To borrow from R. Emmett Tyrrell, the illustrious founder of this
publication, I have the sense that liberal America is headed for
a huge crack-up.
Mid-term elections are less than a year away. A Republican
blowout is in the making. That will leave President Obama without
his majorities and a lame duck in his first term.
Yet the President isn’t the type that can handle this well.
Bill Clinton had conservative tendencies and was able to
triangulate between his Republican Congress and the public. Some
of our best governing came in those years — welfare reform and
balanced budgets.
Obama isn’t likely to do this. He comes from a liberal
tradition that doesn’t even
understand conservatism
but thinks of it as a bunch of country yahoos, anti-abortion
fanatics and fat capitalists trying to hang on to their bank
accounts. His advisors believe the same, not to mention the
panoply of cheerleading bloggers and newspaper columnists. All
this is going to make it difficult for liberals to accept the
idea that they have squandered their “once-in-a-generation”
chance to impose a socialist agenda.
Health care will probably make it through Congress.
Something will emerge from all the pushing and pulling. When
people realize what they’ve gotten, however, the opposition will
crescendo. Wait until young people realize the “solution” to
their lack of insurance is that they are now forced to buy
insurance under threat of fines and imprisonment.
Even if they regain control of Congress, however,
Republicans won’t be able to repeal healthcare reform. The
protests will go on for a few years, I suspect, until it will
finally be overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that
forcing people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Like
the National Recovery Act of 1933, Health Care Reform of 2009
will have lost popularity and will die a quiet death.
As far as the rest of the agenda is concerned, liberals
simply don’t seem to realize there is a vast American middle
class out there that enjoys its freedoms and isn’t looking for
handouts from the government. Take an article that appeared two
weeks ago in the “Outlook” section of the Washington
Post,
headlined “What if conservatives ran health
care?”
If you’re a progressive like me, and you’re upset by the
Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance
from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a
single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or
Sarah Palin were running the country?… [A] single-payer system
would have put us at the mercy of whomever happened to take
control of Washington.
The author, Maggie Maher, thinks the only issue at
question is which party gets to run the healthcare system. She
doesn’t seem to realize the third option — that
nobody run healthcare but
that the principal players — doctors, patients, insurance
companies — run it themselves. The idea that there is an
“American people” capable of taking care of themselves is alien
to the liberal mind.
Or take New York Times’ columnist
Gail Collins’ recent
column on “2012,” which has apparently replaced the Y2K
crisis as the latest version of the apocalypse:
This seems to be the fault of Nostradamus, the Mayan
calendar, angst on the left about global warming and angst on
the right about the election of Barack Obama. Or the health
care bill. Or government bailouts. Or the repositioning of “In
God We Trust” on the nation’s coinage.
Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been
one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers
will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion
Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who
shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.
2012 is a movie made by the director of
The Day After Tomorrow, who was looking for
a sequel to Al Gore’s version of Armageddon. It has the usual
liberal fingerprints all over it. Yet Collins has to come up with
some fantasy that attributes it all to the “religious right.” If
somebody makes a movie of “Left Behind,” then we can start
blaming conservatives for apocalypse mongering.
And speaking of the religious right, have you seen this
month’s Atlantic Monthly? The
cover
story — I’m not making his up — reads as follows:
“Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Hanna Rosin, whoever she may
be, has made the rounds of some Hispanic evangelistic churches in
Charlottesville, Virginia, and discovered that they were
preaching — are you ready for this? — self-reliance
and upward mobility!
Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the
parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass — “because
Americanos don’t do that,” one told me — and file quietly into
church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks
with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando
Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes
Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to
reflect his wingtips.
It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about
money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me
one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico,
Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being
good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good
money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money
is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus
Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!”
From here Rosin arrives at this dazzling insight:
Many explanations have been offered for the housing
bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low;
regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of
temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one
explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in
American culture — a shift in the American conception of
divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.
Isn’t that amazing? While some people might suggest that
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the FHA — which is about to
experience its bankruptcy — or the Community Reinvestment Act of
1977 or its implementation by the Department of Housing and Urban
Development or ACORN, which broke up Congressional hearings
trying to reform it, or Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank who kept
it going when all the danger signs began to appear, or Wall
Street, which bundled these worthless mortgages, or the ratings
agencies, which gave them all AAA ratings — that any or all of
these might have conjured up a housing meltdown. But no, instead
Rosin gives us a smug portrayal of some ambitious, churchgoing
Mexicans in Charlottesville trying to secure a portion of the
American dream.
This calls for some historical revision. Maybe we can blame
the Great Depression on Billy Sunday and the recession of the
1970s of Reverend Ike. That some eccentric writer would float
this theory at a New York cocktail party is perfectly
understandable. That a major magazine would run the story on its
cover is a national disgrace.
Then there’s Paul Krugman. Now I know there’s no sport in
knocking Paul Krugman. Even President Obama has put some distance
between himself and the Nobel Prize-winning New York
Times columnist, whose only solution to
everything is for the government to spend more money. But on the
subject of U.S.-China relations, Krugman and Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner seem to see eye-to-eye. Here’s what
Krugman
has to say about “China’s outrageous currency
policy”:
China’s bad behavior is posing a growing threat to the
rest of the world economy. The only question now is what the
world — and, in particular, the United States — will do about
it.
What are they doing that’s so terrible? They
are buying dollars! It seems that,
unlike the Fed and the Obama Administration, the Chinese do not
want to see America’s currency degraded:
If supply and demand had been allowed to prevail, the
value of China’s currency would have risen sharply. But Chinese
authorities didn’t let it rise. They kept it down by
selling vast quantities of the currency, acquiring
in return an enormous hoard of foreign assets, mostly in
dollars, currently worth about $2.1
trillion [emphasis added].
Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s
asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting
the stage for the global financial crisis.
By setting interest rates at zero, the Federal Reserve is
trying to inflate the currency as fast as possible. What else do
you do when you’re $12 trillion in debt? That’s what we did
during the 1970s under Jimmy Carter, isn’t it? But China, which
owns $1.7 trillion of this debt, is worried about the dollar
losing value. So it enters in place of the Fed and offers
support. And for this, Krugman and the Obama Administration say
China is the problem!
Like fourth-generation heirs to some 19th-century
industrial fortune, liberals have long forgotten where money
comes from and are spending it as fast as they can with the
inbred assurance there will always be more there. They have two
simple lessons awaiting them:
a) You can’t go on forever
spending money you don’t have.
b) You can’t go on
borrowing money to
spend what you don’t have.
Our economic future is at stake. Republicans know this in
their bones. That’s why they’re opposing just about everything
Democrats are doing right now, from healthcare on down. Democrats
have nothing to say in response except to ignore the situation
and look for scapegoats — the religious right, China, whoever is
at hand. Even with control of the Presidency and both Houses of
Congress, they’re having a tough time facing reality. Be
prepared. When they start losing power, they may become
incoherent.
