Slowly Going the Way of the Buffalo

How did we get here?

There is something really odd about the oblivious nature of humanity. One day, you stand for this, and the next day without even realizing it, you stand for that. It is a weird thing to wake up to. The Progressive Era started at the end of the 19th Century and it has carried us to the current state of affairs. As we stand here, twiddling our thumbs, our opinions are changing without us even noticing. The Progressive Era has been smooth like that. It is a charming creature. It is a powerful creature. It despises you. It controls both parties. It controls both movements. It will not go away until it consumes itself. So how did we get here?

The aftermath of the Civil War left the country without any powerful conservative movement. The Republican Party of today has always been, since its very founding, for the nationalized banking system, protective tariffs, and crony capitalism. It has always stood for these things. The Republican Party from its founding stood for the following: government control of the money supply through a nationalized banking system, protectionism, and internal improvements. This was the party platform then and more or less the party platform now. This was not conservatism. This was the “American System” traced back to Alexander Hamilton, to Henry Clay and the Whigs, and to Lincoln and the Republicans. This brought about a modernization of the country to prepare it to be active overseas. It was the goal of being a world power that came about at that time. This led to the Reconstruction of the South which ushered in the Progressive Era. This is a brief summary.

In that time period, the Conservative faction was the Democratic Party that was crippled by the Republicans in the aftermath of the war. It took 24 years for the party to compete on the federal level. Grover Cleveland was probably the last Jeffersonian to hold the office. After him, came the Progressive Era. The Democratic Party was remade by Woodrow Wilson and it has essentially been a different variation of the same thing since FDR. The Republican Party had a slight makeover with Ike when they chose his adventurism and the Military-Industrial Complex over Robert Taft. You get slightly different personalities, but the platforms have been pretty much the same.

If the parties have been the same for the past fifty years, how have we gotten so far off-course?

It has been because in the Progressive Era, we more or less fall into two main camps, the Left and the Right. I will define these terms. The Right looks at the past with reverence. There was nothing bad, or at the very least better than now, and most of them want to go back to a bygone era. It was the 50s. Then it was the 80s. The Left, on the other hand, looks to the past with utter disdain. Nothing good came out of the past and we must never go back there. With a mindset like this, if you are not moving forward, you are moving backward. It is insatiable. It will never be happy. That is why they really want to remake the history, by erasing the memories of it. They do this by minimizing the contributions of the people of the past because they had slaves. Well, the Republican Party, tried to beat them at their game. They said they were the party that ended slavery. They remade the Constitution completely by reducing it to the 14th Amendment. By doing this, the Republican Party loses all the time. They are only willing to look back to their chosen heroes so they let the Left censor and remove the people that came before. Now the Left is an insatiable monster and they are turning on the Right’s new heroes. The Right is next to pander to the middle by picking up the discarded heroes of the Left, see MLK and other civil rights heroes. The Right in the fifties and sixties knew he was a socialist and a pervert. Now they use him as the counterpoint to the Ledt’s current Moral Signifier, whatever in the fuck it currently is.

The Right by nature appreciates the status quo and does not want to ruffle feathers. The Left always needs a new monster because they fear complacency. They attack every single school board with the trendy Moral Signifiers of their overlords in Hollywood or on social media and they hit them hard. The Right does not even show up to the meetings. Then they wake up and realize that the world has changed and they do not like it. The problem is they will accept the status quo in order to slow the march to the Left. It happens over and over again. All of this is OK because they will just vote harder in the next election. They will find the guy who the party selects for them and just vote for that guy. Up until recently, the Right was kept at bay by at least believing in the justice system. Now in the aftermath of the phony trial against Trump, will that hold up?

The Left controls the schools from K-12 to all of the universities. The Right, even if they were aware of how their kids get indoctrinated for 17 years, have no plan of action other than voting in the next election. Even though the people they are voting for have no intention of stopping this march. Just look at the panderers on the Right with an issue as dumb as Juneteenth. Now the Right acts like this is a day that symbolizes that they are happy to work with the Left. They justify accepting this stupid holiday in the name of “progress.” They are just scared of getting the wrath of the public and losing reelection. So the Right’s leaders were happy to let the Confederate monuments get destroyed. They cheered when this dumb holiday was created. They think if they give into the Left, the insatiable monster will be satiated. That is not how this works. That is why they lose. That is why they will fontinue to lose. They are all cowards. The parties themselves have no intention of stopping anything. The Left controls every aspect of communication. The Right is scared of its own shadow. The Democratic Party steals the elections. The Republican Party is just happy to still be around.

This game has been the same since the 2008-2009 Occupy Wall Street/ TEA Party coming together to stand up against the bailouts. In that time, the Democratic Party went from its current state to straight Identity Politics. It had to create a new bad guy because both sides had realized the game was rigged. The deck was stacked against the people and they knew the bad guys sat in D.C. So they needed to create a new bad guy. Why not go back to the well one more time and make White Male Christians the new/old bad guy? It worked. No longer did it matter that the country had a minority in the land’s highest office, but somehow it was more racist than at any other point. The White Males were coming for every single minority. Then this morphed into the LGBT Monster and into the other nightmares we face today. In doing so, the people started fighting against each other and no longer remembered who the real enemy was anymore. Now fifteen years later, the same things are happening, but people are more concerned with Imaginary Genitalia and ignoring how bad pubkic education really is. Even the Right thinks these perverts and ideologues are underpaid. It has always been bad, but people seem to forget that the Republican Party helped create that monster.

What do we do now?

Stop falling for the Groundhog Day that is the American Electoral Cycle. Stop electing these grifters and reelecting these crooks. Vote in your local and state elections, but only vote for people who stand up for your counties and states against the Leviathan State in D.C. Take back your states and then either restore the federalist system of the Constitution-as-ratified or secede. There is no reason to keep up the system established in the aftermath of Lincoln’s War of Aggression. There is no need to keep forcing different people to live under one set of rules. If this stays this way, the Right will go extinct. States’ Rights is Conservatism. It isn’t this “We the People…” crap. This is why the Right loses. It remembers Lincoln as a hero and not a complete scoundrel. In accepting Lincoln as a hero, it has to discard actual conservatives. It creates a “status quo” for conservatives by accepting precedents. It remembers horrible people as heroes. Stop this madness and discard the idolatry of Lincoln. Push for the return to the Jeffersonian Tradition that we inherited from our Founders. This was the way then and it is the way forward now. Even if you believe that the elections are on the up and up (which they are not), the Republicans at the federal level belong to Johnson and McConnell. The system is a joke that keeps getting less funny each time it is told.

As always, thanks for reading.