The liberal elite, when faced with resistance to its agenda, invariably contemptuously labels its opponents as people afraid of change. Peggy Noonan, in one of her better columns, (alas! for subscribers only) in the Wall Street Journal, explains that the popular revolt which is going to bury the democrat party in the next cycle of elections is fueled by perfectly legitimate fear of, and opposition to, change: change in the nature of the country’s character and culture.
There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.
This is part of what’s driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.
The most vivid illustration of the fear comes, actually, from another country, Greece, and is brilliantly limned by Michael Lewis in October’s Vanity Fair. In “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” he outlines Greece’s economic catastrophe. It is a bankrupt nation, its debt, or rather the amount of debt that has so far been unearthed and revealed, coming to “more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek.” Over decades the Greeks turned their government “into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums” and gave “as many citizens as possible a whack at it.” The average government job pays almost three times as much as the average private-sector job. The retirement age for “arduous” jobs, including hairdressers, radio announcers and musicians, is 55 for men and 50 for women. After that, a generous pension. The tax system has disintegrated. It is a welfare state with a cash economy.
Much of this is well known, though it is beautifully stated. But all of it, Mr. Lewis asserts, has badly damaged the Greek character. “It is simply assumed . . . that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. . . . Government officials are assumed to steal.” Tax fraud is rampant. Everyone cheats. “It’s become a cultural trait,” a tax collector tells him.
Mr. Lewis: “The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible.”
Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole. …
Government not only can change the national character, it can bizarrely channel national energy. And this is another theme in my mailbox, the rebellion against what government increasingly forces us to become: a nation of accountants.
No matter what level of life in which you operate, you are likely overwhelmed by forms, by a blizzard of regulations, rules, new laws. This is not new, it’s just always getting worse. Priests are forced to be accountants now, and army officers, and dentists. The single most onerous part of ObamaCare is the tax change whereby spending $600 on goods or services will require a 1099 form. Economists will tell you of the financial cost of this, but I would argue that Paperwork Nation is utterly at odds with the American character.
Because Americans weren’t born to be accountants. It’s not in our DNA! We’re supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant—to be romantic about it, and why not—to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren’t meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren’t meant to wear green eyeshades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!
There is I think a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn’t a new rebellion—it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism—but it’s rising again.
For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, “the elites,” especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules, and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn’t have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.
Washington is now to some degree the focus of the same sort of profound resentment that Hollywood liberals inspired when they really mattered, or seemed really powerful. For decades they made films that were not helpful to our culture or society, that were full of violence and sick imagery. But they often brought their own children up more or less protected from the effects of the culture they created. Private schools, nannies, therapists, tutors. They bought their way out of the cultural mayhem to which they’d contributed. Their children were fine. Yours were on their own.
This is part of why people dislike “the elites” and why “the elites,” especially in Washington, must in turn be responsive, come awake, start to notice. People don’t like it when they fear you are subtly, day by day, year by year, changing the personality and character of their nation. They think, “You are ruining our country and insulating yourselves from the ruin. We hate you.”
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c.1829-1832
John Fund discusses the startling results of the latest Gallup Poll.
Yesterday, Gallup delivered its first 2010 “likely voter” poll and the results floored the political community. In the generic ballot question, which asks which party a voter would favor in a generic House contest, Gallup gave the GOP a 46% to 42% edge. But then Gallup applied two versions of its “likely voter” turnout model. In its “high turnout model,” Republicans led Democrats by 53% to 40%. In its “low turnout model,” the GOP edge was a stunning 56% to 38%. That kind of margin in favor of Republicans has never been seen in Gallup surveys.
What should worry Democrats most is that the “low turnout model” is typical of recent midterm elections. If the Gallup numbers hold up (and the firm cautions that “the race often tightens in the final month of the campaign”), some word more cataclysmic than “tsunami” would be needed for the Democratic losses.
Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, says either of the Gallup turnout models would produce “a Republican House majority the likes of which we have not seen since the election cycles of 1946 or even 1928.” Mr. Barone says the historical parallel might no longer be 1994, when the GOP gained 54 House seats, but instead 1894, when Republicans gained more than 100 House seats in the middle of the economic downturn that engulfed Democratic President Grover Cleveland.
– Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income
– Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit
– Repeal small business mandates in the new health care law.
Cutting Spending:
– Repeal and Replace health care
– Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone)
– Establish strict budget caps to limit federal spending going forward
– Cancel all future TARP payments and reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Reforming Congress:
– Will require that every bill have a citation of constitutional authority
– Give members at least 3 days to read bills before a vote
Defense:
– Provide resources to troops
– Fund missile defense
– Enforce sanctions in Iran
Full text pdf (as I write this, I’m waiting for 17 minutes of download to finish)
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A lot of people, including most prominently Don Surber, Erik Erikson, think it is too damned long, too platitudinous, and not what it should be.
