Today, we’ll decide on a new President. By most accounts, we’re going to elect Barack Obama. There have been lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from conservatives that this is the end times, that America is falling into the end of an empire morass that almost always tends towards more government, slowly becoming statist. For a little while, I bought into that doomsday scenario and combined with the financial market meltdown and the buyouts of Wall Street, I was a little gloomy about the future of conservatism in America. Hell, for a little while there, I was gloomy about the future of America in general. While I still think there is great danger oozing out from the financial and monetary decisions our elected leaders have made over the last 30 years, I think we’re going to pull through that.
I think we’ll pull through this flirtation with statism too.
America consistently self-identifies with conservativism. America was founded on principles of freedom and liberty and those values still run powerfully through the political veins of many people here. I think most Americans think it’s pitiful that we would bailout people who were unable to afford their mortgages. I think most Americans think it’s pitiful that we would bail out companies who made stupid bets on exotic financial derivatives that they couldn’t understand or correctly value. And I think Americans will soon show that having the state become even more involved in our lives is the last thing we’re trying to do in this election contrary to the left’s beliefs that electing Obama is a mandate for change.
As Bill Quick says, if a completely unappealing conservative candidate like John McCain can basically take Obama and his statist, big government policies right down to the wire in a time when Americans are fed up with the current Republican President and his failed war and a terrible economy, then Americans aren’t screaming for change and more government. Obama doesn’t have a mandate. He has luck. And I think he’ll find that in four years, his attempts to bring bigger government into the lives of the American people will result in his being tossed out on his ear.
We’ve been in this situation before where Democrats swept to power based on the follies of Republican leaders. When that happened last time in 1992, it resulted in the Republican party retrenching and returning to true conservative roots. Republicans are getting kicked out this time, not because they are conservative but because they didn’t act conservative once we put them in office. It seems that they have to be taught a lesson every 16 years or so that America wants government to stay the hell out of our lives. This time will be no different. I think we’ll see 2 years of Democratic majority preside over one of the worst recessions of our times followed by a sweep to power of a Republican party that has “found” conservativism again.
I think we’ve been pulled back from the brink of having to move to France. Too many Americans want to be left alone to run their lives, their businesses, their faith. I have high hopes for a return to a fiscally conservative, socially liberal zeitgeist once people are reminded that big-government machine types almost always make it harder on the average person. We will have another battle in this war of statism versus liberty.
Eventually, liberty will win out.