Posted on 09/08/2012 9:03:35 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
They won’t get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.”
After a first term that has been historically abysmal, President Obama stands a good chance of being reelected. How can that be?
Here is the blunt explanation: We have lost a third of the country and, as if that weren’t bad enough, Republicans act as if it were two-thirds.
The lost third cannot be recovered overnight. For now, it is gone. You cannot cede the campus and the culture to the progressive, post-American Left for two generations and expect a different outcome. So even if Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter — and he has actually been much more effective, and therefore much worse — it is unreasonable to expect a Reagan-style landslide, and would be even if we had Reagan. The people coming of age in our country today have been reared very differently from those who were just beginning to take the wheel in the early 1980s. They have marinated in an unapologetically progressive system that prizes group discipline and narrative over free will and critical thought.
The narratives are not always easy to follow. In the progressive weltanschauung, good and evil are relative. Good is whatever it is said to be in the moment; don’t ask anyone to explain why “choice” is a value when it involves killing the unborn, though it is seen as an obvious nuisance when it involves the right to choose the double cheeseburger over the salad. Evil is contextualized and root-caused into vaporous abstraction. We no longer know whether it’s wrong — only that, whoever may have done it, it’s our fault.
Yet, even with good and evil enveloped in fog, progressive narratives remain sharply Manichaean: You can always tell the heroes from the villains. Obama is a hero because he cares. Conservatives are villains because they don’t. And Republicans are villains because they are conservative.
None of these statements is true, of course. Obama cares about Obama, which is hardly heroic. Conservatives are repulsed by government intrusions into the private sphere because we believe private citizens are better than government’s social engineers at promoting prosperity for everyone. And today’s Republican party is not very conservative: At a time when the welfare state is — inevitably — collapsing of its own weight, Romney and Ryan run as its guardians. They’ve come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.
Still, the truth is increasingly irrelevant. Contemporary American politics is about emotion and perception. And this is a game Republicans will never win — and not, as they would have you believe, because the deck is stacked against them.
Certainly, the media, the academy, and most of our society’s major institutions are heavily influenced by progressives, if not outright controlled by them. It is therefore a given that elite opinion will portray Republicans as villains. Yet, that longstanding challenge for Republicans has never before been an insuperable one. In America, at least until now, the avant-garde has never been able to tame the public. It has always been possible to run against elite opinion and win — if you make a compelling counter-case.
Today’s Republicans do not. Indeed, they cannot, because they have accepted the progressive framework. Their argument is not that the welfare state, deficit spending, federalized education, sharia-democracy promotion, and the rest are bad policies. Their argument is not that Washington needs to be dramatically downsized. It is that progressive governance is fine but needs to be better executed.
Ain’t that something to rally around! The counter-case is supposed to demonstrate why the other guys are deeply wrong. You’re not going to get very far with “We’re not as bad as they say we are.”
It is hard to complain about Obama’s $5 trillion in new debt when you added $5 trillion just before he did. “Well, we took eight years and he took only four” is not exactly a response that stirs the soul — particularly when the country took two centuries to amass the first $5 trillion.
Then there’s Medicare, which the GOP has made a pivotal election issue. The problem with Medicare is not just that its current formula is unsustainable, or that Obama diverted a staggering amount of projected future spending on it into yet another bank-breaking entitlement. It is that the national government is innately incapable of running an entitlement program. Is the election about the side that grasps this versus the side for which enough is never enough? Surely you jest.
As constituted, our government offered two visions of “providing for the general welfare.” First is the Madisonian principle that Congress’s capacity to tax and spend is strictly limited to its enumerated powers — which do not include running social-welfare programs. The second is a Hamiltonian gloss, giving Congress additional latitude, provided that its schemes benefit all Americans equally — which would preclude welfare programs that take from A for the benefit of B.
Once you abandon these moorings, once you accept a wealth-redistribution system in which government becomes the arbiter of “social justice,” the ball game is over. If government is given license to even the scales between the have-nots and the haves, the political incentive to even them will be constant and overpowering: Enough will never be enough. If the rationale for giving government this power is that the asset in question is corporate property, not private, what is to be the limiting principle? Why health care but not housing or income? And when it comes to providing for the truly needy among 310 million people, central-government planners will simply never be as good at it as decent societies and their local governments. And so the allocation of burdens and benefits in federal entitlement programs are guaranteed to be warped, wasteful, and ultimately unsustainable.
