In all sorts of ways our Politically Correct, and increasingly corrupt, political culture is colliding with reality, and not surprisingly, reality looks to be the winner. This is taking place in the international arena, in the political/economic environment, and even making some inroads among the liberal elites.
First, internationally, those famous chickens we have heard so much about, are coming home to roost; Richard Fernandez does an excellent job parsing President Obama's speech to the West Point cadets in the context of the recent act of war committed by North Korea against our ally, South Korea:
Obama understood that power must ultimately be undergirded by economic strength. That is fair enough. But if the steps the Federal Government have been undertaking at “home”, both in the form of unprecedented deficits and its deference to the Green Lobby and the teacher’s unions sap the strength of the American economy and saddle it with mega-programs, then Obama’s new “international order” simply becomes a statement of intention to beg abroad after he has blown his wad on the new domestic order. After propping up a number of politically sacrosanct interest groups that are “too big to fail” the Administration may be frankly telling the West Pointers that there will simply be no money left for anything else. In way the West Point speech can be restated in this way: ‘after we have finished doling out the tax dollar for entitlements, entitlements which we cannot sustain anyway; and after having raised taxes to the level where business growth tapers off to zero, then that’s all she wrote. Therefore we are going to deal with all future international crises — and by that I include global warming and nation building — through multilateralism and diplomacy.’
The risk inherent in this approach is that it will pay in weakness abroad for political pork at home. Can this new multilateral world order work? Probably not without a core of hard power.
Second, note the growing undercurrents in our political/economic environment; here summarized by Clark Judge:
For years, the GOP’s national leadership has been all but clueless about the disenchantment growing around the nation. But now, in talks with senior Republicans around town and beyond, I increasingly sense that the message of 2006 and 2008 is sinking in. Not everywhere, but among the more astute. They understand that the GOP Congress’ of George W. Bush’s presidency and the President himself totally dropped the tax and spending ball, and this is why voters turned them out.
In many respects, those who switched from Bush in 2004 to the Democrats in 2006 and 2008 and are now returning to the Republicans share the concerns of Henry Olsen’s swing vote in Britain. They highly prize individual autonomy and enterprise. They are emphatically citizens, not subjects, and are showing themselves to be super sensitive to what they see as Obama Administration moves to subject them to the whims of an overreaching government. More broadly, they see astronomical increases in Federal spending (and the taxes that will inevitably go along) and vast expansions of Federal power as threats to the national character, in particular to democratic self-government and to the freedom to chart one’s own course in life. Increasingly, as I say, the most astute leaders in Congress understand this....
It was Victor Hugo who said that there is no power on earth equal to an idea whose time has come. In this Sunday’s New York Times Thomas Friedman wrote (see: http://tiny.cc/8he7m) of the disappearing room for fiscal error in the United States today. There is much Friedman will never understand (he works for The New York Times after all), but if he has started to grasp this truth, the truth that drives the Tea Party crown and the American swing vote, if even he understands it, we may be witnessing the arrival of an idea’s time.
When such liberal luminaries as Tom Friedman and Andrew Cuomo are starting to see the light, it is clear that our unsustainable course will be changing in the near future.
There is no doubt the Republicans can yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and in fact, victory in November 2010 and 2012 will earn the victors little in the way of traditional political rewards; the cupboard is bare and there will be little largess left to reward political allies, yet only by doing the unpopular and difficult will the Republicans regain legitimacy and deserve their victory.
Finally, at the base of all this is a nascent recognition that culture and reality trump politics, something which the Far Left (among whom I include Barack Obama) has failed to appreciate:
There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
It is a relatively short, though difficult, distance from recognizing that some of the poor are poor because of their culture (ie, their behavior) and that their culture is not simply the result of their poverty, to a recognition that not all populations are exactly equivalent, that some cultures are inimical to the modern world and that some cultures are insensitive to diplomatic language.
The most committed ideologues prefer to bend reality into compliance with their ideologies, and in a wealthy nation, with an expanding economy, in a generally peaceful world, there is a great deal of room for such elasticity in perceptions of reality. In a crisis, when reality reduces the margins for error, such self-imposed perceptual blindness endangers us all.
It is close to the point of no return for the current administration. They can yet tack back to the center, confront our enemies as assiduously as they confront their political opponents, and begin the difficult task of rationalizing entitlements of all sorts and shrinking the size of our bloated government. Just enumerating what needs to be done is a useful antidote to the belief that the Obama administration is likely to do any such thing. They are too wedded to their ideology and can only forge ahead or forfeit their claims to enlightenment and truth. We must hope that the upcoming change occurs before too much more damage can be done.
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