Webloggin » We Won, So Shut Your Mouth

I’m not worried. It’s just like 1993 all over again. More and more liberal nonsense, completely unrestrained, until the voters finally get sick and tired of it and lower the smackdown.

Meanwhile, get a good look because it’s history in the making. As I said before: If you got a solar eclipse right over your head every sixteen years, you’d still make the effort to look at it or get a picture of it, right? It’s a rare opportunity to focus on some of our more hidden human weaknesses…and those of our so-called “leaders”:

Sometimes political movements, as they grow old, become arrogant, insular, and dismissive of criticism. Critics said that the conservative ascendancy of the last few decades succumbed to that disease, and there is more truth in it than conservatives would like to admit. What we are seeing in Washington, D.C., right now is different: President Obama and his supporters are showing early symptoms of this syndrome in the first flush of victory. The liberal ascendancy is already becoming a liberal complacency.

In part this tendency reflects the character of the new president, a preternaturally self-confident man. His ambition to remake American policy and politics is staggering. His agenda for just his first year in office includes a fiscal stimulus unprecedented in size, a push for a new energy economy, and the revamping of American health care. That ambition may wreck his presidency, or it may make him the world-historical figure he aspires to be. But what is more troubling is the unwarranted intellectual self-confidence that liberalism in the age of Obama increasingly exhibits.

The debate over the economic-stimulus plan illustrated the point. When that plan was criticized, President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority whip Dick Durbin all resorted nearly immediately to the “argument” that they had won the election. It is of course true that a lot of Democrats won their elections and that they will consequently get their way in most policy disputes. Yet they — and liberals generally — seem oddly exercised by the continued resistance to their policies by the small and relatively powerless minority that elected Republicans now constitute.

I would argue that “I won, now back down” is a far more legitimate argument coming from a conservative than coming from a liberal. At least, in cases like this, when the election that just took place is one revolutionary in nature.

A revolutionary instant of support for liberalism, is a mandate to make something go. Making something go invites all kinds of debate that would be, if allowed, quite legitimate: How do we make it go? In this case we could discuss, waitaminnit, we’re out of money and we’ll fix the problem by spending lots of it? How does that work? Or: Waitaminnit, the economy is on a deathbed and we’re going to shock in back into robust health by taxing the ever-luvin’ snot out of it? Or, what has become my favorite lately: How come it is that if I’m offered a retention bonus, I’ll be able to keep it, even though you’re saying when an AIG executive is offered one, it’ll be revoked or taxed away on Congress’ whim? How is it you’re attacking their right to own property, and leaving mine intact?

This kind of liberal snobbery shuns important and necessary exchanges of ideas, like these, and many more.

The same is not true of a conservative who earns a mandate to make something stop. In that scenario, you have a situation like what we had in the 1994 elections: The voters are sick to death of something and want it ended.

You know, as far as that goes, according to President Obama’s own campaign rhetoric He fits into that paradigm as a conservative — in the sense He was put there to put a stop to something, not necessarily to make something go. “Change” from those “failed policies” that belonged to President Bush, and all that. Being a Messianic Enlightened Being who’s super-duper-smart, so I’m told, He should understand that when He puts a plan together, the time’s come to put it up for some kind of discussion — even though He won. The process of construction is just a bit more complicated than the process of destruction.

It’s yet another thing we’ve said around these parts quite a bit: You need to attend some kind of training to operate the crane that swings a wrecking ball to get rid of a building (and most of that has to do with how not injure people when you’re gettin’ it done, not so much the actual wrecking); to be the architect of the new building that goes up in its place, you need quite a bit more training. Things have to fit together. Materials have to be chosen and customized, measurements have to meet code, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Wrecking is easy. Stopping things is relatively simple.

The voters deserve to have some way of saying “we’re sick of this, enough!” They also deserve to have some way of saying “er, y’know, this really might not quite be what we had in mind.”

(discuss at House of Erastosthenes)

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