Failure Guaranteed

Last week I did three items on the collapse of the Republican Party in recent elections, the abandonment of bed-rock traditional/fiscal conservatism and a framework for an agenda for the future. With the debrief, the analysis and the game-plan in hand, I now ask if this could work.

First, will the Republicans recognize what went wrong and will they respond to correct those errors? My gut reaction is no. They will micro-analyze and fail to stand back and see the big picture. They will scrutinize the campaign, the “failure” to nominate a “true” conservative, and the ineffectiveness in making any of their accusations or attacks stick. They won’t stand back and evaluate the macro level. They will fail to notice their own pandering, venality and inability to express consistent principles. Hence they will not change. It is too late.

Second, even if they did take my advice, they would fail. They have lost the big battle, the one for the minds of the electorate. The problem is that they lost it thirty years ago. They lost it when the products of the misguided Vietnam draft policies that offered exemptions from service to those who took degrees and careers in public education began to filter into the schools of America. They lost it when the plethora of American local newspapers began to consolidate under the control of a small handful of mega-info companies who could control the content. They lost it when the National Education Association became a powerful lobby with appealing emotional pleas for inclusion and broadening and ethnic-studies and student-centered learning rather than emphasis on fundamental skills for self-sufficiency.

What the Republicans failed to recognize in their micro view of the political scene is that you must first clear and till the fields before you can plant the seeds. If you don’t prep the soil, your product can’t grow. Simply playing Johnny Appleseed and sowing seeds along your path won’t get you a harvestable crop. It takes an educational equivalent of Archer-Daniels-Midland to reap the big harvest. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes generations. As Mao poignantly said, “the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.”

We’ve long heard the accusations that education at all levels is skewed to the left. The universities across the country have become bastions of anti-American, socialist-focused, ethno-apologist, political action pseudo-intellectuals. Remember Ward Churchill in U Colorado? How about Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn in Chicago? The examples from the Ivy League would fill books. All of this huge industry is creating the next generation of “citizens of the world” with the proper Kumbaya attitude to make us all feel warm and fuzzy. Hold hands now and feel the power.

It didn’t happen overnight. Only the conspiracy theorists might have foreseen the pervasive dependency culture we’ve created. It extends even into people who superficially profess to be conservative. Look around you. Talk to people and ask them questions. Who did 9/11? Who is the guilty party in Gaza? Why does oil cost fluctuate? What, really, is the minimum wage about? Or, simply ask the most basic and telling question of them all:

“WHAT IS THE PROPER ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA?”

Everyone wants government to fix the problems. Government should make it right. Government should bail us out. Government should provide us healthcare. Government should keep corporate CEOs from making “too much” money. Government should give us low oil prices. Government should cure cancer. Government should solve (newest terminology) the “Climate Crisis.”

That has never been what the phrase, “promote the general welfare” meant.