The prophet Whittaker Chambers

A friend writes:

Did you ever come accross this quote?  Whittaker Chambers wrote this shortly before his death, to his friend William F. Buckley in the wake of the Republican defeat in 1960.

“If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in, and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to masses of people – why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure, some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel.”

Eerily accurate, isn’t it?

Yes.  Even when they win here and there (as I expect the to do in the mid-terms since the party out of power usually does), one gets the sense of a party that is increasingly untethered from reality.