by danwismar » Wed Sep 29, 2010 2:38 pm
A couple of things...first the Tea Party....then the marriage debate...
It amazes me that the left (and the occasional "centrist") insist on imputing to the Tea Party movement an agenda and a worldview other than the one that they manifestly and loudly espouse. If I may be so bold as to summarize it:
...government spending and debt, at all levels...federal, state and local...are out of control, and we demand new leadership in both political parties in Washington that understands the crisis we are in, and will take bold political steps by way of reform to get us on a path to fiscal sustainability.
No more, no less.
It's not, as some in here are suggesting, "we don't want to pay taxes anymore". It is not, as many on the left suggest, "we are uncomfortable with a brown person in the White House"
It is simply this: There are too many people riding in the public cart, and not enough people pulling it...and this state of affairs is potentially ruinous if we don't solve the problem by shrinking (or at the very least, slowing the growth of) the public sector and growing the private sector...primarily via entitlement reform, tax reform, public pension reform, and overall economic growth.
The problem as I see it...and the urgent (and politically poisonous) message that nonetheless needs to be delivered...is that we are not approaching some dangerous "tipping point" off in the distant, or even the near future. The message that desperately needs to be ingested by the people is that the tipping point is in the rear view mirror. The status quo of unfunded entitlements in the public sector, in the form of everything from the military to the political class to the public pensions and benefits and salaries for teachers, firefighters, cops, social workers...all of it, is not potentially ruinous...it is right now ruinous, in the absence of radical reform.
The demographics of retiring boomers make this a problem that is going to get much worse before it gets better. The cart...riders and pullers.....
My main point here is that there are a great many Democrats and independents who are are in near total agreement with this rather simple statement of the crisis we face. The President himself has made statements along these lines in recent days that might just as well have come from the Tea Party Manifesto.
Like many of you here, I have very little faith that the GOP, when it rides to what looks like a decisive victory in November, will have the political courage to do what needs to be done. But it's a safe bet now that the people of America...certainly the all-important middle 20%, the so-called independents, believe that there is zero chance that Democrats will even take a significant step in that direction. Hence the polling showing a coming wipeout of Democrats in November.
I think it is a fair statement to make that the majority of people in the country today believe that the problems with out of control government spending and debt articulated at tea party rallies is a real one and a serious one. And if this is a view held by the majority, it is by definition not an "extreme" position.
So why and how can the Tea Party movement and the candidates it supports for political office, be considered "extremists" or for that matter...on the "far right"?
Somehow, the GOP "good old boy" incumbents in the House and Senate, who are routinely mocked and derided by the left as corrupt and self-serving, if not completely power mad...have morphed into "moderates" in contrast to the "extremists" represented by the Tea Party movement. What a strange state of affairs on the desperate Democratic left!
Sarah Palin, as the national "face" of the TP movement has also come to be defined by the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) as being somehow on the "far right". (Maybe one of you lefties in here can point out to me which positions Palin has taken on political or public policy issues would constitute a threat to the Republic if her preferrred "far right" policies were to prevail.)
As a conservative, I am not necessarily comfortable with Palin as the standard bearer of the political party I generally favor, but let's get real about the level of "extremism" inherent in her policy positions, OK?
It is an insult to the Tea Partiers...(as a rule, a group of well-intentioned, law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic, concerned, politically engaged citizens)...to suggest that they have taken to the streets in huge numbers, in the absence of any centrally organized leadership, to lie about their real agenda. It is unserious to impute racism or extremism to people who are so concerned about the fiscal direction of the country that they volunteer their time and money to deliver an unambiguous message to their elected political leaders about those concerns.
It is precisely that their message is so unambiguous that the Democrats (and certain Republican incumbents) are so desperate to turn their message into something...anything...other than what it so obviously is. And of course, to try and define it as "extreme" when it is clearly about as "mainstream" and widely held a position as can be found in the country today.
I see the White House as being so bound to their ideological zeal for redistribution of wealth, that they are unwilling to do more than give lip service to the policies necessary to foster the creation of wealth in the private sector. I should say it is a combination of ideology and economic incompetence.(Why should anyone have expected anything but economic incompetence from a man who has never run anything, let alone met a payroll or turned a profit?)
And it is the opposite of the pragmatism and bipartisanship platform on which Obama campaigned and was elected....but then most Americans can see that ideological rigidity now...to say nothing of the narcissism and condescension....just as many of us saw it and warned of it before the election.
Conservatives, me included, are facing a dilemma of their own these days. We are dispositionally opposed to radical change. We tend to respect tradition and value the lessons to be learned from the past. We favor incremental change, with an eye toward the possible unintended consequences of government policies. We are skeptical of government's ability to re-engineer society effectively, let alone efficiently. We believe that change is not synonymous with progress. We believe that good intentions do not trump, let alone excuse, the often malign results of government interventions, regulations and social engineering.
All that said, radical change is what we need to embrace when (not if) we reassume power in Washington. The direction of Obama's "transformation" of America for two years has been so radical and far-reaching that what is needed now is not a minor course correction of the kind normally favored by conservatives (by definition). What is needed is more of a 180 degree turn.
C.S. Lewis: “We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
This current imperative for radical reform runs counter to our nature, but it is what needs to happen...hence the dilemma. We will be called hypocrites. But we're used to being called worse than that for taking principled positions that leftists have trouble arguing against coherently. It is their default position when they have no argument. (as the Journolist scandal demonstrated nicely..."It doesn't matter who it is...pick one...Newt...call them racists")
The marriage debate in a subsequent post...
"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken
Dan's OSU Links -
http://bit.ly/uXRD51
