Month: February 2019

Northam Non-troversy and Abortion

The Portly Politico11 Comments

I’m going to be honest here:  I do not care about Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s old yearbook photograph, in which he’s either in blackface or wearing a Klan hood.  I don’t support or endorse doing either of those outfits, but how does a photograph of a goofy costume from over thirty years ago affect the man’s ability to do his job now?  It’s not as though he has a track record of racist remarks that might bias his enforcement of Virginia’s laws against black, Jewish, or Catholic Virginians.

The problem with progressivism is that it eats its own with gusto, as the socially-acceptable behavior of yesteryear becomes the always-forbidden “hate” of today.  It was certainly in poor taste to wear blackface in the 1980s, but, give me a break.  When does the statute of limitations on poor decisions expire?  Are we allowed to never commit a mistake if we want to serve in public office?

What demonstrates how truly evil the Left is is that they don’t care about Northam’s endorsement, just a little over a week ago, of infanticide.  When asked in a radio interview what should be down with a child born alive that the mother initially wanted aborted, Northam replied that the mother and at least two physicians should consult about the baby’s fate while the baby was “kept comfortable.”

Where are the anguished cries about that?  Northam wearing a Klan hood to a beer bash in the 80s didn’t cost any black people their jobs or their lives.  Abortion kills them by the tens of thousands every year.

Pat Buchanan—ever-brilliant, ever-prescient and -insightful—has a piece exploring the implications of the Northam non-troversy that I highly recommend you read.  A representative excerpt:

We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world.

Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them.

And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.

America will pay for its generations of infanticide if we don’t end it, and soon.  God is just, and delivers His judgment with swiftness and ferocity after long forbearance.  One reason the Philistines were destroyed was because of their worship of Baal, which required sacrificing babies.  Similarly, the Carthaginians were crushed, in part, because of their child sacrifices.

We’re sacrificing babies to the altar of progressive politics and the ethos of “if it feels good, do it—and don’t worry about the consequences.”  I can at least appreciate the hedonist who accepts the bad with the good of his lifestyle—say, the smoker who acknowledges it’s bad for him, but he enjoys doing it anyway.  But what kind of monster snuffs out a human life for convenience?

Northam needn’t resign over a picture.  But he and other Democrats should fall on their knees in repentance over their endorsement of the mass murder of innocents.

TBT: The Alabama Special Election, Principles, and Persecution

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Back in 2017, I was enthusiastic about the candidacy of Judge Roy Moore as he ran for US Senate in a special election in Alabama.  Moore is a darling of social conservatives because of his willingness to challenge flawed higher court rulings on the establishment of religion.  He famously refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama State Supreme Court in defiance of a federal court ruling, and was elected back to the bench after being removed for his defiance.

I relished the idea of this bumptious, no-nonsense Christian in the US Senate, and after he won the Republican nomination in a heated campaign against Establishment GOP favorite Luther Strange, I figured he would coast to an easy win.

Then, of course, the Left brought out the knives, and heretofore unspoken allegations of sexual misconduct from the murky past surfaced.  Remember, Moore ran in multiple races, often as a controversial and high-profile figure, without any of these allegations ever surfacing.  What made this race different?

In this piece from December 2017, I argue that Moore was railroaded, and that while some of the stories of his age-disparate relationships with teenage girls were likely true, they all seemed relatively benign given the times (the swingin’ 1970s).  My basic takeaway was, and is, this:  the worst of the allegations against Moore also was the most incongruous from others; Moore was super respectful to the other girls who mention dating him; and several of the girls were eager to date a successful, older attorney.  Essentially, it’s highly unlikely he did anything illegal or wrong; he was just a dude who liked dating girls in their late teens.  That’s a big unusual, but he wasn’t breaking any laws at the time.

With the modern Left, though, yesterday’s unorthodox peccadilloes become today’s wicked heresies (and vice-versa).  That Moore is a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian made him an even more appealing target for character assassination.  The noodle-wristed hand-wringers of Conservatism, Inc., were all too willing to fall over themselves proving to the Left that they, too, were good guys with their denunciations of Moore.

