Well, don’t hold your breath, really. Continue to act smartly and with a positive spirit because good times are coming, no matter what you are being told, ad infinitum, by the usual sources. I have come to this conclusion from some reading that I’ve been doing and also from observing the scene around me—my sense of the zeitgeist. But first, the reading. The redoubtable Carol Swain has a new book out, this one written with Mike Towle, titled “The Adversity of Diversity: How Real Unity Training Can Promote Healing in a Post-Affirmative Action World.” (Note the “post” affirmative action—hurray!) Carol and Mike’s extremely useful book takes those of us already disgusted with the pervasive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) nuttiness in our schools and businesses—most readers here, I suspect—to the next important (corrective) phase that I believe we shall soon be in or are in already. Get it.
Also, more than worth reading and delving into is the October edition of the always-stimulating The New Criterion that’s been given over to “The New Conservative Dilemma: A Symposium.”What that amounts to is a series of essays from eminent conservatives who have been looking into the split in their movement between the old establishment wing of the Republican Party and the newer “MAGA populist” wing. The latter group seems to have won the battle for the hearts and minds of the voters in a landslide, if not with some of the more conventional intelligentsia (not to include those perceptive enough to appear in The New Criterion).To get a good overview of the issue, read editor Roger Kimball’s excellent introduction that references one of William F. Buckley’s more amusing quotes, which hints at where the deceased conservative icon might stand amid today’s “dilemma.”
Also, apropos Swain’s diversity book, check out Peter Thiel’s “The Diversity Myth” in the same issue to see just how long this rancid, left-wing strategy has been with us. But now for the zeitgeist that I view as increasingly positive.If we examine the polls (yes, I know, but stay with me), in the Real Clear Politics average, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party—former President Donald Trump at 58.8 percent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (sorta MAGA) at 12.5 percent, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (full MAGA) at 7.5 percent—adds up to just shy of 80 percent of the vote, a total blowout.Meanwhile, President Trump is now eking out a victory over President Joe Biden in head-to-head polling. But those are, as we know, only polls, snapshots in time, and of questionable accuracy anyway. Still, what we have is better than the reverse, no? Many other things are active, however, one being the Cloward–Piven strategy, in this case, the failure thereof. What’s that, you may ask (or you may not, if you think back some years)?
In the early 1970s, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work, argued that the way to “end poverty” was to continue to expand social programs, spending more and more, until, voila, the economy broke down and would be replaced by socialism, their nirvana with its consequent end to poverty, or so they said.Sound familiar? In the past few years, spending has gone beyond whatever those professors could have conceived in their wildest imaginations. We have sent $46.6 billion in various forms of aid, including weapons, to Ukraine alone, at least according to the Council on Foreign Relations. (It’s probably more.) The cost of illegal immigration has been $150.7 billion thus far, according to researchby the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). (Again, it could well be more.)That’s not even beginning to count the exponential numbers misspent on COVID-19 and that boondoggle of boondoggles: “climate change.”Yet—after all those billions, or is it trillions—our cities are in the worst shape anyone can remember, overwhelmed by illegal immigrants taxing every possible system from high school basketball courts to upscale hotels, while the rich speed past the homeless encampments in their long-range Teslas. If that’s socialism, as film producer Samuel Goldwyn famously put it, “include me out.”“Bidenomics” is just Cloward–Piven dressed up for The New York Times, or, better yet, “Saturday Night Live” as it used to be, and has been an utter failure. What the two professors completely missed was the advice of that other Democrat, James Carville, who said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But maybe he just wanted to preserve things, the poor sod.Nevertheless, with the economy in free fall with no end in sight, things are looking bad indeed for the Democrats as they thrash about behind the scenes for a way to show President Biden the door.In the face of this, there is, dare I say it, something of a new Trump, a Trump 2.0 that many have wished for. The former president, while always good on policy but criticized by some (not me, really, but I understood) as a bit excessive in his presentation, has become remarkably statesman-like.Those who thought he could never learn from his mistakes—the let-Trump-be-Trump crowd—have been proved wrong. And he’s done that in the face of the most bogus legal assault on a major politician in American history. What an achievement!We saw that assault, perhaps more accurately an assassination, demonstrated and then some by the constant evasions and prevarications from Attorney General Merrick Garland as he testified in front of a congressional committee on Sept. 20.They say it’s not the crime, but the coverup. But in this case, it’s both!We are in the midst of what we could only call a moral war for the soul of our country, and, for the first time, I am beginning to think (take a deep breath, Simon) that the good guys can win.But, as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds constantly reminds his readers, “Don’t get cocky!”Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, columnist for The Epoch Times.
