LIBERALISM'S LAST STAND, ON NOT FEELING THE "BERN".

I was once a liberal. In my late teens and early twenties. Membership in the liberal club offered an abundance of emotional balm and psychic salve for what ailed the pre-adult me.  Cured everything but my acne.

Liberalism welcomed me, as it does all young people, with open arms.  I knew immediately that I could "belong" if I'd just follow the path laid out before me. I really wanted to belong. To something, anything. Once a member of the club, I could reap its benefits. Love, respect, enhanced feelings of being important, having my ego massaged, and all that in exchange for merely being against war and capitalism.

Wow.

Everything that was once so hard became so much easier, why, I could even get girls.  Besides, at the time, they seemed to be right about the war, and about capitalism, based on what I could see. Why can't we all just get along, and.......share? It felt so right, so good.

It sure seemed like a club, a family. Once initiated, I found it to be more like a tribe. It was only when I attempted to leave that I realized it was a freaking cult.

I think I mentioned "getting girls." I don't know if conservatives realize how powerful the psycho-social trappings that liberalism affords its members actually are, and a big part of it, today as before, involves the sexual urge. Believe it or not, even for those with hormones raging,  it wasn't the only reason that leaving the liberal plantation was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

When I checked out of the liberal hotel, I instinctively knew I'd never get a room there again. I knew I'd suffer the loss of my friends. And I did lose them. I knew I was leaving a warm, cozy place for the street. I could just feel the loss of the sense of belonging, the very powerful admiration and esteem for my views, yep, the love. The respect. A loss of the intoxicating feeling of occupying the moral high-ground.

All because I had an economics professor who, having fled Cuba,  convinced me not so much that capitalism was perfect or had been falsely maligned, but that socialism was simply not deserving of another go.

Liberals have always been psychologically connected in a way that conservatives are not. They were hard-wired long before the internet. They "see", therefore they conclude,  they "feel" therefore they are, then they believe, therefore they become......ONE.

We shouldn't be surprised, nor should we fret that our kids are drawn to Bernie Sanders. It's not the socialism.  Never has been. Though we scoffed at her comment, Gloria Steinem got it right when she said that young girls are attracted to Bernie because "that's where the boys are". This is not new. Our penchant for packing the kids up and sending them off to college at the age of eighteen is a formula for alienation, a tried and true recipe for subjecting our young to the liberal siren song. From our family to theirs.

So back to Bernie's kids.

Relax, there are not that many of them anyway. Remember, they're unemployed,  so they have lots of free time. They're wired together now, hard-wired. Makes them easier to be manipulated. Not difficult to get them to show up. But are they really there for Bernie? No, they're there because they're drawn to each other.  And Bernie promises to legalize weed. Bernie's place is just another party without Mom and Dad. They won't vote in any great numbers, not for Bernie, not for Hillary, not for Trump. Theirs is not a political world, it's a social one. And voting is not a social event.

But. just to be sure, what can we do?

Liberalism may never be defeated, but it can be marginalized. It can be managed. Liberalism has no Achilles' heel. It does have wiring protected by the emotional reward structure. Liberalism can be short-circuited.

First, conservatives must begin to realize these people are wounded. Yes, they are. Take it from a former member of the "Movement". We railed against the "establishment". Liberalism is now the establishment. We must do unto them what they have done unto us. They are weaker at this moment than they have ever been, we must know this too.

Wounded. Not dead. They are wounded not so much psychologically-as we can see, they can function rather well-but....wounded they are.... emotionally. This is why ridicule is so powerful, so important if we want to hit 'em where it hurts. Proof? Liberals are prone to tantrums. Hissy fits. The emotional integrity of the collective is breaking up. Sarah Palin literally unhinged them.

The strength of liberalism lies in the emotional interconnectedness of its membership, which is ironically its biggest weakness. They're a tribe without a chief. A collective Borg without a CPU. They don't need a chief, a CPU. They never have. This is why when the Stalins and Maos go away, they don't. We conservatives dwell so much on their perceived leadership-Obama this and Hillary that, and we think all we have to do is decapitate them, when it's the wires that connect them that must be cut. We must deprive them of the emotional rewards, this is where they're weak.

If we realize this we can send them packing, for a while...they'll never go away for good.

While the anti-war sentiment once insulated the liberal wiring, it does so no more. For them, pacifism was a fad, liberals and their ilk-socialists, communists, utopians all, have never really been opposed to violence, now have they?

