Maybe We Want Things to Get Even Worse by Kurt Schlichter for Town Hall
Could it be better for freedom if things in America got even worse? More economic hardship, increased crime, further humiliations of America at the hands of seventh century savages – you know, business usual under President Gumby. Should we patriots try to save these idiots from themselves and give them an out, or let the natural consequences of their failures build into a critical mass that brings on a backlash that brings us the power we need to destroy all their Marxy dreams? Perhaps we should root for our garbage ruling class to hit bottom and start digging. Actually, digging deeper – these incompetent corruptocrats are already tossing shovelfuls of dirt out of the hole.
It’s a cynical strategy, but this is a cynical time. There is a school of thought that says that the way to win the kind of macro-societal conflict we are in is to allow the enemy to crash and burn, to so thoroughly fail to perform adequately by any metric that they will discredit themselves for a generation – but only for a generation, since as long as there are stupid college students and stupider academics, there will be communists. This is like a conservative version of the Cloward-Piven strategy, where the left would burden the welfare state so heavily with deadbeats, bums, and shiftless losers that the only possible response would be a massive expansion of the welfare state ending, they hope, in full socialism. We win by letting them lose and lose and lose, despite the pain we’ll feel while they do it, until they are utterly spent. If it works, okay, but if it doesn’t, would we even have an America to save?
In today’s scenario, if it all worked out, we conservatives would let the Democrats screw up so badly that people would demand actual freedom and capitalism as the cure. And it’s not a totally wacky idea. We have had monumental backlashes before. In 1980, which I remember because I am old (but not President Crusty O’Kiddieshowers old), Jimmy Carter screwed up so deeply and comprehensively that even when the American people finally picked a Democrat again 12 years later in a three-way race with a Republican liar who asked them to read his lips and a populist spoiler-elf named Ross Perot, the Democrat talked about law and order and how the Era of Big Government was over. Of course, he did not mean it; his wife was not the only one in that relationship faking it.
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So, the idea is that, like a drunk waking up in a different state wearing someone else’s pants and a strange wedding ring and sporting a fresh tramp-stamp of Ernest Borgnine riding a surfboard while wearing a thong, the ruling class and enough people are going to come to, look around, and think, “Gee, time to get into a national twelve-step.” But the strategy of letting them wreck the country until the voters come crawling back to beg us to come back into power has several problems, and like many problems these derive from uncertain premises.
