Pjs Lament - Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

POOR OLD P.J. O’Rourke is singing the blues. In a post-election lament in The Weekly Standard he writes we’ve only ourselves to blame. “We blew it,” he writes.

The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

It’s true. If there was a mistake to be made in the last 20 years, conservatives and Republicans made it. And made it in spades.

Only trouble is: That’s always the way. That’s what humans do. We make every mistake in the book, all the time. That’s why we’ve developed these outsized brains of ours. So we can figure out how to climb out of the holes we dig for ourselves.

So let’s think this through again. Given that we conservatives are all fallible mortals, and given that we are battling against the progressive educated class, the ruling class of the modern era, how much better could we have done?

OK, all right. We could have done a lot better.

The main thing is to learn from our mistakes, and do better next time.

But, the big problem really has nothing to do with us. Try as we might, there’s not much we can do to promote truth, freedom, and the American Way if the American people really prefer the “free” services of the nanny state.

So cheer up P.J. Things could be a lot worse. The Democrats could have won 60-40 in the presidential election and be up 65-35 in the Senate.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.