Here, then, is 2017’s “The Alabama Special Election, Principles, and Persecution“:

The campaign of Alabama Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore is reeling after allegations that, in the 1970s and 1980s, Moore dated several teenage girls.  The Washington Post article that broke the news focuses on Leigh Corfman, who alleges that Moore approached her at the courthouse in Etowah County, Alabama, when she was only fourteen-years old.  After obtaining her phone number, Corfman claims Moore met with her and forced her to touch him over the underwear.

Several other women also told the Washington Post that they dated Moore while he was in his early 30s and they in their late teens.  These other women were between sixteen and eighteen (sixteen is the legal age of consent in Alabama), and report that their dates with the young deputy district attorney were respectful, involving no physical contact beyond hugging and kissing.  One of the women even said her mother was thrilled that her daughter was dating a successful attorney.

Judge Moore denied all of the allegations, but each day seems to bring some fresh revelation or twist.  He has since said that he may have dated some teenagers of legal age when he was younger.  The truth is difficult to discern, but here is what we do know:

  • Four women–all above the legal age of consent–reported that Moore was respectful (one noted that after her mother forbid her from dating an older man, their relationship ended, apparently without any further fanfare).
  • Leigh Corfman, who was fourteen at the time of the alleged groping, was the only woman accusing Moore of any explicitly illegal and illicit sexual activity.
  • Tina Johnson emerged a few days into the controversy, alleging that Moore grabbed her butt in 1991. (Link)
  • Judge Moore has been married to his wife, Kayla Moore, who is younger than him by fourteen years, for decades.  She has defended her husband fiercely in the face of these accusations.
  • Moore has run multiple local and statewide campaigns–many of them controversial–and no allegations have emerged during any of these (highly contentious) campaigns.
  • Moore is a boogeyman for the political Left, and something of a Jacksonian folk hero for the Right.  He famously refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the grounds of the Alabama Judicial Building after a federal court ruled it constituted an establishment of religion (Alan Keyes eloquently denounced that federal court order in a classic essay–and, for my students, perennial Government class assignment–entitled “On the Establishment of Religion:  What the Constitution Really Says“), leading to his removal from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003.

    He was reelected to the Alabama Supreme Court ten years later, only to be removed again in 2016 for refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s dubious decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that read into the Constitution a heretofore unwritten and unrecognized right for same-sex couples to marry.

  • Moore was favored by the Bannonite-wing of the Republican Party (if such a thing exists) in the intense Republican primary run-off battle against Senator Luther Strange, who had been appointed to fill the vacant seat after Jeff Sessions was tapped to serve as Attorney General in the Trump administration.  The Republican Establishment–notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but also President Trump–supported Strange, while Moore was cast as the “Trumpian” candidate.
Those last two points raise my eyebrows.  Here’s a man who is no stranger to (political) controversy, the consummate culture warrior in an age when every political battle seems to connect to cultural and social values.  Moore’s firm religious convictions make him evil in the eyes of progressive Democrats, and embarrassing to well-heeled, Establishment, country-club Republicans.

It’s no secret that the Washington Post endorsed Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones.  Then the Post sought out women who claim to have had encounters with Moore.  For a heavily left-leaning publication hoping to humiliate the sitting president and the Republican Party in a deep red state, the temptation to go after a popular but controversial populist figure would have to have been palpable.

The disdain of the Establishment Republicans for Moore (and, by extension, President Trump) could explain the fervor with which they have gone after Moore, calling for him to resign within mere hours of the Post‘s story breaking.  It’s as though McConnell was just waiting for something like this to cross his desk, so he and other RINOs could rush out to denounce Moore and try to twenty-three-skidoo in their preferred candidate.

It seems that Republican leadership has succumbed to the same mania for virtue-signalling that dominates the Left.  I can barely read National Review–formerly one of my favorite publications–because of its consistently noodle-wristed editorializing whenever any populist-oriented Republican speaks out of turn.  Just read David French’s off-putting essay on “creepy Christianity” here.  With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The worst of the accusations–the groping of the fourteen-year old and the incident in 1991–don’t seem to fit the pattern of the stories the other women told the Post.  I’m fully willing to concede that, based on what we’re learning now, a young Roy Moore dated some girls in their late teens.  He married a woman fourteen years his junior.  Clearly, he had a taste for younger women, but he hasn’t committed adultery, as one of his most vocal critics, Senator John McCain, did, and his relationships, by all accounts, were above-board.  He’s remained faithful–as far as we know–to his wife.

