The debate, the debate and nothing but the debate.
Argghhhh!!!
We confess to a limited (vanishing?) interest in politics as sport or even blood sport. We were tired of the debate weeks before it happened.
Equally tiresome is the BIG, BIG news that was not news at all. President Biden’s mental and physical health are failing. Everyone now can say out loud that the Democratic Party has a big problem on its hands.
Ho hum. It’s not that big a problem. It’s a one-election difficulty. The Dems have other, more serious problems but the debate did not illuminate them.
What we got out of the debate is that the Republican Party has a much bigger problem.
The great GOP Hegira, the Long March from Nixon to Reagan, was about one thing: the emergence, then ascendence, of optimistic Republicanism.
At least since Hoover the Republican Party had been the party of “it can’t be done.” The thing that absolutely could not be done was offer a frank, hopeful alternative to the Dem slide toward socialism. As it was said in our youth, “The difference between the two parties is that the Democrats want to run the country and the Republicans don’t want them to.”
Nixon-era Republicans rarely contested either the New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society spending binge. The furthest they would go was to offer allegedly more efficient versions such as Nixon’s Family Assistance Program, advertised as a welfare system that would support families rather than subverting them as government welfare programs did.
None of it worked. The welfare state destroyed inner-city and Appalachian families, and feminist ideology plunged the U.S. birth rate far below replacement. Nixon ended up funding Johnson’s programs more lavishly than Johnson could have dreamed.
Apparently, Nixon believed the war in Viet Nam was unsustainable if he simultaneously fought the Dems on domestic issues. Apparently, he believed the war was more important than stopping the rise of socialism in the U.S.
What would Nixon say today if he knew that after the ignominious loss of the War by the U.S., Vietnam has become a leading Asian bastion of capitalism and support for the U.S.? European Economist-pollster Rainer Zitelmann proves it in his new book, How Nations Escape Poverty, which George introduced.
Wage and price controls expressed the ultimate in Republican pessimism–Republicans so despairing of free markets that they adopted systems that had been failing in the Soviet Union for decades.
Reagan changed that, by talking not about what government could not do, but about what Americans could do.
The most fierce anti-communist ever to reach the White House, Reagan was nevertheless cheerful, almost relaxed about the outcome of the contest with the Soviets. Of course, we would win and of course Communism would be consigned to the scrap heap of history. Freedom was not only more fun it worked a lot better.
Last Thursday night no optimism was on offer from the GOP. It’s not just Trump’s eminently understandable sense of embattlement. The entire congressional GOP alternates between rage and fear. Rage that any county would dare to challenge us for the title of Top Nation, and fear that we are not up to the challenge.
Protectionism is pessimism as policy. It reaps what it fears. Frantically the government tries to sanction and subsidize its way to victory in semiconductors, with the net result that American companies have lost an astonishing amount of ground to the Chinese in just the past two years.
The subsidies are bad enough; the sanctions are a protectionist own goal. China might have decided on its own to keep American microchips out of the Chinese market to encourage its domestic semiconductor industry. Instead, we do it for them in the vain, nay ridiculous hope that if we refuse China’s money for billions of chips the Chinese won’t be able to get their hands on one of them to unearth its secrets.
Don't the Washington experts know that China educates four times more engineers than we do and comprises much of the world's electronic supply chain? Meanwhile, in Taiwan, which directs 60 percent of its investment to the mainland, lies the heart of the global semiconductor industry in TSMC and its myriad suppliers. We less chance of stopping the Chinese from trading with Taiwan than China would have trying to stop the U.S. from trading with Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
The most damaging version of the new GOP pessimism, though, may be its rollover on climate. Although boldly acting as President to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty, in the debate, Trump ran like a rabbit from the climate question. Pretending it doesn’t exist has become GOP policy. No Republican leader will now directly confront the climate issue.
Republicans won’t contest the alleged gravity of the threat (which likely approaches zero) because they have allowed it to become an orthodoxy. It’s reached the status of “point you must concede before being admitted to the debate.” It’s become one of those questions that always gets answered in the “of course, but” form. “Of course, racism (sexism, ableism, serial murder, pedophilia, climate change) is a grave problem in our society today but… “
Orthodoxies are not immune to dissent. They can be shaken, even unseated, but not without effort. The GOP is never going to win the anti-life, de-populationist Green vote, why not fight back?
If disputing green science seems too difficult, why not dispute green socialism, now the most malevolent form of the socialist virus?
In the debate Trump defended his refusal of the Paris Accords by saying it was a bad deal, with the U.S. carrying too much of the burden. It sounded weaselly because it was weaselly.
The right answer is that green socialism is more than bad economic policy. It is a counsel of despair. It denies the Providence of a bountiful creation or our God-given abilities—and duty—to nurture it. It makes man a plague upon the earth. It is the new Suicide of the West.
Reagan’s answer would have been faith in the ingenuity and resourcefulness of free men to solve a problem that itself merely testifies to the astounding achievements of capitalism. If entrepreneurial and technological creativity were really powerful enough to have changed the very climate of the earth, then surely that same system commands the power to curb the change if necessary.
The only solution to any human crisis is human creativity and enterprise. Socialism and industrial policy merely enshrine the failures of the past in a fallacious claim of socialist progress.
Democrats have a one-election problem. If Republicans cannot recover their faith in freedom, their problems are just beginning.
geez, Richard! Now who's being negative and fatalistic? Trump had a good four years. He did many good things. Best of all perhaps -- and the reason the economy took off -- was his speedy neutering of the EPA, which had become a rogue agency under Obama. I see no reason why Trump shouldn't have learned stuff in his first four years and will have an even better four years if -- Baruch ha'Shem -- he gets in again.