WHO IS JOHN GALT?

Rod Dreher compares the nascent civil rights movement of the 1950s with the contrarian rights movement of today.

The Right has to understand that it has the Michael Beller [principal counsel for public broadcasting] class firmly against us — and they hold the power in this society. Violent radicalism, and the language of violent radicalism, only increases their power. Trump pulled off an extraordinary thing, getting elected, and showed the power of populist ideas. But he did not govern with discipline or intelligence, or by principle, and thus squandered a golden opportunity. It is going to be hard to get that opportunity back. Inevitably the hatred the the Belleristas will cause them to overplay their hand, in the same way the passions of the MAGA mob drove it to do the same thing. But we can’t count on that.

We need serious strategy. We need serious leadership: moral, disciplined, driven by love, not hate. The question is this: Who is the Martin Luther King of the Deplorables?

Do we even have the culture on the Right — especially in the churches — capable of producing  an MLK of the Deplorables?

UPDATE: Michael Beller resigned.

That is, some of the old conventions still apply, despite the best efforts of the call-out culture to implement their vision of liberating tolerance.

Mr Dreher is an orthodox Christian, and he is unlikely to agree with the way in which I'm introducing this post.  But a push-back against this perceived corporatist crackdown is more likely to be emergent than that it is going to be led by a different sort of vanguardist.

Melancton Smith, for instance, appears to be agreeing with Mr Dreher on the general form of the tech tyranny to come.

Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and independents, though they might not have voted for Trump and have disagreements with him, should come to the aid of the civil liberties of his supporters. Instead, too many leaders have allowed the Left to set the terms of the debate and are cowardly trying to distance themselves.

Until Trump appeared, the major parties refused to address the concerns of those in “flyover states” about jobs, taxes, immigration, the family, cronyism, religious freedom, foreign interventionism, and other issues. Political elites want to go back to the happy days where the two parties marched in lockstep. Trump upset that apple cart. Common people found someone—a very imperfect person for sure—who listened to them and sought to address their issues.

Many elites are now united in seizing the day to ensure that no future threat to their power can take hold, no peaceful dissent and debate be provided a platform, with draconian new unconstitutional powers being proposed in the name of responding to a crisis.

Perhaps so, although I keep thinking of Messrs. Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the like as real-world versions of James Taggart or the other industrialists who went along with the Zeitgeist so as to be able to keep going to the right parties, and I'm not sure whether Tesla's Elon Musk is Ragnar Danneskjold or Francisco d'Anconia.  I'd be a bit more confident if I saw the Insta Pundit, Pajamas Media, Town Hall cluster devolving back to a network of weblogs, rather than turning into its own closed system of linking to each other.  As far as the lights of New York going out, well, between the mayor and the governor of the state, it isn't going to take John Galt coming for the power company.