A SWNIDish Confession: We Contritely Repent

Our blogging has been infrequent of late. Today we reveal why.

It's not the press of real-world duties that has impeded our cyber-world bloviation. It is our very deep, painful re-evaluation of our political, economic and social views, a process ongoing since the first Tuesday of November, 2008.

That process has taken us to this day to complete. And so we are now prepared to reveal the transformation, something akin to Saul's on the Damascus Road.

Our views on matters of faith and art remain unchanged. But the revolution has overtaken us in politics, economics and society. We hereby repudiate our earlier positions to affirm the following:

• The body politic consists of two groups: worthy and unworthy. The former, if they work and have access to a shower, shower after work. The latter, if what they do can be deemed "work," shower before. The former are blameless in all matters. The latter are to blame for everything. The former are not subject to the hubris that gives rise to what Christians call "sin." The latter are incapable of anything but. Call this "limited total depravity." Or Proletarian Gnosticism, if you prefer.
  
• Though the worthy class is indeed worthy, it is also mostly helpless. It needs an exceptional few champions to rise up, either transcending the limitations of their origins or abandoning the privilege of their class, to enter the political fray and protect the hapless plebes who otherwise would be continually victimized by the unworthy.
  
• Economics is inherently a zero-sum game. If someone has more, it's always because someone else has less. Productivity is unimportant. Distribution is everything. Nevermind that something has to be produced before it can be distributed: production happens irrespective of the incentives to do so, largely because there is a class of good people in the world who always do the producing as long as they aren't victimized by the unworthy.
• When the right people, those who are pledged to protect the worthy folk, are elected, they can be trusted to do what is right. Limitations on their power, out of fear that they might abuse their power, merely interfere with their doing what needs to be done.
• The world is filled with peace-loving, friendly people who want nothing but harmony and goodwill with their global neighbors. The only thing that can provoke them to hostility is the hostile attitude and futile saber-rattling consistently demonstrated when the wrong people get elected to power in the United States.
• A very special class of worthy humans are scientists. These exceptional women and men know not only their disciplines, with their specific methods and narrow outcomes, but precisely what the implications of their findings are for the public at large. Their conclusions, mediated by the right people in public office, can never be questioned.
• The great heritage of conservative political and economic thought (Locke, Smith, the Federalist Papers, Burke, von Mises, Buckley, Friedman, Kirk, everything every published by National Review, even including P. J. O'Rourke) is really an intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt sham to keep the wrong people in power and oppress the right people.
• Conservatism is completely uncool: pale, fat, backward and nasty, like Ned Beatty in Deliverance.
  
• Conservatism is also inconsistent with Christian faith, which is obvious to anyone who knows the gospel. See all points above.
  

So that's it. We were WRONG. But from today forward, we'll be right. Er, we mean left.