What Have We Learned From the Indiana Primary?
It’s been a day. The time for eating your hats in quivering fear is finished. The hour of rending your clothes and covering yourself with ash and sackcloth is done.
What is left of the Grand Old Party is, indeed, a populist shell of the self-interested political elite trying desperately to sink their jagged vampiric claws into the eviscerated elephant red with blood that’s trying desperately to leave the room. Our last best hope of anything resembling American conservatism has dropped out, stating that he has lost “any viable path” to candidacy. Kasich, finally, after too many pancakes and too many voters asking “who?” has capitulated as well. Trump, abominable, stands last upon the stage.
On the Democrat’s side, things are more or less business as usual. Sanders scrapped by to capture most of Indiana’s delegates, but it doesn’t really make a difference—Hillary only needs an additional 182 delegates for her nomination to be secured. Exactly how much voter fraud is occurring is hard to tell, but c’mon, it’s the Democratic Primaries. It just wouldn’t be proper without voter fraud.
Meanwhile, as Hillary Clinton marches, torches ablaze, toward the White House as Ross and Cockburn did two centuries ago beneath the Union Jack, Bernie Sanders supporters grow more fervent in their decrying of Clinton’s corruption, lying, empty boasting, and obvious pandering to minority groups. The call for Bernie to run a third party campaign grows louder—and, were it not that he’s just as much of a fascist as Hillary or Trump, we here at QNUW couldn’t be more thrilled for him to split the Democrats’ vote. But with candidates like these, the choices on the ballot this November are looking more like what caliber gun we’d prefer to shoot ourselves in the heads with.
It is in fact my estimate that we will have more Democrats and Republicans voting for a third party candidate this year than we have had in generations. Godspeed, Libertarian party! Now’s your chance!
So. What have we learned?
Turns out, the fascist-hating, freedom loving, liberty pursuing, commie crushing AMERICA that has dominated our propaganda for almost two centuries now might just be a thing of the past (although the fascist-hating bit may never have been true, if Wilson, FDR, and Johnson are any indication). Turns out, against any common sense and any appeal to history, the Democratic party really will march out an unapologetically dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and then, they really will run him against one of the most established—if unpopular—figures in American politics. And then, it turns out, he really can capture almost half of the national popular vote on the DNC’s side. So, it turns out, what we’ve learned here is exactly how far left we have swung—how far left the 60s counterculture pushed the content creators, the professors, and the media specialists who have raised the last two generations of kids for us while Mom and Dad have both been at work.
And how far left is that? Well, far enough left that, by conservative estimates, roughly twenty to twenty-five percent of the American voting populace are willing to vote for a man whose platform shares more in common with the defeated and destitute regimes of dictatorial Europe than it does with the any reasonable, rational, common-sense interpretation of our own constitution. And, moreover, that’s far enough left that this movement is dragging along the other half of the DNC in pursuit of its uncompromising collectivist agenda by sinking its ideological fangs into a candidate that, until Sanders, had the legacy of her husband’s economic and social moderation to run on. Where eight years ago a candidate like O’Malley might have had a shot at capturing at least 10% of the vote, where sixteen years ago a candidate like Jim Webb would have been at least a reasonable choice to stand behind, today such candidates aren’t just unpopular, they’re jokes. Webb was even less known than Kasich, and as for O’Malley… well, I have to admit, I’d prefer someone who almost ruined one difficult-to-govern state to a woman whose track record already includes having misplaced classified documents, destroyed an entire country, left it in ruinous anarchy, and let American blood seep into foreign soil (and whose only recompense was a cover-up so obviously shoddy, so poorly woven, such an embarrassment of a lie that her status as a Clinton should really be in question).
We are so far left now that ‘moderatism’ consists of keeping the national yearly deficit between a hundred billion and a quarter trillion, while people who speak of shrinking the intrusiveness of government regulation, decreasing spending, and simplifying the tax code are considered far-right radicals. We are so far left that a platform which mostly boils down to the mildly classical liberal-tinged brand of honest, working-man’s grassroots conservatism that stands on the middle ground carved out by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams is considered absolutely bonkers. Because it’s actually conservative.
Ah, but—“We’re more right-wing than Europe is!”
Europe is literally socialist. The only way to be further left than they are is to go full North Korean, given how quickly they’re approaching Soviet-style centralization in their bullying tactics.
What else have we learned?