“For a heavily left-leaning publication hoping to humiliate the sitting president and the Republican Party in a deep red state, the temptation to go after a popular but controversial populist figure would have to have been palpable.”

It may seem unorthodox now–and I am certainly not advocating that thirty-two-year old men start dating sixteen-year olds!–but such age-disparate relationships were more common and socially acceptable forty years ago.  For a fuller examination of this point, I refer you to Frank J. Tipler’s piece at American Thinker; read it here.

Regardless, the Left has no logical grounds for objection.  How can a philosophical and political movement that endorses every sexual arrangement imaginable stand against legal, age-disparate, consenting relationships and maintain even a modicum of internal consistency?  Again, this is no endorsement of such relationships, but if you’re the party of transgender, bisexual, polyamorous, gay, lesbian, queer, inter-species rights, how can you draw the line here?  You’ve already run miles past it.

Ultimately, squeamish National Review-and-Establishment types are claiming the moral high ground, arguing that a US Senate seat isn’t worth sacrificing principles.  At this point, though, their haste to condemn Moore smacks of moral cowardice and political opportunism.  Are they not going to at least entertain the idea that the man is innocent, or was just a bit unorthodox in his dating habits forty years ago?  Rather than try to scuttle a still-popular candidate before he barely has a chance to defend himself, could not McConnell and other Senate Republicans attempt to reach out to the Moore campaign?  Even if he’s not your style of Republican, you could learn to work with him, rather than prome to expel him from the Senate if he wins!

This video from Stefan Molyneux (below; WARNING–NSFW) gets down to brass tacks:  preserving the Republican’s razor-thin majority in the Senate is worth showing some political backbone, rather than allowing a partial-birth abortion-supporting Democrat to snag the seat.

This election suggests that Establishment Republicans, for all their talk of decorum and principles, are sometimes little better or different than their Democratic opponents.  They don’t want a scrappy culture warrior  And despite some dire poll numbers, the accusations may not stick:  according to RCP polling, Moore was up 3 points over Jones (as of 14 November), though he has fallen to a far more dicey 0.8% lead (as of 16 November, the date this post was written).  That’s within the margin of error, though certainly not the double-digit lead Republicans want in Alabama.  More on those poll numbers, and my analysis of them, to come.

If we learn that Moore did indeed assault Leigh Cofrman, than I’ll retract my defense of him immediately.  But for now, we have no consistent pattern of bad behavior, and what appears to be some very powerful opponents arrayed against a man who has suffered professionally for his beliefs.  From where I’m sitting, Judge Moore’s treatment looks more like persecution than justice.

Best SOTU Ever

The Portly Politico5 Comments

I was wrong, as were most conservative (and some progressive) commentators:  President Trump was right to hold out for a real State of the Union Address, rather than reviving the Jeffersonian tradition of the written address.

The president’s State of the Union speech was a tour de force:  he spoke eloquently of America’s role in advancing civil and human rights; the sanctity of human life, born and unborn; the economic development of the United States in the last two years; and the crisis at the border.

It was an address that was optimistic and accurate.  Unlike most SOTU addresses, which tend to be tedious attempts to inflate small bits of good news beyond all reasonable proportions, Trump’s 2019 address described, in detail, just how great America is, and how far we’ve come in two short years.

It’s little wonder Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wanted to cancel the speech:  how do Democrats respond to that?  The first part of the speech was full of positive economic news, news that can’t be ignored or denied.  The president detailed explosive wage and job growth, including the lowest unemployment rates for black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans in history.

Beyond the economic good news—and the vow that the United States will never be a socialist country—it was a fun speech (well, it was a bit long, and dragged a smidge, but not much).  Even Democrats started getting up and dancing around at one point!  Congress sang “Happy Birthday” to a Holocaust survivor.  President Trump cut some jokes, and was clearly having a blast.  As any performer knows, if you’re having fun on stage, the people in the audience will have fun, too.

