"The Night We Waved Goodbye to America"

Worth a read, but we're not quite done yet.

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

America, in the end, will turn out to be not terribly different than Iraq. A very strident sectarian minority complained endlessly of the terrible occupation by George W. Bush and his neocon warmongers, promising a fantastical faith-based future if only they could be delivered power.

In large swaths of Iraq, power was in fact delivered to the jihadi utopianists -- and the experience was not a happy one. It turned out that firebrand cultists were much better at spitting venom and making laughable promises than actually governing.

And so it will likely be here as well. History stubbornly refuses to provide us with counterfactuals, allowing us to witness what would have been if other paths have been chosen. Instead, such scenarios are merely described by alt-history science fiction writers as well as their dilettante wannabes, hyperpartisan political agitators and the press (but I repeat myself).

The hard left, Obama cultists, and the media (but I repeat myself twice) has spun fantasies that we've not been living in a difficult world -- only under a difficult president. And they have promised, implicitly as well as sometimes explicitly ("the world will heal and the seas will fall") that Al Qaeda, the economy, and so forth would suddenly show themselves to be rather easily-solved nits if only we had The One in office.

That will not turn out to be the case, of course. And America will soon find that The Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers can no more deliver on his millennialist promises than Moqtada al-Sadr.

Sometimes the rhetorical question, "Well, how bad could it be?" can only be answered by non-rhetorical experience.

Surprise! Rumblings and rumors that the top tax rate will not be raised to 39.6% -- but to 45%, once an additional 5% surtax is levied.

posted by Ace at 03:16 PM

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