Countenance: The Tragic Central Ironies of the Left and the Right

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Among many other public services the Countenance blogmeister performs on a regular basis (e.g., analyzing pols and handicapping races), he has written a series of brilliant essays on the total failure of constitutional conservatism.

I read the best, tightest such essay of his last November, I believe. It ran about 800 words, which is much longer than his usual blog item, and his longer pieces are usually collections of miscellany, such as his Sunday roundups.

I asked him if I could reprint his essay on constitutional conservatism, and he said, “Sure” (in case you didn’t know, I’m his biggest fan—just ask him!), but after at least two hours of searching his blog, I gave up.

This time, I didn’t ask his permission. He had earlier given me what sounded like carte blanche, plus if you ask someone’s permission, he—no, make that she—might just say, “No.”

“May I kiss you?”
“May I grope you?”

According to Anderson Cooper, I am guilty of countless offenses of kissing or groping someone without her permission, and much worse than that! (Does he ask the men he rendezvous with for permission to… whatever? The question was rhetorical.)

Hit the link to Countenance, in order to read the comments.
 

The Tragic Central Irony of Constitutional Conservatism
By Countenance Blogmeister
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Countenance

In our sphere, we often discuss the tragic central irony of the left and its constituent parts. Our case has this scaffolding: The left is undermining that which it necessarily depends on to succeed in order to acquire enough power to implement its agenda. From there, all you need are proper nouns and particularities.

One such example of proper nouns and particularities is BLM. They hate the cops, but need the cops to enforce the system which they need to fulfill their agenda. Deray McKesson despises the Baltimore Police Department but now “works” for the Baltimore City Public Schools, an institution whose finances heavily depend on the Baltimore Police Department collecting taxes from unwilling city property owners. Of course, I don’t think BLM and Deray really hate the cops, they’re just pretending they do in order to leverage the black undertow’s contempt for cops, in order to play it against white pathological altruism, in order to extract benefits for themselves. Hence, Deray’s sinecures.

Another such example is one that you’ve read often, if you read your Sailer like you all should. It’s the “running out of white kids” doctrine. The left wants to demote white people from majority status in the country, but at the same time thinks that the social problems of non-Asian minorities can be solved by spreading them out among white people, using white people as a buffer for NAM social dysfunction (e.g. school deseg, AFFH). I think the modern left with power, because they are mostly baby boomers, live under a demographic delusional fantasy that the country they run still has the same kind of demographics that the country had when they were kids. They behave as if the country is 89% native-born white, 10% black and 1% others.

I figured out this morning, over my OJ, that the left isn’t the only universe that suffers from the syndrome of the tragic central irony.

Hence, modern constitutional conservatism.

If I had a dime for every time I read or heard one of our kind of people pop off about some pie-in-the-sky fantasy about adding constitutional amendments, or repealing constitutional amendments, or something of the like, I’d be able to buy out Gates and Zuckerberg several times over. The problem is that if we had the kind of power it takes to do that, then we actually wouldn’t do that, because we wouldn’t waste our time with that; we’d be doing other more forceful, more impactful things. Our constitutional fantasies usually revolve around compensating for our inability to acquire power, but in order to make those constitutional changes, we’d need to acquire power. But once we acquire power, we’d have power, so why should we bother with the constitutional changes? The reason we don’t have that kind of power is because we waste our time hem-hawing over a piece of paper and its supposed magical ability to save us.

The difference between our tragic central irony and the left’s is that the left’s are of the sort that will eventually undermine their victories and their agenda that they have fulfilled because they have power, while ours puts us in a vicious cycle which prevents us from competing for power.