Clearly, the Democrats and their policies are unpopular. But what is the alternative? For what can you vote, when you go into the ballot box? Republicans are the party of nothing, even now. If Republicans took over tomorrow, most of them would be the same people who ran the show before. Republicans are not the party of limited government, in the Jeffersonian sense, nor even the party of smaller government. Look at George W. Bush’s eight years in office with a Republican Congress. They grew the government at the rate of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the biggest liberal Democrat in history up to that point; this gave Democrats the ability, once regaining power, to grow the government to Soviet Union levels. Thank you, Republicans.
Republicans have been, and presumably still are, the party of a slightly slower growth of government than the Democrats. What this means in practice: Republicans will tax, spend, borrow and regulate what’s left of the private economy at a slightly slower rate than did Democrats. It’s the bare minimum they can get away with, is all. When government interventionism fails, this allows liberal Democrats to run for office claiming, “See? I told you so. Limited government doesn’t work. Republican philosophy is a failed philosophy.” What philosophy? What is a Republican? It’s clear what Democrats stand for, both in words and action. What is a Republican other than Democrat-lite?
In fact, it’s big government that isn’t right and therefore doesn’t work–whether run by Democrats or Republicans. It’s heartening to see Obama and the Democrats collapsing so much quicker than expected. But to what end? What will replace them, if they do lose office in a year or two? Look at the Republicans in the Senate, and elsewhere, and judge for yourself if you think their policies will be substantially different from what came before them and what they themselves were doing just a few years before. Democrats are admittedly so bad, so liberal, so extreme in the fullest socialist-fascist sense of that term–like nothing yet seen in American history–that conventional Republicans do seem better by comparison. Obama and Pelosi have indeed done the impossible: Make George W. Bush seem not so toxic. Yes, it’s true that most Republicans will not read terrorists and war criminals their Miranda rights, and allow them to plea out of their crimes as if they were purse-snatchers. But is that how low we have come in America: to elevate foolishness to the status of solution as the only alternative to outright insanity?
Democrats offer the politics of something–something perfectly awful and horrendous that will, before long, bring America down once and for all. Republicans offer, and have offered all along, the politics of nothing. No wonder Americans keep crying out for change. If liberals are thrown out of office in mass numbers, it remains to be seen if limited government–in the original Constitutional sense–is what we will get.