Winning By Losing

SO CONSERVATIVE columnist Jonah Goldberg is the first bigfoot conservative to mention the unmentionable. Maybe it would be best for the Republicans to lose the presidency in 2008. Not that he is being defeatist. Not at all. He is thinking about the future.

If the war on terror really isn’t that big a deal, hurray. Then Democrats can’t do that much damage, and we can all argue about the minimum wage and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane. If it is a big deal, Democrats need to be slapped out of their anti-Bush hysteria by real life.

Our Democratic friends have made quite a issue recently of belonging to the “reality-based community,” (as opposed, you see, to the faith-based community.) But any time you are in opposition you are not really dealing with reality. Instead you are dealing with faith—faith that the other guys are rascals leading the nation to ruin. Reality is making mistakes and then doing something about it.

The meaning of the Democratic taunt, of course, is that Republicans are operating in a dream world, primarily with regard to the war in Iraq, but also in regard to other issues of reality, such as evolution and theocracy. After all, as everyone--even those with the most tenuous grasp of reality--knows, the United States is this close to a theocracy.

Of course both political parties and their partisans find it difficult to admit that it is ever time for the other party to be elected to power. Apart from questions of loyalty and defeatism, every partisan knows that the other party just cannot be trusted with the government of the nation.

But a little thought surely indicates that the opposite is true. The most important thing in politics is to put the rascals on the other side in power and let them demonstrate in short order how bad they are. Democracy is the political system where the people get what they want—good and hard. Because of this the people have become fairly good at is discerning when they have had it good and hard and they just aren’t going to take it any more. At that point they decide it is time for a change.

Remember 1992. The Democrats won the White House and they thought Happy Days Are Here Again. The awful “Me Decade” of the 1980s was over and America would once again be governed by people who were just more educated and enlightened than the yahoos of the Religious Right.

How wrong they were. The American people took one enlightened mouthful and spat it out two years later.

The best thing that could happen for Republicans is for a Democrat to get elected to the White House in 2008 and then lose both houses of Congress two years later, just like in 1994.

Beyond the question of simple political hygiene there is another factor that demands a Democratic president in 2009. It is the refusal of the Democrats to countenance any substantive reform of their vast welfare-state patronage system.

We know that Social Security must be reformed from a transfer-payment system into a savings system. But the Democrats have demagogued and blocked reform.

We know that the health-care system must be reformed so that people start making real choices with their own money about the kind of health care they want. But Democrat evangelism has raised a vast faith-based community to believe that health care is an absolute and indivisible right.

Then there is education. Again and again Republicans have called on Democrats to get their special interests out of the school house door and suffer little children to get the education they deserve. Again and again Democrats have refused.

After fighting on offense on these basic issues year after year and getting the elbow from Democrats and indifference from the mainstream media it is time for Republicans to regroup.

We know what the Democratic will do once they are back in the White House: They will call for more spending, more centralization, more regulation, and no reform.

They are determined to test the welfare state to destruction.

The next time that Republicans once more gain the White House the unreformed welfare state will have experienced two or six or even twelve more years of testing to destruction. That will be a shame. It would be better for us if we could reform it today. It would be better for the helpless clients of the welfare state. It would be better for the reality-based office holders and the managers of the welfare state. It would be better for America.

But the truth is that we won’t get reform until Republicans sweep into office in another election like 1980. Remember those first months of 1981? Ronald Reagan had a mandate to cut the budget and cut tax rates and cut inflation. The Democrats knew it in their bones.

We want them to get the same feeling once again.

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

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

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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