Last of the Mugwumps Issues a Call to, So To Speak, Arms

The current political discourse is confounded by a deficiency in our vocabulary. It is a deficiency that can be cured, only, by recourse to the legacy of The New York Sun, coiner of the term “mugwump.”President Biden recently slurred the MAGAs — the militantly populist, nationalist faction of the Republican Party — as semi-fascist. Mr. Biden was wrong to do so. Yet who am I to judge? Here’s who. I am not a MAGA Republican, ultra or not. I am one of the last of the living ultraconservative Reagan Republicans and was once branded by a Washington Post columnist as “the second most conservative man in the world.” America has forgotten an essential political category, thus converting the prevailing political discourse into gibberish. The word for that category is Mugwump. Per the Political Dictionary it meant and, all but forgotten, still means, “the original independents, eschewing their party for the things they believed in strongly.” I, the last of the self-identified mugwumps, only am escaped alone to tell thee. Follow along.David Frum observed, in The Atlantic, well before the advent of Trump: “If you could visit a big political rally or convention in the 1880s, you’d discover a party system unexpectedly reminiscent of today’s. Then as now, partisanship was intense. Then as now, partisans lived in closed worlds.”These partisans, Mr. Fum explains, “read only the newspapers that confirmed their respective prejudices, lived in towns and neighborhoods that tilted overwhelmingly to one party or another, celebrated different sets of heroes, and disdained different villains.”Mr. Frum goes on to observe that this “highly ritualized approach to politics, this pretense of great disagreement, is familiar in our own time. A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale offered Americans substantial policy alternatives.” Yet in 2010, he saw “the parties hammering each other over differences barely more perceptible than those of 1880.” The Mugwumps, Mr. Frum writes, “wanted to end congressional manipulation of the currency. They got their wish in 1900, when the United States wrote the gold standard into law, and in 1913, with the founding of the Federal Reserve. They also wanted secret ballots, printed by the government, not the parties, and effective measures against vote-stealing and ballot-stuffing.”Wait, what? Effective measures against vote-stealing and ballot-stuffing? Hello to what the Democrats now call “The Big Lie” (which I, publishing at the ultraconservative Western Journal, called “a little fib”). What to do?The storied New York Sun has made many iconic contributions to world culture, what the Library of Congress calls “perhaps the most famous editorial ever written.” It was called, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” What perhaps?Let us also pay tribute to the Sun’s advocacy of the classical gold standard. That said, the Sun’s coinage of the category of “mugwump” portends its most valuable contribution to political culture. Per Britannica, “The term Mugwump, first used by Charles A. Dana in The New York Sun, was derived from the Algonquian Indian word mogkiomp (‘great man’ or ‘big chief’). In U.S. political slang, mugwump came to mean any independent voter….”Mr. Frum puts it more pointedly: “the editor of The New York Sun, Charles Dana, mocked these party-switchers as Mugwumps, a name he apparently took from an Algonquian Indian word for an important person — self-important was what Dana ironically meant to say. Other critics, less polite, drew them as absurd cartoon characters with their ‘mug’ on one side of the fence and their ‘wump’ on the other.”Such disdain toward us mugwumps was, and is, pure floccinaucinihilipilification on the part of the coastal elites. We mugwumps, as the Britannica suggests and the Political Dictionary presents in its fullness, were “the original independents, eschewing their party for the things they believed in strongly.”Country before party? Nothing wrong with that. We mugwumps, let it be noted, constituted a movement rather than a party. And, in all but name, we’re back.All that now is needed to set America to rights — a movement triggered by opposition to the possibility of election tampering and, appalled by inflation, ready to support restoration of the classical gold standard — is the wide issuance of crimson bill caps emblazoned with the word MUGWUMP.

Last of the Mugwumps Issues a Call to, So To Speak, Arms

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