Enough Of The 100 Hours Already

BACK IN THE old days when people took life seriously they didn’t talk about this Hundred Days or that 100 Hours lightly. And they certainly didn’t gin a Hundred Days concept up before the fact.

Napoleon did not issue a press release before the Hundred Days between his escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo. And FDR’s 100 Days was not a marketing ploy gussied up before the event. It was only later that people came to refer to the first three months of the 73rd Congress between March and June 1933 as the Hundred Days Congress.

Perhaps you can forgive the Republicans for the enthusiasm of their 100 Days in 1995. They were, after all, assuming the overall majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years. People can get carried away at such moments. And anyway, Speaker Newt Gingrich was a history professor.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, and second as farce. That was Karl Marx. Although the exact quotation is a bit different.

If we can agree that FDR’s first Hundred Days was a tragedy, because it did not get the United States out of the Great Depression as promised, and that Newt’s Hundred Days was something of a farce, for it really ended up doing nothing about Big Government, what are we to say about the Democrats’ 100 Hours?

Well, it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of farce which is, after all, an honorable theatrical form. How about a trivial distraction? Even the AP is wondering:

The clock is ticking for House Democrats, but it's hard to tell what time it is.

The tragedy of the Democrats (and of their cousins, New Labour in Britain) is that, if they wanted, they could take it all. If they stole the legislative program of the Republicans, fair and square, they could use the eternal support of the marginalized to really lift them out of the squalor of welfare-state dependency.

It’s the sort of prospect that wakes a conservative up in the night with a cold sweat. In the dream the latest progressive Great White Hope, a mixture of the fresh Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Ted Kennedy in his prime, booms:

And for the first time in history we will bring true educational choice to every last single mother in America. For years partisan Republicans have sent their children to the wealthy private schools of their choice but stood by while underprivileged mothers were unable to keep their children out of violent, drug infested schools, the product of a selfish system that just doesn’t care!

Or this:

And we will bring genuine wealth to every last family in America. Our program of Social Security reform will reverse decades of mean-spirited Republican privilege. Under my bipartisan balanced budget plan every FICA dollar of every American wage earner will go into her own personal America First Social Security account. For the first time in history the underprivileged will look forward to genuine wealth in their old age. Only Democrats could do it, because only Democrats care.

But they don’t. They can’t. You can see that in the failure of the Third Way. It seemed, back in the heady days of the mid 1990s that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had found a way of renewing the progressive brand. Third-way government would not need to control and run everything out of a government program. It could do better.

But it didn’t work. It couldn’t. The officers of the progressive cadre--the San Francisco Democrats, the Seattle liberals, and the North London luvvies--just do not understand a world beyond the plodding bureaucratic organization of the welfare state. And why would they? They were raised in government schools; they were educated in government universities or in “private” colleges organized around the pursuit of the almighty government research dollar. Living their lives as tax-money remittance men they care nothing of the risks and uncertainties in every business plan. Economic and cultural Newtonians, they know nothing of the quantum economic dynamics that capitalizes Google at $100 billion and General Motors at $10 billion. (Who does?)

Now that we know that the Pelosi 100 Hours was really just business-as-usual in drag we understand that the Democrats newly on offense are not poised in scoring position on the Republican 35 yard line. They are just first and ten on their own 20 yard line and perfectly content to execute plays, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, out of a 30 year-old play-book.

But that means that the political future of this great nation is wide open, if we have the courage to grasp it.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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[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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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