Nixon's Catholic coup, and more
- Nixon's Catholic coup. He made mistakes (affirmative action and pure fiat money, for example) but nobody owned him; a Greatest Generation fellow who did what he thought was right. Pat Buchanan on an effect of the Sixties that the Republicans have tried to use since Nixon: shifting practicing, orthodox Catholics away from their deep Democratic roots. (Also what brought the neocons in; they and the Rockefeller Republicans run the party.) "If you're religious, you're stuck with us." I have no dog in that fight anymore really as I haven't voted for a mainstream Republican since 2000 (when Bush and Cheney talked sensible post-Cold War non-interventionism before 9/11 Changed Everything™; actually the PNAC was hiding in plain sight). Watergate: Kennedy got away with that stuff.
- The only thing the Republicans have going for them is that they oppose Obamacare. But even that is only because it is not a Republican health-care plan.
- A cashless society in a world of fiat.
- Why are so many men applauding masculine women?
Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
Sarah Palin who can gut a moose in a bikini is the redneck conservative version of the new masculine woman.
ReplyDeleteI thought of that, but her appeal is above all feminine, which is why the mainstream, the left, hates her: envy. She's fulfilled and happy as a woman: she's been married for many years to a manly type, she's a mom and a grandma, and men are still very attracted to her.
DeleteThe conservative parties have done the same here in Australia. It used to be a law of the universe that if you were Catholic you were Labor. Not anymore.
ReplyDeleteUncanny resemblance. Would I be right in assuming that like other British countries (the mother country and Canada) the whole political arena is farther left than here?
DeleteYes, generally you could say that. We never did have that radical nonconformist element. However, the secular nature of the Commonwealth Anglosphere is fairly recent I think. Before the '60s Australia was quite religious and had a strong sectarian element. Catholic/Irish/Labor vs. Protestant/Anglo-Saxon/Conservative (non-union).
DeleteMakes sense that the convicts (the first settlers) weren't intellectual radicals. Actually, as P.J. O'Rourke has observed, and you can see it in manosphere writers such as Roissy, successful criminals are hard-headed realists about human nature and thus can be conservative. Then again crime is about disrupting society: short-term, selfish gain at society's expense. (Like pickup artists.) The Anglosphere upper class has had a big secularist element since the "Enlightenment." Going through the motions of religion because religion was utilitarian, good for society (Roissy calls it a good kind of pretty little lie for kids) - it made the proles behave - but not believing in it anymore.
DeleteSomeone who is considered conservative in Europe would be considered a leftist here. The leader of the part that was once the Fascist Party in Italy, and is still the party that is the most to the right, espouses policies that would make them liberal Democrats here.
DeleteTrue in mainstream politics but I understand there are also monarchists, et al. there who look down on the classical liberalism that's one of the bases of American conservatism, another being a sort of Burkean high churchmanship, and still another being the social conservatism the practicing Catholics, evangelicals, and in their way the neocons (old Jewish liberals who rightly hated the hippies) have tried to bring into the GOP (and whom the Rockefeller/neocon GOP has strung along?) since the Sixties.
DeleteI think English Catholics have always tended to be conservative. It was the influx of Irish working-class Catholics into England that swelled the ranks of leftist Catholics there.
DeleteJohn, orthodox Catholics of German heritage (like my family) were never part of the Dem-Cath monolith. They were always Republican. The development of that demographic had more to do with the extreme poverty of Irish, Italian, and Central European immigrants who arrived in this country through the ports of Boston and New York, where they were immediately met by the local Dem alderman who offered shelter and unskilled labor in ethnic slums. The Germans who arrived were craftsmen and farmers of modest means who skipped right over the teeming East Coast, and settled in places like the upper Midwest, where they could buy land and take up the life they left in better circumstances. From the the Civil War on, when most of them arrived, German Catholics gave their allegiance to the Republican Party no matter their depth of orthodoxy.
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