If you believe, as I do, that American institutions are hitting a creaky middle age, then you have a lot of time for [the Republican’s] argument. If you believe that there has been a hardening of the national arteries caused by a labyrinthine tax code, an unsustainable Medicare program and a suicidal addiction to deficits, then you appreciate this streamlining agenda, even if you don’t buy into the whole Ayn Rand-influenced gospel of wealth….
On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic Party, which says: We don’t have an agenda, but we really don’t like theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.
But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.
It seems to be a bit gratuitous to charge the Republicans with having no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it. The U.S.A. has no cultural resources or institutions that precede the Age of Progress. As far back as H.G. Wells he observed that America’s right wing and left wing are just two species of liberalism. That’s one of the reasons why the culture war takes the shape it does in America differently from elsewhere, and why, in Peter Berger’s language, it is the most religious populace ruled by the least religious elites – both are bound by the same underlying liberalism and so are able to function in the one country (although that is increasingly under stress as they). “Conservative” in the U.S. means something different than elsewhere, especially Europe, seeks to derive social practices directly from abstract principles without the use of mediating existing social institutions as much as the Left, and is just as ruggedly individualistic as the Left, it simply prioritizes different aspects of that individualism.
Brooks is either asking for the Republican party to be exceptionally radical in its social vision or he’s being just a tad unfair at this point.
I have seen and experienced what the Democrats have had to offer the unemployed here in the San Joaquin Valley, and particularly in Merced County, where my wife and I live: [i]nothing but unkept promises.[/i] Could the Republicans do better? Maybe……I hope so. But who knows these days? I voted for Obama the last time around……and I won’t repeat that mistake. Once burned, twice learned.
Neither the republicans or the democrats can “Do Better”
The republicans simply have the sense to admit this and offer to get out of the way so we can help ourselves. Or at least that’s the storyline. I’ll believe it when I see it. ( which, I recall, I said in 1981, when I saw it.)
I suppose one could say that we don’t want rhetoric here…….what we want are [i]positive results.[/i] Congress and the President have been [i]all talk and no action[/i] for the past four years while the economy has gone down the sewer.
4, No action? Obama spent trillions and we got Obamacare too! The Republican house was able to stop the madness forcing Obama to abrogate the Constitution and rule by decree. That is a good thing because it shows all who want to see the totalitarian face of Obama personally and the Democratic Party.
And those who think Obamacare is such a good thing should thoroughly read the law……especially if they’re 75 or older. It’s [b]scary![/b]
The problem is that the GOP and the Democrats are philosophical twins. They both favor an activist government which tells people how to live their lives, though admittedly they differ on which aspects should be dictated. They both favor a neo-imperial foreign policy. They both have enthusiastically trampled on civil liberties. Rhetoric aide they both support a policy of crony capitalism. Both have shown a great willingness to run up staggering deficits. And neither has produced a coherent plan for dealing with a runaway national debt.
aide=aside*
#1, perhaps it may be better to say that America has no surviving cultural resources or institutions that precede the French Revolution. Our founding fathers took great pride in an Englishman’s rights and of England’s constitution and tried to enshine some of that in our written one. It’s my understanding that during the time of Jefferson’s populism the institutions that were to carry on those traditions were attacked in the same revolutionary fervor that threatened Burke’s England, and that ancient memory was eventually forgotten as Jacksonian Democracy transformed the American way.