Rarely (if ever) in my adult life have I ever been so distressed
and demoralized as I am today by the political situation and
prospects both here and abroad. From many informal conversations, I
gather I’m far from the only one who feels this way. And for once,
even though I’m the prototypical “glass is more than
half-full” optimist, I don’t see any obvious solutions to the
problems.
Right reason is on the retreat, the American conservative
movement is splintered, the national Republican Party (especially
its congressional wing) is virtually useless — and the rest of the
West seems on a quest (this is no jest) to do its best to invest
the rest of its capital in a viper’s nest of statist, defeatist
policies that in no way pass the test of success. All of which, of
course, leaves too many national economies (and their cultures)
depressed.
And, as I just discovered when writing the paragraph above,
using silly rhymes to lighten the mood doesn’t help matters one
bit.
So, what exactly is so depressing?
WELL, A PRESIDENT PUBLICLY identified as a “conservative” is in a
long-term funk in the polls with less than a 40 percent approval
rating. Even with unemployment at a phenomenally low 4.7 percent
(for which he has received no public credit), which should result
in greater tax revenues (it has) and less need for social
“safety-net” spending (it hasn’t), the annual deficit is projected
to be in the $375 billion range. The national debt is growing as a
share of the total economy, and energy prices are rising as a
predictable response to a worthless Congress doing too many of the
things it ought not do while leaving undone those things it ought
to have done.
Health care costs keep growing out of control, as do (relatedly)
entitlement costs — but real entitlement reform is farther from
reality than ever because President Bush and Congress passed a
horrendous Medicare-expansion bill while spineless GOP congressmen
vamoosed into rabbit holes rather than support the president on
necessary Social Security reform. On immigration, the forces of the
right are either hopelessly fractured or else just plain ignored,
while protests in favor of sovereignty-destroying illegal
immigration gain fawning media coverage but little public
counter-action.
Congressional GOP ethics have been, frankly, in the toilet for
years — matching the lows so long exhibited by the congressional
Democrats when they were in charge, and certainly matching what the
Dems would do again if they again took over. Yet ethics and
lobbying reforms go nowhere, and the barons of pork protect their
turf with the fierceness of rabid rats. Big money and big corporate
interests vie for supremacy with screeching liberal pressure groups
(also backed by big money), while common sense and principle get
thrown out the window.
Quick: Name the last time Congress passed (and the president
signed) an important law that did more good than harm? Okay, maybe
not so quick: Take your time…. Now take even more time thinking.
It doesn’t matter. You can think all you want and you may not come
up with anything substantial. But the bad bills have been legion.
Godawful Medicare bill. A decidedly mixed bag of an energy bill.
Bad farm bill. Horrible transportation bill. Extravagantly
expensive Appropriations bills. An idiotic bill creating a
counterproductive reshuffling of agencies into the bureaucratic
mess of a Homeland Security Department. And so on.
Deadly incompetence in response to Hurricane Katrina, both
short-term and long, while my wonderful home city of New Orleans
lies in ruins. Sheer political cowardice in the battle over judges,
so that a Republican Congress is on pace to approve fewer appellate
nominees of a Republican president in the first two years of his
second term than a Republican Congress approved for Democratic
President Bill Clinton in the first two years of his
second term, even as Clinton was being weakened by the
then-politically-devastating first months of the Lewinsky
investigation.
ABROAD, EVEN WHERE REAGANITE expansions of freedom have occurred,
President Bush gets no credit. World trouble spots have benefited
from democratic revolutions named after numerous colors and flowers
— rose, purple, tulip, orange, probably even a pink-polka-dotted
marigold revolution somewhere or other — at the same time that
India and Pakistan both draw closer to us and as Muammar Qaddafi
publicly gives up his nuclear weapons program; yet nobody here
seems to celebrate those gains while other Western nations merely
bitch and moan in their various states of unprincipled
senescence.
France is roiled by corruption, racially tinged riots, and
protests by whiny students and young “workers” that make obnoxious
President Jacques Chirac back down from the economic reforms that
are just about the only good thing he has tried in years. Italy’s
elections resulted in a basically unworkable standoff that has
hobbled (and probably deposed) the strong American ally, Silvio
Berlusconi. Germany’s government also is so split between
coalitions of the left and right that it is all but paralyzed. All
three nations are mired in stagnation and unemployment exacerbated
by huge, sclerotic, and unwieldy national bureaucracies and other
ills of rampant nanny-statism. And Spain already turned turtle
after one bout of terrorism.
Even in the stalwart United Kingdom, American friend Tony Blair
will step down at some point to be replaced by far more leftish
leaders of his Labour Party, while the Tories leave Thatcherite
principles farther and farther behind in a cynical pursuit of an
“us-too” strategy that adopts more and more of the statist and
culturally leftist tropes of the Labourites.
Castro still reigns in Cuba, and has announced plans to drill
for oil 45 miles off the American coast. The hard-left troublemaker
Chavez still makes trouble from Venezuela. Iran gets closer and
closer to being nuclearly weaponized. North Korea, also probably
nuclear armed, lurks in the East. And Russia becomes ever more
autocratic (and dangerous) under the iron hand of the man into
whose soul President Bush supposedly saw, a soul Mr. Bush
pronounced good and “trustworthy.”
Yet with so much of the rest of the world increasingly proving
itself venal and dangerous, a majority of the United States Supreme
Court here at home picks and chooses from among foreign laws and
foreign court decisions to impose supposedly “evolving standards of
decency” on Americans while claiming to protect some sort of
tommyrot connected to the “sweet mystery of life,” or words very
much to that effect. Yet private property rights, the very basis of
the social compact, are stripped by the same high court in the name
of state-sponsored “economic development” that enriches already
wealthy business interests…
OKAY, ENOUGH ALREADY. As odd as it may sound, there is one possible
development that could do so much to upend all these bad trends,
and to regain the moral and political high ground for the
good guys, so that the entire, downwardly spiraling spirit of the
age escapes its doomed track and starts ascending to new heights of
freedom and prosperity. (Please forgive all the cliches. They
happen to say the right things in this case.)
Win in Iraq, demonstrably and definitively, and the United
States will be vindicated, as will, in domestic politics, the
administration that fumbled and stumbled but never lost its will or
its admirable aims. And victory over the terrorists in Iraq, a
victory for republican government every bit as lasting as the ones
post-World War II in West Germany and Japan, is indeed still
possible. A government is on the verge of being stabilized there.
The terrorists are ever more desperate, and by some reports running
out of weapons materiel. The good guys — the Americans and our
allies — can win this thing. And silence the critics. And strike a
mighty blow for freedom.
In this Easter week, all our eggs are in that rickety basket.
All the more reason for us to redouble our efforts to make sure the
basket doesn’t fail.
Right now there’s no specially good reason for optimism anywhere
in the public sphere. But steadfastness and courage — and sheer,
cussed insistence on seeing a principled commitment through to the
end — can survive even where optimism falters. Churchill once
offered blood, toil, tears and sweat. Grimly, we conservatives can
do no less.