If you missed the speech, go to YouTube, shut the office door, and fire that baby up while you file TPS reports.  You won’t regret it.

The Facts on the Border Crisis

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As I’ve learned more about immigration—and especially since reading Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West—I’ve come to believe it is the defining crisis of this moment in American history.  The debate is not, as it has been in the past, primarily around how much immigration is desirable; rather, the question has morphed beyond reason into “does a wealthy nation have the right to define and enforce its own immigration laws?”

That used to be axiomatic to what it meant to be a nation:  by definition, a nation had the right to defend its borders, and—of course!—to have them!

Now, there’s a twisted logic that, because the United States has loads of wealth (and won tons of land from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, after we soundly defeated them and captured Mexico City), we somehow have a moral obligation to surrender our sovereignty to every hard-luck case in the Western Hemisphere (and beyond).

America is a melting pot, but if you dump a bunch of salt into the soup all at once, it becomes inedible—the salt takes over.

Case in point:  the aforementioned Mexican War.  That conflict had its root in the Texas Revolution, in which the Republic of Texas gained its independence in 1836.  Texas was a province of Mexico, and the Mexican government wanted to encourage settlement, so it invited Southern yanquis to move in with their slaves.

Those American settlers had two requirements:  they had to convert to Catholicism (the official state religion of Mexico), and they had to become Mexican citizens.  A handful of token conversions later, and the Texans were in.

In 1829, Mexico abolished slavery throughout its territories.  The slaveholding Texans protested; rather than face the threat of secession of its unassimilated but wealthy minority, the Mexican government relented, granting unprecedented, asymmetrical “states’ rights” to Texas.

While Mexicans resented Texas’s special treatment, everything was fine until the military dictator General Lopez de Santa Anna rose to power.  Santa Anna vowed to end Texas’s exemption from federal law.  When he moved to enforce his decree with the Mexican Army, the Texans declared independence; after their defeat at the Alamo, American volunteers flooded in to help Texas gain its independence.

The moral of the story here is clear:  a large minority of unassimilated foreigners successfully ignored the laws of their host country, before ultimately breaking off to form a short-lived nation, before annexing into the nation of their native culture.

Mexico is playing the same playbook in reverse; indeed, some Mexican radicals call the influx of unassimilated, illegal migrants into the southwestern United States the reconquista, or “reconquest.”

Death of the West is the best feature-length discussion of that process.  For a shorter, more immediate discussion of the impact of illegal alien migration, the White House has published a page of statistics about the crisis at the border: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/crisis-southern-border-urgent-ignore/

Stop screwing around—and build the wall!

The Good Populism

The Portly Politico3 Comments

I’ve been kicking around a course idea for a couple of years now:  History of Conservative Thought.  I’ll be offering the course this summer for high school students; if it “makes” (gets enough enrollment to run), I’ll have to put together a quality syllabus.  The scope of the course will essentially begin with the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, and extend to the present populist-nationalist movements in Europe and the United States.

I have a few ideas for course readings already, including Richard Weaver‘s Ideas Have Consequences and excerpts from Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose.  I also need to include some shorter readings, and I’ll probably include a couple of podcast episodes.  Of course, with only eight weeks, it’ll be a fairly focused course (if you have any recommendations for readings or possible topics, leave a comment below, or e-mail me).

We’ll see if it makes.  Regardless, one reading I will definitely include is a popular essay from New Criterion; indeed, it was their most popular essay in 2018.  The piece, “The Good Populism” by ancient historian Victor Davis Hanson, is a consideration of healthy, middle-class populist movements in the United States.

Populism—like its cousin, nationalism—suffers from a public relations problem.  Hanson argues effectively that there are different kinds of populism, and it shouldn’t, by default, be considered a bad word.  Conservatives tend to get hung up on populism as an essentially Leftist phenomenon—think corrupt Louisiana Governor Huey Long in the 1930s, or Senator Bernie Sanders or Congressbabe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today—while progressives link it to nationalism, which they perceive as inherently fascistic.

