The very fact that Ms. Palin makes libruls soil their knickers makes me love the high cheek-boned, long legged, multi-racial looking beauty regardless of her obvious flaws.
If she’d spend a month with me in the Alaska wilderness, with the wife’s permission of course, I could break her of those habits to the point where even you’d be hollerin’…Sara, Sara, Sara!!!!

The tricks are to first find out what those primary issues are, then to go at them in the right way with the right people. There are places where traditional conservatism of the FPR variety and populism, loosely understood, overlap one another. Seems to me that those areas of commonality would be good places to start talking.

Just as there is no support for labor by either party, there will not be any retreat from Empire, by either party…from within the beltway. Meanwhile, back at the Colosseum, the Reds and Greens will fight their populist fights while Empire bleeds the patient to expiration. It is an old script, older than the colosseum itself and the cast is following it to perfection.

That a Sierra Club Swell might deny that there is great beauty to be found along the ridges and hollows of the Flint Hills south of Cottonwood Falls is completely unsurprising. The Nature 500 likes their spectacular landscapes because they are the only thing that can draw the attention and donations of our busily distracted consumers. The bulk of the landscape might be treated like a dirty dishtowel but this is of no material interest to the Nature 500 because their cocktail circuit revolves around star power…the spectacular locale, distant and hence, like a prize in a cabinet they “protect”. This is, in a way, much like the parsing of the various Think Tanks of Washington where a general premise may be put forth : Conservative principles, support of small business, environmental aims etc etc…but in reality, these aims are window dressing to a degree, subservient to the larger show …..The Spectacular Event, with high production values and an easily controlled story line. Little human interest stories may be charming but only as an occasional punctuation…a minor grace point within the bigger extravaganza.

Watching Ms. Palin’s bus tour of Maverick Malarkey next week should sum up the populist potentials quite nicely.

“the 1960s, the Democratic Party – increasingly a party of establishment Washington and educated elites – threw off their traditional blue-collar (and largely Catholic) electoral base in favor of a new coalition of anti-war activists, the college-educated, and feminists. The result was a political vacuum in which the “populist” wing of the Democratic party was without representation – until Nixon developed a strategy to bring them into the Republican fold.

I’ve seen this written so many times in so many political tracts that I think it deserves someone asking: “Why would they do this?” Why change your political base something completely difference and suffer defeat for it? The answer is: It wasn’t exactly planned this way. Someone once asked one of the protesters at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention why didn’t they protest the Republicans and the answer was “Because we were the children of the Democratic Party.” The Vietnam War and the changing economics structure of the country changed the nature of the Democratic Party, which has always been the most broad-based and divers of our two parties. As a result, that’s why the Democrats changes, not because they suddenly woke up one morning and decided to dump their Catholic wing for the hell of it. The Republicans have inherited something they feel they have to manipulate instead of embrace or at least lead towards path that can benefit it through better policies.

http://www.kansasindependenceparty.com

-Junker

But, the analysis of Populism is incomplete, and the transformation of the Democratic and Republican parties in the 1960s far too simple. William Jennings Bryan was accepted, barely, by the People’s Party in a fusion with the Democratic Party, with a lot of tension. First, Bryan had a Wall Street banker, Sewell, as his running mate. The Populists tried to nominate Bryan and Tom Watson, the Populist from Georgia, but Bryan said my whole ticket or nothing. This was fatal to the Populists, because the whole point of turning the Farmer’s Alliances into a political party was a need for national Treasury policies to extend credit without going to “The Man” (or the Furnishing Man) at exorbitant interest — and Bryan wasn’t doing beans about that. Populism is not equivalent to a liberal caricature of neanderthal ignoramuses, nor does it match the caricature of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.” A good conservative position would recognize, individuals are ornery and different and don’t fit into neat little holes in a matrix.

