Hangin’ With the Wrong Conservative Homies

posted at 1:18 am on November 2, 2009 by J.E. Dyer
[ Politics ]    printer-friendly

I love Peggy Noonan to death.  No, really.  She’s long been a favorite columnist of mine, and a delightful chronicler of Reagan and his years in office.  Bless her heart.

Alert readers probably sense a “but” coming here.

Tuned in to the conservative zeitgeist in 2009, she’s not.  Now, she did her usual fine job of coining memorable expressions in her 30 October editorial in the Wall Street Journal.  “Big Insura,” her offering to the lexicon to take its place next to Big Pharma, is a hit with me, at least.  And her final paragraph is drawn through the acutest of gimlet eyes:

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

That’s great, rousing stuff.  It’s the other stuff that tells me she’s hanging with the wrong crowd, for someone who consciously purports to write from a conservative perspective.  She’s out of touch with the reality of conservatism out here in the grassroots – the Candlestick Park of conservatism, if you will:  where “Tea Party” is an allusion to American history, and people aren’t worried that government can’t fix everything for them.

Noonan’s concern, apparently, is that the malaise that grips the country now is precisely the latter anxiety.  She recounts this exchange with an acquaintance:

I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call “the drug companies” until we decided that didn’t sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early ’80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we’re experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here’s why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, “If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!” Others said, “If we follow Reagan, he’ll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we’ll be America again, we’ll be acting like Americans again.” Everyone had a path through.

Now they don’t. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.

Concludes Noonan:

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Peggy, Peggy.  If you weren’t so busy dismissing the “Palin faction” and the Tea Partiers, you might understand that there are millions of Americans out here who have no such pessimistic thoughts.  Oh, no one thinks the “Republicans” can “make it all work again” – not if by “Republicans” you mean a Congressional delegation that keeps putting up Gangs of Ten and Fourteen, and spent the years 2001 to 2007 using its majority to make drunken sailors look like paragons of thrift.  And of course no one thinks “it will get all better” if we “follow Obama and the Democrats.”  Obama and the Democrats are the people who are in the process of doubling our national debt in less than 12 months, and who want to charge us ordinary folks out here hundreds more per year so they can do some arcane mumbo jumbo behind a programmatic curtain and then present us with new, improved health care that starts with a lifetime limit on MRIs and runs out when we hit 65.

So, no, we aren’t looking to any of these people or their proposals for a way to solve our problems.  But that doesn’t mean we are pessimistic about the problems ever being solved.  There are millions of Americans who think our problems can be solved – just not by a good 95% of the people who hold public office right now, at least at the federal level.

I call it “Optimistic Conservatism.”  It’s a belief, based on historical evidence, that when government is limited, and when it focuses on what empowers the people – freedom of thought and speech, the rule of law, law and order, property rights, constitutional limitations on what majorities can do – that under these conditions, what the people can and will do for themselves far surpasses the grandest visions of even the most fanciful statist ideology.

It is simply not true that no one can see a way ahead today.  The problem, Peggy, is that you aren’t acquainted with the people who do see a way ahead.  Please consider getting to know them.  They are people who read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and other founding documents.  People who understand the difference between “checks and balances” and “separation of powers.”  People who can name the branches of government, and the role of each one, without breaking a sweat.  People who can explain “federalism” and “judicial originalism,” and know what’s in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution.  People who are not afraid, not even a little afraid, of facing life without a busy government that acts routinely on the pretexts of banal collectivism – but whose much greater fear is, instead, of the damage that that kind of government can do to their prospects and their children’s future.

There’s a whole America out here that is optimistic and confident about the future we could have if we got statist-collectivist government off the people’s backs, and out of our wallets.  No, Peggy, your Republican friends aren’t going to bring that future about.  They don’t see a way ahead on that.

Exactly.

J.E. Dyer blogs at The Optimistic Conservative and “contentions”.

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