Reply #34: Home run, Your Honor: [View All]

Robin:

"Conservatism has not only depended upon outsiders; it also
has seen itself as the voice of the outsider. From Burke’s cry that
“the gallery is in the place of the house” to Buckley’s complaint that
the modern conservative is “out of place,” the conservative has served
as a tribune for the displaced, his movement a conveyance of their
grievances. Far from being an invention of the politically correct,
victimhood has been a talking point of the Right ever since Burke
decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative,
to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost some-
thing of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth, whose chief
complaint is that they never had anything to lose. His constituency
is the contingently dispossessed—William Graham Sumner’s “for-
gotten man”—rather than the preternaturally oppressed. Far from
diminishing his appeal, this brand of victimhood endows the con-
servative complaint with a more universal significance. It connects
his disinheritance to an experience we all share—namely, loss—and
threads the strands of that experience into an ideology promising that
that loss, or at least some portion of it, can be made whole."

Kunstler:

This is exactly the theme of Sarah Palin's campaign. A large segment of the American public has entered the dark wilderness of loserdom. They've lost jobs, incomes, and even their homes. They can't support a family, can't afford to gas up their God-given cars, can hardly even afford to buy food - though many of this group have been programmed, tragically, to get much of their food from hamburger and taco dispensaries that "free market" America has generously dotted the landscape with. They are ashamed, especially living in a nation where liberty is supposed to enable you to get a leg up in the world, to be self-reliant, to make something of yourself. Hence, they imagine themselves to have somehow been deprived of liberty (and honor!) which they must now get back.