Reasons for Political Hope

Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. PresidentMany Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.

Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.  Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.

Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.

Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.

First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.

Regular fair and transparent elections mean that changing course is always possible. It may be that things will have to get much worse than they are now to wake up those 4 million Republicans who stayed home in 2012, or those 5 million voters who gave Obama the victory. And there’s a chance that the pain of correction will be much more severe, much more socially disruptive than anything we’ve seen in many years. But we still will have the legal right to change course when that moment comes.

Second, despite decades of assault on federalism, sovereign state governments still exist. They still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In recent years states have gone their own way on issues like gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, right-to-work laws, reduction of public employee unions’ political power, limits on abortion, or legalization of marijuana. Particularly important are the states’ right to set tax laws and business-friendly regulations that lure investment and people.

A comparison of California with Texas illustrates this phenomenon. As Forbes reported last year on the country’s two most populous states, “California’s state and local tax burden ranks as America’s 4th-highest compared to Texas at 45th.  California taxes a 42 percent larger share of state income than does Texas, California’s restrictive energy policies discourage oil extraction, even though it has the largest proven shale oil reserves in the nation; while its industrial electrical rates are 88 percent higher than in Texas.” As a result, in 2011 Texas’ per capita GDP surpassed California’s. No surprise, then, that between 2000 and 2012, Texas’ population growth rate doubled California’s, and that 183 Californians moved to Texas for every 100 Texans moving to California.

Increasing red-state success in growing their economies and liberating people from the intrusive Leviathan state will attract more and more people, even as the bankrupt blue-state policies of ruinous tax rates and over-regulation will drive more and more people away. We could then see a return to the Founders’ idea of federalism as “islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance,” with people free to feet-vote for the political and social order they find congenial.

Third, American civil society––those 1.5 million associations and organizations separate from government––is still vigorous, though not as much as it was at its peak in 1970. People still belong to groups like the PTA and the Rotary Club, and still attend more than 350,000 churches. The pushback by churches and religious organizations against Obamacare’s requirement that they offer abortifacients and birth control in their health plans illustrates the impact civil society can have on public policy. More significant is the rise of the Tea Party, a truly grassroots movement that quickly organized in 2009, and by the summer its members were confronting politicians at “town-hall” events, a display of direct political accountability to the people more typical of early America or ancient Athens. There is no question that the Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm was made possible by Tea Party activists.

Finally, new communication technologies have broken the monopoly liberals once held over information and commentary. Before the rise of talk-radio in the 80s, political opinion was controlled by a few score network news anchors, magazine editors, and syndicated columnists. Today there are hundred of thousands of voices and opinions on cable news networks like Fox News, blogs, on-line magazines like FrontPage, websites, social networks like Facebook, and video sites like YouTube. It’s clear that the persistence of Fox News in reporting the Benghazi debacle and the IRS scandal have kept these administration failures alive in the public square.

Of course some of these sites are frequently venues for misinformation, propaganda, and transient trivia. But they also provide ordinary citizens with a democratic virtual town square in which lies are exposed, truths hidden by the establishment media revealed, and opinions aired to raucous challenge and debate. Don’t forget, the Tea Party could become a national organization nearly overnight because of a YouTube video and the Drudge Report. Still protected by the First Amendment, this virtual town square gives everyone the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech, and to mobilize resistance to the political status quo.

The resources, then, are there, and they more than any one election give us hope. We just have to make use of them. It is still in doubt whether the 2 terms of Barack Obama have represented a permanent change in the American political character, a shift much farther to the left than this country has ever experienced; or whether the unique circumstances of electing the first black president will be a one-off, and the nation will return to its traditional center-right character, and restore our fiscal sanity and our global leadership. Whatever the outcome, it will be the responsibility of the people to use resources of the Constitution to get our country back on track.

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  • Michael Garfinkel

    The writer’s suggestion (hope)
    that the political ascendance of Barack Obama may be a “one off” is a
    sentiment heard frequently on the Right.

    If only.
    Here’s the brutal truth, in a nutshell: the U.S. census puts the Black, Hispanic, and Asian share of the electorate at 27%.

    In 2012, Blacks voted at a greater rate than Whites did.

    (http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-568.pdf)

    This “minority” vote, Reince Priebus and Ron Paul not withstanding, is statist, anti-libertarian and Left.

    Then consider the Jewish vote, which in 2012 stayed with Obama at 70%, in spite of (some say because of) the President’s contempt for traditional Jewish concerns. (http://www.pewforum.org/2012/11/07/how-the-faithful-voted-2012-preliminary-exit-poll-analysis/).

