With nary a rumble, a fresh Danielanche of hiked eyebrows and squinted eyes, nicely on point and cue, has appeared at Eunomia [scroll down] regarding that Charlottesville conference some of you may have been hearing about. There isn't enough time right now to properly join the exchange that's developing. But I want to point out a couple of things.
First, Ron Paul did receive a spontaneous collective huzzah at this conference, and note of Paul's increased pollage blippage received a red tide of raw remarks -- pro and con -- at No Left Turns. These are maybe not very large (small, y'know, is still beautiful) signs of Something Afoot, but they are signs, concentrated and isolated but powerful and latently spasmatic. Second, everybody wants a new GOP candidate to materialize and nobody for the life of themselves can account for what the hell this person is supposed to say, think, want to do, and want not to do. This is because George W. Bush has cracked his own governing majority. It does not exist anymore. Even among a conference full of the very few people on Planet Earth who know who Wendell Berry is appear in danger of falling amongst themselves. Have we degenerated to the level of dumb beasts? Or is there, really, finally, far less of a 'we' than we fancy? We all line up so well to face our very obvious enemies, but what else grounds this discipline? Third, the Republican Party is facing a wretched reckoning which probably Andrew Sullivan understands as well as anyone but, in so doing, completely misunderstands it, because he comes down on an incoherent, untenable side. That reckoning revolves basically around morality -- sometimes strictly religious, but often not. Do we really want a three-time divorce dude letting his wife sit in on Cabinet meetings, "certainly" when the talk turns to health care? Are the present terms of national politics destructive to virtue, or not? Is the war in Iraq morally indefensible, or is it now only morally defensible? Are certain lifestyles wrong -- are they vices -- or are they not? You can run from these questions, folks, but there is nowhere to hide.
These thoughts are jangled and incomplete, but I'll follow them up later, in good PoMoCo fashion.
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