Who's Really "Destroying Government"?
Topic: Liberal Fascism
I’ve argued before that progressivism requires intelligent people to pretend that they’re stupid. This may be called the institutional stupidity of the Left, and examples abound. Take progressives’ oft-repeated charge that conservatives “hate government.” The public is asked to believe that the neocons, the Tea Party, the GOP, etc. seek not to limit the power of the federal government but actually to demolish it. That there exists scarcely a speck of evidence in support of that claim bothers progressives not at all. True to form, they trust that if they repeat the charge loudly and often enough, it will stick. This is a crude, unsophisticated lie. In a word, it’s stupid.
As a matter of fact, the people most interested in demolishing the power of the federal government are not conservatives at all. They’re libertarians, and Ron Paul is their herald. Conservatives, on the other hand, want the federal government to possess all the power it needs to carry out its legitimate duties. This is a distinction that makes a considerable difference.
Too, be sure, it’s difficult to generalize about this issue. Even within the ranks of the conservative movement, there’s disagreement about what are and are not the proper functions of the federal government. Unlike progressives, whose opinions are stamped out for them by the same ideological cookie cutter, conservatives are a fractious lot. On social issues, on foreign policy, on economic policy, the conservative movement exhibits many shades of opinion. For some, social issues such as abortion are most important. Others worry more about America’s global standing, while others point with alarm at the nation’s precarious financial position.
But it’s fair to say that most conservatives believe the federal government has become too expensive, too intrusive and too unmindful of the traditional American commitment to individual liberty. Conservatives are arguing, in effect, that government has become too big for its own good. As it strives to do more and more, the federal government progressively squanders its credibility. The abject failure of Barack Obama’s grand experiment in stimulus, with bankrupt Solyndra as its poster child, is only the most recent example of this dismal trend. People have lost faith in the government’s ability to do anything—including the things that everyone agrees it should do.
The chief responsibility for the collapse of public confidence in government lies with progressives like Barack Obama. Though it would be wrong to hold the Republican Party blameless (George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” comes to mind in this connection), the doctrine of big, activist government is specifically the doctrine of the Left. And the Left’s stupid lie about conservatives’ desire to “destroy government” is really nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention from that terrible mess that progressives in their hubris have created.
Posted by tmg110
at 9:25 AM EDT