    Finally, there’s the women:
    Women were the majority of voters. According to exit
    polls 53 percent of the voters in the 2012 elections were women.
    Moreover, 55 percent of those women cast votes for President Barack
    Obama. Women who voted for President Obama made up 29 percent—nearly
    one-third—of the electorate.

    (http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/report/2012/12/12/47916/how-women-changed-the-outcome-of-the-election/)

    Not content with even these advantages, the Democrats are feverishly pursuing an open-border agenda and challenging in court even minimal voter I.D. requirements.

    It is likely George W. Bush was the last Republican president – and even Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000.

    Conclusion: The great liberal impulse to extend the franchise to previously excluded groups will, in the final analysis, hasten the demise of the American republic.

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      I agree with the main thrust of your argument, that minority groups (who will soon become a majority in this country) are overwhelmingly statist. That includes Asians, who though hard-working, accept the statist doctrines of the East which had no freedom at all until we defeated Japan in 1945. And even there, there is a very strong “obey the leaders” sentiment; I would hardly call Japan a free country. If we don’t get control of immigration, our only hope will be secession.

      I disagree slightly about women: what the polls didn’t show was the great difference between married and unmarried women. Unmarried women, being less secure financially, are vulnerable to the Democrats’ empty promise of security in return for her liberty. Married women are less likely to be gulled by these Democratic snake-oil salesmen.

      • Michael Garfinkel

        Unfortunately, the fact that married women generally don’t support the Democrats is not decisive; Obama enjoyed 55% of the womens’ vote – married and unmarried.

        Here are interesting (and prescient) excerpts from a 2012 piece entitled “Put a Ring on It: Obama Wins Women, but Not the Married Kind.” by Matt Negrin:

        “In the 2008 presidential race, unmarried women voted less than married women did, too, though at higher levels.
        That data seems to favor Romney, but Democrats see hope in growing numbers of unmarried women (almost 2 million more between 2010 and 2012), a group that tends to care more about social issues like birth control and abortion than married women do.”

        “The evidence would appear to support that idea. Since women’s issues — Sandra Fluke, pre-abortion ultrasounds, aspirin between the knees — hijacked the GOP primary, Obama has enjoyed a growing gap over Romney.”

        So, there it is, and to seal the deal, the Democrats continue to enshrine the right to murder the unborn through their execrable spokesperson, Deborah Wasserman-Schultz..

        • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

          Agreed. I think the most revealing line in Negrin’s piece is this” “Democrats see hope in growing numbers of unmarried women…” which explains the Left’s support of gay “marriage,” the purpose of which is to undermine real marriage.

          • Michael Garfinkel

            Yes, the Left is the scourge that keeps on taking.

            Greenfield has a good piece today on FPM.

            See my comments there…

          • TruckinMack

            The Left wants women to group think. Girl Power. War on Women. Us versus Them.

            The unspoken, ‘Strength in a man is a vice, and weakness in men is a virtue.’ – So attack strong men and nurture weak, effeminate boys.

            If we isolate women from having a husband or having (male) children, they will more fully join with women and reject men. Let’s create a culture that isolates women from men. Let’s foment distrust and anger. Then, we shall attack men for not doing more to support women who revile them.

            This is but one of the ways the Left is spreading hate. It is nothing new. They having been doing this with Black people for decades.

  • TruckinMack

    Our enemy is not necessarily the DNC, even though they are the useful idiots being led around by the nose.

    Our enemy is the Liberal Media, and it’s master the Hollywood machine. Our culture is inundated with Liberal meme after Liberal meme after Liberal meme. Our politicians, like our electorate, regularly fall prey to the Dreadnought that is the Left’s stranglehold on our culture.

    On the political side we need to dig our unions out of our Federal and State offices and out of our schools and universities. On the cultural side we need to destroy the Liberal nightmare that is Hollywood.

    When the Republicans win the next election it will be but a band aid over a hemorrhage. There is much more work to do than win a single election cycle.

    • wesley69

      To that I would add our educational system from grammar school to the university needed to be reformed to where a fair and balanced curriculum associated with key subjects is implemented. We need to get rid of the political agendas and simply teach.

      To do this, the Progressives in education need to be removed or diluted with teachers and professors who will be fair and balanced in their approaches to their subjects. Grades should never be determined on the basis of liberal political orthodoxy.

