The Ebb And Flow Of Politics

AT TWO WEEKS to go before the 2006 mid-term elections everyone is agreed that... well it would be hard to disagree with the idea that Democrats have a good opportunity to seize control of both houses of Congress.

In fact, if Democrats don’t win control of at least one house, they ought to be ashamed.

Republicans are disappointed in their party, and they should be. The Republican Congress has been very short on legislating beneficial reform, and that is bad.

The folks on conservative talk radio have been insisting that Republicans must rally to reelect a Republican Congress... or else.

But the purpose of politics is not to legislate and reform. The purpose of politics is to avoid civil war.

In recent years the Democrats have become so utterly enraged that they have started to develop conspiracy theories, the sort of conspiracy theories that they have utterly deprecated when they came from the right. In fact, any party gets angry and conspiratorial after many years in the wilderness.

We need to put the Democrats back in power. We need to say to them. OK, if George W, Bush is so stupid, and Republicans are so eevil, then show us what can you do.

The last time we did that, in 1992, the American people vomited the Democrats back up in two years.

Because the long-term fact about American politics is that the Republican Party is the party of enterprise, and the Democratic Party is the party of tenure. Republicans are people who live and work in the enterprise sector, Michael Barone’s Hard America. Democrats are people who live and pick up paychecks in the tenured sector, Michael Barone’s Soft America.

And it is all that Democrats can do to protect and preserve the pensions and the tenure and the sinecures that they have awarded themselves and their supporters over the last seventy years.

Let’s fight like hell, but let us remember the old adage of Benjamin Franklin:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Americans, foolish or not, must alternate power between each party and see what each can do. It’s the democratic thing to do.

Sphere: Related Content |

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

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close 0