Many thanks to EagleKeeper for this topic. 2012 makes me wonder about the forces unleashed in 2010!
The Election of 2010 is not without meaning, but it becomes harder to interpret it after the Election of 2012. Did we catch liberals napping in 2010? Why were the gains of 2010 not continued in 2012? Was it because Republicans AGAIN nominated an older white Grandpa, this time with issues like RomneyCare, religion, and Wall Street service to drag him down?
Foot-in-mouth syndrome affected too many candidates in other races.
As a student of History throughout my academic career (which is still perking along), I will say that historians in general make bad seers of the future, despite what one might think. Despite that, History must be a factor in delineating possible paths.
The nature of democracy contains the seeds of its own demise: history has shown this from Athens to Britain. Mediocrity eventually rises to the top, because in a democracy the majority is mediocre ipso facto. Only if they are cognizant that voting for someone like themselves is a guarantee for mediocre government, and then choose candidates more talented than the average American, will democracy function.
We are not seeing such choices however: we see mediocrity everywhere in both parties. And talented, dedicated people are turned away: Romney was not mediocre certainly, which is why his successes in business were interpreted as failures from the perspective of voters who want someone to feel their pain and care about them....and send them a check.
This is why restrictions on democracy were in place earlier in our history, with the Electoral College being just about the last one. We now see Leftists working to let criminals in prisons vote.
Perhaps we "need" a complete national bankruptcy to wake people up, as some have written. But I suspect that such a disaster would simply be blamed on "The Rich" and as "proof" that Capitalism is a failure, and that the gullible would persist in their leftist videoized slumber.
So what do we have? Despair or retrenchment? A lost war or a lost battle? If anything of the Tea-Party Spirit of 2010 is left alive - and I think it is - then 2014 and 2016 can be a time for a counter-revolution against Socialism...but not if people shrug.
I have told my students that "forces of History" do not exist: what does exist are the billions of choices, small and large, which we make every day. e.g. When we choose NOT to protest a leftist teacher in high-school propagandizing our children, because we are too polite, or are too busy running our businesses, or working overtime, or have thrown up our hands that it will not do any good, we have made a small choice which contributes to the persistence of Leftism. When we patronize the movie with the leftist movie star, we have made a choice which could in the long term influence the direction of the country. No extraneous "force of History" exists pushing us in that direction: we choose it.
Is the war lost? Possibly. It is still too early to tell: so we can still protest and with the Internet organize better than ever before. It will be especially interesting to see if Catholic bishops and priests (and others) across the nation make good on their promise to be jailed rather than submit to MAObamaCare's attack on Freedom of Religion. That could be the bridge too far for this regime.
But even if the war is over, why submit to the Dictatorship of the Lazytariat?