In the 1960′s, the Democratic Party was dominated by cold war liberals and aging trade union leaders challenged from many directions. The McCarthy and McGovern campaigns mobilized more of the rank and file working class than most histories give credit for — I know because I was knocking on doors in working class districts, and the ward by ward election returns show it too. But, those who had been sort of trendy radicals who came from “good families” all moved on to prosperous middle class positions and became a kind of intellectual elite rather distasteful to just about everyone. They like to think that they are “the progressives” — but they are all wrapped up in stereotypes and assumptions that “the way we think is the RIGHT way to think.” Oh, the Republicans? They absorbed those former Democrats who couldn’t stand the civil rights acts — which were opposed by more Democratic votes than Republican votes at the time they were passed. Anyone who claims to speak for “The People” is a liar, because “The People” have 300 million ideas of their own. We all like to think that “the will of the People” just happens to agree with us. Sarah Palin is merely the latest and most aggressive to show that self-delusion.

I share your dissapointment with the failure of so-called conservatives do make any substantial headway in the area of economic decentralization.

That said, I have a bone to pick with your complaint that many on the right (implicitly the DC conservative policy crowd) are just as supportive of the rise of an economic elite as the left is of a political elite. Leaving aside the fact that conservatism is a disparate label, representing quite a few approaches to economic policy, I do not think this argument holds much water.

In fact, I think the neo-con right represented by AEI and the Weekly Standard is especially illustrative. Many scholars and writers from these institutions railed against the Bush administration’s creation of a new prescription drug entitlement (a benefit for the pharmaceutical companies but not so much for most grandparents and certainly not their grandkids); corporate welfare that rewards DC-rent seekers but not mainstreet small businesses or taxpayers; forced unionization that benefits union bosses at the expense of small business and most workers; and high income, capital gains, and estate taxes that punish entrepreneurs, small business owners, and the investors that fuel their success.

I could list further examples, but I think these are sufficient. The right, for all its faults, is not a champion of economic elitism. Most on the right champion a wide-spread economic decentralization in which local entrepreneurs can more easily compete against large, established corporations. Complaints that the right favors economic elitism seem to blatantly ignore the facts on the ground.

Now, it is possible to refute my argument if you conflate the “big business” trade associations (many of whom support policies that narrowly benefit their larger members) with “conservatism.” While some purported conservatives have certainly become excessively cozy with the business community, I don’t seem evidence of this among conservatives in general.

Perhaps you mean something different with “economic elitism” or I have otherwise misunderstood your argument. If so, I definitely would appreciate clarification.

I haven’t been a fan of the Sierra Club for a while, but that astonishes me. Did he really say that, Caleb? Cripes, what a fool.

This, I think, is very true.

And this: “let’s hope that some cagey political leaders understand that the way to harness this populist anger is not by purging its Left or Right elements, but understanding its consistency – the anger toward private and public concentrations of power, the elimination of a dignified role for the citizen, the infantilization of the American freeman, and the looting of the Republic by power elites of all stripe, is cause for righteous and fervent anger.”

Amen.

Is Kansas buying? There are two stories I tell when I go around my fair country talking about this stuff, which I have discussed here:

First, I am a Trustee for Kansas Audubon, which is the chief conservationist and advocate of the world’s largest remaining reserves of tallgrass prairie in the world in Kansas’s Flint Hills. One of our biggest enemies is the Sierra Club, whose aggressive environmentalist agitation against global warming causes them to advocate for turning Kansas prairies into a massive wind farming system. Confronted with the fact that this would destroy an actual environment, the president of Sierra commented wryly: “There’s no place in Kansas worth preserving.”

Similarly, at a Club for Growth dinner I attended with Steve Moore, Moore talked about the need for Kansas to eliminate its income tax. I cheered. With his next breath, Moore said that this would clear the way for skyscrapers to rise across the prairie from end to end. I was sick.

This is what unites the enemy, as far as I’m concerned. They want to kill what I love. Giant deadly industrial windmills or hideous corporate idols of “growth.” Both represent the abominable phallus of distant overlords set on rape and pillage and enslavement.