Yet, no political party is making that case. Both candidates want you to know they are sentries of the safety net. And no major conservative journal or think tank, it seems, would have it any other way. Concededly, the GOP’s approach, “Let’s work within this implausible system and do the best we can to patch it up . . . someday,” is a more attractive position than Obama’s “Let’s break the bank now.” But inspiring? . . . Not exactly.
The third of the country we’ve lost may seem like a decided minority. Progressives do not need more than that, though, to run the show, not today. They proved that at their own convention this week, with the laughable platform-amendment episode.
The smarter Alinskyites among them realized that taking God and Jerusalem out of the platform was a blunder, so they ordered them put back in. Under the rules (ahem), that required a two-thirds’ vote of the delegates. When the vote was publicly taken, it became embarrassingly clear not only that there were not two-thirds in favor but that the “nays” may have had a majority. But the minority “ayes” are in power, and that’s all they needed. They peremptorily deemed themselves the victors. The amendments passed, and, after some brief groaning, the rest of the Left got with the program.
It was as rigged a vote as you’d find in any banana republic. But Democrats are unembarrassed — maybe even unembarrassable. It’s like the Obamacare debate in Congress: They’re not worried about what it looks like; they’re worried about winning.
Today’s Republicans are worried about what it looks like. Winning is secondary. What matters most is that they not appear too mean on a stage they’ve allowed their bare-knuckles opponents to set. Their consultants tell them: “It’s not what you stand for; it’s how you get to 50 percent plus one. So soften your edges, drop the philosophy crap, and if you need to show the media some backbone, find a conservative to bash.”
There is a big conservative base out there — bigger than the third of the country we’ve lost. But they’re left to scratch their heads and say, “I’m supporting this guy . . . why?” The response comes a little less quickly after each fit of pique: “Oh, right, because he’s not Obama.”
That’s a lot, but will it be enough?
Obama’s base, that lost third of the country, may not be as enthralled as they were in 2008. But they are committed, utterly convinced about who the villains are, and are prepared to be as chameleon as it takes to reel in, from the culture they dominate, the additional 15 percent or so needed to push their guy across the finish line. That’s how what should be a landslide for his opponent becomes a squeaker.
Unfortunately Romney won the primary and we're forced to go to war with the army we got. Ryan is all about facing the truth and tackling the deficit and its entitlements. They are who stands between the Country and the Cliff.
/johnny
Last night I was thinking about these issues, coincidentally.
Liberals think we are so radicalized and extreme, but the truth is we have conceded most every issue to the liberals on every single subject.
I have to admit my mom is pretty conservative and she just turned 65.
It is hard for me to believe that she would be willing to give up the Medicare and Social Security, in principle.
The fact of the matter is we have a welfare state and most Americans like it, though this thought is repulsive to me, but the great question for conservatives is how do we deal with what we got and how to deal with the future, because liberals will never stop asking for more.
My more optimistic self believes the times will require the conservatism - no choice and the Congress (we absolutely have to retake the Senate) will lead the way more than the POTUS.
All predictions are guaranteed double what you paid for them. ;)
/johnny
Seems many/most republicans are democrats..
They rejected any and all conservative candidates for President..
Instead chose the inventor of Romney care to run against the inventor of Obama care..
Could be most republicans are for democracy which is Mob Rule by mobsters..
Which means they are not republicans at all but democrats..
We have TWO DEMOCRAT PARTIES..
1) the perpetually clueless..
2) and the sometimes clueless..
That would not be principal, it would be stupid, and for millions, suicidal, principal is in voting for reform.
I am voting to remove Obama. But, let's be real. What you have just stated will likely be proven to be wrong.
The inertia towards bigger government is seemingly impossible to stop at this stage. That is the entire thrust of McCarthy's excellent article.
I consider Ryan an excellent technocrat. Like many others I do not at all put him in Reagan's league; not by any stretch. Yes he can quote Hayek, and Friedman, but his actual voting record goes against the very essence if their deeply held principles.
