Clearly, Beck’s rally was a vague, confused jumble of meaninglessness. Or, if you prefer, a hot ghetto mess. Yet many conservatives are excited and thrilled, and think that 8/28/10 will forever be remembered as some kind of turning point, as the day when the huge task of “taking America back” formally got underway. In reality, it was the exact opposite. I’m convinced that one of these days, we’ll look back on this as the nadir of the mainstream conservative movement, as its death rattle, as the day the conservative movement gave up the ghost. Hundreds of thousands of white conservatives spent millions of dollars to travel to DC, to stand around and do nothing, after being ordered not to bring any signs to express themselves, while Beck and Palin lectured them on the glories of The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the importance of getting back to the fundamentals of the Christian-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Sikh-Mormon faiths.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the world they’re desperately trying to preserve, but can’t, because they’re desperately afraid to even name it, just keeps disappearing. In fact, the very next day the New York Times published an article about the death of conservatism in Orange County, California, which used to be the epicenter of political conservatism in America.
The demographic changes that have transformed Orange County are also transforming the rest of America. The process may be further along in Orange County, but it’s happening everywhere. Thanks to immigration, sixty percent of the babies being born in Texas are non-white, and it’s only a matter of a few more elections before Texas’s electoral votes go to the Democrats, and when that happens, the GOP can forget about putting one of their own in the White House ever again. And there are many other cities and states that are right behind Texas, and lots more where the process will take a few more decades to have the same effect, but all of America is on its way to turning into Orange County, California.
That’s why the Beck Heads and Tea Partiers are losing their country. Not because they don’t attend their local mosque often enough. But they can’t admit that, because that would be “racist”, and losing your country is a lot better than being called “racist.”
But a conservative movement as willingly impotent as the crowd that came to DC on Saturday can’t go on much longer. At some point it’s going to dawn on them that no matter how much they grovel to MLK and praise his holy name, or how many “conservative” imams they pack their podium with, they still get called racists and Nazis, and their country just keeps slipping further down the tubes.
