Publius Redux: Passenger Revolt at Your Cockpit Door

"[T]he Declaration of Independence, with its boldly spoken truths, could only have been uttered successfully among a community of people who had been prepared, over centuries, to possess the ears to hear such things."--James Poulos
"Honey, I forgot to redux!"--Ronald Reagan

The Price of Forgetting

Publius Decius Mus' excellent "Flight 93 Election" has hit some turbulence. Let's roll:

"Some also complained about the aptness of the analogy: the plane crashed! Well, yes, and this one might too. Then again, it might not. It depends in part on what action the electorate chooses to take. The passengers of Flight 93 roused themselves. They succeeded insofar as that plane did not hit its intended target. The temptation not to rouse oneself in a time of great peril is always strong. In another respect, the analogy is even more apt. All of the passengers on Flight 93—and all of the victims at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—died owing in part to a disastrously broken immigration system that didn’t then and still doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. Which also happens to be the core issue at stake in this election. ...

Meanwhile, the much stronger Ryan wing of the Party actively abets the administrative state and works to further the managerial class agenda.
Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to threaten this arrangement. [T]he question here is: who rules? The many or the few? The people or the oligarchs? Our Constitution says: the people are sovereign, and their rule is mediated through representative institutions, limited by written Constitutional norms. The administrative state says: experts must rule because various advances (the march of history) have made governing too complicated for public deliberation, and besides, the unwise people often lack knowledge of their own best interests even on rudimentary matters. ...

Trump is mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation. He may not see himself in those terms. I believe he sees himself as a straightforward patriot who just wants to do what is best for his country and its people. Whatever the case, he is asserting the right of the sovereign people to make their government do what they want it to do, and not do things they don’t want it to do, in the teeth of determined opposition from a managerial class and administrative state that want not merely different policies but above all to perpetuate their own rule. ...

All this happened because, for more than a century, the Left has been working at best to “change” and “update” the Constitution, and at worst to ignore it or get around it. This agenda is not hidden but announced and boasted of. Yet when someone on the Right points out that the Constitution—by design—no longer works as designed, that the U.S. government does not in practice function as a Constitutional republic, we are lambasted as “authoritarian.”
That’s a malicious lie. The truth is that the Left pushed and dragged us here. You wanted this. We didn’t. You didn’t like the original Constitution. We did and do. You didn’t want it to operate as designed because when it does it too often prevents you from doing what you want to do. ...

I differ in no respect from my conservative brethren in my reverence for constitutional government in general or for the United States Constitution in particular. No respect, it seems, but one. They seem to think we are one election away from turning everything around—only, you know, not 2016, but the next one when we can run Cruz. Whereas I fear we are one election away from losing the last vestiges forever. ...

If Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. ...The country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a blue state on a national scale. Only one party will really matter. A Republican may win now and again—once in a generation, perhaps—but only a neutered one who has “updated”...

For the rest of you—flyover people—the decline will continue. But things are pretty bad now, yet you can still eat and most of you have cars, flat screens, and air conditioners. So what are you complaining about?
Keep in mind, this is the best case scenario. Which leaves open the larger questions raised in the prior essay that gave so many the vapors: how long could that possibly last? And what follows when it ends? ...
Conservatism had a project for national renewal that it failed to implement, while the Left made—and still makes—gain after gain after gain. Consider conservatism’s aims: “civic renewal,” “federalism,” “originalism,” “morality and family values,” “small government,” “limited government,” “Judeo-Christian values,” “strong national defense,” “respect among nations,” “economic freedom,” “an expanding pie,” “the American dream.” I support all of that. And all of it has been in retreat for 30 years. At least. But conservatism cannot admit as much, not even to itself, in the middle of the night with the door closed, the lights out and no one listening.

I tried to tell it, and it got mad." .........................

With a food-cart chaser right down the center aisle:

"As for my alleged counsel of despair, I said precisely the opposite. I offered an exhortation to do something: vote for a man who promises to protect the interests of the lower, working and middle classes, and reassert control over our government so that republicanism may live.
...Here, again, is “conservative” idealism in all its rootless abstraction. Trump and his voters have risen to defend the actual, physical America and its actual, physical people. This is anathema to the managerial class for which Gerson is a spokesman.
...I admit to being a little nostalgic. My defense is that I prefer the good to the bad and America is in many respects worse today than it was in the past. It also appears to be in decline. I would like to see that reversed, and I believe it is possible to do so, by making the right political decisions through proper Constitutional means.
Truth is true. Conservatism’s genuine insights will live on, no matter what shallow, false ideology appropriates its name.
Conservatism as we have known it is over. The battle for its future has begun.
But in the final analysis, there is going to be a line. Some will be on one side, some on the other. If we must use today’s terminology because tomorrow’s has not yet been invented, then people like Gerson are going to be on the “liberal” side—which, let’s face it, he already is. There can be no accommodation with him and his like. As fellow citizens, yes, but as political or intellectual compatriots, no.
For everyone else, it will be time to join the side you’re on." ..........

We've gotten a little too good at building stone monuments. Time to rebuild the living.