Howdy suckers, and welcome to the failed state that is America 2023. This used to be a country where you succeeded by working hard and playing by the rules, but there are new rules now. Here are two: One, there are no rules. Two, if you think there are rules and play by them, you are a sucker. But the good news is this is all going to come crashing down.
In the meantime, welcome to the suck. Just look at yourself, all responsible and upstanding. You worked hard, and you played by the rules. You didn’t go out and commit felonies or drop a bunch of kids with so many partners that you need a spreadsheet to keep Father’s Day straight. You’ve earned a credit score in the triple digits by paying your bills. Congratulations. Now you get to pay for the deadbeats who party while you grind out a paycheck. The Biden regime’s new plan is to add a surcharge to the mortgages of people with good credit scores to subsidize a key Democrat constituency, the ditzes, doofuses, layabouts, and bums whose bad decisions would have once led to bad consequences, except we only do dire consequences for good people in 2023. Their problems are your problems, and your problems are also your problems. That will teach you to do the right thing!
The same is true if you were a sucker, like me, who actually paid off his own student loans. But what about that gender studies major out there who does not feel like paying the diploma debt? He/she/xe made a bad decision, except it turned out to be a good decision because if the Democrats get their way, that useless college degree will be free! You get to pay his/her/xir student loan off. Why? Because you can, and you can because you are not a lazy deadbeat. Which makes you wrong.
See, not being a lazy deadbeat is where you went wrong.
The simple fact is that if you are responsible, you are also responsible for everyone who is not responsible because of reasons and greed, and take that, the average person. You are the safety net for the dummies walking the high wire of social pathologies. You and your labor and effort are the backstops for the people who don’t give a damn, who make stupid choices, and who are lazy and dumb. You know, the people who are the beating heart of the Democrat Party.
And some peeps out there are perfectly happy doing that. Well, they are probably not perfectly happy. Still, they are willing to put up with it and willing to accept Democrats running things because Democrats say stuff they like about the ability to kill babies and how we must show solidarity with dudes who think they are chicks despite their penises. Two decades ago, a popular leftist book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004) talked about how liberals did not understand why middle-American voters would vote based on their cultural preferences rather than on economics. But the world does not run on economics. Marx thought it did, but Marx was wrong about that as well as everything else, and if you look around at the Marxists in 2023, most of the Marxists have little to do with Marx anymore. What would that creepy German butthead have thought of the current left? He would hate it because then he pretty much hated everybody else anyway. He would not be down with diversity, but today’s Marxists are only about diversity. They are perfectly willing to allow the current Democrat Party poobahs, which are essentially billionaires and lazy upper middle-class Chardonnay-swillers, to exploit the workers to steal free money from those of us who actually do something constructive. Workers of the world unite; you have to pay for the people who don’t work at all!
Any residual pretense of Democrats caring about working people is a tired pose. The antidote to their fake populism is real populism, which, of course, is verboten. The Democrats used to claim they were populists, but that was back when they liked people who sweat when they worked. In 2023, they despise people who sweat, except when fat blue-haired weirdos sweat while marching for the right to talk about sex with little kids. That kind of sweat is OK.
Of course, this war on production is unsustainable, a weird phenomenon where you have a bunch of vegans killing the golden goose. My hope is that I am still around and cognizant enough to enjoy and participate in the inevitable backlash. Of course, by that time, I might be living in a Buick somewhere since, having spent 40 years of my life working and building up savings, the left sees me as the problem, and stealing my money is the solution.
Our reactionary solutions will not look like those of the conservatives of yesterday, which is appropriate since it is no longer yesterday despite the fervent desire of many on our side to pretend that it is still 1997. Jack Kemp’s sunny optimism is going to make it all A-OK. For example, there was once a time when the idea of a billionaire tax offended me, but that time passed. We used to have a principle about people keeping the money they earned. Still, the only principle that the billionaire class seems to have is to do everything possible to disenfranchise and defund us, productive people so now they can kiss my Chuck Schumer. We, Republicans, need to advocate for a billionaire tax at a painful rate, and while we might be accused of allowing spite to overcome our economic sense, that’s OK. Sometimes spite makes sense. They chose their side, and it was against us, and I’m okay with making them pay for it figuratively and literally.
Oh, Kurt, that’s not conservative!
Okay, fine. I reject a conservatism that is merely an ideology of explaining why we are somehow morally obligated to serve the people who hate us. I have a better idea. How about they pay? And there are many ways we can do this. Remember the carried interest deduction? That’s for hedge fund guys. They make a lot of money off it. And they hate us. Yeah, we need to get rid of it. Why? Because screw them. I’m tired of billionaires trying to tell me what to do and what I can say, trying to shove untested vaccines in my arm, and trying to make me eat bugs. At the same time, they jet around to Davos and expect me to ditch my jalopy and ride a bicycle to work like some man-bunned grad student pedaling across campus to his next seminar. Never.
The idea that a good credit rating means we have to pay more to subsidize people who have terrible credit ratings exemplifies everything that’s wrong with this country. Now, I’m an optimist. I know this is going to get corrected down the road, hopefully harshly. After all, what can’t go on won’t go on. People will not be played for suckers forever. History teaches that they will rise up, which will be an unpleasant surprise to our elite since modern academia no longer teaches history. I’m just wondering how painful the backlash is going to be, not that I care because it’s not going to be painful for me. It’s going to be painful for the wrong people, and the only question is how painful. Are we talking about mild societal reorganization and reform by a competent Republican, or will we go full Caesar? If I am too old to join in the fun myself, I just hope they have left me with a few bucks to buy popcorn.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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