Here is Bruce Walker making my point about how conservatives have failed in the information war:
Leftism has been on life support for fifty years. The Republican landslide in the 1966 midterm election was recognized by everyone at the time as a massive rejection of the agenda and the politics of the left.
The reasons were clear. The War on Poverty produced race riots and idiocies like “Welfare Strikes.” Having achieved civil rights, militant blacks were now demanding “Black Power.” Affirmative action was so clearly discrimination that there were few serious minds who could coherently defend this vile incarnation of state-mandated bigotry.
The left’s approach to foreign threats was precisely as it is today: put in our brave men in harm’s way with no discernible purpose other than to make Washington bosses look good; reject waging war to win and instead muddle from failure to failure hoping not to win or to lose; reduce defense spending so that in any future conflict, instead of spending treasure, we would spend blood.
Beginning in 1968, Democrats began calling themselves “Progressives” and scrupulously avoided the term “Liberal.” As I have noted often, self-defined “conservatives” dramatically outnumber self-defined “liberals,” but less known is that even in the aftermath of Goldwater’s defeat, when smug leftists insisted that conservatism was dead, ordinary Americans called themselves “conservative” by a two-to-one margin over “liberal.”
The left was sustained not by the quality of its politicians. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton are such dull minds and slow wits that the worst Republican nominee in the last five decades looks brilliant and wise by comparison.
What, then, has kept leftism alive? It is an imperial occupying force in much of America. Flyover country, largely, is America – particularly the part of America that actually produces the wealth we consume. Leftism is a small minority even in states like Minnesota and Michigan and Maine.
The three pillars are (1) monopolistic control of news and entertainment by the left, with a corresponding collusion against the public interest; (2) limitless usurpation of power to Washington and within Washington to the federal bench, independent regulatory agencies, and executive departments, which buys support; and (3) the creation of a vast taxpayer-subsidized system of pseudo-education and pseudo-research whored into unsavory work corrupting all true education and research.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: www.gallup.com.
