ME AND HARRY SELDEN | 2007-11-15
I often feel like Harry Selden in the old Foundations Trilogy. Selden speaks to people not yet born in films, telling them what is going to happen. Selden explained his foresight from a truly realistic, mathematical sociology – even the Marxist Asimov admitted that sociology in the '50s was one step below astrology.
My prescience is simpler: I've been here before. I remember when conservative meetings could be held in a phone booth. Paul Weyrich recalls those days in his contribution to The New Right Papers. There were conservatives in congress, just as there are anti-immigration, anti-quota congressmen today, but they were and ARE on the defensive. They are useless, because they cannot deal with the future and the real issues.
Sound familiar?
Conservatives back then were Republicans or Dixiecrats first.
Sound familiar?
So I see you back in the same phone booth. If anything, our New Orleans phone booths and American Renaissance phone booths are bigger than the old conservative ones.
Conservatives then were like Goldwater, who immediately turned the Republicans Party over to the old moderates after his 1964 defeat. He could have won in 1968, but it was Republicanism first. Reagan lost the nomination every time after 1968 with his eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any other Republicans." He got rid of that in 1976 and came within an inch of winning.
In 1980, to appease the moderates, he appointed Bush his Vice President.
So Bush was nominated in 1988. He announced a "a kinder, gentler" Republicanism. FINALLY, that speech made the scales fall from Fall Girl Nancy Reagan's eyes, "Kinder and gentler than WHO?"
Bush's first act as president was to get rid of EVERY Reagan appointee. In 1992, as a good moderate, he lost.
There is very little going on now with our movement that not only is not new to me, but is TIRESOMELY REPETITIVE to me.