This election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the plutocracy before it sets its features in concrete.

That’s what I’ve been saying for a long time. Romney will lose the election and the Republicans will suffer a defeat in the next elections to Congress and Senate. Hopefully, this will prod the country’s Conservatives to lose the ultra-religious branch and start formulating the tenets of a modern secular Conservatism. I, for one, cannot wait to see what the American Conservative movement will look like when it isn’t hijacked by its fundamentalist wing. I am convinced that the Conservatives who respect the separation of the Church and State and do not want to legislate morality have a lot to contribute to our political discourse.

Fanatical state-sponsored religiousness is losing ground fast even in the least secular of all Western societies. The Republicans will have to pay the price of not seeing that most people prefer to hear about addressing the problems with the economy instead of policing the reproductive and sexual choices of others. That price would be the loss at the polls in November.

The Conservative movement in this country is in a deep crisis, in my opinion. The Republican flailing around for at least a marginally tolerable candidate in the recent primaries was evidence of that. More and more people are getting repulsed by the screechings about how needing contraception and having boyfriends makes a woman a “slut” who shouldn’t have political opinions. More and more people laugh when they see politicians have fits of hysteria over pornography, homosexuality, and masturbation. More and more people are confused by how one can support a limited government and, in the same breath, try to legislate the government sticking ultrasound probes into women’s vaginas against their will.

Dear fellow Conservatives, lose the fundamentalist branch already. The country needs the rational, intelligent, powerful thinking you are so capable of providing.

It turns out that the Harvard University has been abuzz over a construction sign erected on campus. The sign encouraged the workers to be respectful of the students and professors of the university and abstain from swearing, making loud noises, and taking drugs and / or alcohol. The students protested and the sign was removed:

Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14 called the sign “ridiculous” and said that it made her uncomfortable because it was “patronizing and patriarchal” towards the construction workers. “It sets up Harvard as some sort of exceptional place where no one can swear because they are defiling the purity of Harvard,” said Korn, a Crimson editorial editor. Avinaash Subramaniam ’14 said that he was “shocked” by the sign and that it held workers to a different standard than Harvard students.

Of course, to be completely honest, there is a huge difference between the workers and the students on campus. The former are paid for being there while the latter pay huge sums of money to do so. This is something that the earnest little undergrads don’t seem to understand:

Avinaash Subramaniam ’14 said that he was “shocked” by the sign and that it held workers to a different standard than Harvard students.

“There are students who drink and smoke at Harvard and the final clubs blast music late at night,” he said. “How is it any less wrong when Harvard students do drugs?”

When this student graduates and finds himself in the workplace, I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a shock that his customers, clients, students, patients, etc. will have a lot more rights in his workplace than he will.

What I find especially cute about the article is how well the students pretend not to know why they even are at Harvard:

Although the University did not put up the sign, Divinity School student Hanna L. Hofheinz said it bears equal responsibility for the sign’s message.

“I think that the sign was expressive of class and social dynamics that too often are part of the Harvard ethos,” she said. “I expect more from Harvard than to allow this type of statement to be its public face.”

As if there was any reason to shell out huge sums of money to go to an Ivy League institution than a hysteric fear of downward social mobility. You don;t go to such places for an education per se. For the most part, you’ll be taught by bored and indifferent grad students, anyways, and not by actual professors. The only reason of going there is to meet the right sort of people. If you are not into that, you’ll waste your time and money.

The reason why I quote this article here is that when I was a student at my Ivy, the attitudes evinced by these students were precisely what drove me nuts. I could have put up with the low quality of instruction, with the rigid hierarchies, with snobbery, with being surrounded by “legacies” with no interest whatsoever in studying, with endless discussions of who bought what when and where, with very little intellectual stimulation. But it’s the annoying earnestness of these rich kids who go around quoting Marx and blabbing about social equality and class struggle that got to me.

“There is no difference between me and a truck driver because we are both working people,” a spoiled Pappa’s boy who spent his summer holidays traveling the world on his parents’ money at the age of 35 told me. Is anybody surprised that I had a major depression at the end of my schooling in such an environment?

I was sent a link to an article that quoted the following statement from a “Nice Guy”:

“Dear ‘Females:’ I’m fedup.  Done.  Finished.  I always hear stories about girls not being able to trust guys because they cheated, or treated them bad, or hit them.  I always hear stories of girls saying they just don’t want to be with guys because of past relationships.  Say that you’re waiting for a good guy etc.  But why the f*** when you get a good GREAT guy you ignore him.  Call your best friend or some shit like that and when he falls for you, you give him some bullshit about how you’re not ready for a relationship…then two hours later you’re f***ing some asshole who clearly didn’t give a f*** about you before.  Dear females…you constantly wonder where the good guys are.  They’re out there…I’m just letting you know that you’re the ones making us scarce.  Sincerly, Good Guy…or rather New Found Asshole.” (sic)

This made me laugh because I knew a guy who’d break out in precisely this kind of rant, almost word for word. The really scary thing was that, just like the author of this statement, he was a jerk of humongous proportions. He would sit there criticizing everybody’s relationships, sex partners, and personal lives because, in the total absence of a sex life of his own, he was very attentive to the particulars of other people’s romantic histories.

He’d complain so much about his loneliness and tell such pathetic tales of personal misery and abandonment that people would take pity on him and befriend him. The more naive among us never thought that he considered this favor that was done to him as some sort of a promise that sex was imminent.

The guy would be so insistent with his “friendship” that he’d become almost stalkerish. I was much younger and found it easier to agree to meet with him for coffee from time to time than to tell him to stuff it once and for all. Every time, he would start complaining about yet another woman who rejected him in favor of somebody much worse.

“I’m great boyfriend material!” he would exclaim, oblivious to how unattractive the use of the phrase “boyfriend material” made him.

“What makes you think that?” I once asked to put an end to the whining.

The “Nice Guy” was very obviously taken aback.

“Well,” he said, “I can listen.”

“To what?” I asked, stunned.

“Well, to anything a woman might want to say,” he responded irritably.

“That would make you a good therapist,” I responded.

“But why does nobody want to date me?” he asked. “Why?”

“OK, I’ll tell you,” I said. “You reek of desperation, you ask out everybody who has a pulse, you are resentful, self-involved, and pushy. Being around you feels like having a black cloud smother one.”

“Well, you are single,” he said. “Would you like to date me?”

That was when I realized that his promise to listen did not involve actually hearing what a woman said.

A person who is truly interested in improving his or her personal life would not condemn others for not being sexually interested in him or her. It isn’t like people can choose to desire somebody sexually and not to desire somebody else. A mature man or woman who is constantly rejected by people s/he desires will analyze what it is about her or him that precludes people from feeling sexually attracted.

If you need to persuade yourself that the entire female (or male) population of the planet is profoundly messed up, then the only really screwed up person here is you.