It is a civil war
– Though as I anticipated , it is (as of now) a soft and bloodless one. Paul Ryan seems to get that . Responding to David Brooks – and, by proxy, to the rest of the establishment Republicans content to live within the faux binary of the current two-party competition for control of first eats at the taxpayer trough: The issue is not whether we ought to “zero out the state†or whether “all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi-socialist.†The issue is rather more subtle and sophisticated than that. The real debate is about whether and how government ought to create the foundations for growth and prosperity, securing a safety net for those who need it most; about how government can act now to avert a catastrophe later. The truth is that there are two stark, competing philosophies over this matter. I know better than most that the debate will at times be uncomfortable and unpleasant. In ordinary times, political debate concerns the means, not the ends, of government. But we do not live in ordinary times; we live in a time when the first principles of governing are on the table. Nor did we seek this debate; bipartisan failures of the past and our current leaders’ acceleration of their agenda have forced America to make this choice. So we cannot advance to the “day after tomorrow†until we decide today what kind of government we want our nation to have after tomorrow. And that is, right now, an open question. This is a potentially clarifying moment for the US. Sure, media filters applying progressive, big government spin will slow the impulse and blunt much of the early momentum of what the establishment is trying to term “anti-government” sentiment. But that’s no reason to accept the flawed (and unstated) premise from the GOP establishment that the best way forward is to continue to act within the constraints imposed upon civic and political discourse by the left. Progressives have made incremental changes to our various institutions — each one of those changes designed to move us away from the principles of classical liberalism and toward the tenets of progressive leftism, with its concentration on identity politics, epistemic contingency, and linguistic unmooring, all of which taken together leads to the deconstruction of the individual and the inversion of liberty into a federal soft-tyranny, a liberal fascism. It’s not they those rebelling are “anti-government”; it’s that they are pro-liberty, and they see the government as overreaching and out of control. What GOP members are “electable” or not is really up to those voting — not to pundits and pollsters operating without all the facts, or well in advance of any kind of potential groundswell. And frankly, electing GOP candidates whose vote for conservative policy only roughly half the time anyway has the perverse effect of providing cover for a progressive policy agenda. As I noted in an interview with NPR during the 2008 GOP primaries, if we have to have a statist in the White House, I’d just as soon s/he wear a D — because then, when the progressive agenda so obviously and fully failed, voters would know going forward precisely who to blame . Obama, in recent speeches, if fond of telling crowds that a vote against the Dems is a vote for a return to Bush-era policies. But what the Tea Party movement is saying is something else entirely: a vote for big government is a vote against the people, regardless of what party letter a candidate aligned with big government wears. And now that even Karl Rove — long depicted by the left as an evil “ultra-rightwing conservative” is being denounced by those who are tired of politics as usual, the left’s most potent attack rhetoric is greatly diminished: by painting Bush and Rove and the “compassionate conservatism” and statism of the establishment GOP (and hell, even of “mavericks” like McCain) as “extremist” and “ultra-right wing,” the left gave itself no room to denounce the Tea Party movement in fresh political terms. After all, Bush was Hitler, remember? And it’s hard to get more “extreme” than Hitler. Keep the fight going. Vote for who you believe in, not who you think can win. We are at a crossroads in this country — a time of deciding on the ends of government, not the means. If that end is to be individual liberty, equality of opportunity, and a government designed to protect your natural rights — not one designed to grant and deny rights based upon current fashion and ideological bullying — the choice on how to move forward is clear: refuse to give power to those who wish to lose more slowly simply because they claim to have your team’s interest at heart. They may or may not in theory. In practice, however, they are creating a conservatism that continues to slide to the left — and that lays claim to the mantle solely by staying to the right of a “liberalism” that continues to drag the country more and more toward the leftist paradise of social democracy / Marxism. (h/t sdferr)
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It is a civil war