{"id":50930,"date":"2015-01-28T06:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50930"},"modified":"2015-01-26T20:14:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T02:14:31","slug":"goodbye-to-demigogues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50930","title":{"rendered":"A Farewell To Demigogues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Charles C.W. Cooke, like a lot of conservatives, is pretty much over Sarah Palin. \u00a0While the attacks on her from the left were almost entirely the sort of caustic sexism that accompanies the toxic racism that they dish out to apostates in &#8220;their&#8221; demographic groups, it&#8217;s fair to say that Palin hasn&#8217;t developed much as a politician beyond, as Cooke says, the leader of a cult following.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/m.nationalreview.com\/article\/397238\/sarah-palin-slips-self-parody-charles-c-w-cooke\">You can read the article for the Palin-related stuff<\/a>. \u00a0Because for my money, that&#8217;s not the real payoff of this piece.<\/p>\n<p>The real value is its swipe at what&#8217;s become, among conservatives and libertarians, the beginnings of a very non-conservative trend (and even if you&#8217;re a Big-L libertarian who eschews the &#8220;C&#8221; word, it&#8217;s also un-Libertarian); the subscription to political personality cults, which&#8230;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;is deeply unconservative, too. The Right will likely never agree on how best it should move forward, but we might at least unite against the belief that there exist superheroes who are able to save the country from itself; against the idea that any one person can be the official standard bearer of a whole ideological or demographic group; and against the presumption that conservatism will gain anything much at all from the promotion and advancement of its most erratic champions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It matters not if your superhero is Palin, Ron Paul, Ben Carson, or any other candidate who&#8217;ll &#8220;fix it all&#8221; through, apparently, the strength of his or her personality and the purity of their principles.<\/p>\n<p>Not only is that not the way government works, it&#8217;s not supposed to be the way representative republics work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles C.W. Cooke, like a lot of conservatives, is pretty much over Sarah Palin. \u00a0While the attacks on her from the left were almost entirely the sort of caustic sexism that accompanies the toxic racism that they dish out to apostates in &#8220;their&#8221; demographic groups, it&#8217;s fair to say that Palin hasn&#8217;t developed much as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50930"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50934,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50930\/revisions\/50934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}