  • James_IIa

    Bruce Thornton, you have a nice little insight hidden in this piece. The liberal monopoly in the media has been broken decisively. Impatient as we are in this electronic age, we expect to see results with the speed of a video game. However, despite modern technology, cultural change advances at its own pace, which is much slower, with reverses and surges. That provides at a least a small purchase for optimism.

  • tagalog

    Once we get past the problem of being ruled by people who serve ideologies, the biggest problem by far in our federal government is rule by bureaucracies.

    We won’t be able to get rid of administrative agencies, though. No one will agree to that.

    If I may make one admittedly vain point, though: In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke said that in a government ruled by the consent of the governed, “when anyone…shall take upon him to make laws, whom the people have not appointed to do so, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new legislative…being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who without authority would impose any thing upon them.”

  • RMThoughts

    Progessive Democrats/ Progressive GOP. If I were a ruling elite, I would create a Democrat and GOP brand of essentially the same product and market them differently and create loyalities to each brand. Coke and Pepsi, if you will. When I sense public sentiment move to the right I would promote the one brand and when it moves the other way, promote the other. Either way they are drinking Cola.

    At the same time I would do what Beohner called “crush” the Tea Party. I would crush all potential challenges to my brand by purchasing the up and coming new brand and its protagonist then smother it with negative advertising in my own MSM.

    • Sheik Yerbouti

      You are right of course. Entirely. And this has all happened before. And it always leads to bloodshed. Elitists are incapable of learning from these mistakes because they simply do not care about anyone but themselves.

  • steves5687

    Posted at the Hill.com… An excellent reminder of the lies and incompetence from the Obama administration:
    The Obama’s distorted world…
    It is unlikely we will have a breakout here…
    1. I will have the most transparent administration.
    2. I have Shovel ready jobs.
    3. The IRS is not targeting anyone.
    4. There is not a smidgen of corruption involving the IRS targeting.
    5. If four Americans get killed, it is not optimal.
    6. So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them.
    7. under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
    8. ObamaCare will be good for America.
    9. You can keep your family doctor.
    10. You’re going to be able to purchase high-quality health insurance for less than the cost of your cellphone bill.’
    11. Premiums will be lowered by $2500
    12. You can keep your current healthcare plan
    13. Just shop around, for that healthcare I claimed you wouldn’t lose.
    14. I am sorry you lost your healthcare, (you know the health care you have to shop around for, ya the same health care I said you could keep, yup, that’s the one).
    15. I did not say you could keep your health care. (Regardless that 29 recorded videos show I did)
    16. ObamaCare will not be offered to illegal immigrants.
    17. ObamaCare will not be used to fund abortions.
    18. ObamaCare will cost less than 1 Trillion Dollars.
    19. No one making under $250,000 will see their taxes raised one dime.
    20. It is Bushes fault. (this can be inserted in between every statement).
    21. It was about a movie.
    22. I will fundamentally transform America. (This one sadly is very true)
    23. If I had a son.
    24. I am not a dictator.
    25. I will put an end to the type of politics that “breeds division, conflict and cynicism”.
    26. You didn’t build that.
    27. I will restore trust in Government.
    28. The Cambridge police acted stupidly.
    29. I am not after your guns.
    30. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. The BHO of (2006).
    31. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics.
    32. “If I don’t have this done in three years, this is going to be a one-term proposition.
    33. I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.
    34. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.
    35. The Public Will Have 5 Days To Look At Every Bill That Lands On My Desk
    36. It’s not my red line it is the worlds red line.
    37. Whistle blowers will be protected.
    38. We got back Every Dime we Used to Rescue the Banks, with interest.
    39. I am good at killing people.
    40. I will close Gitmo. (but instead built them a $750,000 soccer field).
    41. The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t, but she is a typical white person
    42. I am not spying on American citizens.
    43. By, on, on, by, Friday uh afternoon things get a little uh, uh challenged uh, uh (when his TelePrompTer broke and he was left to think for himself).
    44. I am a Christian.
    45. If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.
    46. Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. It will force America to conserve power.
    47. John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.
    48. It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy.
    49. UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems. (Attempting to make the case for government-run healthcare).
    50. The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.
    And the biggest lie of all
    I Barrack Hussain Obama pledge to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

  • bob e

    a step in the right direction would be a return to verifiable ballots &
    voter id .. no id no … food stamps, welfare, housing, obama phones..

    hud homes, insurance payments .. on & on .. you got no idea of the depth of the scam .. no idea.. this is before any amnesty .. i gotta puke