Dwindling Optimism This Thanksgiving

I'll be enjoying some tasty leftovers today, grading papers and watching football. I'll also be blogging the holiday. I noted last night that I'm thankful that we have our wonderful U.S. Constitution to safeguard against tyranny, and right now boy do we need all the protection we can get. But notice how I argued that the current progressive ascendancy is "brief." Sure, we'll always have the idiot big government types who think their ideology has an answer for every public problem through more statism, but ideological trends run in cycles, and when things get bad enough there'll be a shift back to markets and federalism to invigorate our economy and polity. We may have a long way to fall before that happens, and literally millions of American lives could be harmed, if not destroyed by leftist failures, but in time the economy simply won't be able sustain all that the left imposes on it. California is America's Greece. Prop. 30 is just a breather to a fiscal reckoning that won't be long in coming. The national government's going to have its own reckoning, but alas it won't be during the second half of the Obama interregnum. We'll have to wait for a resurgence of pro-American values in our national political leadership. It will come. The hardships will be in enduring the interim.

In any case, I was inclined to riff further on this by Alan Caruba and his essay, "Memories of Thanksgiving's Past":

I have always been an optimistic person, but that optimism has been drained by four years of Obama’s regime and the prospect of four more. It is compounded by a Congress that has steadily marched toward turning America into a European socialist economy now on the brink of financial collapse and, worse, by a nation that has abandoned many of the values and shared beliefs that made it great; a beacon of freedom for those who chose to come here, a superpower following World War II, a compassionate and largely tolerant nation.

Continue reading.

I'll have more throughout the day.