This article illustrates a comment I made to Ron Paul at last weekend’s Jekyll Island conference. He had said that defenders of the existing system were on the “defensive.” I suggested to him that they weren’t defensive, but desperate. “Conservatism” is on its way out, primarily because it does not have a principled base upon which to stand. Thanks to the Buckleys, et al., their position was essentially “anti-communist,” or, more precisely, “anti-Soviet.” When that monster went away, they had nothing left upon which to stand except power for the sake of having power.
I believe there is a major transformation in thinking taking place; that the “libertarian/anarchist” position is the only one I have seen that appeals to the minds of thoughtful, intelligent people (I say this not just to toot our own horn). As this man’s article reflects — along with so many others, be they from the Left or Right — most of those whose attachments to the dying order are threatened, can do little more than react with name-calling, sloganeering, and flag-waving. The more clever statists will engage in the kind of fear-mongering that people will accept as a justification for extending more power to the state. But, as “climate change,” “mad-cow disease,” “swine flu,” “terrorism,” etc., were each trotted out as the bogeyman du jour for public consumption — only to be refuted by what the political establishment most fears (i.e., evidence) — the statists are discovering, like the modern version of the “big, bad wolf,” that the “little red riding hoods” are not as easy to bamboozle as they used to be. People can get their minds into the substance of what Ron Paul and the rest of us are saying; and that trying to dismiss the supporters of change as “lesbian, Nazi hookers abducted by aliens” appeals only to the philosophically and morally bankrupt.
In the short run, all of this is annoying; in the long run it shows a system in its death throes. Such people remind me of terminally-ill dowagers who lie on their death-beds counting their silver spoons and suspecting their children of evil intentions.
