2013’s lesson for conservatives

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Washington Post:

This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an annus mirabilis for conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time and effort.

 

Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society.

 

It is difficult to recall and hard to believe that just three months ago some conservatives, mirroring progressives’ lack of respect for the public, considered it imperative to shut down the government in order to stop Obamacare in its tracks. They feared that once Americans got a glimpse of the law’s proffered subsidies, they would embrace it. Actually, once they glimpsed the law’s details, they recoiled.

 

Counterfactual history can illuminate the present, so: Suppose in 2012, Barack Obama had told the truth about the ability of people to keep their health plans. Would he have been reelected? Unlikely. Suppose in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts, instead of rewriting the health-care law to save it, had been the fifth vote for overturning it. Would Obama be better off today? Probably.

 

Franklin Roosevelt, emboldened by winning a second term in 1936, attempted to pack, by expanding, the Supreme Court, to make it even more compliant toward his statism. He failed to win congressional compliance, and in 1938 he failed to purge Democrats who had opposed him. The voters’ backlash against him was so powerful that there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress until after the 1964 election.

 

That year’s landslide win by President Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, less than 12 months after a presidential assassination, left Democrats with 295 House and 68 Senate seats. Convinced that a merely sensible society would be a paltry aspiration, they vowed to build a Great Society by expanding legislation and regulation into every crevice of Americans’ lives. They lost five of the next six and seven of the next 10 presidential elections. In three years we shall see if progressive overreaching earns such a rebuke.

 

In 2013, the face of progressivism became Pajama Boy, the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux-adult who embodies progressives’ belief that life should be all politics all the time — come on, everybody, spend your holidays talking about health care. He is who progressives are.

________

 

The state of conservatism 2013.