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Sunday, November 09, 2008
Mark Steyn continues the push for a small government Republican party
Mark Steyn, who used to write the back page column for the Western Standard, has a great column out in the National Review. It's actually one of the benefits of Obama's victory: It is stirring up some of the best opinion pieces I've seen in a long time. Finally, some acknowledgment that what matters isn't that your team wins, or that the guys in the winners circle are wearing the right colours--what matters, and what has normative primacy, is a political philosophy complete with a theory of justice and a good sense of what the proper role of government ought to be.
While I don't read Steyn as often as I used to, he has been, along with a boatload of other conservatives, strangely silent on the mess the Republicans were careening into. Maybe they were too worried that if they said something negative about McCain and big government Republicanism they'd be blackballed by their compatriots who just didn't understand that a McCain victory would usher in a slightly less big big government agenda than Obama's. Blinded by "pick-a-side-ism," it's difficult, I understand, for Republicans to see only through one stupid prism: If you like Obama, you're liberal. If you dislike McCain, you're liberal.
But at least with the defeat of McCain comes a realization that the prism doesn't consist of two sides, but many. That even genuine conservatives could dislike the red team because the red team was just about indistinguishable from the blue team. What was the difference, in terms of policy? A dispute of four per cent in the top marginal tax rate?
Now we're beginning to see the re-emergence of old Reagan coalition kind of talk. The kind of talk that saw a basic commitment to small government and fiscal responsibility as the cornerstone around which a broader coalition could be forged.
Heed the Steyn:
“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Now who does that remind you of?
Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: he briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.
If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H G Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida to vote for Obama because “I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.” [...]
In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty — for economic dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. In Forbes this week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free — or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of nanny-state sirens.
Bonus: Below the fold, you can view Peggy Joseph saying all those things Steyn quoted her as saying.
Posted by P.M. Jaworski on November 9, 2008 in U.S. politics | Permalink
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Comments
Brilliant!
Posted by: Matthew Johnston | 2008-11-09 11:39:20 PM
Dead on! I had never heard of Steyn before he was featured in Hillsdale's Imprimis, and the more the I hear, the more I like. Pity he's so mean spirited...
Posted by: Charles Martin Cosgriff | 2008-11-10 5:47:29 AM
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