A
national election always triggers an onslaught of political books
claiming that the next several decades will belong to the party which
just swept into power. These books are laughably wrong, usually being
discarded and discredited by the next election night. This election is
no different, and books are being finished right now which explain why
events in history will be marked henceforth as Before Obama and After Obama. There are other books being edited currently which will be the obituary
of the GOP, claiming that Barack Obama killed the great elephant on
his way back from killing Osama bin Laden. The byproducts of both
responses to the 2012 election will in short order be discarded, but for
reasons far outside politics.
The future is dramatically conservative, in a very uncomfortable and dark way. This conservative future is inevitable -- not because of political events, but because of societal trajectory. If political events are man taking flight, the conservative future is characteristically similar to gravity.
The governing assumptions, reflected in the electoral outcomes of 2012, are of total collapse. The magnitude of government and the trajectory of culture have created a Leviathan State of such girth that it has escaped the control of self-governing people and can be tamed only by the realities of nature asserting itself again.
Such is the size and audacity of present government that in accounting terms it is documented in quantities of trillions -- a number rightly reserved for astrophysics. Trillion, though mathematically sentient, is a number divorced from human experience and thus comprehension. Government measured in units such as these can be discussed in terms and under conditions roughly equivalent to stories of science fiction. It is as useful to propose jiggling about tax rates in this realm as it would be to debate the chance that a Jedi swinging a light saber could overcome a Klingon wielding a photon-torpedo.
The future is dramatically conservative, in a very uncomfortable and dark way. This conservative future is inevitable -- not because of political events, but because of societal trajectory. If political events are man taking flight, the conservative future is characteristically similar to gravity.
The governing assumptions, reflected in the electoral outcomes of 2012, are of total collapse. The magnitude of government and the trajectory of culture have created a Leviathan State of such girth that it has escaped the control of self-governing people and can be tamed only by the realities of nature asserting itself again.
Such is the size and audacity of present government that in accounting terms it is documented in quantities of trillions -- a number rightly reserved for astrophysics. Trillion, though mathematically sentient, is a number divorced from human experience and thus comprehension. Government measured in units such as these can be discussed in terms and under conditions roughly equivalent to stories of science fiction. It is as useful to propose jiggling about tax rates in this realm as it would be to debate the chance that a Jedi swinging a light saber could overcome a Klingon wielding a photon-torpedo.
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