Monday, September 8, 2014

What will our “watershed moment” be?

Breitbart has an interesting interview with Nigel Farage of Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP was formed by conservatives disgruntled over the Tories’ gradual philosophical convergence with pan-European happy talk and the embrace by the Conservative Party establishment of the inevitability of the nanny state. Farage sees a similar disconnect between conservatives and the GOP leadership in the U.S.
There’s no serious talk in grassroots circles of a third party movement, but Farage said that could change if there’s a “watershed moment”—like the passage of amnesty for illegal aliens into law, or a major policy embraced by the establishment half of the GOP that is in direct contravention to what conservatives believe. Farage said there's still a fighting chance in the U.S. that conservatives can eliminate establishment-minded Republicans and save the GOP from them, but that time has long since passed in the U.K.
I’m not sure how much of a “fighting chance” conservatives really have of reversing the tendency toward uselessness of the Republican Party, but I certainly believe it’s worth the effort.

It will be a hard slog, though. As Farage points out, there’s an awful lot of money that flows into American politics, and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, whose goals are increasingly at odds with the desires of the rank and file, seem to have gotten a hammerlock on the party leadership. But whether we retake the GOP, or wind up creating a new party, it will probably be the work of decades – which just goes to show the wisdom of T.S. Eliot’s observation on lost causes:
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
And we know that the irreducible minimum requirement for a chance at triumph is keeping the idea alive.

2 comments:

Robert of Ottawa said...

Hi Paco, if you want to see another view of the current UKIP, I suggest Richard North's site, http://www.eureferendum.com, wherein he lays out the facts of a serious strategy of withdrawal.

On the other hand, can I offer the example of Canada, wherein a liberal-in-blue-suite party was finally overthrown by conservatives. Google Reform Party of Canada.

It took 10 years, during which the liberals had no opposition, but success, as much as it was, arrived.

It's a question of moving the political center to the right, not moving to the center, which is a very left place.

bruce said...

Farage's spoke for many of us outsiders when he said he doesn't quite get the Rep/Dem thing.

If the US Democrats are your 'labor' party, supposed to represent ordinary folk, then it's the Dems who are the biggest betrayers of the masses, just like our labor parties.

And the mechanism is the iron grip of the labor unions who now control everything - academia is just one union franchise, civil servants are just as important in extending government corruption.

Nixon won by getting the vote of alienated southern dems. Surely there's a whole nation of alienated dems now. But the unions have to be smashed before you'll hear them.