harmonicminer

No, I’m not saying that Democrats are terrorists.

I am saying this: in battling terrorism, the problem for the defenders is that they must be essentially perfect. All they can do is defend, unless they can find a way to go on offense against the terrorists. In contrast, terrorists don’t really care if they fail 9 times out of 10, if on that 10th time they can create havoc of such a degree that it changes the culture they’ve attacked. In that sense, 9/11 was a huge victory because of the way it changed America, even though the results were the removal of the Afghani and Iraqi regimes, and having to spend the next 7 years hiding in the mountains. And consider: even if Al Qaeda was completely removed from the face of the earth, the changes to America will still be there. We’ll still have ridiculous procedures at airports, the trade centers will still be gone, and those 3000 people, plus the casualties of the Iraq war, will still be dead. And there will still be other Islamic extremists to carry on.

Compare this to the Democrat/Republican battles: generally, Republicans do not advocate any policy whatsoever that cannot be fairly easily undone by a future Democrat majority. The largest military buildup can simply be defunded. The biggest tax cut can be reversed.  As we learned to our sorrow in Vietnam (and may yet learn in Iraq) even a victory in war can be given away and transformed to defeat.  The only war that Democrats can’t lose for us is one that is completely over before they take office.   And so it goes.

But when Democrats get a working majority in Congress and have the White House as well, changes can be made that cannot be undone in any simple way, like merely changing the law or tax rates or whatever.

Consider: early 1930s and 1960s Democrat governments created Social Security and Medicare. Those programs are now among the very largest problems America has to solve in coming decades, because they boil down to unfulfillable promises of government to citizens.  And further, it is not merely that those programs are expensive, but that they created bad effects on American society and the economy.  High priced medical care for ALL can be traced directly to those programs, because of market distortions they introduced.

Democrats only have to win ONCE, because one term of a Democrat White House and Democrat Congress (with filibuster proof Senate, a crucial point) is all it takes to commit the entire future of the nation to whatever new entitlement program is dreamed up by the Left. After that, Republicans can only make adjustments on the margins (and often not even that), because anything else is portrayed as mean spirited, people will selfishly cling to whatever benefit they have, or hope to have, and on it goes.

Democrats can lose and lose and lose, in the sense of not acheiving fully unified government, and it doesn’t matter, because they only have to win big ONCE.  Republicans, because of differing commitments about the role of government, must essentially never lose (again, loss defined as allowing a unified Democrat government), because Republicans are unable to institute ANYTHING that cannot be cancelled by Democrats.  That’s because, at bottom, Republicans do not attempt to bribe the entire electorate with goodies that are ostensibly bought with someone else’s money.  But that’s exactly what Democrats DO, and when they succeed, it’s as impossible to undo as it is to take back Christmas toys from a child and give them to someone else.

It seems likely that the Democrat “perfect storm” is about to happen for the first time since the 1960s.  I remember the 1960s:  that’s when Kennedy abandoned Cuba to its fate, when the world almost died in an unnecessary and mishandled missile crisis, when Kennedy and Johnson laid the foundations for the Vietnam War, when Medicare was invented and caused HUGE increases in medical costs that will continue to plague us, when moral equivalence and deviancy of all kinds became the new normal, when the War on Poverty was started that cemented in place a permanently poor black underclass by incentivizing bad behavior, and from which come the radicals that now teach in our universities and advise presidential candidates of the Left: and that’s just a few obvious things off the top of my head.

Act ONE:  the 1930s.  Act TWO:  the 1960s.

Is Act THREE about to begin?