The world-famous Nightfly transmitted the following to the Czar via Dream-o-Scope. Due to the length and content, the Czar elected not to use blockquotes, but instead is altering the font. Behold our power to change the very appearances of letters to suit our needs!

O Terror of the Steppes –

Your description of the possible future is, sadly, a description of the possible present, one several of my own family members (all of my generation or younger) are living now. Later tonight, I’m putting my own thoughts about the whys of it into a post back at my place, since it builds on a general theme I seem to have stumbled into to begin the new year.

(Far be it from me to redirect your glorious readership to my own backwater outpost – I would have gladly shared the whole thing here, but the Sleestak who took my letter began to sound bored, and a bored Sleestak is a hungry Sleestak. I’m fond of both my lungs.)

The nuts and bolts of it: the Blue State Model has failed to improve much of anybody’s life, but our political class (there’s an oxymoron!) has noticed its primary effect: those under the model vote to continue it, because it’s how they survive. This makes the feds more powerful and much richer. So now the feds are busy trying to make the Blue State Model inescapable for their own gain. Your observation is the outcome.

Of course the resources to run this Model will inevitably be exhausted. Already it’s probably too late to do much more than to make the inevitable plummet into reality more than a controlled crash-landing; but there are steps that can still be taken. The recent “why did my paycheck get smaller” epiphany is a teachable moment. Another opportunity is to point out, at every turn, that nearly every politician is one of the class of “despicable rich” they complain about, except that they hide the rich part. It’s just the beginning of the despicable behavior – it ought to be made plain the contempt they have for anyone and everyone else: that they exempt themselves from paying the fair share they dictate to others, that they isolate themselves from the rest of us, and refuse to answer our questions about their conduct; that all their talk of community and rallying together is a base lie, since they are exploiting us emotionally for their own profit and prestige; and most despicably, that they remove the freedoms that would enable anyone to live in a way that they personally disapprove of.

As often as possible we should be pointing this last one out: the so-called champions of the common man and “diversity,” the modern Left, are the ones who hate our differences and are cracking down on increasingly-wide areas of it. It starts with how we live and act, and has gradually spread to control what we buy, what we like, how we speak, and how we think.

The people who shake free and give themselves a basis for independent living are the pillars around which a recovering civilization will rebuild. The idea is to get as many of those pillars as possible, so they can shelter as many of the rest as they can when it goes to smash – because sooner or later this is going to go to smash. I’m rather hoping we avoid a domestic French Revolution. I’d say “we’ll see” but hopefully none of us will have to.

Most fearfully (in both senses of the word),
Nightfly

You are correct across the board, sir, and very well stated and said. The Czar suspects you would be served well by creating a series of posts on the topic over at your place where they still make the beds each morning.

Conservative values are hardly doomed: they make too much sense to disappear entirely; however, the future can look bleak regardless. That said, a lot of pundits—though not so much us here at the Castle—are starting to recognize that the ludicrous and trivial nonsense hitting the airwaves from progressive liberalism is the public’s growing perception that twilight of the fools is near. One of the bigger names—sadly, the Czar’s memory is failing as to whom—said in the last month that liberalism as we know it has less than 20 years of useful life yet. He based this on the realization that all of life’s big targets have been toppled, and that anything left becomes an intrusion into the life of the average person; and when that happens, the average person will start resisting. The sheer stupidity of some of the stuff coming from the Left since 2000 is actually a dying gasp.

Let us hope so.

Also, historians have observed that this weirdness tends to happen in thirty year cycles. Liberalism hits a high every thirty years: the late 1880s as aristocracies toppled and dumped spoiled rich kids with no job skills on the local economies through Europe (many of whom wound up here as so-called Bohemians), the mid-Teens under Wilson, the mid-Forties under Roosevelt, the mid-Seventies after Watergate, and during the lame-duck years of the Second Bush (2006).

Conversely, conservatives take over popular culture about ten years after that: the Gay Nineties, the late Twenties under Coolidge, the mid-Fiftees under Eisenhower, the mid-Eighties under Reagan, and, well, the next couple of years we expect. This isn’t so much a political thing as a generational thing: it takes about 30 years for a spoiled generation to work itself out of power, and the more conservative kids to grow up and take over. You can see early signs of it now in Congress as younger, conservative Republicans seem to be dominating the Right’s attention.

Heck, the Czar could go back even further than that to find examples of that 30-year-cycle as well. The Czar promises nothing in this regard, but is hopeful that the persistent drone of history continues its usual cycle and we can finally start writing less about Obama and Big Government, and more about television programs from the 1980s.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.