Our Road Warrior world

Victor Davis Hanson protects his peaches.

Conservative author and big-time war-enthusiast-from-afar Victor Davis Hanson, like a lot of pasty, self-styled masculine archetypes of a certain age, is preparing for the end of the world -- and he wants you to know about, for how else would everyone know how much of an alpha male he is in our fallen age of metrosexuality and womyn's rights.

Spurred in part by a passer-by trying to get all up on his fruit ("[He tried to] steal the peaches from my trees; he honestly thought not only that he could, but that he almost was obligated to."), Hanson has come to believe that society is collapsing around him. The blame for this, for the "ubiquity of tattooed, skin-pierced tribal people with shaved heads and strange clothes," says Hanson, of course lies with the obvious, most influential segments of society: poor people and immigrants, and especially poor immigrants. But let's also not forget the "whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast," Handson reminds us -- and you know the type, the self-parodying sort that rather than Man Up take to the Internet to complain about some meanie picking their Prunus persicas.

This terrifying new reality that Hanson describes, one where people think they can just go around enjoying the earth's blessings willy-nilly without so much as a hint of respect for some old white asshole's claim to monopoly privilege, requires preparation -- a new code by which to live. Have you seen The Walking Dead? Think that, but instead of zombies there's Obamacare. And our leader is a contributor to the National Review:

I find myself insidiously adopting the Road Warrior survival code. Without any systematic design, I notice that in the last two years I have put a hand pump on my grandfather’s abandoned well in the yard and can pump fresh water without electricity. I put in an outdoor kitchen, tied into a 300-gallon propane tank, that can fuel a year of cooking. I am getting more dogs (all vaccinated and caged); for the first time in my life I inventoried all my ancestors’ guns in all the closets and found shotguns, deer rifles, .22s etc.

I have an extra used pickup I chose not to sell always gassed in the garage. For all sorts of scrapes and minor injuries, sprains, simple finger fractures, etc., I self-treat — anything to avoid going into the local emergency room (reader, you will too, when Obamacare kicks in). And the more I talk to neighbors, the more I notice that those who stayed around are sort of ready for our Road Warrior world.

As a white dude, let me be the first to say: fucking white people.

An indictment of the liberal/conservative movement

Michael Brendan Dougherty, an editor with The American Conservative -- perhaps the only remaining publication on the right that happens to be interesting -- has penned a deservedly scathing letter to the conservative movement. An excerpt:

You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:

1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting—whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics—is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we're supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.

Or:

2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers.

If one of us tries to walk a fine line between these two, we’ll be accused of either disloyalty by the hacks or of hackery by the principled and aloof. One way merits a secure gig in the movement's intellectual ghetto. The other may win a few of us a higher status but a more insecure job at a respected outlet.

This situation makes actual arguments difficult, since everyone assumes we are simply enacting long-term branding strategies, rather than stating our views honestly. You’ve made it impossible for us to have a conversation.

Because you’ve made yourself a prostitute for the GOP, a cynical and corrupt organization since Reconstruction, all of your young geniuses are tainted. People don’t respect their ideas, because they can’t assume they are genuinely held, rather than cynical ploys to keep Joe Palinsupporter in line.

And so, young conservatives hate themselves. They live in fear that if they do state their actual views, they’ll be forbidden from any meaningful work in the future outside the movement.

Notable is that Dougherty, a committed right-winger, could have written much the same if he were seeking to author an indictment of liberalism in the age of Obama, what with the serious, respectable types like Kevin Drum bemoaning anyone to the left of Genghis Khan who dares question Democratic orthodoxy -- and war-making -- when it's Nancy Pelosi and the Blue Team in power. Meek criticism of tactics and strategy, perhaps, but a comprehensive indictment of the Democratic Party? Good luck making a living writing for Counterpunch, asshole.

Whether one identifies politically as left or right -- whatever those terms mean when the embrace of the corporate warfare state is a fully bipartisan endeavor -- "the movement" always takes precedence over the principles that at one time or another animated it, as the likes of David Sirota and Jane Hamsher are no doubt learning. Power corrupts, and party politics corrupt absolutely.