Winning By Losing

SO CONSERVATIVE columnist Jonah Goldberg is the first bigfoot conservative to mention the unmentionable. Maybe it would be best for the Republicans to lose the presidency in 2008. Not that he is being defeatist. Not at all. He is thinking about the future.

If the war on terror really isn’t that big a deal, hurray. Then Democrats can’t do that much damage, and we can all argue about the minimum wage and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane. If it is a big deal, Democrats need to be slapped out of their anti-Bush hysteria by real life.

Our Democratic friends have made quite a issue recently of belonging to the “reality-based community,” (as opposed, you see, to the faith-based community.) But any time you are in opposition you are not really dealing with reality. Instead you are dealing with faith—faith that the other guys are rascals leading the nation to ruin. Reality is making mistakes and then doing something about it.

The meaning of the Democratic taunt, of course, is that Republicans are operating in a dream world, primarily with regard to the war in Iraq, but also in regard to other issues of reality, such as evolution and theocracy. After all, as everyone--even those with the most tenuous grasp of reality--knows, the United States is this close to a theocracy.

Of course both political parties and their partisans find it difficult to admit that it is ever time for the other party to be elected to power. Apart from questions of loyalty and defeatism, every partisan knows that the other party just cannot be trusted with the government of the nation.

But a little thought surely indicates that the opposite is true. The most important thing in politics is to put the rascals on the other side in power and let them demonstrate in short order how bad they are. Democracy is the political system where the people get what they want—good and hard. Because of this the people have become fairly good at is discerning when they have had it good and hard and they just aren’t going to take it any more. At that point they decide it is time for a change.

Remember 1992. The Democrats won the White House and they thought Happy Days Are Here Again. The awful “Me Decade” of the 1980s was over and America would once again be governed by people who were just more educated and enlightened than the yahoos of the Religious Right.

How wrong they were. The American people took one enlightened mouthful and spat it out two years later.

The best thing that could happen for Republicans is for a Democrat to get elected to the White House in 2008 and then lose both houses of Congress two years later, just like in 1994.

Beyond the question of simple political hygiene there is another factor that demands a Democratic president in 2009. It is the refusal of the Democrats to countenance any substantive reform of their vast welfare-state patronage system.

We know that Social Security must be reformed from a transfer-payment system into a savings system. But the Democrats have demagogued and blocked reform.

We know that the health-care system must be reformed so that people start making real choices with their own money about the kind of health care they want. But Democrat evangelism has raised a vast faith-based community to believe that health care is an absolute and indivisible right.

Then there is education. Again and again Republicans have called on Democrats to get their special interests out of the school house door and suffer little children to get the education they deserve. Again and again Democrats have refused.

After fighting on offense on these basic issues year after year and getting the elbow from Democrats and indifference from the mainstream media it is time for Republicans to regroup.

We know what the Democratic will do once they are back in the White House: They will call for more spending, more centralization, more regulation, and no reform.

They are determined to test the welfare state to destruction.

The next time that Republicans once more gain the White House the unreformed welfare state will have experienced two or six or even twelve more years of testing to destruction. That will be a shame. It would be better for us if we could reform it today. It would be better for the helpless clients of the welfare state. It would be better for the reality-based office holders and the managers of the welfare state. It would be better for America.

But the truth is that we won’t get reform until Republicans sweep into office in another election like 1980. Remember those first months of 1981? Ronald Reagan had a mandate to cut the budget and cut tax rates and cut inflation. The Democrats knew it in their bones.

We want them to get the same feeling once again.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close