In fact, as Hanson argues, the “good” populism is the populism of the middle-class, those who love their country, want to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and generally want their values and property to be protected.  To quote Hanson:

The antithesis to such radical populism was likely thought by ancient conservative historians to be the “good” populism of the past—and what the contemporary media might call the “bad” populism of the present: the push-back of small property owners and the middle classes against the power of oppressive government, steep taxation, and internationalism, coupled with unhappiness over imperialism and foreign wars and a preference for liberty rather than mandated equality. Think of the second century B.C. Gracchi brothers rather than Juvenal’s “bread-and-circuses” imperial Roman underclass, the American rather than the French Revolution, or the Tea Party versus Occupy Wall Street.

Since Trump’s triumphant rise in 2015-2016, we’ve seen the reinvigoration of this kind of “good populism,” which was dormant for many years, but smoldering below the surface.

Grab a cup of coffee and give yourself fifteen minutes to read Hanson’s essay.  It’s a great discussion of a much-maligned, oft-misunderstood term: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/6/the-good-populism-9842

Sunday Self-Indulgence

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Today’s post is in the vein of self-indulgent updates about my personal life.  Blogging tends to involve some blending of the personal with the topical, as the whole format lends itself to opinion-based writing.  Obviously, my blog promotes my opinion and my worldview, backed up (hopefully) with facts and data, but still from my perspective.

This post will mark the thirty-fifth consecutive day of posting (yes, this is a “meta” post, of sorts, as I’m posting about posting).  I know this bit of information because WordPress tells me every morning how many days I’ve been on a streak.  Indeed, once I found out that WordPress congratulates you for keeping a streak going, it motivated me to post more.  I committed myself to keeping that streak going at least through 1 February 2019, which I have done.

In fact, one day I accidentally backdated a post to the previous day, and realized that, even after correcting it to the current day, WordPress wouldn’t acknowledge it toward my streak.  Fortunately, that was my 99th post, so I wrote my 100th post that night… to celebrate 100 all-time posts.

I had resumed updating this blog once Christmas Break began, and I found myself with ample time to write.  I intended to back off once school resumed, but the aforementioned “streak” counter kept motivating me to write more.  Unfortunately, writing daily is a difficult pace to maintain, and I may have to scale back to weekly or twice weekly posts.  My only fear there is that, once I do so, I’ll return to inconsistency.

Actually, writing 300-700 words a day is not that difficult.  What’s difficult is finding the motivation and time to do it amid everything else I have going.  I teach history and music full-time during the day, and currently have ten active private music lesson students.  I also adjunct teach online for a local technical college (lots of grading with that and my full-time gig).

On top of that, I’ve declared this year the “Year of the Panther,” and I’ve been trying to play out as much as possible.  I performed eight times in January.  That includes six open mics at three different venues in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.  Open mics aren’t as intensive as full performances, but I still have to lug out the keyboard, practice a bit, etc.  The other two gigs involved traveling to other parts of South Carolina.

To be clear, I’m not complaining in the least about any of this:  I love this tempo, and performing my music live is a source of inspiration and energy for me, even when it’s exhausting.  I also love teaching lessons.

I’m merely stating that, given my workload and my desire to gig more, something’s got to give.  Unfortunately, it may be this blog.

That said, I will continue to try to put something out as often as possible.  I am bad about writing succinctly, but I may have to force myself to write shorter (200-300-word) posts.  There are some deeper topics I will dive into at some point (especially abortion—the “tl;dr” version:  “it’s evil”), but I’ll probably have to do more short-form posts and reblogs if I want to keep the streak alive.

All that said, thank you to my loyal readers for checking in daily and reading my material.  Your feedback and comments are always appreciated, as is your support.

Happy Sunday!

Twilight Zone Reviews on Orion’s Cold Fire

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Remember The Twilight Zone, those short, weird vignettes from the early days of television?  Every episode featured some bizarre, last-minute twist, usually delivered with plenty of over-acting and frantic hysterics.

Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire has embarked on a lengthy mission:  to watch and review every episode of The Twilight Zone.  Put another way:  he watches so you don’t have to.

