Off the Deep End with Brett Stephens

Brett Stephens writes on his blog:

Giving up is what many are doing on election 2012. They have convinced themselves that both parties “are the same,” and that the system is rigged. Or that no candidate represents their values. Or even that it’s all hopeless and there’s no point participating.

All of this denies the fundamental truth of politics, which is that there are essentially two directions. They aren’t positions or parties, but paths of thought.

Yeah, but the issue here is that both the Democratic and Republican party presidential nominees represent movement in the same direction.

The first is leftism. It’s new, starting in the 18th century, but seems to appear in every society when it gets too bottom heavy. The idea of leftism is that everyone should be able to do whatever they want to, with minimal hierarchy, because what people feel and perceive is most important.

Leftism is obviously not the idea that everyone should be able to do whatever they want. Leftism is a vision of morality as surely as Conservatism is, with its own taboos and strictures. Leftism stands out for its lack of teachings relating to an afterlife, but though they claim not the power to punish in another world, Leftists continually seek to punish in this one.

The second is rightism. It’s ancient, being invented when every society is created. Its idea is that we should pay attention to how reality works and use proven, workable and eternal ideas to guide ourselves. Perception and feelings are secondary to the outside world in this view.

Actually that's empiricism. The earlier forms of rightism would've been based on the concept of reverencing tradition, not the concept of checking tradition against reality to see if it worked. The traditions that survived would have been the ones that worked for the people who followed, and this explains the general consonance between rightism and reality.

It was actually the philosophy of empiricism which helped to undermine rightism and tradition due to the fact that it discovered some traditional beliefs to be empirically invalid, shaking the masses' faith in tradition and leaving them much more receptive to leftism.

It’s not popular to say this, but America and Europe are basically in the same fix. A massive leftism lobby is slowly taking over and replacing the indigenous people with leftist voters, who are both immigrants and home-grown people who are mentally broken because of the effects of liberal social programs. This mob grows like a snowball, and its only desire is to destroy all culture and heritage, all values and preference, and replace them with good “non-conformist” conformists who have one goal alone, reaching the leftist Utopia through equality. Leftism takes prosperous societies and leaves behind starving third-world ghettos because it removes sanity from human minds.

While there's much truth to this, it's important to understand that leftism is not primarily objectionable because it destroys prosperity, something that can be regained once lost, but rather for how it is in the process of destroying things that cannot be replaced.

We can either go toward more leftism, or toward more rightism.

Going toward more rightism is not actually an option in the US Presidential Election of 2012. America is a two party state due to its lack of proportional representation, and it so happens that the only two viable parties have fielded two candidates who both want to take us toward more leftism. Neither Romeny nor Obama want to take us toward more rightism.

Perhaps Obama wants to take us to more leftism faster than Romney does. If this assertion is credited, perhaps it would give someone with rightist beliefs reason to support Romney.

But why is Bret Stephens talking nonsense about Romney wanting to take the country in a rightist direction? That simply isn't the platform he's run on.

Those are your two options. There are no others; even the most far-out and creative belief system is going to be going more toward one direction than the other.

Yes, and both Romney and Obama have belief systems which would take us more in the direction of leftism.

You might look at Mitt Romney and think, “This guy is really too restrained and moderate for what needs to be done."

There is no reason to project traditionalist beliefs onto Mitt Romney. There's no reason to think he's just someone who isn't assertive enough about his beliefs, or that his beliefs are a moderated version of conservatism. Really what's happening is that he doesn't have traditionalist beliefs, only perhaps seeming that way to some due to his pandering to Republican primary voters and the tendency some have to view all things as relative ("Romney doesn't seem to be as extreme a leftist as Obama is, so that means he must be a conservative!")

While that’s true, you should pay attention to our opponents — the leftists — and how they beat us and took over. They found a popular idea. They steadily advanced it, through baby steps and daily acts of disobedience, until they’d browbeaten or guilt-trapped others into joining them.

But Romney isn't trying to do that. He doesn't stand for anything. Even when he accidently was caught expressing an idea (that 47% of the country are moochers) which wasn't quite an echo of what a Democrat would say, he backtracked and apologized like a coward.

A man can't be a vehicle for advancing ideas if he can't be relied on to stand by the ideas he expresses.

It's like if your football team had a running back who fumbled the ball on every single play.

While people hunger for sudden explosive change, it’s the guys like Mitt Romney who are pushing us to victory.

A President Romney would represent a facade of continuity with the American past, a bland talisman giving the apearance of stability even as he wouldn't do anything to actually stave off the advance of chaos and destruction.

They are supremely able administrators and they push relentlessly and constantly for baby steps in the right direction.

People like Romney have administered a policy whereby the country that made them wealthy has been dismantled and sold for parts. The change they push for is the exact same change the hardcore leftists push for, the only difference being their distaste for high taxes on the wealthy and their need to appoint less liberal judges to the Supreme Court as a sop to the pro-life lobby.

In other words, no matter where you are on the right, from a moderate who leans left on gay marriage to an extreme radical counter-revolutionary, you are serving your interests best by joining mainstream politics and approving its message mass support for a rightist direction.

If Romney wanted to take the country in a rightist direction he would be talking about repealing at least some leftist laws. Instead he only whines about some leftist laws while making clear he'd never do anything to change them.

As his spokesman Ed Gillespie said: "The governor would not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Act. He was opposed to it at the time. He would not repeal it."

That's what opposition to a leftist law means to Romney, pretending to oppose it to fool people against the law into voting for him, while having absolutely no intention to repeal or otherwise alter the law.

Times change, and with it we must, or we fail to adapt and become obsolete. This is the age of liberalism’s failure, as all of its social programs turn into disasters, which means we must be the antithesis of those ideals but also use its methods.

Except in his personal life, where it might've been better if he had married a man or at least used more birth control, Romney has embodied liberalism's ideals.

He's just embodied them in a somewhat different way than Obama has.

As we push forward with patience and deliberation, our opponents quake in fear because this is the one attack they have no defense against.

No sane leftist would much fear the prospect of a Romney presidency. It's just that a lot of leftists in America have an emotional attachment to Obama because he's the first Black president, and they wouldn't like to see him beat even if it was by Leon Trotsky himself.

Unlike in America, elections in Greece actually mean a whole lot now thanks to a party called Golden Dawn, a group of people who are actually conservatives on account of the simple fact that they want to conserve the things they love, principally the Greek people and their traditions. This stands in contrast to Romney, who feigns love for things he'll then sit back and watch die without even trying to lift a finger.

Golden Dawn's website is found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home

Information on how to donate to Golden Dawn can be found here:
http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/home/oikonomikh-enisxysh

Golden Dawn New York's website is found here:
http://xaameriki.wordpress.com/