J. Robert Smith @ American Thinker
The battle lines are being drawn. The fight for the GOP is on. The seemingly eternal struggle between the right and the Republican establishment has entered its newest phase. In the wake of Mitt Romney being end-run by Barack Obama, GOP get-alongs want to double-down on failure. Moderation — the odor of it — is in DC’s air like cheap, fetid perfume.
But the fight between grassroots conservatives and the get-alongs is different this time — very different. The eternal struggle may prove not to be eternal, after all. If grassroots conservatives fail to take control of the Republican Party, establishmentarians may find that the GOP has become a rump; not much more than the rightwing of the leftwing Democratic Party. Grassroots conservatives will bolt, and with compelling cause.
The newest GOP civil war is more than Bob Taft versus Ike; more than Goldwater versus Rockefeller; more than Dutch Reagan versus Jerry Ford. Statism is nearing existential crisis, and so, as a result, is the good ol U.S.A.
The American left got the memo back in the 90s about the collapse of communism but chose to disregard it. That memo landed in circular files throughout academia, the media, in Hollywood, and among Democrats everywhere. Fervid belief trumped the stark object lesson that was the Soviet Union: statism doesn’t work, particularly when taken to its logical extreme.
But, protest American lefties: “We don’t embrace communism. We’re progressives in the American tradition, or, if you must, social democrats, like our Western European cousins. We want a mixed economy with a decidedly stronger role for government. We want a stronger social safety net with universal… everything. We want a progressive culture shorn of traditional America’s exclusions for gays in marriage. Sex isn’t bad if contraception is free and easily accessible. Women need the right to abortion without exception. People need to be governed in their diets (Michelle says so). Children need to be educated from grade school through college in the radically New American Society, which is about tolerance and inclusion — except for the faithful, the traditional, and the producers.”
Evidently the American left hasn’t read the memo about Western Europe (or Europe in its entirety, for that matter). You know, the memo that’s being updated daily, grimly.
Europe’s elites are cooking the books, shuffling paper assets first here and then there to forestall economic and governmental collapses. The give-me masses in Greece, Spain, and Italy are in full-throated protest and riot. You see, social democratic statism doesn’t work much better than its more extreme variant: communism. It just takes a little longer to fail.