The prevailing political narrative is left versus right (going back to the French Revolution). Yet, there is an ordinate to be added to that abscissa: libertarian vs authoritarian.
Two dear, departed, visionaries, Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner, were so devoted to exploring this augmented matrix that they founded the Transpartisan Review. Oddly, they invited me, an old white right-wing heteronormative cispartisan, to their advisory board and to be a contributor.
There I was cheek by jowl along with sinister figures like my favorite archnemesis Joan Blades, co-founder of the Flying Toaster Screensavers, MoveOn.org, MomsRising, and — yikes, how sinister! — LivingroomConversations.org.
Unbeknownst to most of my fellow capos of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are plenty of leftish libertarians — commune-ists rather than communists.
Arlo Guthrie famously supported Ron Paul. (Adieu, Alice, iconic restaurateur.)
Arlo, son of Woody, is no anomaly.
Counterculture bard Pete Seeger famously observed to a reporter in 2007:
“If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!”
And, the Hippies and the Hells Angels detested each other over their respective stances on the Vietnam war. Then:
Legsville: Allen Ginsberg wrote a short poem about the Hells Angels coming to parties at La Honda. How did the Hells Angels come on the scene?
Ken Babbs: Ken Kesey was up in San Francisco one time, in North Beach, at this place called The Place which had an open mic on Tuesdays. He heard this Hells Angel –– Freewheelin’ Frank –– reading a poem. Kesey got to talking with him and invited him to come over down in La Honda, and Freewheelin’ Frank came down with some other Angels. They got to talking with Kesey and set up this party where the Hells Angels would come down and spend the night, maybe a whole weekend there.
Anti-war Hippies rocking out and getting high with pro-war Hells Angels?
Pete Seeger, a former Communist Party member, anticipating MAGA?
What’s next, “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them.”?
Sign of the End Times?
But wait, there’s more.
Way back at the height of the Tea Party, only Steve Munisteri, Steve Bannon and, less consequentially, I envisioned the Latinos flocking to join the Republican center-right coalition. Way back when, I (futilely) was promoting the idea of the Tea Partiers partying with the ethnic Mexican-American (about half of the U.S. Latino population) community and its organizers every September 15th.
Annually on Mexico’s Independence Day. As I wrote at the Washington Examiner almost 15 years ago:
The Grito de Dolores is the July 4th of Mexico: the celebration of their fight for independence from their own colonial power, Spain. Its rallying cry is “Death to Bad Government,” the tone of it has similarities with that of our Tea Parties, and conservatives well might embrace it.
On Sept. 15, 1810, just before midnight, Father Miguel Hidalgo ordered the bells of his church to be rung to summon his congregation and said:
My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once. ... Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government!
So 2010 is the Grito's 200th anniversary. Among Mexicans, it is “an almost mythic event.” The Grito is redolent of America’s “revolutionary” values, values that reside inside America’s DNA and in the human core.
Who wishes to deport so many conservative, Republican-leaning, Latinos?
Deep State Perfidy?
Sleeper Agent Democratic Party operatives?
Fellow archconservatives! Demand that well-behaved immigrants make themselves right at home right here.
The breakdown in our politics doesn’t come from ideological differences. It comes from a deficit of (social, not political) parties at which opposing factions can affably fraternize … despite our real, even profound, ideological differences.
Ignore the political kayfabe. There is no good reason to doubt that the ever-expedient Donald Trump cannot produce an immigration package allowing millions of high-value migrants (of every economic, skill and education level and national origins) to become permanent residents.
Then: citizens.
Party time! Let's try building rapport by partying with those we have mistaken for enemies.
Many of them are our allies-in-waiting.
Mi casa, su casa.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here
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