More of the Same Ol' "Rightists, Watch Out You Don't Go Too Far"

The Economist last week printed an issue which included the articles What's wrong with America's right ("Too much anger and too few ideas. America needs a better alternative to Barack Obama") and The risks of “Hell, no!” ("The tea-party movement is pushing the Republicans to the right. That may make it harder to recapture the White House from Barack Obama").

The more positive (i.e., more realistic) news is that this week it compared the Community-Organizer-in-Chief to Vladimir Putin…

I responded by writing them the following:


When you write that America's "voters expect solutions, not just rage", you are suggesting that citizens are demanding (some sort of) intervention from above (from Washington, DC). But that is not what America is about. America is about solutions from the bottom — unfettered from (undue) interference from the top.

Speaking of foreign affairs and the USSR, Ronald Reagan said, "there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace" and that is to "surrender." The equivalent, for liberals, in America's internal affairs, is that there is one guaranteed way to "bridge the divide", to "renounce extremes", and to "go beyond polarization" and "beyond hatred and anger" (all "in the interests of America", of course), and that is for America's conservatives — never for the liberals themselves — to surrender their principles.

Therein we have the true meaning of the Democrats' "bipartisan support." It is Orwellian newspeak, concealing a request for Republicans to shut up and go along with liberals' progressive and statist politics.

The GOP is the party of No. As well it should be. Just as Democrats — and statists the world over — stand for "Yes we can" (get more government intervention and more bureaucracy and more hand-outs and more unity behind a "benevolent" ruler), the party of No stands (or ought to stand) by the Constitution, which itself is the declaration, 222 years ago, to statists the world over, from the British monarchy (in 1776) to would-be élites in the United States itself (from the 18th century to today), that the people stand up and say No.

They say No to the idea that we must rally behind the country's ruler (well-intentioned or otherwise); No to the idea that we must not question his policies, his taxes, and his decisions on our behalf (or not criticize them too harshly in any event); No to the very belief that our alleged betters have a better understanding of what is good for us; No to hamstrung efforts by would-be nannies to regulate our lives; and, indeed, No to the belief that the common individual is in need of oversight in the first place.