DEMOCRAT WEEDS IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL GARDEN

Here is the great conundrum of our day:  Why can’t conservatives and Republicans be as ruthlessly and passionately focused on reducing government power as liberals and Democrats are on expanding it?

Until a solution to this is found, government guns and bureaucrats will relentlessly continue to control ever more of our lives, as they have for generations.  The most that can be achieved, such as under President Reagan, is to marginally slow down the continuing advance of fascism.

TeaPartyers love to fix the blame for this on their favorite enemy, the despised RINO.  In so doing, they run the grave risk of hubris.  Anyone who does not meet their standards of political purity is reviled – which might result in travesties such as ensuring the re-election of Harry Reid in Nevada. 

Danny Tarkanian and Sue Lowden are solid Republicans – but they weren’t good enough for Nevada TeaPartyers, whose enthusiasm got a neophyte named Sharron Angle selected to challenge Dirty Harry in November.  Harry is likely to eat her alive for a breakfast snack.

Note that Sarah Palin didn’t come near the Nevada primary.  She placed her endorsement bets elsewhere.  Note further – she ignored the barrage of condemnation she got for her endorsements – and they were spot on. 

Thanks to Sarah, California’s Barbara Boxer is going to lose to Carly Fiorina.  The TeaPartyers wanted Chuck DeVore, who would have been obliterated by BarBox.  Sarah would have none of that.  She made the difference for Carly, understanding that Carly has the combo of charisma, moxie, smarts, gravitas, and money to kick BarBox out of the Senate.

Sarah made the difference for Terry Branstad in Iowa, who will now clean Dem gov Chet Culver’s clock – as opposed to TeaParty favorite and Mike Huckabee acolyte Bob Vander Plaats who would have lost.  (Huckabee gives Sarah the creeps.  Me too.)

TeaPartyers could learn two vital lessons from Sarah – humility and pragmatism.   They are going to have to learn them fast to max out their effectiveness in November.  Humility means no hubristic arrogance – leave that to the Zerocrats.  Pragmatism does not mean abandoning your principles – it means being smart enough to see how you can best advance them.

So – how can conservative, constitutional principles best be advanced?  How can the Great Conundrum specified above be overcome?  By ruthless patience.  By a change in perspective.

This certainly is how the Left got their chokehold on our Constitution.  This did not happen overnight. By a patient strategy of what I call Fabian Fascism taking many years, the American people have been persuaded, unwittingly and almost unconsciously, to voluntarily give up their Constitutional freedoms.

"Fabian Socialism" was in vogue in the early part of the 20th Century, particularly among British socialists, such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. They argued that socialism could best be achieved by not frightening the horses, that is, not through immediate revolutionary action, but in small, incremental steps[1].

Yet the gargantuan growth of governmental power in the United States over the last hundred years has not been in a socialist direction, towards nationalization and governmental ownership of industry.

Clearly, it has been in the direction of ever more bureaucratic, regulatory control – that is, in a fascist direction. Since this growth has not been sudden, but slowly accumulative, we can accurately and aptly call the process Fabian Fascism.

As an ardent admirer of Marx, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) called his version of Marxist socialism "Fascism"[2]. Instead of nationalization – government ownership – of private business, Mussolini advocated government control of business via complete bureaucratic regulation. Instead of individual rights subordinated to "the people" or the "proletariat," Mussolini subordinated them directly to the State.

That’s the goal of the American Left and the Democrat Party.  For a hundred years they have been moving inexorably towards it.  They never gave up.  Their patience was ruthless, a Leninist patience. 

Lenin, the founder of Communist Russia, had a policy:  Always keep probing, always try to advance on every front; when your probe hits steel, pull back and wait; when your probe finds mush, continue the advance.

Here’s a metaphor.  Suppose you had a beautiful garden and you let the weeds grow in it.  The only gardening you did was half-hearted because you had to work to make a living and couldn’t take the time – or you were just too lazy – to trim and prune and de-weed adequately.

How would your garden look after a few years?  After a hundred years?  Would the folks who originally created the garden recognize it?  No – of course not, it would be an overgrown morass of weeds and brambles that had choked the garden out of existence.

Democrats are the weeds in America’s garden of government.  Republicans are supposed to be the gardeners – and they’ve done such a lousy job they’ve let the weeds take over.  The problem is not so much that too many of them are RINOs or insufficiently principled.  It’s that they don’t understand the job Republicans are supposed to do.

This is a matter of perspective, not principle.  Republicans look at government as an annoyance, a necessary evil, and working for it as a form of public duty or community service, as a sacrifice that takes time away from working for a living in the real world.

For Democrats, working for the government is their livelihood.  If they don’t have a government job or handout or subsidy, they don’t eat.  Being successful and prospering in one’s career and business is a Republican purpose.  Acquiring government power, handouts, subsidies or jobs is a Democrat’s. 

Since the Democrat morality is fascist – might makes right, the end justifies the means – they will do whatever it takes to acquire that power, normal morality of honesty and decency be damned.

Republicans and conservatives do not need to change their morals, just their perspective on government, looking on it as a garden.

