Are we going to allow America to become Declinistan?

The United States is still different [from European states]. In the wake of economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly “students” in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless “university” costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and  your multitrillion dollar porkathons and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.

That’s the America that has a fighting chance – a nation that stands for economic dynamism, not the stagnant “managed capitalism” of France, for the freest, widest, rudest bruiting of ideas, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion: for self-relience and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. But when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America’s animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we’ve already gone. Live free – or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.

Your call, America.

from After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn

Jeffery Lord, Gladwell and the American Tipping Point

Last week, on Hannity’s radio show he discussed a recent column by Jeffery Lord/The American Spectator, called  American Tipping Point. In it, Lord discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point and makes comparisons to America’s tipping points at different times in our history and the rise of conservatism and the Tea Party.

Lord says that:  Thanks to the Tea Party movement, Conservatism is on the verge of a major victory that dwarfs the technical and actual realities of whatever the details of the resulting deficit deal passed last night. Yes, there is a long, long way to go. But the idea that America doesn’t, in fact, have to be governed for eternity as a debtor nation with a mammoth, out-of-control, ever-expanding government is winning the day. It is tipping the balance with increasing decisiveness against an idea that has become so much a part of conventional wisdom that even some conservatives, startlingly including, inexplicably, the Wall Street Journal, have displayed the wobblies at the thought of confronting the Leviathan. The WSJ’s attacks yesterday against Jim DeMint, Michele Bachmann and Sean Hannity, saying “sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage” — follows another editorial in which the paper railed against Tea Party members as “hobbits.” The paper, sounding like cranky British Tories in 1775 Boston rather than the bold, forward-looking paper that championed the much-derided ideas of Ronald Reagan​, wildly bought into the liberal notion that the Tea Party from Hobbitville is somehow holding the government hostage, instead of the other way around. In fact Big Government liberalism has spent decades holding and trying to hold the average American hostage to all manner of outrageous tax rates, taxes and regulations on everything from capital gains to sex (in Harry Reid’s Nevada) to soda, SUVs and poker.

Lord chronicles the rise of conservatism from Senator Robert Taft’s strident opposition to FDR’s mega New Deal in the 30’s, through William F. Buckley to the great Ronald Reagan to Mark Levin’s landmark best seller and Tea Party bible, Liberty and Tyranny and how all these little, or sometimes large events, are causing a tipping point in American history. He says that conservatism is spreading almost like a virus: in Gladwell’s vocabulary, “connectors” — “people with a particular and rare set of social gifts” who have the ability to “spread” an idea like an epidemic, a Tipping Point is in the works. Henry Regnery, for example, published and made a star of Buckley, who befriended Reagan who inspired Limbaugh, who was befriended by Buckley and placed on the cover of National Review, with Limbaugh in turn aiding Hannity and Levin and Levin’s book inspiring the Tea Party etc., etc.

Reading Lord, once again gave me hope. And reminded me that in Beck’s words, we are not alone. Most of America is conservative to some degree. Most of Americans want to be or remain at least, middle class and we see that vanishing under Obama’s ideology. Most of America finds communism (call it socialism or European socialism but it’s still a form of communism) to be antithetical to the fundamentals of our beliefs and our founding. And most of America will fight it.

I hope they don’t think for a minute that we will forget being called racists, nazis, homophobes, Hobbits and terrorists. We will not. The real revolution will occur on November 6th, 2012 – bloodless, gunless and in a voting booth. They are being fore warned and to disregard the tipping point signs will be at their own peril.

It’s a must-read by Lord and I hope you will take the time to read it.