The Watershed Election Will Decide if America Will Continue or Become European

George F. Will, the “conservative-in-chief” of the Washington Post editorial staff, wrote an opinion piece for the Post last Thursday, August 30, 2012.
I have always admired George Will, and the article - “Voters, Are You Bluffing?” - was full of interesting and provoking ideas about the reality of conservatism and liberalism in America today.
I’m going to paraphrase it here because it is a very important piece.

His thesis is simple : when Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his vice presidential running mate, he called the nation’s bluff. What Will means is that Romney is unmasking the core problem in American politics, which is that while twice as many Americans consider themselves conservative as compared to liberal, they support liberal agenda items and often vote for Democrats. What Will said was, “Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face the fact that they fervently hold flatly incompatible beliefs.”
Will believes that Americans are “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.”
He quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan to support this idea. Moynihan was the Democratic Senator from New York, who was earlier a member of every presidential administration from Kennedy to Ford and ambassador to India and the United Nation. His controversial Moynihan Report on the Black family in America was influential in the 1960s when the Great Society was being created by Lyndon Johnson. He died in 2003.
What Moynihan said was that the American commitment to limited government is a “civic religion, avowed but not constraining.”
George Will goes on to make the point that this mindset, if it exists, is worrisome for Republicans, because they are acting as if Americans mean it when they say they are conservative.
He then says that it is an even bigger problem for the Democrats because they are “blissfully unaware” that the problem exists.
Will then undertakes a lengthy discussion of a book by Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard, “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic”.
Will quotes Cost as saying that the Democratic Party has succumbed to “clientelism,” the process of purchasing cohorts of voters with federal favors. This has turned the party into the servant of the strong.
It was, according to Cost, and correctly stated, Franklin Roosevelt who created the politics of group entitlements by developing policies not just to buy the allegiance of existing groups but to create groups that from then on would be dependent on government -- labor unions (special workplace rights), farmers (subsidies), business (protectionism), the elderly (social security).
It is what became known as the New Deal.
George Will summarizes this phenomenon thus, “Government no longer existed to protect natural rights but to confer special rights on favored cohorts.” He then quotes Irving Kristol, one of the leaders of conservative thought in post-World War II America, who said, “the New Deal preached not equal rights for all but equal privileges for all - for all, that is, who banded together to become wards of the government.”

Read Will’s own words:

“In the 1960s, public-employee unions were expanded to feast from quantitative liberalism (favors measured in quantities of money). And qualitative liberalism was born as environmentalists, feminists and others got government to regulate behavior in the service of social “diversity,” “meaningful” work, etc. Cost notes that with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, a few government-approved minorities were given an entitlement to public offices: About 40 “majority-minority” congressional districts would henceforth be guaranteed to elect minority members.
Walter Mondale, conceding to Ronald Reagan after the 1984 election, listed the groups he thought government should assist: “the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless and the sad.” Yes, the sad.
Republicans also practice clientelism, but with a (sometimes) uneasy conscience. Both parties have narrowed their appeals as they have broadened their search for clients to cosset. Today’s Democratic Party does not understand what one of its saints understood — that big government is generally a patron of the privileged, a partner of rent-seekers.”
When vetoing the 1832 bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, Andrew Jackson said, “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” When government goes beyond equal protection by law and undertakes to allocate wealth and opportunity, “the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.”
As Cost rightly says, “With the exception of the tea party, there is no real faction out there making the Jacksonian case for an end to special privilege.”
Human beings, said one of the wisest of them — Aristotle — are political animals and language-using animals. Americans, as you do not need to be Aristotle to know, are complaining animals. They use language to complain about politics. Mitt Romney should remind them that one function of elections is to force most voters — the winning majorities — to forfeit the fun of complaining. For example, if the swing state of Nevada, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate (12 percent), votes for four more years of current policies, it must henceforth suffer in silence. Actually, all those who vote to continue Barack Obama’s distinctive brand of clientelism — crony capitalism — must, if he wins, become political Trappists, taking a vow to keep quiet.”

Dear readers, keep this blog handy and read it occasionally between now and November 6. You will find all that is being said, fought over, blared out in TV ads, and hammered home by political analysts fits into George F. Will’s opinion piece.
And, it is what makes this election so interesting and also so extremely important.
If Americans have really succumbed to Barak Obama’s 21st Centruy version of the FDR New Deal, then the American Republic, as the Founders meant it to be, is dead.
It will have been replaced by the European socialist model -- where :
- parents receive government checks in August to buy school supplies for their children,
- where health care is rationed and doled out either on a first come first served basis or by government decree about who will and will not be permitted to see a doctor,
- the price of gasoline is determined by the government and the excess costs are passed back to the producers who have to sink or swim with these costs,
- not only are unions permitted but they become “partners of the government” and virtually dictate what can and cannot be done about labor costs and perks,
- police become national in scope and are directed by the central government to carry out its policies, with local police being relegated to traffic control,
- universities are controlled by tight government budgeting so that what is studied and what matters are taken up in research are subject to the government’s social agenda.

I could go on. But, the point is clear.
November 6, 2012 is a watershed date for America. Let us hope that Cost and Kristol and FDR were wrong about Americans and what they really believe and want from government.