The beautiful writer Peggy Noonan on the DNC:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn’t what you love if you’re American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don’t see all this the same way, and that’s fine—that’s what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The major political party conventions are dog and pony shows. Underneath the hoopla and rhetoric is the thirst for loot and power. All the rest is to fool people into voting for one candidate or another. But the biggest fools of all are the politicians who are nothing but the puppets of the Elites who,behind the curtain,hold the strings and provide the cash for these political extravaganzas. In the end,after the election everything remains the same. Nothing changes except the actors on the stage.