Doug Ross offered a superior, and far more concise, alternative version:
We pledge that every action we take will be gauged by the answer to a single question: Does it show fidelity to the Constitution, our highest law?
With that as our guide, we solemnly pledge the following as our first actions:
• We will repeal the Democrat health care bill and, if vetoed by the President, will de-fund every aspect of that bill until such time as the American people have input into a sensible health care reform process.
• We will slash the size of the federal government bureaucracies (Commerce, Education, Energy, the EPA, Labor, etc.) by 20% in 2011 with a goal of reducing each by 50% over the next three years, thereby saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
• We will secure the border with physical fencing suitable to repel drug smugglers, human smugglers, and terrorists, while encouraging legal immigration and enforcement of the law.
• We will confront the entitlement crisis — Social Security and Medicare — by preserving benefits for those who depend upon them and moving to privatized options for younger workers. Anything less condemns future generations to mountains of debt and economic catastrophe.
• We will strengthen our armed forces, space and missile defense programs to retain our unparalleled superpower status.
• We will begin the process of paying down our debts, spending within our means every year.
• We will ban public sector unions, which exist solely to wage war against the taxpayers who fund their operations.
Put simply: we intend to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Faith, Family, and the Founding. That is our creed.
And for your support and with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
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The Pledge finally downloaded.
I must say that I find it difficult to believe that the guys who produced this bloviating document, loaded down with pretentious, trite, and irrelevant photographs (the Statue of Liberty! Mount Rushmore! even a cowboy) and padded with quotations from people like Ronald Reagan and Bob McDonnell who actually had something to say, are really going to reduce the size of anything.
Reducing this Pledge to specifics and essentials would have been a better start.
Liberal William Galston, in New Republic, sums up the democrats’ electoral problem.
They have, according to Galston, “an impressive record of accomplishment,” but the American people do not like what they’ve accomplished.
There’s an old joke in advertising circles that goes like this: A big firm gets an account to launch a new brand of dog food. It’s an all-hands-on-deck operation, with people working flat-out on logos, slogans, music, endorsements, product placement, and ads suited to every medium. Launch day comes, and everything goes perfectly. But after a couple of weeks, sales are miserable, and it becomes clear that the campaign is tanking.
The entire firm gathers in the big conference room for a gloomy post-mortem. Each element of the launch is second-guessed, and recriminations are flying. Finally, a junior writer in a seat against the wall timidly raises his hand and ventures his opinion: “Maybe the dogs didn’t like it.†…
In a survey out last week, Gallup finds that of five major pieces of legislation, only financial regulatory reform enjoys majority support. …
The bottom line: the majority can neither run on its record nor run away from it. Its only hope is to convince the American people that giving power to an opposition party in its angriest and least moderate mood would only make things worse.
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Die Lösung
Bertolt Brecht
Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
The Solution
Bertolt Brecht
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Citizens for the Republic, a conservative political action committee, has released a parody of the famous Ronald Reagan 1984 campaign commercial “Morning in America” just for Obama.
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The original 1984 version. Quite a contrast between those times and ours today.
Barack Obama experienced publicly one of those handwriting-on-the-wall moments when he encountered Velma R. Hart, AMVETS Chief Financial Officer, at a Town Hall meeting in Washington.
“I’m one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I’m exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for,” Hart told President Obama at a town hall.
John Dennis is running against Nancy Pelosi and has cleverly targeted this advertisement to appeal to the hyperactive and numerically significant Friends of Dorothy voting bloc in the relevant congressional district.
As the fatal election in November inevitably approaches, Rob Long notes that the left is gradually moving past Denial to the second stage.
It’s all part of the Kubler-Ross model, the Five Stages of Grief. Now they’re turning to Stage Two: Anger. Angry at the voters, at Fox News, at Obama himself.
Next up: Bargaining. I’m not sure when that’s going to start — probably a few weeks after Labor Day. But as always, what we’re all waiting for is Stage Four: Depression.
Stage Five is Acceptance, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.
There is no great split in the United States of America on the issue of the Ground Zero Mosque. Sixty-eight percent of Americans oppose it.
In fact, using the same metric — CNN Opinion Research polling of 1,000 Americans — more Americans have doubts about Barack Obama’s birth story than support the mosque.
Rep. Melissa Bean, democratic incumbent of the 8th-IL congressional district (Phil Crane’s old district) turns in a remarkably unresponsive performance at a town meeting held at the Round Lake, Illinois Public Library on August 12. The congresswoman was accompanied by a large male who loomed threateningly over persons daring to ask questions.
This 6:30 video is clearly edited with partisan intent, but it shows enough that is obviously real to be disturbing.
Any bets on whether Rep. Bean will be returning to Washington next year?
