State Of Play In Politics - August '21

Things continue to look down for Dems in Election 2022. This remains important because regaining the House remains the best prospect for shutting down Great Reset--the Senate, not so much, although a message sent to McConnell's wing might help. You have to start somewhere, and in the meantime slowing down the Great Reset is the best we can do. Winning the big battle of ideas--changing Middle Americans into philosophical warriors--remains a bridge too far at this point, so you go for the smaller victories.

Smaller victories appear to be within reach. Two articles that dovetail with each other give reason for hope.

At Red State yesterday we find some analysis of Yahoo polling--and, as the author notes, bear in mind that this was a +11 Dem sampling. Zhou's handlers can read polling results just as well as anyone, and they surely know what this poll is pointing toward:

Zhou Baidan Enters 'Yikes' Territory as Democrat 2022 Hopes Fade

The important thing is to look at the issues and to understand that some of them--bad as they may seem--have yet to really bite. Inflation is a good example. Schools is another--because I fully expect widespread shutdowns in major metro areas. Not just mask mandates. Look at the issues, because it will get worse. Wait till people start waking up to the reality of the Covid Panic and its attendant Regime--the real science. These are all issues that hit home for Americans and they also point toward broader political orientation issues--first principles of life as a society. These are not issues that a policy tweak or two can turn around:

48% approval in a poll that has a Democrat +11 sample is about as big of a yikes moment as we’ve seen so far. Yahoo’s polls are also typically fairly kind to Baidan. To see him below 50% here is a surprise. More surprising is that he doesn’t top 50% on any issue except COVID, and that’s by only a single percentage point.

These are awful numbers that only look to drop further. Our inflationary woes are not going away anytime soon. The situation in Afganistan is likely to deteriorate further, and that’s become a major embarrassment for the “adults in the room” that have so thoroughly screwed things up. Past that, it feels like the border is beyond repair. Even if Baidan reversed course completely today, it’d take years to clean up the mess he’s made. None of this seems to be lost on most Americans, and the only thing making Baidan look halfway alive politically are Democrat sampling edges (like the D+11 here). When polls start to adjust for likely voters, things are going to get really ugly.

Issue by issue, Baidan is also underwater on crime, guns, and race, with the latter showing that you can truly never be woke enough. ...

In short, every disaster that currently plagues Baidan and his cohorts is not easily rectified. ...

To give some idea of what should become a major issue--more so than it is already--check this out:

CPS And Teachers Union Remain Far Apart On School Reopening Terms

Chicago schools are set to open Aug. 30, but school and CTU officials are divided on COVID-19 testing, quarantining and remote learning.

Forget the nonsense that this is about specific issues. The one real issue is: Will government schools in Chicago open, or will they be shut down again. The union has all the leverage, and its members have no desire to return, as long as they're getting paid. The goal is to turn Chicago into a union run jobs program:

But the union is pushing hard to continue the strictest protocols from last spring around quarantining and a potential return to remote schooling. It is also demanding that the school district staff up dramatically.

...

... the union is calling for more special education and bilingual teachers, and an additional counselor, social worker, nurse, restorative justice coordinator and librarian for every school.

They also want clerks and teachers to be paid to do home visits with students who have not been attending school regularly.

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to understand that none of this will get the students anywhere near the educational attainment that will lead to a productive life. It will be circling the drain time.

Also remember--Catholic schools in Chicago were open all year long last year. Even in these times, those schools are a major school system by many standards. That reality exposes the Dem fraud for anyone who cares to see--which explains the surge in home schooling and the shift to private schools for those who can get in.

All this has yet to fully come home to parents. Meanwhile, as some schools return the students are facing a regime of petty mask harassment, fueling parent anger. 

Now, an article at American Thinker plays right into all this:

The Four Horsemen of the Biden Apocalypse

The four horsemen?

1. Borders/Immigration. Every poll I'm aware of places this issue at or near the top of voter concerns. The only issue that may edge it out is crime. This has, predictably, turned into a major disaster that is finally getting some publicity. Oh--it also plays into Covid, because we're admitting huge numbers of diseased people.

2. Energy/Gas Prices. Of course this is part of the whole inflation nation scenario, and there could hardly be a starker contrast--one so immediately visible--to the good old Trump days. Shut down energy production and then beg the Middle East to up production? And why would they want payment in our inflated dollars? Like all these disasters, this isn't going away, and people will be reminded of who's to blame every single day.

3. Crime. This will only get worse, as police bail out when opportunity offers--retirement, move to safer cities, disability. The most corrupt will remain. Lowering hiring standards won't help.

4. Covid. Sooner or later people will wise up. As it is, the two biggest centers of resistance to mandates are in the Dem's inner city base--also plagued by crime and shuttered schools--and the most highly educated.

Again, we're talking about mitigation here--not a dramatic turnaround. The sad fact is that American society's decline in fundamental moral character has been so prolonged and is now so precipitous that we can hope for no better than slowing the decline for now. If you doubt me, look at the state of our educational institutions. Who really believes that that happened overnight? It's taken half a century to get us to where we are now. And that process has brought us to the point that stories like this one no longer surprise: Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine Urges People to Use Terms Like ‘Chestfeeding’ and ‘Human Milk Feeding Individuals’.

In that regard, consider this article--heartfelt but largely out of touch with American reality:

Toward An American Revivalism

It’s time to say “goodbye” to conservatism.

I understand that many readers will find this article appealing--but it's strictly pie in the sky goals ungrounded in real world principles that would make success in any way likely. Conservatism in America remains the product of residual Christian culture. Without a serious revival of that culture across a broad swath of America, talk of "revivalism" is like talk of reviving a corpse. And by "serious" I mean intellectually serious. Ultimately, grounded in the philosophical realism that used to be our Western patrimony as a philosophia perennis, but has now been almost completely expunged from our educational institutions and our public life.

The author briefly nods to this notion--he allows that "religion" can be part of an American revival, but look how pathetic that nod really is:

We think of religion when we think of revival. And yes, we need that. Particularly given that this is and has always been a religious nation, but the problem is that political and cultural power now marinates in a decadent, godless, factless religion of climate change, critical race theory, gender as a social construct, and cancel culture. Reclaiming society for the Judeo-Christian faith which created it, rather than this nouveau pagan heresy which is destroying it, is simply a matter of will. It isn’t a matter of merit.

Sounds good, you think? But what's his solution? This is it: Can't we all just get along? Good luck with that:

 

But it’s more than just a religious revival we need. It’s a societal revival. We need to learn to love one another again. To persuade each other rather than to scream. To refound our communities and the civil society we’ve lost. To cultivate the values which made us great rather than indoctrinate each other into endless, pointless, destructive critiques of them.

If this passes for serious conservative thought, then it's yet another measure of how far we've fallen as a society. Only convictions grounded in serious, religiously animated, intellectual principles--the conviction that our very well being as humans is at stake in these principles--can bring about a revival. Until then we're playing defense and should be seeking to bring about the needed conversion, one fellow person at a time. It won't happen overnight, because we didn't get to where we are overnight.