The cycles of American zeitgeist don't coincide neatly with the country's electoral seasons. Conservatives were justifiably dismayed over the last fifty years at the way the countercultural impulse, in all its forms, from libertinism to abhorrence of American greatness to the dismantling of basics of human identity such as gender, to do-it-yourself "spirituality" to idealization of communal peasant life, continued its cultural usurpation even as periods of political relief, such as the elections of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, seemed to give them straws at which to grasp.
Of course, that impulse gave every appearance of having achieved its full entrenchment last November. The previous midterm elections had provided such a hopeful sign of pushback, with the election of so many Tea Party-style Congresspeople, Governors and state legislators, which made the rebuke of it in 2012 - not just in the MEC's reelection, but in the defeats of the likes of Mia Love, Allen West, and Scott Brown - such a bitter pill to swallow.
The events of the past two weeks would seem to bolster the notion that November 2012 did not tell the whole story of our nation's cultural climate. At the very least, the MEC mystique seems like an ancient phenomenon. I've pointed out some of the abrupt shifts here, such as those of the New Yorker and ABC, but it now extends to Jon Stewart and even Charlie Rangel.
What the nation is realizing is that there is an end product to the worldview that spawned the Most Equal Comrade. It's not an endlessly wonky, Cass Sunstein-style cycle of planning and implementation. Nor is it the seemingly warm and nurturing Michelle Obama-style model of a family, wherein the impeccably healthy offspring are primarily the charge of the parents running the household where they live, but benignly guided by the whole global village, and in which the role of mom still incorporates the old-school virtues of bedtime stories and bandaged owies, but also offers a role model of power and personal sovereignty.
No, that is but a middle stage. What the collectivist impulse of necessity comes to is what we have now: a state that can not tolerate deviation from its official line, a society in which privacy and personal volition are mortal threats.
I suppose the drawing of parallels to Watergate can have some usefulness, but what appears to be shaping up is the fruition of the denial of nature that has informed all the ill-fated experiments in "common-good" societal organization. Think about what is at the root of the EPA's agenda: perpetuating the myth of a troubled planet so as to convince people to accept downgraded living standards. Think about why the IRS is so feared: brute force is implicit in its every dealing with every citizen. Think about why a truly free press is intolerable to regimes such as the one to which we're yoked: It can expose the truly unseemly lengths to which the state might go to prevent people from considering the full range of perspectives on its activities.
This will play out organically. The calls for impeachment don't bother me, but they're not necessary, at least not yet. Developments will continue to unfold, at the brisk clip we've been seeing for the past few days. Nothing will alter the new-found disgust and alarm on the part of those propagandists whose eyes have been opened. Rather, that disgust and alarm will deepen.
Besides, it's not as if the course would have been dramatically reversed had the MEC lost in November 2012. Mitt would have been clueless regarding how to deal with the continuing statist onslaught and the unabated cultural rot. We'd have wound up here eventually anyway.
It's just what we have to go through, and there's nothing pretty about it.
The best we can hope for is that we won't get fooled again.
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