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Romanticism, meet reality
WE WILL never see the current incarnation of right-wing populism clearly, warns Ross Douthat, or weigh "its merits and demerits judiciously [without] acknowledging the legitimate sense of political disappointment that underlies the right's inclination towards intransigence". So by all means, now that the right-wing populists in Congress have acquiesced to doing their jobs and not blowing up the global financial system, let the acknowledging begin! That legitimate sense of disappointment, Mr Douthat explains, citing David Frum, stems from Republicans' repeated failure to "undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon".
Brit Hume gave Ted Cruz a similar elegy last night, worth citing in full:
Now, I ought to admit that I have spent the past three weeks of shutdown high-drama in Singapore and Britain—nations, I suppose, of "unfree" people stumbling miserably about, enslaved by the horrors of universal health care—so perhaps I have lost my taste for freedom. And I wonder where these champions of government shrinkage were during George W. Bush's eight years of federal-government expansion, and why their calls to repeal Medicare Part D and defund the Transportation Security Administration are so much quieter than their calls to repeal and defund the Affordable Care Act.
But such details are boringly quotidian; and as Mr Hume explains, Mr Cruz and his ilk operate in a realm of pure sentiment. Their goal in the shutdown was not to accomplish any specific policy objectives, but to "show their supporters they'll try anything" to shrink the state. Except, it seems, actually shrinking the state. There is a crucial difference between showing people how much you want to shrink the state and actually shrinking it. To do that, they will have to convince people that it's worth doing. They will have to make their case—and it's a hard case to make. People like Obamacare. They like Medicare and Social Security too, and not just because they are junkies hooked on the government yayo, but also, I suspect, out of a sense that in a country as rich as America people should not starve or freeze or die because they cannot afford to see a doctor. To roll all of this back, Republicans will have to set aside the exciting, romantic, vox clamantis thrill of noble failure, and get about the boring drudgery of actually winning elections—and not just in gerrymandered districts, but nationally. As I tell my five-year-old: destroying things is easy. Building is hard.
WE WILL never see the current incarnation of right-wing populism clearly, warns Ross Douthat, or weigh "its merits and demerits judiciously [without] acknowledging the legitimate sense of political disappointment that underlies the right's inclination towards intransigence". So by all means, now that the right-wing populists in Congress have acquiesced to doing their jobs and not blowing up the global financial system, let the acknowledging begin! That legitimate sense of disappointment, Mr Douthat explains, citing David Frum, stems from Republicans' repeated failure to "undo the work of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon".
Brit Hume gave Ted Cruz a similar elegy last night, worth citing in full:
“
In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about.
And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.â€
In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about.
And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.â€
Now, I ought to admit that I have spent the past three weeks of shutdown high-drama in Singapore and Britain—nations, I suppose, of "unfree" people stumbling miserably about, enslaved by the horrors of universal health care—so perhaps I have lost my taste for freedom. And I wonder where these champions of government shrinkage were during George W. Bush's eight years of federal-government expansion, and why their calls to repeal Medicare Part D and defund the Transportation Security Administration are so much quieter than their calls to repeal and defund the Affordable Care Act.
But such details are boringly quotidian; and as Mr Hume explains, Mr Cruz and his ilk operate in a realm of pure sentiment. Their goal in the shutdown was not to accomplish any specific policy objectives, but to "show their supporters they'll try anything" to shrink the state. Except, it seems, actually shrinking the state. There is a crucial difference between showing people how much you want to shrink the state and actually shrinking it. To do that, they will have to convince people that it's worth doing. They will have to make their case—and it's a hard case to make. People like Obamacare. They like Medicare and Social Security too, and not just because they are junkies hooked on the government yayo, but also, I suspect, out of a sense that in a country as rich as America people should not starve or freeze or die because they cannot afford to see a doctor. To roll all of this back, Republicans will have to set aside the exciting, romantic, vox clamantis thrill of noble failure, and get about the boring drudgery of actually winning elections—and not just in gerrymandered districts, but nationally. As I tell my five-year-old: destroying things is easy. Building is hard.
Like Der Spiegel, they, too, have become increasingly shrill and ever more Leftist extremist as they see, but don't dare admit, that Barack Obama was a gigantic mistake. So they turn to the usual Leftist tactic: try anything and everything to defend the indefensible.
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