Everything is worse, except it isn’t

There is a tendency to doomism that annoys me and keeps getting on my nerves. Partly because so many of us who are getting older tend to paint the past in beautiful colors of what we wish it had been, rather than what it was.

There was a post at my friend Kim Du Toit’s blog, and I shared it at insty with something like “This is true, but we have just started to fight back and we have a chance to win this.” Blame it on my having been on the road, and being very tired (road construction and such made this trip almost as difficult as when we used to fly and get routed over half the country) because the post is also not true. I mean, it is, in the sense that our schools have been working overtime on socialist indoctrination, but at the same time they’ve been getting more obvious and therefore easier to fight.

The post is this: Parallel Thinking

And the gist of it is that this isn’t the country of Reagan any longer, because both parties have been converging towards socialism and we’re all doomed. DOOMED I say.

To which I say HOGWASH.

Is there some soft, stupid economics thinking in our ranks. Oh, my dear. When President Trump talks about how he needs to control the oil companies and keeps them from taking “excessive profits” I want to ask him to sit down and let the businessman who actually knows business stand up.

Yes, of course there is a lot of soft socialism in economic thinking and also a lot of “Let the government do it.”

It is the nature of government to run to authoritarian and anti-business solutions. Sure.

I’m not disputing that there’s a lot of stupidity in the nation’s two parties, or that they don’t converge in bizarre and alarming ways.

What I’m saying is: SO HAS IT EVER BEEN. THE DIFFERENCE IS NOW WE THE PEOPLE HAVE A MILLION BULLHORNS TO FIGHT BACK.

Look, popular ideas of the time are popular ideas of the time. No matter how stupid, both parties fall in with bullshit like “progressivist” (meaning the government led “progress”) ideas (We had progressive Democrat AND Republican presidents) and eugenics, and handling the mental health crisis by abolishing madhouses, and– It could go on and on. It is human — and remember people from both parties attend the same school system and all used to read more or less the same newspapers or listen to the same news — to have a bunch of stupid ideas that are the ideas of your time.

And the past — I tell you again and again — wasn’t some golden era of liberty. Sure, sure, both Woodrow Wilson and FDR who in great measure forged these our shackles, were democrats, but a lot of the nonsense they engaged in was supported by Republicans at the time. They could not have done it otherwise. A lot of the opposition and a lot of the people might have disagreed with the specifics, but thought it was right and proper for government to have that level of control.

And people, listen, that we didn’t drop into full communism was probably just a quirk of FDR getting so fascinated by WWII that he let his claws off the throat of the economy. Would it have stuck? Would there have been another American Revolution? I can’t tell and neither can you, but I’m glad I’m not in that time line.

The thing is a lot of that nonsense, from price controls, tot he government sticking its nose into the economic life and stealing the breath of commerce stayed on, until Reagan.

It has been mentioned to me that Maggie Thatcher started the removal of such shackles before Reagan. Perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to her back then, since the UK was a foreign country, but the US was always my focus of interest, even while I was Portuguese. But I DO remember the shock in in Europe when Reagan started dismantling the edifice of government interference in the economy that was still considered absolutely indisputably right in Europe. Oh, the rending of garments and pouring of ashes on heads. America was going to destroy itself, they said gleefully. Weirdly, the boom afterwards was treated as completely unrelated and having nothing to do with this freeing. (Bah.)

Look, I don’t take anything away from Reagan. In a way he did amazing work, and freed us to an extent that was AT THE TIME undreamed of.

But — and I want to make this very clear — he was working against what we now consider to be LEFTIST consensus of both parties. At the time it was just considered “normative” and “sane.” And oh, yeah “the way things are done.”

Reagan broke that and mind you, to a great extent the left has been on the run ever since. Yesterday on Twitter someone told me there haven’t been Marxists since the eighties, that Marxism was completely discredited. I don’t know where he is, I didn’t look, but I assume it’s a parallel world.

Sure, the Marxist economic measures and ideals were proven wrong and cast down and then went underneath, insidiously, into education, into activism — paid for by USAID, mostly — into studies and papers and into all sorts of crap, till people are learning “Marxist literary analysis” which is kind of like learning “blue fish red fish literary analysis” for all the grip it has on the real world.

Except this stuff has real effects. Combined with maleducation, there’s an entire generation parroting “socialism” and “Marxism” who have no idea how stupid and how ridiculous it is.

And this seems to make it be “everywhere.” It’s not. It’s on the run. It’s a rump movement. It will not stand.

No, this is not the country of Reagan. It is the one he seeded. it’s grown from that. There is no way Reagan could have defunded USAID (which might not have been so egregious before Clinton and Obama, but I suspect always was) or sent DOGE into the bowels of the deep state. The deep state, and the “uniparty” won a victory against Reagan on immigration too, that I don’t think they could carry now.

So, are things better or worse?

Yes. They are better in that the victories of Reagan gave us a place to stand and fight against the statists. They are better because we’re no longer subjected to the overwhelming megaphone of main stream media and each have our little channels to fight back. They’re little but there’s a lot of them. It’s better because the “experts” have scored a own goal with covidiocy and made it possible for us to question their “benevolent” rule.

It is worse because we have entire generations of people indoctrinated into the idea that socialism will give them everything they want. And we have a vast number of unassimilated foreigners among us.

So?

You want the perfect country? That was sometime before the thing with the serpent and the apple.

Here in the real world, it is the duty of people of good will — and working brains — to fight the “current thing” that enthralls all sides of our political spectrum and which would, to allude to kipling, deliver us bound to our foes.

We’ve escaped the traps of the past, with varying degree of injury and sometimes by the skin of our teeth. The fight goes on.

Government we must have, and government will always be the enemy of individual liberty.

That’s the tension in which we must exist. And the fight isn’t done. It will never be done. The fight isn’t easy. It will never be easy.

But it is not lost, and it is not worse than the fight our ancestors fought.

Now we have more and better ways to fight back (and not just the ultimate, terrible, fourth box way.)

Stop lamenting and go use them.