Posted on 09/20/2010 8:35:36 AM PDT by pissant
Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.
Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America's essential nature. These forces would replace America's traditional free enterprise system with a European-style cradle-to-grave social democracy.
These forces are more powerful than ever in this age of Obama. So it is the duty for those who believe in the traditional America system to stand up and defend the Constitution. There is no middle ground. Every new government program puts us on the slippery slope toward a smothering nanny state.
As Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks put it in The Wall Street Journal, "The road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship."
Ryan and Brooks are two of the most important conservative thinkers today. Ryan is the leading Republican policy entrepreneur in the House. Brooks is president of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute and a much-cited author. My admiration for both is unbounded.
Yet the story Republicans are telling each other, which Ryan and Brooks have reinforced, is an oversimplified version of American history, with dangerous implications.
(Excerpt) Read more at postbulletin.com ...
“Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened.”
Yeah, but after we dump you aholes out, it won’t happen again.
We're DOOMED without Zer0, Pelosi and Reid (and the NYT)!
Restoring the American Dream: The Defining Voice in the Movement for Liberty [Hardcover]
Robert Ringer (Author), Stephen Moore (Foreword)
sh8t up dah veed you are toast
Retire David, leave your post now......after we are done sacking DC, we are coming for the commie media in NY.
Be warned.
“They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.”
This is not a conservative speaking. It is not someone who has any fondness for a constitution creating a government of limited powers. This is a progressive who has minor quibbles with our current progressive rulers. Pretending that he and his ilk represent the only serious alternative to the dems is just silly.
LLS
This is now my standard reply to anyone that says the tea party movement is damaging the GOP by nominating these “radicaly conservative” candidates:
2008 Election Results
President: Democrat
House: Democrats = 257, GOP = 178
Senate: Democrats = 60, GOP = 40
The GOP did not even have enough seats in the senate to mount a filibuster. The GOP had zero political power. Literally, absoulte zero. This was achieved using the pre-tea-party, “big tent” poliitical approach the pundits and political insiders say we need to pursue even today.
I’m willing to listen, but so far nobody has been able to explain to me how the tea party approach could make things worse than this for the GOP. Zero is about as low as you can go, and that’s what the old approach produced—zero political power for the GOP.
What in the WORLD would YOU know about CONSERVATISM, David???
Stuff a sock in it Brooks. Only wienies who read the NY Times care what you have to say anymore. You add nothing of value to the debate.
True conservatives rightly reject this belief as a tenet not of conservatism but of Progressive liberalism. Ask them to name one problem of people and society that government has helped to ameliorate, much less "solve". Poverty? Health care? Drug abuse? Urban decay? Educational insufficiency? Would it not be more accurate to say that government most often makes those problems worse - and spends a fortune in taxpayer wealth in the process?
Liberals of course argue that we simply haven't expended enough resources (that is: taxed you enough) or given the government enough authority (coercive power) or allowed really smart people with Ivy League degrees to apply their vaunted intellectual and organizational skills to the tasks. That's what liberals do. It is not what conservatives ought ever do.
Utopians believe that people and society are perfectible and that government is the proper agency of improvement toward perfection. No one who accepts this belief, even in the margins, should call themselves a "conservative".
Finally, there is the mathematical dynamic underlying the differences between modern Progressives and conservatives. The former always promote a Positive - the continuous expansion of government power, while the latter desire a Negative - the reduction of government to a minimum consistent with both freedom and social order.
The moderate/liberal Republicans we often call RINO's do not share the negative view of government that conservatives do, but instead promote the "small positive" view in which they accept some or most of what true Progressives desire. Over time, the effect of having such people in charge of the Republican Party has been to add (positive plus positive) with rarely ever a need to subtract. Government thus grows, less quickly than what the Left would desire - but it always grows.
What frightens people like David Brooks is that something different is now underway - a counter-revolution conducted by those who truly believe in subtracting government, and would in its place promote free enterprise, personal responsibility, and overt religious faith. None of which appear to go over well in Manhattan these days. Perhaps if you're a Muslim, RINO Mayor Bloomberg will let you smoke in your new mosque without getting a $50 ticket.
To conserve what? Conserving American jobs instead of exporting them would be a winning objective.
For Brooks and all the other progressive fools, our problems are always so pressing that we cannot solve them ourselves. Inequality is growing and China is rising. Save us Obama, you're our only hope. The reality is that government can't do much of anything about most of our problems aside from making them worse. But to admit that Brooks would have to admit that the ruling class is only human, which would puncture the balloon of his absurd self-image.
The most obvious problem with that sentiment is that it flies in the face of our Constitution's explicit language. Which... is why Progressives are so keen to "reinterpret" our founding documents in light of "changing circumstances" and "new realities" so that we may (here it comes) "progress" or, alternatively: to "grow" or "move forward" as a nation.
But the Constitution of the United States is based not on changeable and ephemeral circumstances, but on those things that are universal and inalienable. Our Founders spoke of truths, rights and duties; not of thoughts, needs and desires.
The foundational idea for America was as a beacon of Liberty under God's commandments, not as a cocoon of security under man's.
Progressives hold freedom as a low value in relation to "justice" by which they uniformly mean redistribution of wealth. Republicans such as David Brooks do not agree with that evaluation, but are notably unwilling to explain why such a collectivist morality is wrong, lest they accidentally trip over the reality that Progressivism is incompatible with a philosophy of individual freedom, and that any compromise between the two augments the former at the expense of the latter.
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