Remember Ryan vote for ethanol subsidies, Medicare Part-D, No child Left behind. Reagan or any other true conservative would never cast such votes.
With that being said, Romney/Ryan is all we have at this point. Under Romney's leadership and the Statist Republican leadership in Congress, it will be a long shot to truly turn things around.
To those who think otherwise, you are not facing the cold hard reality of the fiscal insanity that likely lies ahead.
The absolute first order of business after the election is a push to remove Boehner and McConnell from leadership positions. If that can't be accomplished then I ask, how the h*ell do you envision our fiscal house being restored??"
McCarthy's piece may well be one of the most important commentaries posted on FR this year.
The national dialogue at this critical moment should be focused on whether future generations will be able to enjoy "the Blessings of Liberty" declared in the Preamble to "the People's" Constitution, or whether they will be doomed to lives of equality in misery under the same old forms of government-over-people which have existed in one form or another throughout history.
Instead, we are being focused on "jobs and the economy." If America's Founders had limited their vision to "creation of jobs and improving their economy," then America never would have become the greatest and most prosperous nation the world ever had known!
In the Founders' wisdom and study of the history of civilization, they became enlightened to a recognition and acknowledgement of Creator-endowed individual liberty as being essential to the "pursuit of Happiness" they envisioned. That acknowledgement and assertion in the Declaration of Independence ll years later was implemented in a "People's" Constitution to limit any future tyrant who might fool "the People" into yielding up their rights by giving him/her and his/her cronies power over their livelihoods and over their lives--all in the name of "helping" them.
The primary choice of this election should be identified as being between liberty and tyranny.
"Jobs and the economy" will take care of themselves if "the People" honor and direct their attention to the Creator-endowed rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and turn away from the arrogant assumptions of so-called "progressives" whose ideas come, not from the doctrines of America's founding documents, but from minds of failed ideologues like Marx and Lenin.
That really sounds good until you realize the Republican majority House of Representatives actually agreed to massive automatic cuts from our military, if they couldn’t pass decent reasoned legislation.
If you want to see the problem clearly, look in the political mirror.
If you are going to rest your case on a Republican Senate, I think you’re in serious trouble.
What party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress from January 2001 to January 2007? Oh, and that party did absolutely nothing to prevent the economic melt-down. It’s leaders even made public statements heralding the wonder of minority and low income people’s home ownership, totally missing the fact that they couldn’t make mortgage payments, and had no chance of ever making them.
Sadly, you have to look back and realize our party, has been a major part of the problem.
Arthur Laugher (sp?, perhaps a Freudian slip) was the man who helped Reagan dig ourselves out last time. Day before yesterday he was singing the praises of Bill Clinton, not Reagan. He professed that he voted for him twice, because Clinton was such a fiscal Conservative.
Clinton WAS NOT a fiscal Conservative. Prior to 1994, he was an economic lout. When the Republicans took over Congress in January 1995, they passed legislation that Clinton would then take credit for. The nation was thus spared the damage of his inclinations, and treated to the fiscal soundness he could do very little about except veto it. He chose not to.
The point being, our side is so confused, I sometimes wonder if even a one of them knows which way is up.
Romney and Ryan may do a good job. I’m not trying to say they won’t. I am none the less very concerned. Will they follow through? Will they get the opportunity, with a Republican Senate and House? Will those entities help or fight to implement their own plans?
I have very little confidence in them. I do have far less in Obama, but that’s no road to salvation in and of itself.
And the answer to “two democrat parties” is....
For sure, the T.E.A. party people are never going to be able to subvert the Democrat party sufficiently to make much of a dent in changing their orientation, but the nominally “conservative” Republican party is subject to some triangulation.
Which for the moment, is the best the T.E.A. party people can do. After all, we have our guns and our religion to cling to, and that helps keep us steering to a true north.
Strange and foreign as it must seem to him, Mitt Romney is still more likely to listen to the admonishments from the grumpy old men of America than Obama ever would.
Sort of like using a (slippery)-elm club to steer a mule that won’t respond to tugs on the rein.
We need to get the full unvarnished ugly truth about how bad Obama has been in all its gory detail out to the American voter.
Failure to do this during the RNC was a missed opportunity because the media will stop it at any other time.
The only other opportunity is the ads, and I’ve been underwhelmed by the approach. Not hardhitting enough.
