Trying to organize libertarians,” she said, “is like trying to herd cats.”
Normally I would have said that organizing Leftists and Muslims would have been the same, but the Muslims have successfully (albeit temporarily) accomplished it. Continuing:
(O)nce each individual inclined to these affairs properly understood the importance of clean concepts, there would be no “leadership” required. This is the point to which I alluded with my remark about why people don’t “lead themselves”. The very first task is to think clearly, and this simply is not happening. However, it’s the crucial difference between — in the apt comparison — a “herd” and a “pack”. This whole issue is what led Ayn Rand to conclude: “It’s earlier than you think.” She was pointing out that the intellectual ground-work simply was not in place.
There simply isn’t anything to “lead”, now. But everybody in the joint thinks they know how to do it.
I’m not going to rehash the “How the Left has hijacked Public Education” discussion, but “Public Education” wasn’t really a thing prior to about 1900. Prior to that time, schools taught children how to think. Not what to think, but what thinking actually is: the collection, collation and analysis of information in order to draw conclusions, form hypotheses and test them against reality. They were taught logic, rhetoric (for those in Rio Lindo, “The art or study of using language effectively and persuasively”), and debate (where debate meant “To engage in argument by discussing opposing points.”) Not THIS. Instead, the last 100 years have produced this:
I’ve harped on this repeatedly: The Department of Education in 2025 released statistics that Gallup announced meant that 54% of the population of the U.S. between 16 and 74 years of age reads below a sixth-grade level. CAN they collect, collate, and analyze information? Much less use it to build a philosophy that isn’t “a grab-bag of notions snatched at random,” a “junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance“? This is what we are stuck dealing with.
Some can, obviously. Charlie Kirk had a logical, fact-based philosophy he used to expose the illogical ideologies of the Left on campuses across the country. He was killed for it. Thomas Sowell overcame his attraction to Socialism after being exposed to reality, and his writings have helped many do the same. Like this guy:
It’s safer for them if the Proletariat can’t educate themselves. The United Kingdom’s “counter-radicalisation and counterterrorism initiative” PREVENT – the people who brought you “Amelia,” advised that reading The Lord of the Rings, 1984, Brave New World, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Hobbe’s Leviathan and other authors might lead to Right-wing radicalization. I doubt they’ll ever allow Thomas Sowell into the country. Now that the Democrats control the House and Senate, he might get ejected from this one.
From Michael Smith’s recent Substack post “The King in the North“:
- The Democrat Party has evolved (devolved?) to become nothing short of authoritarians who believe the ends justify the means. This is who they are – believe them when they show you.
- Every claim they lodged against Republicans, they are. The apparently want to fight “fascism” with a strong dose of murderous and demonic authoritarianism.
- They unironically hold “No Kings” protests while harboring the idea they have a divine right to rule.
- They will ally with any belief or faction that advances their goals, even if it puts them in the crosshairs of the belief or faction.
- They show their love and fealty for the Constitution of the United States of America by seeking to destroy it.
- They didn’t go after people after J6 because they were insurrectionists, they went after them because the left can’t allow dissent to exist.
- While decrying the weaponization of government, their first promised acts are to weaponize government.
- The long and short of it is that Democrats aren’t interested in eliminating policy, they aim to eliminate people.
And the “Leave us Alone” faction can’t seem to stop them because we don’t have a common, unifying philosophy.
This list is similar to the one Thomas Jefferson spelled out in The Declaration. I used to think that what the country needed was an updated version of Paine’s Common Sense, but in Paine’s day 90% of the population was literate. In today’s TL;DR world, it wouldn’t have a chance. (If you’ve gotten this far, you’re in the 1% of people who can still read and think. And you’re guilty of WrongThink.)
Some internet wag observed, “We used to believe that stupidity was due to lack of information. The Internet proved that wasn’t it.” No, it wasn’t. The problem is, we stopped educating our kids and trained them instead. And now they’re cannon fodder for the Left. If you can’t read, thinking is a whole lot harder. And if you’re never challenged to think, well, that muscle atrophies.
Who needs philosophy? Western civilization does. But it was the first thing targeted by our ideological opposition, all the way back in the 1920’s. And Civil War won’t bring it back.