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What is at stake in 2010 – and indeed in 2012 – is whether the United States will effectively slip the moorings of its national character.
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| In the logic of Washington, every election cycle is “one of the most important of our lifetimes.” There’s a kernel of wisdom lodged inside that hyperbole. After all, the success of a free and democratic nation, continental in scope, isn’t foreordained. Every biannual return to the polls is one more small triumph for our improbable experiment in democracy.
As summer recedes into autumn, this call will be sounded once again for the 2010 midterms. Republicans will argue that the nation’s economic health and the size of the federal government are at stake. Democrats will counter that GOP gains will create a reversion to the policies that have already crippled the nation once before. Neither is precisely right. What is at stake in 2010 – and indeed in 2012 – is whether the United States will effectively slip the moorings of its national character.
What is at stake is whether the federal government is still an entity of constitutionally limited powers. If Washington may pass a piece of legislation requiring every citizen of the United States to purchase a specific product, such as health insurance, this is no longer so. If it may use the administrative state as an end-run around the legislative process, such as by having the EPA regulate carbon emissions because cap and trade can’t pass, this is no longer so. And if it may launch a judicial jihad against states that enforce federal laws that Washington routinely ignores for political purposes, this is not so.
What is at stake is whether the United States will possess an aspirational economy based around the dignity of human striving or an entitlement economy based on political connections. It is no coincidence that today Washington, D.C. possesses one of the few robust job markets in the nation. That fact is a metaphor for our parasite on the Potomac. Washington can only grow fatter by devouring the nutrients that would ordinarily sustain the rest of the country. In Barack Obama’s America, a lobbyist is a sounder business investment than a new factory. And as a result, politics are more important than products in the marketplace. That is not economic freedom.
What is at stake is whether the friendship of the United States is a meaningful asset for other nations and whether that friendship will continue to be extended on the basis of American values of freedom, democracy, and security. An America that flogs Israel for sport; that treats the special relationship with the United Kingdom as a vestige of an imperial past, and that can’t bring itself to advocate for freedom abroad, is but a shadow of a great nation.
Some liberal pundits have blanched at those who are rallying around the slogan “take our country back.” On the left, this is interpreted as provincialism at best and racism at worst – the obvious product of a nation so hidebound that a significant percentage of its populace can’t reconcile itself to a black president (liberals would do well to ask themselves how many of those same Tea Party protesters are horrified at Clarence Thomas’s presence on the Supreme Court). But what they fail to understand is that conservative activists don’t want to take the country back for someone; they want to take it back to something. As Ronald Reagan once said, “I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past’s way of facing the future.”
That something is the historical promise of America: The promise that we would be free at home, strong abroad and confident enough in our people to trust them with the liberty that is rightfully theirs. That promise is not partisan. It is a common communion open to all Americans. The 2010 election is a chance to rejoin that communion. So vote like it counts.
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