Rick Perry strikes a chord with comments about Texas secession

Of course, the idea of a Liberal Exodus is not unheard of either.

Fifty years ago, the mandarins of the old New Deal left had to deal with the more radical civil rights and New Left activists who challenged their control of the Democratic Party. Before that, the old Wilsonian Democrats of the Progressive Era were challenged by the urban machines and the unions, who emerged as the big winners in the New Deal. Before that, the agrarian Populists took on the McKinley-Hanna Republicans, and before THAT, the Whig elites who created the GOP to contend with the nativist Know Nothings.

Now Rick Moran is discovering, much to his horror, that his elite reactionary ideology — the conservatism of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley — has mutated into a populist movement, with all the carny sideshow theatrics and conspiratorial paranoia that American populist movements have traditionally fostered.

Not to worry: If past is prologue, the elites will eventually regain control, after the movement has been in the political wilderness long enough.

The real story is going to be on the left, as the same dynamic begins to generate friction between the Clintonite and Obamanian Democratic establishment and the less domesticated liberal “netroots”.

For conservatives, this should be a source of some encouragement, not to mention entertainment.