First, let’s look at it as something we have to have – say a vegetable garden where we grow food, not as something ornamental or unnecessary.

Except for looney libertarian disciples of Murray Rothbard (the founder of the Libertarian Party), no one on the conservative side of the political fence is an anarchist.  The functions and institutions that only a government can provide – police, courts, and army – are necessary conditions for a society to safely exist and flourish.

Without a government, e.g., there is no property, no one owns anything (for ownership is a legal concept), there is only physical possession – which means there is no such thing as theft (if I take something from you, it’s mine now because I possess it).

Thus the function of a government is to provide the legal space, the rules, the protection –  the garden – in and by which people can grow food, make a living, and peacefully prosper.  This was the garden created by America’s Founders:  the Constitutional Garden.

The appropriate Republican perspective is to look upon themselves as gardeners tasked with pruning the trees, trimming the bushes, and de-weeding the soil by pulling the weeds out by the roots.  This is not an annoyance, not community service, not "giving back," it is the necessary maintenance that must be provided for the garden to function and flourish.

There are already a number of Republicans in Congress who are acquiring this perspective.  Leading them is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.  His YouCut program – whereby each week people are offered five choices of government programs to cut back or eliminate and the winner is put to an actual vote in Congress – is an excellent way to reframe the perspective of Republicans as gardeners.

And Democrats as weeds.  Trillions and trillions of dollars of weeds, with the Treasury Department reporting (6/08) that US federal government debt is now at $13.6 trillion (93% of GDP) and will rise to almost $20 trillion within five years.

The cause of this fiscal insanity is the Democrat belief that since financial collapse historically most often leads to more fascist government control of a country, that’s what will happen in America.

The danger is enormous – but the bigger the danger, the bigger the opportunity. 

We have been given a priceless opportunity, thanks to Zero’s overreach and his bankrupting of America.  We now have not just a chance to make a minor mid-course correction or slowdown, but to reverse direction away from fascism and towards freedom.  It’s crucially important we don’t blow it, ruin our chance by overreaching and impatience.

Yet it’s equally important that we don’t blow it the other way, by being too cautious, by not reaching far enough – or as the TeaPartyers might put it, being too RINO-ey.

Which brings me to Sharron Angle in Nevada.  She is a good person, an American patriot.  It’s easy to see how the TeaPartyers supported her.  Just listen (when you’ve got 10 minutes) to Mark Levin’s radio interview of her.  (I loved the part where she talks about how Harry Reid has "waterboarded the American economy.")

The TeaPartyers are riding high because today (6/10)because Rasmussen’s poll shows Angle has an 11-point lead over Reid, 50% to 39%.  Yet Dirty Harry is riding high also, because he is sure he can make political mincemeat of her – do to her what he did to Sue "chickens for a checkup" Lowden.  The odds are that he’s right.  I of course hope he’s not.

The Reid-Angle race will be a fascinating barometer measuring how far Constitutional Conservatives can go before they frighten the horses. 

Besides trying to paint her as a crypto-Scientologist wacko, Reid will focus on Angle’s call to eliminate the Department of Education and privatize Social Security.  Right on! is my response – but can Dirty Harry terrorize the voters with it?

Dirty Harry has $9 million in the bank.  The Dems will pour money into his campaign coffers – he’s their Majority Leader, not some backbencher.  Angle doesn’t even have a real website yet.  Logging on to her website today — http://www.sharronangle.com/ — gets you a Donation page saying she’s trying to raise $250K, and a notice saying "Full website launching soon."  This is Amateur City.

No way BarBox is going to roll over Carly Fiorina.  Carly is a pro, ruthless and samurai-sword sharp who knows the way to win is disembowlment.  This 30-second ad of hers is masterpiece of political evisceration:

 

And what’s more, Carly ridicules BarBox for her support of the Left’s greatest passion, glowarming!

Carly’s Major League, Sharron Angle’s not, that’s the reality.  The fate of our nation is at stake here, folks.  The stakes don’t get bigger.  We don’t need heart-in-the-right-place emotion.  We need ball-busting utter ruthlessness.  We need folks who know how and are willing to kill the weeds that are destroying our Constitutional Garden.  Folks who can teach others how to and give them the courage to do it.

Sarah Palin is one.  Chris Christie is another.  And Jan Brewer, Mitch Daniels, Carly Fiorina, Jim Inhofe, Jim DeMint, maybe even Rand Paul if he can overcome his not wanting to defend his country (it’s the libertarian disease).  I would love to add Sharron Angle to the list.

November 2^nd is going to be the learning experiment of our lives.  We’ll see where there’s steel and where’s there’s mush, what weeds we can trim or kill quickly, which ones to leave be until later. 

With that, we’ll best know how to teach RINOs how to be gardeners instead, and how to most effectively apply the right weed-killer to the garden of our Constitution.   

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[1]   The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 in London, taking its name from the Roman General Fabius Maximus, who fought Hannibal’s Carthaginian army from 217-214 BC in small debilitating skirmishes, rather than attempting one decisive battle.

[2]   From the fasces, the bundle of birch rods around an axe and tied with a red ribbon that was the emblem of power and authority in ancient Rome.