It’s great fun.  You can start reading the reviews here (as he uploads more, you may need to move back a page or two to get to the first one).  His review of the first episode is here.

There are 156 episodes (according to Wikipedia), and photog posts one review every evening (seven days a week, it appears), so he’ll be working on this well into 2019.

Friday Musings: Populism is East versus West

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I share my classroom with a veteran history teacher, who teaches my school’s eighth grade South Carolina History course.  The students are currently covering the events leading up to the American Revolution, particularly the unpopular Proclamation Line of 1763.  His discussion of the topic led me to a minor epiphany.

First, some historical context:  after the British defeated the French and their allies in the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War in Europe), millions of acres of land west of the Appalachian Mountains were open to American settlement.  The Americans were bursting with pride in delivering a hard-fought victory against Britain’s major European foe, and were eager to enjoy the spoils of war:  the newly opened lands.

Unfortunately, Parliament stalled land-hungry settlers with a well-intentioned but misguided policy:  the Proclamation Line of 1763.  According to an act of Parliament, there was to be no settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.  The land was to be left to the Indians living there.

The policy was not without merit:  the British spent a great deal of blood and treasure fighting Indians during the French and Indian War, and while the conflict was global in nature, most of the fighting occurred in British North America and present-day Canada.  A major source of bad blood was the tendency of Americans to move onto Indian-owned lands; similarly, rapacious Indians would raid vulnerable settlers in the western parts of colonies (such raids fomented an early populist uprising of farmers in western Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676).  The British sought to avoid another costly war with the natives by preventing their future antagonism:  keep Americans off that land.

Americans, understandably, were livid.  For one, they saw it as Britain rewarding the very foes they’d just vanquished (keep in mind, too, the ferocity of native warriors—there’s a reason we name our military hardware and athletic teams “The Braves” and the like).  They also believed this land was their destiny and their birthright—having defeated a tenacious foe, they were ready to head west.

What got me thinking was a comment my colleague made; to paraphrase:  “If Parliament had just sat down with the colonists and discussed it with them, they could have avoided a lot of disaster.”  That comment made me realize:  so much populism is a conflict between an indifferent Eastern (now bicoastal) elite, and an energetic, cantankerous Western settler-class.

That is, by no means, a novel insight (see also:  Bacon’s Rebellion).  The insight, however, is the repeated unwillingness of elite interests to try to understand or cope with the sources of the common man’s difficulties.  Some differences are, indeed, intractable, but it seems that, in many cases, elites could hear out and account for the problems of the common folk.

Indeed, in many cases, both are right.  Consider the historic struggles between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.  Thank goodness George Washington heeded Hamilton’s advice for how to structure the finances of the young nation.  Hamilton’s fiscal policies set the United States on firm footing, building investor confidence and shoring up the American government’s credit.

On the other hand, Jefferson was right that Congress had no explicit authority to establish a national bank, and that we shouldn’t become too dependent on urban industrialization and finance, lest we lose our sense of republican virtue.

There are, increasingly, fundamental disconnects between America’s urban elites and rural commoners.  Witness New York State’s catastrophic, plainly satanic abortion law, which (from all the discussion around it), seems to allow for abortion while a woman is still in labor.  There’s no compromising with an idea that is, unarguably, evil.

That said, elites should take seriously the common American’s keen sense for fair play.  Illegal (and mass legal) immigration is deleterious not only because it is illegal, but because it hurts native-born Americans, driving down their wages (for the benefit of the elites) and transforming their neighborhoods and towns.  Americans will welcome a reasonable number of legal immigrants with open arms, but they expect immigrants to come legally, to assimilate, and to become loyal American citizens (including breaking ties with their old countries).

The elites are people, too, and often act in what they believe is for the greater good, or for long-term national preservation (at least, this statement seemed accurate in America’s past; our postmodern elites seem largely committed to undermining core American principles).  That said, they’ve adopted the Left’s prevailing ethos of de facto nihilism and materialist self-indulgence, along with the Left’s disdain for the common man.

In short, the elites have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, of obligation to maintaining a good, happy, healthy society.  They are as far removed from their fellow countrymen as East is from West.