The Goal is the Defeat of the Mindset of The Progressive Movement
This week saw the Republican Party, led by the more conservative elements, move itself right into a publicity debacle diminishing its stature and its prospects to keep the house and retake the Senate in 2014. Yet these very same elements are exhibiting an all too common human trait of not taking blame for their actions. Rather they feel that since their motives were pure, any outcome is desirable. Yet the outcome that is necessary is not just the rollback of Barack Obama style progressivism embodied by the spurious name of Affordable Care Act. The real outcome needs to be a change in the sensibility of much of the world that pervasive government is the answer to many of our needs. Since the dawn of the progressive age in the early 1900s, Europe, parts of Asia, and the United States have embodied an ever growing array of progressive institutions despite the arguments that these are failed policies and the bald fact that there is no long term mechanism to pay for these so called entitlements. Even if there was a chance for an alteration of Obamacare, of Dodd Frank, of a lessening of the massive regulatory environment that is being imposed, the gain would only be short term.
At the next economic crisis (and their will be one) the same knee jerk instinct for more government will assert itself. Just as a reaction to the Depression with the New Deal, the reaction to the financial meltdown of companies such as Enron with Sarbanes Oxley, and now the reaction to the recession of 2008-9 with Dodd Frank, there will be a progressive politician extolling that if only we had another program, another department, another set of regulations, all would be solved.
In the 1800s there were economic challenges in 1819, 1836, and most notably in 1893. In all of these cases the nation emerged stronger. Were people hurt and should there have been more powerful mechanisms to assist them? The answer would be yes but the nature of these institutions should be limited and temporary – two concepts anathema to liberal thinking.
There was also a surprise on the part of many of the leaders of the current debacle that there “message” did not seem to get out or when it did, it did not resonate. Shocking. Liberals currently dominate most media outlets. They control Hollywood and its content. And as have been noted on this site since its inception, they control K-12 education, and almost all humanities at the collegiate level. Until this has been rolled back, altered, even dented, any concept of winning a PR battle with the likes of Barak Obama will be failed policy. And yet the President’s own incompetence in areas such as Syria, Libya and the failed roll out of his signature policy shows that even a highly reluctant media will sometimes report the facts.
If the leaders of the more conservative elements truly believe they are on a mission to defeat the forces of progressivism, they need to understand the circumstances upon which they are laboring, and where they can succeed and where they cannot. In a recent movie on Abraham Lincoln, there is staged a (perhaps apocryphal?) meeting between the President and Thaddeus Stevens in which Stevens lectures Lincoln on a strong moral compass. Lincoln counters that a compass is indeed valuable but it will not tell the traveler about swamps, crevices or holes. Certain members of the Republican Party, their moneyed supporters, and most certainly a select group of radio hosts, need to have that scene played to them at least five times until they understand the message.