Screeds
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Battles Of The Bulge
August 28, 2002
Few wars are free of a last surge by the eventual loser. In such a surge, he appears to reverse the current of the conflict, throw the eventual winner on the defensive, and come near to victory. After hostilities have ceased, the winner usually claims that the outcome was never in doubt, but this retroactive optimism is seldom substantiated by the facts.
Several ideological wars of our time appear headed for happy endings, and perhaps quite soon. With voucher programs and homeschooling showing such superior results, the educrats are everywhere on the defensive, even in locales that pride themselves on the quality of their State-run educational institutions. Sales-tax holidays and exemptions for specified merchandise have indicated clearly that enterprise and prosperity thrive in a low-tax environment. Several states are moving to ban partial-birth abortions, and an increasing number of physicians and physicians-in-training are declaring themselves unwilling to perform abortions at all.
Don’t schedule the victory parades yet. Counterattacks are in progress: well organized, well funded counterattacks that, though they might ultimately fail, should remind us all that the enemy is not to be taken lightly. Even if they do fail, we could see a period during which the pro-freedom Right must adopt defensive positions.
Knowing that control of the schools is a critical factor in its dominance over American thought, the Left is doing its utmost to retard the move toward educational choice. Now that the Constitutional battle is over, Leftist pundits are machine-gunning the electorate with the usual terrors: segregation by race, means, sexual orientation, and intellectual ability. People are listening. To make the case that educational freedom is not only a legitmate thing but a good thing, we must slay each head of this dragon separately, and hope that new ones won’t pop up to replace the ones removed.
Taxation shills are less well equipped and face a steeper hill of public disesteem, but they’re fighting nonetheless. Here we see flanking maneuvers, attempts to circumvent the general subject of taxation as a brake on prosperity by pushing another consideration to the fore. For example:
- The battle over taxing Internet commerce is framed as a matter of fairness to the proprietors of bricks-and-mortar retail stores.
- The battle over the income tax in Tennessee is painted as a matter of life or death for TennCare, that state’s bloated, grotesquely inefficient public health insurance program.
- The battle over the income tax in New Hampshire is cast as a matter of funding equity for the inmates of New Hampshire’s government-run schools.
The pro-abortion forces, horrified that distaste and a resurgence of private morality might overturn their three decades of gains, are training legal cannons on us. In California, a law that would make induced-abortion training mandatory for all physicians has passed both houses of the legislature and sits on Governor Gray Davis’s desk. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already signed such a law, which would bind all medical schools in the city. Appeals courts in Florida and Texas have struck down state laws that require parental notification before an abortion is performed on a minor. The United States Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska law that would have banned partial-birth abortions, because the law did not provide an exemption to protect the health of the mother.
If these are spoiling attacks whose effect will merely postpone inevitable defeat, they are nonetheless threatening. We must not ignore them. However, if they are a final, ultimately doomed surge by the Left, after which we can expect to prevail, they speak to us of important things, and we would be wise to listen.
First, they would illustrate one of the foundational tenets of the freedom philosophy: When people are free, their best and most civil character will emerge. This isn’t the same as saying that people are intrinsically good. Rather, it’s a recognition that the traditional virtues of respect for life, a willingness to work for what one wants, and concern for the well-being of others are good things, that will triumph over decadence and dissolution when free to do so. It refutes the power pleas of the authoritarian communitarians, who lacked ultimate confidence in those values and wanted to impose them on us by force.
Second, they would illuminate the nature of political processes in a dynamic society. The argument for government with a popular base—a republic whose officers are chosen by an elective process—is not merely that it ensures the consent of the governed. Indeed, we have seen elections throw up men whose intent was anything but to abide by the will of the governed. However, the requirement for popular confirmation of our officials by regular elections has averted violent revolution. Ballots really have displaced bullets, even though ideas completely divergent from the ones that animated the Founding have been tried all over the land. Therefore, in principle ballots can return us, nonviolently, to the Founding ideas, given time.
Third, they would confirm that the American people are politically educable. The Left’s days of hegemony were largely based on deceit. Its vanguard polished the art of saying one thing and doing another. Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for President on a small-government, hard-money platform. After he won, he discarded the platform and proceeded to do the exact opposite. Bill Clinton did much the same, with the bonus of sufficient personal misconduct to keep the tabloids busy. But the electorate, though fooled and kept fooled for a seeming eternity, proved capable of recognizing its mistakes.
Mine is a cautious optimism. Few things political are carved in stone. In our troubled, querulous time, one cannot rely on victory until it actually arrives—and one cannot expect the Left to surrender graciously on any matter of importance. Patience, endurance, and confidence are all called for, as we strive to outlast the enemy’s bulge.
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