Obama has violated the constitution, undermined laws, harmed national security, killed jobs directly and killed jobs indirectly through his actions and policies.
If Republicans are not openly telling the truth about how bad Obama is, then we are at risk in letting America get harmed by 4 more years of a very bad president.
Thanks for calling my mom stupid.
Ironic that you would call her stupid when you are not even literate in the English language. Now, that is what I would call stupid.
This is what I have been yelling about for years. It is more calmly and reasonably put.
Today’s Republicans do not. Indeed, they cannot, because they have accepted the progressive framework. Their argument is not that the welfare state, deficit spending, federalized education, sharia-democracy promotion, and the rest are bad policies. Their argument is not that Washington needs to be dramatically downsized. It is that progressive governance is fine but needs to be better executed.
Ain’t that something to rally around! The counter-case is supposed to demonstrate why the other guys are deeply wrong.
Sarah Palin made the case that the other guys were deeply wrong. She stands almost alone in that. Even Newt Gingrich fails to go all-in on that notion.
Until we embrace extremism and say that the other guys are thoroughly wrong, we will only be able to present ourselves as "pragmatic Liberals" -- and I am unwilling to be that.
Here’s the truth:
We have been witness to 4 years of the manifest failures of liberal progressive policies, 4 years of failure of the welfare state to actually provide for the welfare of the people.
This has to be explained to people.
Why aren’t the Republicans rerunning Newt’s classes on public access channels like they did in 1994?
Aside from in my rush, misspelling principle, I didn’t call your mother stupid, I said your hope for her to at age 65, not receive her SS was stupid.
You seem disappointed that she would not do the stupid thing that you want her to do.
"Conservatives" are merely on a curve that is not quite so steep as that of the liberals. Everybody is moving to the Total State. There is no way off the escalator. Our education system has given us three or more generations of people educated to the welfare state. The welfare state cannot exist beyond its resources which it diminishes by its very existence until it must become a total state and that which is not banned is mandated. Europe was able to last as a welfare state so long as it did because it did not have to use any resources on defense and it had the American economy to backstop it. The Soviet Union lasted so long as it did because it could imitate the pricing of the Western economy and ration its resources better than it could have done without America.
It must all come to a whole world of "third-world" countries or even a whole world that is one third-world society, a One World the population of which must shrink as food production declines and famine returns to normalcy in history.Eventually communication and technology will bresk down with no resources to maintain or repair it and no innovation. The world will begin to break up as oceans and mountains once more separate populations.
We, over several decades, allowed so-called "progressives" to hide and distort those ideas.
Our challenge, now, is to shine the bright light of liberty into the dark places of ignorance of America's founding principles. Perhaps that is the takeaway from the excellent articled posted on this thread. Even if Romney/Ryan win, the task for restoring America is the same.
These words from Jefferson and Madison might help to arouse a new understanding and explosion of that natural longing for liberty which the Creator implanted in each soul.
"I do not think it for the interest of the General Government itself, and still less of the Union at large, that the State governments should be so little respected as they have been. However, I dare say that in time all these as well as their central government, like the planets revolving round their common sun, acting and acted upon according to their respective weights and distances, will produce that beautiful equilibrium on which our Constitution is founded, and which I believe it will exhibit to the world in a degree of perfection, unexampled but in the planetary system itself. The enlightened statesman, therefore, will endeavor to preserve the weight and influence of every part, as too much given any member of it would destroy the general equilibrium." --Thomas Jefferson to Peregrine Fitzhugh, 1798. ME 10:3
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power." --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278
"If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?... If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. 'Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.' But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,... what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?... No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess, then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233
"An enlightened people, and an energetic public opinion... will control and enchain the aristocratic spirit of the government." --Thomas Jefferson to Chevalier de Ouis, 1814. ME 14:130
"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.". --Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820.
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782.
"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787.
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
"Whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, the people, if well informed, may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789.
From James Madison:
"Although all men are born free, and all nations might be so, yet too true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race. Ignorant – they have been cheated; asleep – they have been surprised; divided – the yoke has been forced upon them. But what is the lesson?... The people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united, that after establishing a government they should watch over it." - James Madison
"A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people." - James Madison
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." - James Madison
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