WILL ROMNEY BE OUR FDR?

If you want to trace back all America’s woes caused by the pathologies of liberalism to their original source, you’d focus on the inception of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

True, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism places the blame earlier, on "America’s first fascist presidency," that of Woodrow Wilson.  But much of Wilson’s assault on our Constitutional freedoms didn’t last, and was reversed by his successors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, resulting in the debacle of Herbert Hoover, the Dems gaining the House in 1930 (first time since 1916), and the complete entrenchment of the Dems at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1932.  FDR became America’s first president-for-life (he finally died in office in 1945), while the Dems held a monopoly of power in the House for the next 62 years (with two irrelevant interregnums, 1946-48 and 1952-54; the Pubs finally got the House back, 1994-2006).

Yet the FDR/Dem victory of 1932 was far, far more than an electoral victory of one political party over the other. It was transformational, so deeply altering the fundamental relationship of Americans to their government and to their Constitution that the alteration lasts to this day – and is now, in fact deeper than ever.

For conservatives, FDR’s transformation was and remains disastrous for America’s freedom, America’s culture, and the integrity of America’s Constitution.  Today, as we reach the final economic consequences of FDR’s transformation, it has proved to be equally disastrous for America’s prosperity.

What we need is a president who can not only reverse FDR, but who can generate a transformation of his own, altering the relationship of Americans to their government that restores their freedom, their culture, their prosperity, and their Constitution.  We need our own FDR.  The question is: will Mitt Romney be that president?

The FDR Transformation has lasted 80 years.  FDR died 67 years ago.  So he didn’t maintain it, he initiated it, pumping in so much momentum that it kept right on going, right on accelerating, blasting through and past any attempts to slow it down, much less stop it, much less reverse it.

For every American unless you’re deep in your 80s, the FDR Transformation has been the paradigm of American politics for your entire life – any attempt to solve political issues or problems took place within the paradigm.  Any challenge to the paradigm itself was ridiculed as flat-eartherism. 

Yet, finally and at last, FDR’s liberal paradigm is breaking down, utterly failing to solve problems proving to be intractable within it.  This is analogous to the breakdown of geocentric or Ptolemaic astronomy at the end of the 15^th century, which became a Rube Goldberg contraption of epicycles within epicycles trying and failing to explain the motions of the planets with the sun revolving around the earth.

Copernicus (1473-1543) provided the solution by challenging the geocentric paradigm itself, and showing how the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. 

This is an analogy only, which we should be reluctant in extending to a comparison of Copernicus and Mitt Romney.  Yet Romney gave a speech yesterday (6/13) to the Business Roundtable – CEO’s of the Fortune 100.  The headline news was that he condemned the Zero Presidency as "the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of policies in modern American history."

Which is true.  Also true is his saying that November is "a watershed election, which will determine the relationship between citizen and enterprise and government." Further, he said immediately upon his inauguration he would "halt" all Obama-era regulations – including Dodd-Frank and Obamacare (naming them specifically) – but his stress was on the word all.  

He outlined many other goals, such as repealing Davis-Bacon, reducing spending to 2008 levels, etc.  Good stuff… but Transformational on a par with FDR?  Not yet.

Then again, neither was FDR in his 1932 campaign, nor was he for quite a while into his presidency.  He became so over time.  Does Romney have it in him to become so?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that he has the opportunity to do so more than any Republican president in our lifetime – more than even Ronald Reagan for whom it would have been a bridge too far.

For Romney, given the historical circumstances of today, the current "correlation of forces" if you will, it’s a bridge he can cross – if we lead him across it.

We (and Romney) have Zero to thank for this.  America could have gotten McPain or The PIAPS instead and we would have continued slouching towards a calamitous tipping point.  But we got Zero, who put his pedal to the metal and is driving us at full speed off the cliff.  VDH (Victor Davis Hansen) explains the irony:

"All empirical evidence points to the worldwide failure of the blue-state model (e.g., California, the southern Mediterranean, anti-Walker Wisconsin), and yet Barack Obama’s entire career, from community organizing, to the state legislature, to the Senate, was predicated on just such a protocol of public borrowing to provide expansive government entitlements and jobs in exchange for a loyal political constituency, with the debt, in redistributive fashion, to be serviced by wringing more revenue from the suspect private sector that is always doing ‘fine.’   Obama knows no other way."    