Anti-capitalism is to this day part of the insulation on the liberal wiring, and opposing capitalism has its feel-good rewards for sure, but it ain't sex, and everyone has food and a cell-phone now.

No, the essential underpinning for the liberal house of cards has been reduced to abortion, and abortion alone.  Radical feminism, gender wars, LGBT issues, and feigned-victimhood are its teetering cross-beams.  The foundation is shaking, yes it is.  Sex, gender issues, this is their chosen battlefield, and they were winning, for a while. As with all social issues, choices have to made. Choices, drip, drip, drip-have consequences. Liberals have succeeded in allowing the banal urges to rule, and the consequences are beginning to become manifest.

Turns out that consequence-free sex is a myth. So abortion has become harder to sell.

Therefore liberals simply had to hate Sarah Palin. It was an existential issue for them that she be destroyed. It should be instructive for us that the left's reaction to Sarah Palin was so visceral, so extreme, so much panic there. Hissy fit. The left was telling us where it hurts the most.

Bad news for the left, you didn't kill her, Sarah's still kicking, and more Sarah's are on the way.

Young people see the house that's been built for them. It's teetering, hell it's crumbling, and the young'uns ain't going to want to move into this house. Too much evidence that this house is on a dead-end street. Too much blight all around it.


Liberals are wounded. By arrows from their own quiver. Sure, they own the institutions-the media, higher education-but their problem is that they still believe they own the moral high-ground, and they don't any more. Abortion is instinctively morally wrong. Even liberals have trouble justifying the killing of a fetus, especially for the sake of convenience. They know they're wrong, but it's a trade-off, and a mental high-wire act. Very difficult to maintain sanity while believing it's ok to kill a fetus in the womb, and simultaneously believing that capital punishment is wrong, and lab rats should be spared physical pain. Is it any wonder Sarah Palin literally drove them crazy?

The media, having served to salve the wounds through constant affirmation of failed beliefs, have been exposed and marginalized. Sure, they've revised history, it's part of the required medicine, but for today's young people history is a decade, and this last one's been a doozy. The media can no longer hide the consequences, they're there for anyone to see. Liberalism today, even for the young, especially for the young, is a hard sell.  Just as our young are naturally attracted to feel-good-kumbaya tribalism, they are not predisposed to being pro-abortion. For the same reason they don't get the argument for capitalism, they don't get the argument for killing a fetus in the womb. Only for the entrenched, hard-core leftist stakeholders is abortion an existential issue. It's their power, their glue, and the glue is melting. What our young are being asked to buy is no longer a vision, it is a harsh reality. Liberalism has been instituted, it has been tried, and its sorry consequences revealed.

The education establishment is therefore no longer hospitable to the young, urging them to move into that run-down, dilapidated house liberalism has created for them.

The young "rebel" today, while eschewing the conservative label and not necessarily embracing conservative values, is nonetheless rejecting the liberal allure. Today's young people already have sexual freedom, it is no longer a reward for the left to lure them with, and this is no small development as we move forward. It was inevitable. The good news is there never has been a third way.

So, we conservatives need to know we have liberals on the run. We need to know our way is winning, or at least we need to act like we're winning even when there's evidence to the contrary. Seize the moral high-ground. Just take it. War ain't easy, and this is war.

We have to realize we are only winning now in the political arena because we are winning in the trenches. Abortion is the key. For liberalism, it's the tie that binds. Being pro-life is the moral high-ground. Conservatives, stay the course. Do not compromise this issue. Do not sell it in exchange for a concession on fiscal issues. Seize this ground and liberals will have nothing left. Vote? Sure, but more importantly we must redouble our efforts to teach our children. I know it's hard, so much opposition. The good news is that liberals actually got their way, and there are consequences to observe. I don't need to tell you what they are, you see them everywhere. Point them out. Ridicule the opposition, abortion in particular is immensely fertile ground for shaming. Make them defend Lena Dunham.

Want some confirmation that we can win with the young? Check out Russell Wilson. Our kids like rebels. Russell Wilson is a rebel. And there are many more like him. The values of chastity and modesty can be re-sold. It's the new moral high-ground that our young will naturally find alluring, what with all the societal devastation that cam be pointed out with the alternative.

So teach the children. They instinctively grasp that it's just wrong to kill a fetus. It's not a hard sell, if we get to them before the liberals do.

Abortion's the key.