I keep hoping that this impasse will lead to more penetrating insight: maybe both kinds of right are stuck for a reason, even if both make some valid points.
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But usually, instead of reflecting on failure in order to succeed in the future, it’s easier to deny that you’ve failed, and insist your ideas just weren’t tried hard enough—or exclusively enough.
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The policy cons can always blame the hard right for letting down the serious policy cause, and the hard right can always say it was sold out by craven wonks.
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Lather, rinse, repeat—this has been the story of the right for whole the quarter century I’ve been involved (first as a high school student), and for years before then, too.
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My engagement with all this leads me to keep open the hope of finally breaking the impasse, yet simultaneously recognizing that politics, policy, punditry, etc. just may not be able to deliver what’s being asked.
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When I look at history, what I see about demographics and civilizational rise and fall looks beyond human planning.
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Beyond a certain level of prosperity & security, populations tend to fall. Yet prosperity & security are among the clearest attainable goods of politics (broadly understood). Success is its own punishment, viewed in this light.
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You know what’s good for population growth? Often, new religions or religious movements; land-grabbing settler efforts; and the first flush of industrialism. Various forms of adversity can be, too.
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There are chicken-or-egg questions here, but my sense is that the impulses that lead to new religions, settling of territory, and industrial surges can’t be planned or finely manipulated.
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They’re outbursts of spirit. Which is why old-fashioned Providential history seems to understand something that policy brains and assertive reactionaries do not.
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Would you agree that even if outbursts of spirit can't be planned, they can be quashed (by bureaucrats and political commissars?)
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