Thank heavens he doesn’t, that he’s too stupid, too incompetent, and too ideological to. Because he doesn’t, he is precipitating what James Pierson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation, calls The Fourth Revolution.  Folks, Pierson has written a tour de force, and I couldn’t encourage you more strongly to read it carefully and entire. 

In sum, he maintains that the US has had three prior political revolutions or transformations establishing the rule of a "regime party" for a subsequent 60-80 years:  Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in 1800 (becoming the Democrat Party under Andrew Jackson), Lincoln’s Republican Party in 1860, and FDR’s Dems in 1932.  Now we are ready for a fourth.

This is because, like the previous two revolutions, FDR’s has reached the point of exhaustion – and when this happens, "notwithstanding its reputation for stability and continuity, the U.S. political system seems to resolve its deepest problems in relatively brief periods of intense and potentially destabilizing conflict."

Each realignment discredits the previous governing elite and brings into power new groups of political and cultural leaders.  They reorganize national politics around new principles, staff the government with their supporters, then extend their influence into cultural institutions — newspapers, college and university faculties, book publishers, and civic associations.

Thus, Pierson observes, "the United States has rarely had a two-party system but rather a one and one-half party system consisting of a ‘regime party’ and a competitor forced to adapt to its dominant position. These competitors-the Whigs in the 1840s, the Democrats after the Civil War, and the Republicans in the post-war era-occasionally won national elections, but only after accepting the legitimacy of the basic political themes established by the regime party."

The Democrats became America’s current Regime Party through "public spending and the recruitment of new groups into the political process, often by promises of new public programs."  They are now "a public sector party that finds its votes and organizational strength in public sector unions, government employees and contractors, and beneficiaries of government programs."

The Republicans, as a private sector party of middle class taxpayers and businesses large and small, has so far been unable to eliminate or reduce the regime party’s New Deal or Great Society programs, nor its overwhelming cultural influence. 

That is about to change, as we are now in the end game for the system of politics that originated in the 1930s and 1940s – because the funding that maintains the Dems as the regime party, public spending, public debt, and publicly guaranteed credit, has reached its limits.

Pierson:

"The regime of public spending has at last drawn so many groups into the public arena in search of public dollars that it has paralyzed the political process and driven governments to the edge of bankruptcy.

These groups are widely varied: trade associations, educational lobbies, public employee unions, government contractors, ideological and advocacy organizations, health-care providers, hospital associations that earn revenues from Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the like.

These are what economists call rent-seeking groups because they are concerned with the distribution of resources rather than with the creation of wealth. They consume rather than create wealth. These groups are highly influential in the political process because they are willing to invest large sums in lobbying and election campaigns in order to protect their sources of income.

While rent-seeking groups can be found in both political parties, the largest and most influential of them (at least on the spending side) have congregated within the Democrat Party… One might describe the Democrat Party as a coalition of rent-seekers."

This is why Zero, "in trying to emulate FDR and his other predecessors, who were operating under far different circumstances, (has) made all of our current problems worse."

And that is why, Pierson concludes, Zero will not be the herald of a new era as he envisions himself, but rather, "the last representative of a disintegrating order."

So we arrive at the massive opportunity of conservatives, conservative-libertarians, and Tea Party Republicans to seize the opportunity history is handing them.  Romney is not going to be our FDR all on his lonesome, any more than he can be another Copernicus. 

But with him in the White House, we can toss the Ptolemaic paradigm of the Dems onto the ash heap of history and replace it with a Copernican Conservative paradigm. We can effect the restoration of our Constitutional government, our prosperity, and our culture by taking charge of the Fourth Revolution bearing down upon us.

Will Romney be our FDR, with Tea Party Republicans as the politically, economically, and culturally dominant regime party for the next 60-80 years?  He can be, if we dedicate ourselves to achieving it.  Let’s get to work.