SIEGECRAFT: THE IDEALISTS | nationalsalvation.net
I said that I gave away my tickets to the Reagan Inaugurations. Had I gone, I would have heard everybody there talking about his part in getting the Reagan Democrats on board, the vote that caused the Reagan Landslide.
We all know that everybody was For It When It Counted. I remember that all of those who were For It When It Counted had a secret meeting with a governor asking him to run on our ticket for Republican nomination.
We were trying to influence national policy, but he was the governor of a small state who needed to get reelected.
By "all of us" I mean a group of people who, with the governor, his aide and a bodyguard, fit nicely into one hotel room.
So listening to people saying how they were always for it did not entertain me.
In 1933, tens of thousands of people lined up to get appointments in the new Hitler Administration because they had Always Been For It.
In 1945 those people lined up for appointments with the Occupation because, despite their apparent support, they Had Always Been Against It.
It is when the crowds are all howling that they were always For It that Well-Known Writers announce who the Idealists were, the people who Made It Happen.
If you want to get credit for being an Idealist, you have to concentrate on positioning yourself for it, being the one the writers pick. If you want to make things happen, you have to concentrate on THAT.
Nobody who makes things happen is going to a Recognized Idealist.
To make this perfectly clear, notice that no war hero ever made the slightest difference in world history. Now notice that we are supposed to thank veterans for our freedom.
They made no difference and they are the heroes. That is routine and, as Joe says, nobody will ever notice.
None of this BOTHERS me. If I sound irritated, it is because it is always hardest to explain the obvious. I am not irritated at humans being human. My BUSINESS has always been understanding humans being human.
It's called politics.
In a huge society like ours, there are different groups specializing in different things.
A person like me comes up with a concept. He pushes it and pushes it until a fringe character on the outside fringe of the inside takes it up.
So Pat Buchanan acted like he had finally discovered that the white race was disappearing by writing The Death of the West.
I am critical. But what is far more important is something only I can know: I am also unique.
The Pat Buchanans are critical, but they are not unique. The writer who takes Pat's ideas and makes them more mainstream is critical, but not only is he not unique, he is just the first one to get to it.
Then a President makes Great Decisions based on the parameters we set down. He is a Great Man, and he is the commonest of the lot.
The woods are absolutely crowded with potential presidents who would have done that.
The further down the chain of ideas you go, the less you matter. The farther down the chain of ideas you get, the more important you are the more you get paid.
And that last sentence is the key to my whole worldview.
That sentence, the one before last, is the one I have devoted my entire life to.