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“I Don’t Work for the G-d-Damn GOP”

Jonah Goldberg, explaining why he’s not voting Trump.

This is what I’ve been saying to myself for the last month or so. I don’t owe the GOP my vote. They don’t own my franchise, I do. I not only have the right, I have the duty as a citizen not to give my legal assent to something that displeases me. And if Hillary wins, so goddamn be it. But I live in a state that hasn’t given it’s EC votes to a Republican since I was 8 years old. There is no purpose to me holding my nose for the Great Orange Hope.

And it must be pointed out that for all their gleeful trollery, the alt-right crowd has a point. What the hell has the conservative movement conserved? What the hell has the GOP actually accomplished when they’ve been given the keys? I mean, aside from holding firm on the Second Amendment, which is really the one area of successful pushback we’ve had in the last several decades.

I’m tired of the charade of voting these clowns in, so they can find the most strategic way to only hold the left to half of what it wants, for now. I’m tired of them railroading the actual, committed conservatives so they can elect another Bush scion or sellout. Trump is what they deserve for playing that game too long.

Frankly, the GOP can go screw itself with an endive fork.

Read the whole thing.

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Jonah Goldberg on The Vital Importance of Saying “I Told You So.”

Normally, when a piece of legislation is flawed, the spirit of bipartisanship demands a responsible effort to fix it. In this way, both critics and proponents can work together democratically to best benefit their constitutents.

But not this time. This time, the Democrats can eat it. This time, they passed a law that every Republican voted against, that hordes of citizens rallied to stop. This time, they told us we were crazy, stupid, and racist for not bowing to the New Order. Now that the New Order is falling about their ears, we must savor the deliciousness of their tears. As Jonah Goldberg points out, this is Nemesis at work.

And Schadenfreude (or schadenboner, as Andy at Ace of Spades prefers) is the only appropriate response from the right. We said this wouldn’t work. We said that people would lose coverage. We said that giving one-sixth of the economy to the government was a bad idea. And now that we’re proven right, to point this out is a necessary act of truth-telling for the Republic.

Because:

If Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?

Chew each bite 25 times, proggies.

UPDATE: Pocket Full of Liberty puts this in starker terms: “Do nothing, GOP.“

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Social Darwinism: The Movement That Wasn’t There

All of this will be old news to anyone who’s read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, but he once more takes up the cudgel to defend Gilded Age businessmen from the charge of “Social Darwinism.” (h/t Instapundit)

In the first place, Herbert Spencer wasn’t much of a Social Darwinist:

The truth of the matter, as aggrieved libertarians have been saying for years, is that Spencer was a thoroughly benign classical liberal. Yes, he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” (a term Darwin embraced), but contrary to generations of propaganda, he did not oppose charity (he celebrated it at great length), did not advocate the mastery of superior races over allegedly inferior ones, did not believe corporations should ride roughshod over the poor (he supported labor unions), and was in fact a great foe of imperialism and a champion of women’s suffrage.

Oh, and he never called himself a Social Darwinist. He didn’t call himself a Darwinist at all (he had a different theory of evolution).

And in the second place, most of the “robber barons” never heard of him anyway:

As Robert Bannister and Irwin Wylie (and more recently Princeton intellectual historian Thomas Leonard) have painstakingly documented, the captains of industry in the 19th century were not particularly influenced by, or even aware of, Darwin and Spencer. This shouldn’t surprise anybody. “Gilded Age businessmen were not sufficiently bookish, or sufficiently well educated, to keep up with the changing world of ideas,” writes Wylie. “As late as 1900, 84 percent of the businessmen listed in Who’s Who in America had not been educated beyond high school.”

Overwhelmingly, businessmen of the period were influenced by Christianity first, classical economics second, self-help inspirational nostrums a distant third, and egghead notions about biology almost not at all. Cornelius Vanderbilt read one book in his entire life. It was Pilgrim’s Progress. And he didn’t get to it until he was past the age of 70. “If I had learned education,” Vanderbilt famously quipped, “I would not have had time to learn anything else.”

Naturally, you should Read the Whole Thing.