Posted On: Thursday - March 2nd 2017 9:24AM MST
In Topics: Pundits Liberty/Libertarianism
John Derbyshire writes a monthly "Diary" article for VDare, composed of many segments, like his weekly RadioDerb podcast is. Anyway, there was one section I didn't agree at all with, regarding interest in politics, as Derbyshire discusses what he termed, 4-years back, the "Cold Civil War".
This is snipped out, mind you, from the February Diary, in the 6th section, about a NY Post article in which the author says that some people can not date others with opposite political views these days:
I haven’t yet heard of cases like that of Union General George Thomas in the Hot Civil War, whose Virginia family disowned him when he declined to join the Confederacy, but ruptures like that can’t be far away.
This is damn depressing. Politics shouldn’t matter that much to civilized people.
I’m occasionally asked about the politics of the Derbyshire household. Short answer: There isn’t any.
Mrs D, like most sensible people, is uninterested in politics ninety-five percent of the time. She stayed up to watch the election result in November (which was more political engagement than I could summon) but in all probability has not thought about politics for ten consecutive seconds since.
She understands instinctively that a passionate, all-consuming interest in politics is characteristic of bores and monomaniacs. Normal people have better things to think and talk about.
I am in great disagreement with this part of the otherwise great February Diary. Here’s the deal, Mr. Derbyshire's from England, see. Over there they’ve had big government for a long time. With China that time is another order of magnitude longer. There are still Americans to this day who can remember when Americans had pretty good control of all governments up to the Federal one. It used to be a really free country, because state government was small, and the Federal one was reasonably small enough to control.
OK, so far this may seem like I’m getting it backwards here, but I’m not. Listen, you SHOULDN’T HAVE TO be interested in politics. That’s the case in a few great countries like the former US. However, when the government gets big, politics is interested in you. The future of your life, that of your family, your business or even whole field of employment, the property you own, ALL OF IT, can be messed with by changes made in the Washington Federal S__thole .
In other countries that have had statist governments for centuries running, nobody figures that there is any control; government is gonna do what it’s gonna do, so what is the point in caring about it so much. Now, the reason many Americans feel they need to get so involved is that they used to have control of things, and not that long ago. The decent Americans that can remember freedom want to set things right, and are used to having a say. They also see that any day of the working-week some new law could be passed to mess with their lives, and we still feel like they need to fight this stuff.
Normal people are not really going to have any “better things to think and talk about” when this world becomes nothing but a big statist hellhole resembling George Orwell’s Oceana. It’s time to put the hurt on the statists before that is not possible.
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