Anyone For Tipping Points - Road to the Middle Class

IS THIS it? Are we right now in the middle of the great realignment election, the generational political earthquake of which we’ve heard tell? It’s too soon to know, of course, but to put things in 1940 terms: if I were the French candidate I would be concerned about reports of suspiciously intense firefights at the Meuse river crossings. What if they turned into something big?

All year, the Democratic guns have been firing away at the Bushies. And boy, did they have artillery. There were the regular heavy howitzers from the DNC; there was Colonel Soros’s 527th Artillery Regiment. There was the Big Bertha from the 9/11 Michael Moore Battalion, and General Rather with three big army corps from the Mainstream Media Army.

But after the smoke cleared and Candidate John Kerry reported for duty back in July, it became clear that the furious bombardment of the Bush positions achieved very little. Then the Republican counterattack began.

First off, a diversionary action by a Swift Boat Vet infiltration squad wrong-footed the French headquarters, and then the Republican convention attack achieved remarkable success, with Rudy Giulani invoking the spirit of 9/11; John McCain reminding us all that the War on Terror is serious business; Arnold Schwarzenegger telling America’s immigrants not to be scared, but they could be crypto-Republicans; Laura Bush reminded America’s women that Republicans are thinking about the thousand-and-one dilemmas that they are pondering. Then came the surprise attack right up the gut from ex-Marine Zell Miller that rocked Democrats back on their heels: Democrats in general, he said, and John Kerry in particular were wrong on defense. Then came an understated demonstration of adult competence from Dick Cheney and a tableau featuring President Bush, a steady but human leader, framed in the middle of a sea of adoring delegates. After it was over, the president was up ten points in the polls. Something had changed, something big.

It’s about time. We’ve been playing Democratic one-size-fits-all politics for the last 70 years, enacting comprehensive and mandatory national programs for everything imaginable. But for the past generation Democrats have been promising comprehensive universal national health insurance, and they just haven’t been getting traction. Maybe it is because Americans already have health care. (Yes, senator, you are right. Not every American has health insurance but then insurance doesn’t make sense unless you have assets to protect, does it?)

Suppose what Americans want is a government that is there when they need it, a government that sets down clearly marked life highways, and then gets out of the way to let them get on with it? That’s the bet that Bush and Co. are making. They know that they have to take a risk if they want to change the rules of American politics. So they are proposing an ownership society in which people will get to own their lives instead of have them dependent on the government, its experts, its activists, and its politicians.

Is that what the American people really want? Correction. Is that what a majority of the voters in Election 2004 want? Nobody knows. That’s why we have elections. Each party throws up its vision of the future, its hopes and its fears, and the American people get to choose.

But the Democrats have a problem. They are on defense. It’s the result of holding the reins of power for all those years. After legislating so many programs to reward its supporters over so many years, they are finding that any change, any alteration in government policy is likely to hurt their loyal supporters. You have to feel sorry for the Democrats. Sooner or later, Social Security and Medicare are going to smash up in red ruin. Nobody knows how it will happen. Maybe the young generation will refuse to pay up. Maybe the immigrants brought in to do the work once performed by retired baby-boomers will rise up and overthrow the government. Maybe the government will dissolve in a great inflation. Until then, the Democrats will defend their programs to the last taxpayer.

But Bush and Co. have taken a bold decision. They have decided to stop worrying about how to pay for the welfare state. The welfare state is the Democrats’ baby. They made it; let them look after it.

For the rest of us, they offer a life of adventure. At home, they offer the adventure of starting a business, making a family, making decisions and seeing them through. In the world, they champion the world-historical middle class against its current enemies: the radical Islamist reactionaries that want to return to a caliphate in which everything is inside the House of Islam, nothing is outside the House of Islam, and nothing is against the House of Islam, and the radical progressives who want everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, just like Mussolini always said.

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

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