Kurt Schlichter: Can Someone Tell Me Why People Belonging to a Party Which Purports to Stand for Individualism and Skepticism of Government Are Now Reflexively Preaching Faith in Government as the Default Mode of Any Good Citizen?

This election has been brutal, but it has torn a lot of masks off a lot of smug, well-fed faces.

Apparently the Republican Party is now supposed to be the Party of Trusting in Government and Alleged "Experts."

No pearl went unclutched when Trump refused to agree in advance to validate the giant scam that is this election. Yeah, scam. In light of all we've seen during this stupidest of years, a year where I had to move my book about this country tearing itself apart from the fiction section to nonfiction, how the hell can anyone keep a straight face as he, she, or xe demands that we default to trust the system?

Okay, this is where Team Fake Pearl Clutch jumps in and whines about my "dangerous talk" and about how I have no "honor" because I won’t submit in advance to another establishment okie-doke. Yeah, sure, whatever – and the emperor caught pneumonia because the little kid pointed out that he wasn’t wearing any clothes, not because he was walking around with his junk in the wind.

The system is manifestly rigged – even Heap Big Chief Warren used to say so until a memo informed her that this meme is now inconvenient – so spare me your sanctimonious crap about our sacred system. Our loyalty is properly only to the Constitution, not a perversion of it. Just because you hold office under Article I, II, or III doesn’t mean we still owe you respect or deference when you treat your obligations to the People like a teenage Thai boy at one of Raymond Burr's Halloween parties.

We owe the system nothing. Nada. Zip. Instead, the system owes us fairness and honesty, and without them it has no right to our default acceptance of its results. That acceptance must be earned. This means that the system must aggressively police its own integrity, and this year it has utterly failed to do so.

And he's just getting started.

The GOP has always had two conflicting impulses in it, which tend to manifest itself as two different factions.

One impulse is for orderliness, domestic tranquility, and rule-and-law-following which beget what is called "ordered liberty."

This impulse is made manifest in the Establishment types who pee themselves when they think about defiance and things like government shutdowns.

The other impulse is dated to the start of the Republic itself: That citizens are entitled to a responsive and representative government, and that a government's failure to be responsive to the citizenry and represent its interests may justify actual armed insurrection against it.

For more on this, see the Declaration of Independence. A lot of Trumpkin crazies signed it.

This impulse is manifested in the rowdies, the malcontented, the "anti-government agitators," etc.

Now, I think most people have bit of both impulses in them, but obviously, as with any binary impulse, most people lean more towards one side than the other.

The GOP used to attempt to have a balance between these two impulses.

Not any longer. The "official" GOP -- the power centers in office, the power centers not in office (corporations, corporate-funded think tanks and magazines, etc.) -- is now revealed to be almost wholly devoted to the first impulse -- trust and obey the government -- and now derides those more inclined to the second impulse as dangerous "populists" and possible terrorists.

Exactly like the liberals brand them.

It boils down, like many questions, to who serves whom. Is it, as Schlicter says, the government's responsibility to make itself credible, or is it the citizen's duty to pretend the government is credible, even if it's not?

Does the government work for us, or do we work for it?

The same question can be applied to many institutions. The media, for example -- its credibility has cratered.

Now, just because the media is an important institution, are we required to prop it up by yielding to it a reservoir of trust and goodwill it has manifestly not deserved?

I'm glad the Establishment, NeverTrump, Trust-the-"Experts" wing of the party isn't attempting to rehabilitate the media's credibility, at least, and blame its shortcomings on citizens too ill-educated to appreciate what a great job it's doing.

Whoops. Spoke too soon.

posted by Ace at 06:48 PM

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