Turns out, the GOP is so disorganized and so run by headstrong egotists that they’re willing to throw away one of the most important and easiest general elections in recent history because they just can’t get along. Turns out, instead of consolidating early around one candidate in order to defeat a roughshod wildcard bully, they preferred to flail about until they had wasted three important primaries before backing out and limply falling into endorsements—and in Rubio’s case, avoiding an endorsement altogether. And it turns out, the GOP’s candidates this year were so far removed from their voting base that maybe it really is time to lay down and die; Lindsey Graham couldn’t gain the evangelicals, Bush couldn’t gain the old conservatives, Rubio couldn’t gain the neocons or the tea partiers (nor even his own state), and the ones that didn’t completely misjudge their audiences, like Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker, simply ran out of money. And then, of course, there’s the behemoth.
Turns out, the ‘silent majority’—the entire class of lower-middle working-class whites of flyover country that, historically, have generally been Democrats—are so pissed off at the media, at Obama, and the government, and at the entire poli-tainment establishment complex that instead of backing a constitutionalist reformer, they’d prefer to see the whole thing subsumed under the might of a fascistic Trumpian ego. Turns out, the GOP establishment is so ideologically hollow that they’d prefer to change the party into one that makes allowances for such pandering, despite being entirely antithetical to the conservative principles on which the party was founded (to say nothing of the country’s founding principles). And it turns out, the GOP doesn’t like you; the GOP doesn’t like you if you’re a Trump supporter, they don’t like you if you supported Cruz, and they don’t like you if you were one of the twelve people that supported Kasich. They don’t like you if you kinda think killing babies should be illegal, that maybe government spending should be cut back on things like bloated entitlement programs, and that maybe the Federal Reserve should be investigated and audited periodically. And if you’ve read anything like The Federalist Papers—or, these days, even just the Constitution—chances are, the GOP really doesn’t like you.
The GOP was at a breaking point six months ago, when Trump’s rise was cemented amid a bickering and contested playing field of hotheads a little too eager for their day in the sun. With Trump being the last man standing, the GOP is finished. For real. Whatever continues as this lumbering zombie-like monstrosity of a party is going to be populated by two peoples: the clingers-on who hope desperately for a Republican victory, thinking Trump is a tamable vehicle for the GOP’s interests; and the newcomer Trumpsters whose numbers have, at least in his mind, swelled the ranks of the GOP and turned out the vote in nearly record numbers for a primary season. The latter crowd are only on board insofar as Trump is. The former will, given enough time, be either ousted by Trump and his most vociferous cheerleaders, or they will grow disillusioned and, one by one, drop off like ticks.
So what happens to the #NeverTrump Republicans? Or the grassroots conservatives that followed Cruz? Or the moderates who fell in line behind Rubio? Sure, there will be some that end up on the Trump Train in the end, weighing the Hillary-shaped.45 caliber bullet against the Trump-engraved .454 come November. But there will be others—many others, in the coming years—who will decide that maybe, maybe shooting America the Beautiful in the head isn’t really what our elections should be about. And they are the ones who will be the new future of this wonderful country.
And I think there will be a definite split on the Democrats’ side as well. I think it will happen sooner if Bernie runs as a third party candidate (and effectively hands the election to Trump), but even if he doesn’t, the internal strife of the Democratic National Party is becoming obvious even within the media establishment. Bernie, like Obama before him, stands at the front of a crowd who have been raised on entitlements of social, fiscal, and political convenience. The poisonous fruit of Leftist demagoguery that was planted during the 60s cultural revolution has ripened and fallen from its trees, and Bernie is here to finish the harvest that Obama began in 2008. Whether the system can survive that—or indeed what it will look like afterward—is anyone’s guess. But I, for one, have no interest in seeing the same sort of decline witnessed under eight years of Obama’s administration ratchetted up by an order of magnitude under Sanders. In any case, the DNC must contend now more than ever with what strain of “Liberalism” they wish to follow; whether to nip off the radical Left to form its own party, or, as it has been apt to do throughout its history, allow it to take over the party and slowly drown out the moderates.
And now. It’s been a day. The sun has set, and darkness comes.
Rebuild. Prepare. Track down your fellow conservatives. Find the moderate liberals and recruit them wherever they are. Begin consolidating your strengths. Organize. Prepare the culture for the long game by fighting the cancerous Leftist monologue that has saturated our social institutions and entertainment. Prepare the political establishment by leaning in on the local level first. Prepare for dawn.
This had never been a fight to establish something new. This had been a misguided struggle to conserve the principles upon which our country was founded. Now it is a struggle to restore them.
