In John Derbyshire’s last radio transmission, he mentioned the great Sam Francis. Francis was a brilliant observer of America, even if he was a bit too iconoclastic. There should always bee a wide space between what the culture rules out of bounds and that which the elites would like to silence. Elites will always try to silence their critics. In a free society, they can shout and bellow, but ultimately must win the argument. Even if that is not the case as we see in modern America, that does not change the fact some speech is rude, offensive and unnecessary.  You’re not getting very far by offending the people. Offending the rulers is one thing, but when you piss off the crowd, it give the rulers a free hand to dispatch you. That’s what happened when Francis indulged in pointless race mongering. Derbyshire arguably did the same thing with his infamous Taki column.

The point of bringing it up is that Francis was mostly right about things. It turns out, Pat Buchanan was mostly right about immigration, trade and the economy. Joe Sobran was mostly right about the culture and capitalism. John Derbyshire has been right about the things he considers important, namely immigration, culture and science. Robert Weissberg was right about the schools, in his book Bad Students, Not Bad Schools. I could go on, but the trend is rather clear. All of these men were once mainstream conservatives writing for popular conservative journals and city broadsheets. Today, those who are not dead have been pushed off to the fringe. Many were fired in ceremonious fashion from places like National Review and the Washington Times. What was once merely contrarian has now become heretical and damnable. The fact that time has proven most of them right (Sobran, Buchanan) and is vindicating others, says something about the drift of the nation.

Mark Steyn coined the term I’m using as a title. The elites of America are feverishly insulating themselves from reality. It is one thing to live behind a wall. It is another to think behind one. The hive mind is dangerous not because of ignorance. It is dangerous because it is aggressive. Our increasingly delusional elites are not sending dissenters off to the lithium mines just yet, but they are on that road. The conventional wisdom on the establishment right is that the tide goes out, but always returns. The rejoinder from guys like Derbyshire is it always returns until it doesn’t. Both of course can be right for a long time.

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