After The Fall

posted at 12:51 am on September 3, 2010 by Doctor Zero

The November elections may well be the most historic reversal of political power in modern history.  Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics thinks over 60 seats in the House could go Republican.  Dick Morris is ready to toss another 20 seats into the ante.  A more restrained estimate in the high 40s comes from Larry Sabato, who also reminds us the Senate almost always switches parties when the House does.

The usual caveats apply: campaigns will stumble, local issues will come into play, unforeseen events could change the minds of jittery voters, and skeletons have a habit of tumbling from closets around Halloween.  Still, it seems very likely the GOP will at least take the House.  Thanks to the Tea Party influence, some old RINOs will also be replaced by tough new war elephants.

What then?

The highest priority for Americans is the repeal of ObamaCare, whose damage to our dignity, economy, and health care system is absolutely intolerable.  Outright repeal must wait until Obama has been replaced in 2012, but a Republican Congress can neutralize the worst provisions of the bill, sealing its toxic waste into lead-lined containers until we can shoot it off into space and be rid of it.

There is some concern that a successful Republican Congress will engineer enough prosperity to pump air into the Obama re-election campaign.  Knowing ObamaCare was dead would send a euphoric surge through an economy that has spent the last couple of years curled up in the corner, hugging itself and whimpering as it awaits the next beating from Democrats.  ObamaCare killed tens of thousands of jobs almost immediately, and the weight of its mandates has been crushing job creation, especially among smaller businesses.  It seems reasonable to believe its repeal would produce a far stronger surge of payroll expansion than any of the gimmicks being kicked around by statists today.

This is why the election of solid, articulate conservatives to Congress is so essential.  If the Republican wave in 2010 is an isolated outpouring of voter anger, we’ll have trouble finishing the job in 2012, and could soon find ourselves right back where we started.  It’s not enough for the electorate to “throw the bums out” this year.  We have to teach them to build electrified fences topped with razor wire around the federal government, to keep those bums from ever returning.

It takes nothing away from Obama’s failures as President to point out that he did not create our current situation on his own.  He bankrupted us, but we were already on shaky financial ground when he arrived.  He detonated the deficit to pay off his political allies in the historic “stimulus” heist, but his crew wasn’t the first to roll out of the Treasury with bags of taxpayer swag in their fists.  Barack Obama is the absurd final extension of a system that has been dying for longer than most of us have been alive.  He didn’t change the course of the State.  He just stepped on the gas.

Conservatives underestimate the inertia of that gigantic, doomed engine at their peril.  The apparatus of the federal government is like nanotechnology: self-sustaining and self-replicating.  Powers it has seized are never returned.  Its budgets are never cut.  It howls in agony if the rate of budget increase is even slightly reduced.  In the past two years, trillions of dollars in new commitments have been added to its bulk.  The media will eagerly assist Democrats in strapping the poor and destitute to its hide as armor, to turn away budget-cutting knives.

What will be crucial for Republicans after 2010 is leadership. It is essential to make the voters understand how we got here, and restate the Constitutional principles that render so much of this bloated government utterly immoral, as well as ineffective.  Encouraging voters to pour unfocused anger at Obama is ultimately counter-productive, because he didn’t create the crumbling system he presides over.  Its foundations were laid long before his birth, and it won’t magically improve as soon as he’s gone.

In fact, letting the voters work out their frustrations on an Obama punching bag is dangerous, because once they’re exhausted, there are far too many ways he could talk them out of their anger.  No matter how unpopular he might be now, a Democrat president who enjoys the slavish devotion of the media will always have potent protection against personal criticism.  We will be told that failure to re-elect Obama is a sin… an unforgivable act of racism and bigotry, and a hate crime against the vulnerable people he supposedly represents.  It is necessary to run against the corrupt and venal system he truly represents.

Look beyond that campaign to 2013, and imagine a political environment in which the signature “achievement” of the Obama presidency is seen as one of the worst mistakes in recent history.  The Democrats invested every drop of their political capital in passing it.  They twisted arms, cut seedy backroom deals, and ultimately shoved it down the throats of a protesting majority of Americans.  Imagine a jubilant nation celebrating the repeal of this disaster, and the defeat of the party that inflicted it on us.  Nothing like it has happened in the modern era.  Political parties dissolve after that kind of defeat.  There will never be more solid ground for conservatives to stand upon, as they begin the daunting task of dismantling the out-of-control system that produced the poisonous notion of socialized medicine.  There will never be a better time to return to the just, and effective, principles that guided us before we lost our way in the New Deal and Great Society.

If we fail to create and use that opportunity, our next appeal to the voters will come among the ruins, after a collapse that every one of us should be united in our determination to prevent.  There is nothing patriotic about allowing our fellow citizens – even those who hate us – to live through what is coming next.  Nothing like it has ever happened in the modern era, either.  We stand within a dozen years of watching this mighty nation devour itself in a frenzy of non-negotiable, utterly impossible demands.

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama.  It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.”  It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future.  We need healthy opposition parties.  The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats.  That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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