We don’t know for sure if Charles Darwin actually said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change,” but whether he said it or not, it’s an insightful observation that transcends the context of natural selection. It is supremely relevant in this day and age of a Republican Party and conservative movement both in a state of flux after Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
The RINOs in congress and various think tanks and the Never Trumpers are enormously outnumbered by the ranks of disgruntled voters and their era of arrogance is coming to an end. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard has made a career out of being wrong about… well, everything. George Will, once a giant of conservative thought, has grown shrill and should probably stick to opining about baseball in his golden years. The National Review, despite its cachet, declared war on the candidacy of President Trump, lost their gambit. Two-faced Republicans in congress such as Jeff Flake, are retiring en masse as they watch their party transform into something new and out of their control.
The dinosaurs are dying. It’s a protracted process and stands in stark contrast to the merciful death blow delivered to the leviathans of old by a flaming meteor that landed on the Yucatán Peninsula near Chicxulub. In politics, a year is an eternity. The first term of Donald Trump will, at its conclusion, feel like a millennia as his detractors persist in their death spiral, kicking and screaming every step of the way. The dinosaurs didn’t have a choice, their demise was an unfair aberration that flies in the face of Darwin’s alleged exhortation to embrace adaptation. The imposters who have poisoned the conservative movement have no such excuse.
This is a teachable moment for each of us who finds ourselves on the right side of our nation’s political spectrum. Change or die.
For years, conservatives running as Republicans have excoriated deficit doves and debt addicts who have exploded our country’s fiscal crisis to the tune of twenty trillion dollars. The debt, these hawks have warned, is unsustainable and threatens our long term economic viability and national security. These warnings are not without merit. Net interest payments on our debt cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year and the price tag isn’t getting any smaller. Our most recent budget expands our deficits and kicks the can – the solution to this crisis – further down the road.
What the deficit hawks don’t want to tell you is that there is no solution to the debt crisis. There’s a reason Republicans run on paying down the debt and then capitulate to untenable spending on policies that they truly oppose but find themselves powerless to resist. The reason for this about-face is because once these individuals find themselves in the halls of power, they confront the truth: they ran on an unrealistic promise.
Elected representatives who tout themselves as deficit hawks have sold us a bill of goods, not out of malice, but ignorance. The damage these promises have done to the expectations of conservative constituents is not inconsiderable. Right wing voters want the debt to be paid down, they want the problem fixed, this is, in part, what motivates their decisions at the ballot box.
Paying down the debt is a fantasy, and not a bad one. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, said our national debt is our top national security concern. In a perfect world, paying down this incredible figure would be our country’s number one priority, but it’s not. Liberals have absolutely zero interest in keeping deficits low and paying down our debt, unless, of course, Republicans are driving up both, then it’s good politics to castigate conservatives for their hypocrisy. And they are hypocrites, with a few exceptions like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
In a perfect world, both parties would prioritize paying down the debt and in a perfect world such a goal would be feasible. But it’s not feasible and it’s not a priority for either party and at this point, it shouldn’t be a priority.
Our debt is, for the most part, a product of unsustainable spending on entitlement programs and GDP growth that for the past decade or so, has been mediocre at best. Both are the results of progressive policy making and surrender by Republicans in congress who have come face to face with the reality that too many voters are addicted to government largesse and don’t give a damn about the cost and what it means for our future. Theoretically, we could eliminate all of our entitlement programs and institute comprehensive supply-side reforms. We got tax reform passed and that’s a good start. But cutting the spending isn’t a realistic goal. Voters wouldn’t stand for it, regardless of the fact that it means national suicide, and that means lawmakers in Washington, D.C., won’t stand for it either.
Our national debt doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On an infinite horizon, our entitlement programs are hundreds of trillions of dollars in the red. Combine that with our twenty trillion dollar debt and you must come to an unavoidable conclusion: there literally isn’t enough money in the world to pay for our government’s promises and there exists zero political will to reverse course. This is an unworkable problem and it presents the conservative movement with Darwin’s dilemma, that is, change or die.
Every second we spend arguing about the debt is a second we could have spent on something that has real implications for the future of our country and culture. Neo-marxist post-modernists who have found their home in the Democratic Party, don’t care about the debt not because they’re ignorant of how dangerous it is, but for the exact opposite reason. They know, at least their intelligentsia knows, that a debt crisis generally has one of two consequences, or both: collapse and war, such as what happened at the end of the Weimar Republic. Post-modernism is characterized by a hatred of the old order and a mission to destroy it and replace it with the horrors and ugliness of Marxism. They want the country to collapse, they want our culture obliterated.
With a focus on the future, the post-modernist Left is positioning itself to dominate our country and culture after the collapse. They have been systematically infiltrating and poisoning our institutions, both governmental and civil. They control Hollywood and the music industry and the news media. They have tainted the Boyscouts and the NFL. They ruin everything they touch and they do so deliberately. The perversion they have brought to entertainment and art is a perversion they wish to project on the entirety of our society.
While conservatives squabble among themselves over unsolvable problems like the debt, the Left is preparing itself to control our culture in the aftermath of inevitable collapse. We on the Right can no longer distract ourselves with fantasies of paying down the debt and controlling deficits. The time has come to focus fully on defeating the Left and winning the culture war and reclaiming our institutions and reinvigorating our time honored traditions. If that means saying to hell with the debt, then so be it. We can waste our time and energy on something that we cannot accomplish, or we can concentrate on those battles we can and must win.
Our national debt is not the hill we want to die on. The time is now to bolster our military capabilities abroad, which we are doing under President Trump, and over-power our political enemies here at home, which we’re doing as evidenced by the rightward shift of the Overton Window. In November we must strike a killing blow on the post-modernist’s political vehicle, the Democratic Party. We must engage in measures now to ensure our survival and cultural hegemony in the days after the inevitable calamity of our debt crisis.
This is not an abdication of conservative values and morals. This is a matter of survival and survival is not a moral dilemma. We must, for the time being, think of ourselves as pragmatists first and conservatives second. Conservatism is pragmatic but not infallible and if we do not adapt to the reality of our unworkable debt crisis, we will go the way of the dinosaurs. It will be a self-inflicted coup de gras and one which is totally avoidable.
