While the debris of the recent political season and the Republican Party continues to rain down around us, conservatives (the few left) have plenty of time to think about what happened and, more importantly, why it happened. After waiting for over 20 years for a Reagan style conservative, there seemed to be the perfect alignment of events creating a fertile opportunity, at long last, to see a conservative candidate in the General Election.

The GOP allowed critical states, like Texas, to move their primaries earlier in the calendar, giving them more influence in choosing a candidate, instead of rubber stamping whatever Rockefeller country club Republican was left. The slate swelled up with several strong and conservative options, like Bobby Jindal from Louisiana, Scott Walker from Wisconsin, Carly Fiorina from California, Marco Rubio from Florida, and Ted Cruz from Texas. And then the Great Manipulator entered the race.

After flailing around and bellowing non-sequiturs on the peripheries of the race for weeks, Trump said something incendiary about illegal immigrants and captured the attention of blue collar voters, and he never let go. Focusing at first on the fears and secret prejudices of the general populace, Trump soon turned his attention to destroying his competition, through ruthless lies and gross allegations, always bracketing his wild accusations with plausible deniability and populist rhetorical nonsense.

In the end, despite the first opportunity in a generation to elect a rock ribbed conservative candidate, a minority of bitter, largely uneducated, politically incoherent, angry blue collar Republicans picked an aging, white, slanderous, celebrity bully, who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, is married to a Democrat, whose children are Democrats, and who said in the past he identified more as a Democrat, and who openly admits that his path to victory in November requires appealing to disaffected Democratic socialists voters.

That’s where we are, but why did it come to this?

“The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames
And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”
–Smashing Pumpkins–

It starts, as with any conversation about conservatism, with Reagan. We have to understand that Reagan was a product of the Greatest Generation, not the Republican Party. It was the generation that suffered but did not break during the bleak years of the Great Depression, and then were able to rise up and defeat the blackest evil of murderous fascism of Hitler’s Germany and fanatical imperialism of Tojo’s Japan. These unbreakable Americans, born to the generations that still remembered the Civil War, were Reagan’s cohorts. It was the three generations from the WWI era through the Korean War Era that understood what it meant to be unabashedly American and understood the meaning of “blood, sweat, and tears“.

Then came the Vietnam War Era and the Baby Boomers, influenced by anti-American socialist agitators like Saul Alinsky and C. Wright Mills. The 1960’s culture was inundated with utopianism and rejection of the unabashed Americanism of their parents and grand parents. Their music, from the Beatles to the Doors, became anthems for a world without religion, without capitalism, and without the dirty business of patriotism. It’s these people, like Clinton (age 68), Bernie (age 74), Trump (age 69), Boehner (age 66) and McConnell (age 74), that have been in political power and influence for decades.

While politicians like Obama are the cultural inheritors of their poisonous cultural paradigms, in the wake of this abandoning of the ideological purpose, Generation X found itself excluded from Reagan’s Americanism. Our shared cultural experience became one of an implacable cynicism, flirting with nihilism. Raised on a culture that had no meaning, no culture, and nothing to connect us to our forefathers. This bleak inheritance has infected our own sons & daughters, creating a generation of Millennials seeking the meaning that so many of us could never find.

It is the Baby Boomers, having already cut us off from Reagan’s culture of opportunity and Liberty, who remained ever eager to infect new minds with their radical leftist era ideas.

Enough.

“I got another gang story to tell
Peep, about how a black nigga was born in hell
And right then and there it’s no hope
Cause a nigga can’t escape the gangs and the dope”
–Compton’s Most Wanted–

There was a man named Ronald Reagan, he was funny, eloquent, firm, yet shockingly approachable. He rode horses. He didn’t take himself seriously unless he had to. Above all, he loved America, not just the nation or the country or even the people, but the idea. He believed in the truly revolutionary idea that people have a right to be free and, more importantly, left alone. He believed in the truly absurd idea that the only thing government was good at was getting in the way of the people’s freedom.

Reagan believed that we, you and I, have a God given right to be free. As Reagan said in his farewell address to America, “I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, Liberty contracts.” This truth is at the heart of Reagan’s America. The America of the Greatest Generation. The America that we have been robbed of.

So why did the Party that once twice elected Reagan in landslide elections pick the only candidate to repeatedly reject this idea even when offered a host of candidates among whom some even wholly believed it? Because the Greatest Generation that voted for Reagan is all but gone, the Korean War generation is going, and the Vietnam War generation is at the zenith of its power, despite a myriad of “conservative” leaders like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and a host of others who have gotten very rich off of obviously failing to transmit Reagan’s very simple message.

“Black hole sun; Won’t you come; And wash away the rain
Black hole sun; Won’t you come; Won’t you come (won’t you come)”
–Soundgarden–

We are living in a nightmare Twilight Zone episode, with no chance of waking up. Regardless of whether or not the Great Manipulator, Donald Trump, manages to win the White House in November, America will end up with an amoral, leftist, anti-Liberty, Establishment authoritarian at the helm of what remains of the “Free World“. Save for a miracle in Cleveland, the Republican Party is finished and the fleeting benefits of remaining part of the stricken party are outweighed by the costs, so it’s time to move on.

A new dawn rises in the Culture War, one where we are forced into the wasteland, our country lost to leftist utopianism and populist nationalism.  We must come to terms with the fact of Reagan’s America being nothing more than a comfortable illusion. To the center left Establishment and their many collaborators, we conservatives are nothing more than outsiders, malcontents, and wastelanders. To them, our principles are but primitive superstitions, outdated and irrelevant.

Wherever we go, we must take our message of Liberty and safeguard it, uncorrupted and uncompromised. Liberty is hard and its price high. It requires courage in the face of deprivation and war. This is something our Founders understood, and it’s something that Reagan’s generation learned the hard way. A People unwilling to fight for their Liberty have already lost it, but if not Liberty, then there is precious little else worth fighting for in this world.

“There’s a man in need of resurrection (No religion)
Can’t you see a modern primitive (No religion)
But I’m a man, I need my love and freedom (No religion)
When there was no freedom at all.”
–Billy Idol–

Welcome to the age of Generation X and Millennial Conservatism. We need no banners, just new voices.  Come with us as we try to keep Reagan’s “rendezvous with destiny“.

Be Brave. Be Free.

Liberty is For The Win!

---

We just checked, and it turns out that fighting for Liberty isn’t free, because it requires time and energy to research, prepare, and propagate this message for you. Please drop just a dollar a month into the proverbial tip jar and become a Patriot Patron. Of course, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share. Keep this fight for Liberty going! – @LibertyIsFTW