Establishment and Rebellion

Unlike Mrs. X, I don't have a lot of blogs that I read on a regular basis.  The two I do pay a reasonable amount of attention to are Glen Reynolds and Daryl Cagle.  I've mentioned Mr. Reynold's stuff here before but I've never talked about Mr. Cagle's stuff.  He talks about various editorial cartoonists and the declining state of the profession due to newspapers not wanting to rock the boat.  He gets a lot of hate mail from people who take some serious umbridge with his cartoons.  But he also lets people submit articles for posting.
 
His most recent post has an article written by Henry Payne.  For those of you not familiar with Mr. Payne, he's a conservative leaning cartoonist who draws for the Detroit News.  His article focused the decline in cartooning due to media consolidation and bias.  He specifically looked at how frustrated conservative cartoonists are getting with the Pulitzer Prize committee, who in the last 5 to 10 years have been favoring the most liberal viewpointed cartoonists.  He goes on to argue that we need a good balanced argument from both viewpoints and that even liberal cartoonists could get shut out in a few years because of newspaper fears of rocking the boat.

Now, you may just think of this as another rant from a conservative against the perceived liberal bias of the media.  That's your opinion and you may disagree or agree with him as you see fit.  But he mentioned one thing in his argument that got me thinking:
 
But "the establishment" is a moving target. The notion that liberalism is anti-establishment is a nice illusion, but it's 30 years out of date. Today, the hypocritical, self-satisfied protectors of the status quo are on the left.
The welfare state has failed, with its liberal champions denying their legacy of fatherless, unemployable children and tattered inner cities. The civil-rights movement has become desperate quackery, abandoning Martin Luther King's ideal of "the content of their character" for a permanent racial spoils system. "Green" pols park their SUVs at the curb and then bloviate about America's wasteful consumption. And fantastically rich trial lawyers claim to represent the "little guy" while looting 50 percent of their clients' winnings.
 
Forty years ago when the baby boom generation celebrated anti-establishment and the leaders began to shift to more liberal causes, the country was coming out of a strong conservative phase.  The 40's, 50's, and very early 60's were strong conservative times.  Everything was white bread and Leave It to Beaver.  Never mind that minorities and women had limited rights and the government was unassailable.  Those are just the thorns that go with conservative rule.  But then the country began to shift to the left again.  More rights were granted to minorities and women.  Government became larger to help the underprivileged and fix other problems.  We became a more liberal society. 
 
The conservative elements faught back.  Leaders were assassinated and change required mass upheaval and violence and riots erupted through the late 60's and 70's.  But things settled down.  Reagan came in and moderated some of the liberal swing.  However, government did continue to grow and people became more comfortable with the more liberal ideas of government fixing your problems.  People coming in to power were former anti-establishment activists from SDS and the Black Panthers. 
 
During the Clinton years the liberal viewpoint was firmly established, but the conservative viewpoint was waking up.  It started sprouting up on the fringes in the form of things like the Moral Majority and right-wing militias.  Then people who claimed to represent conservative interests started to come into power.  But even they were still affected by the liberal focus of government.  To fix moral problems you regulate it through government and no economic problem can't be fixed by throwing money at it in some way.  Now we have candidates who are so alike in most policy ways that its just a question of what their personality is like or whether they will play nice with foreign leaders and such.  As Mr. Payne noted, the liberals are now the establishment and have gotten fat.  But they still cling to the idea that they are anti-establishment.  It is not in the nature of conservativism to strike out and be anti-establishment, but I think it will.  I also think that such a change is necessary at this time and may be as violent as the transition that made liberalism the norm.
 
You may disagree with me and I won't hide the fact that I could be totally off base.  But this is an observation that occurred to me and one that I think may not be as far off as we hope.  I certainly believe that things are going to get worse before they get better.