For months we’ve been bombarded from both sides of the political
aisle with the idea that when it comes to healthcare, and nearly
anything else in Washington, that our most pressing need is to
“get something done.” This idea that Congress was created by our
founding fathers with a mandate to “get things done” should be
offensive both historically and grammatically to all Americans.
At the same time, despite the precipitous drop in popularity of
the party in power, folks continue to point out that the GOP is
“leaderless” and “rudderless.”
They point to meaningless signs like the results of the
straw poll at CPAC; as if the votes of 2,395 mostly young people
— including an openly gay group for the first time — were
vitally important. Believe me, I’ve been to CPAC many times and
many was the time that friends and I repaired early to the bar,
leaving the ballots commingled on the floor with sandwich
wrappings.
But far from anointing Ron Paul as their presidential
nominee of choice, the most indicative effect of including gays
was this result from the
poll: while the great majority of respondents named reducing
the size of government as the most important goal of
conservatism, only nine per cent cited the promotion of
“traditional values.” Scary stuff when you realize that the
former is impossible without the latter for our particular
constitutional republic.
A smaller government that is not based on the moral
underpinnings of our founders would have been just as repulsive
to them as a larger one that is. As John Adams said, “We have no
government armed with power capable of contending with human
passions unbridled by morality and religion.… Our Constitution is
designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate for any other.”
So the goal of a true conservative movement should be to
conserve — or in this case to reestablish — those founding
ideals; that a nation of laws and not of men ought to govern
loosely at the federal level, with great emphasis on state
sovereignty. How sweet to the ears of conservatives should be the
words of the Tenth Amendment: The powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people.
And maybe the best consequence of the hopefully short-lived
majority reign of Obama and his party is the greater awareness
the American people have gained regarding the nature of their
government; that it was founded as a confederation of individual
states with an intentionally restraining instrument known as the
U.S. Constitution. This may not seem like a big deal to those who
are familiar with American history, but when was the last time
you tried to explain something like the Electoral College to,
say, a college student? Blank stares and disbelief are usually
the reaction to the news that our president is not elected by the
country, but by the individual states.
But the fact that ours is a union of fifty entities with
vastly diverse needs and interests was made crystal clear by the
deals cooked up by Harry Reid and friends in their attempt to
nationalize healthcare and otherwise wreck our economy. Voter
anger at cash-for-cloture deals such as the Cornhusker Kickback
and the Louisiana Purchase translated into a thorough and
stunning victory for Republicans in the liberal bastion of
Massachusetts.
Americans started to wake up to the reality that sometimes
some states were more equal than others and they didn’t like it
one little bit. But this is a good thing, as this kind of
friction between the states was very much intended by our
founding fathers as a way to restrain the forces that would
collude with each other in order to establish the ever-growing
federal government most of them feared.
And make no mistake about it; government expansion is the
goal of liberals, or progressives as they now label themselves.
But that is surely what they are, because they see the growth of
federal power as progress, whereas conservatives feel exactly the
opposite. In his essay, The Rights
of Man, Thomas Paine wonderfully summed up this difference
when he warned that governments in a continuous quest for
progress are the most dangerous:
If, from the more wretched parts of
the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage
of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government
thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and
grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually
exercised, to furnish new pretenses for revenues and taxation.
It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape
without tribute.
A great day for progressives in Washington is one where
they “get things done.” But for conservatives, it’s when
Congressmen are at home doing what they do best: raising
money.
