Via Theo.

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

From Dan Mitchell.

[T]he age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

— Edmund Burke

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.

Via Theo.

One of my left-wing classmates this morning was blaming the federal credit downgrade on the Tea Party, describing Tea Party-ers as worse than 19th century Know Nothings and referring to them as “Talibanic zealots.” He attacked the patriotism of the Tea Party movement, and predicted that the American masses would wake up when the New Deal safety net began to unravel. All this, he said, made his stomach churn.

I replied:

It is grotesque in the extreme to find political Philistines, oblivious to the philosophic foundations and the Constitutional intent of the founders of their own country, a group of reactionary ideologues clinging to outdated, historically-refuted late-19th-century Utopian visions of heaven on earth and equality of economic results between the provident and the reckless, the educated and the uneducable, the law-abiding and the criminal, the industrious and the idle achieved by the rule of scientism through the medium of socialism and collectivist statism, referring to people with a far more sophisticated and accurate understanding of economics, political philosophy, and America history as primitive zealots.

With a very special kind of irony, we find today all the patriots who stabbed their own contemporaries fighting for freedom overseas in the back, the same people who waved North Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…,” the patriots who are always telling us how disgraceful American history was until they came along, now waving the flag and demanding that we support their fiscal excesses out of patriotism.

The safety net constructed since collectivism’s heyday in America is already unraveling. It was always a Ponzi scheme and it has arrived at the inevitable endpoint of all such schemes. Demographics is no longer working on its side. It was only in the imaginations of ideologues that all this was ever permanently sustainable. Reality has refuted the left’s theories again.

You can pray aloud and whistle in the dark and spout this kind of nonsense about the masses “awakening” to agree with your own insanity, but the reality is that the apolitical, pragmatic mass portion of the country has already had its rude awakening. They elected the second leftist president in our adult lifetimes, and his regime has succeeded in surpassing the debacle of his predecessor. What you are going to get is a landslide election that will consign Obama, the democrat party, and the welfare entitlement state to the rubbish-heap of history to repose discarded beside the rest of the entire collection of intellectual dead ends and political mistakes. Well might your stomach churn.

Cartoon via Theo.

Hat tip to Theo.