and the attempt by any fill-in-the-blank candidate to make good on promises of the Left will come to the same end. Of course the past eight years are a monumental failure; I never said they were not. The Bush Administration was never meaningfully conservative, neither fiscally nor ideologically.

If you were not prone to such a predictable hair-trigger rant, you might have noticed my reference to “Consciousness III” (C3), an unfortunate relaxation from the condition of social solidarity and national mobilization, of which the New Deal was the final American manifestation. The Obama campaign is a continuation and conclusion of the rights-and-grievance pole of C3 and the slovenly 60s. The other C3 pole is "Movement Conservatism," which had the same disease, and could not effectively lead the Republican Party.

There is not a single light to show the way.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?