By Lawrence Henry on 11.17.06 @ 12:08AM
There's no resisting the mentality of permanent defeat.
In the 1970s, when Larry King hosted an overnight radio program,
he used to indulge in a conversational riff about how everybody
really was a liberal. In an elementary sort of way, it made sense.
Everybody liked Social Security, he said, and that was a liberal
idea. Everybody liked having the ability to join a union, everybody
appreciated the idea of a minimum wage, of a 40-hour workweek, and
so on.
He did not mention abortion, as I recall, or gun control, and
so-called "gay" marriage had not even appeared on the political
horizon.
Still, within limits, King was right then and he is right now.
Most people are comfortable with the kind of government essentially
defined by Franklin Roosevelt, the most popular president the
country has ever had. We still fight our elections between the
40-yard lines, as one pundit put it recently, and not in desperate
goal-line stands, like parliamentary democracies, and it's a good
thing, too, a legacy bequeathed to us by the incredible wisdom of
our founders.
I state all this in terms of popular opinion, understand.
Example: In a recent column, I deplored the state of the modern
press as a PR agency for liberal causes. I heard from a friend of
mine, quite well educated, who simply didn't understand what I was
talking about. He opined that CNN was middle-of-the-road, and
protested that he never read the New York Times.
In comparison to most of the electorate, my friend is quite well
informed.
THOSE OF US DEVOTED TO POLITICAL OBSERVATION know that today's
Democrats are stark raving postmodernist Leninist deconstructers,
that our politics does not any longer represent a simple midfield
swing between FDR and Eisenhower. Sadly, our recent Republicans in
majority tried to play it that way. When you play midfield ball
against a team that plays red-zone ball, you lose. And so the
Republicans have lost, and with it have lost the franchise to
protect America against very real enemies, enemies as real as Tojo
and Hitler, and even more bloodthirsty, with atomic weapons in the
offing.
At home, we face a real enemy, too, an enemy of extraordinary
power.
In the November 14 issue of Opinionjournal.com, Josh Manchester
argued, in "Moral Purification," that an entire class of
people in the United States loves our defeat. Quoting The
Culture of Defeat, a book by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Manchester
explains that these individuals see the United States' defeat as a
moral purification -- a kind of superiority, in fact.
"...There is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the
United States," Manchester writes, "...who don't merely feel as
they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way
all the time. Like it or not, this mentality of permanent
defeat plays a large part in the Democratic Party."
And the Democratic Party sells this attitude very well indeed to
the rest of the country -- as normalcy. You can't sell defeat;
that's for the eggheads. But you can sell a "return to normalcy."
They sold it to the country, with the connivance of the media, in
the last election. It was sold to the electorate, with the parties
flipped, after World War I, and resulted in the U.S.'s near-deadly
quiescence in the face the rise of the fascist threat.
Thus Nancy Pelosi's description of Iraq as a problem to be
solved, not a war to be won.
THAT IS WHERE WE ARE. The electorate has bought it, and, if we
believe in our way of government, that is what we must accept.
To win back, two things have to happen. First, we have to do
what Ronald Reagan spent 20 years doing before he made his first
run at the Presidency. He crisscrossed the country, giving
speeches, very good speeches, about the state of freedom versus
Communism, about the nature of government. We need a program of
conservative education every bit that good, and probably better. In
our 12 years in office, we didn't even come close. This time, we
don't have 20 years.
The second, unfortunately, is another attack. In this, the
jihadists may well outsmart us. They may just leave the American
homeland fat and sassy. Instead, they'll attack Europe. They may
wait a decade to hit us again, while the capitals of Western
civilization fall across the sea.
When they're ready to aim at us, they figure, we'll be so flabby
we won't be able to do anything. And they might be right.
topics:
Education, Nancy Pelosi, Social Security, Abortion, Iraq, Communism
