Statism's insidious evolution

I wrote this morning about Ezra Klein's hissy fit, pitched this morning on Morning Joe when Joe Scarborough called Klein's fondness for government interventions in the economy "progressive". To Klein and the Left, the interventions are only pragmatic applications of good policies. Klein's spin to avoid the progressive label is telling. After every period of statist over-reach when the public pushes back, the Left has to rely on obscurantism to go forward. In the 70s and 80s when the word liberal became a political slur, the Left avoided the label. It gradually became fashionable, with the help of Hillary Clinton, to use the term progressive in place of liberal, but now that everyone knows it's just more Leftist interventionism which ends in spending and taxing, the Left will have to go further with the narrative they started a while back but never successfully developed and sold to the American people -- the idea that Leftist proposals are just good policy and pragmatically sound. The Left will attempt to convince the American people that Republicans are reactionaries, holding onto failed policies of the past which favor the rich, stagnate the middle class and oppress the poor. The Left only wants to implement humane regulations which make the system fair -- they don't want the government to completely control the economy -- just make it fair, that's all. Sounds reasonable.

The civil Left is in double trouble now with the violent episodes and rhetoric emanating from OWS becoming routine -- they have a lot of obscuring to do. How can anyone in the Democrat Party openly embrace OWS, but how can they hold the base if they don't support OWS? The issue will be pressed in 2012. The Left will be forced to clarify its positions. Many OWS supporters are calling for violent solutions and they entail State power like we've never witnessed. The uncivil Left will not be satisfied with incremental changes, and if the pressure is to cut spending and reduce regulations, and if the Democrat Party doesn't fight against spending reductions  and regulation reduction, then the Democrats are in trouble. The Democrats will have to openly call for more State power in order to appease the base.

As I wrote last year, 2012 will be about statism vs anti-statism, even if not in those terms. The big question facing Americans is the role of government in our lives, in the economy and in foreign affairs going into the 21st century. What we don't know, related to the elections, is how many people who've never voted will vote this year, and will it help the statists or anti-statists? The global economic crisis is evidence that statism has failed universally. The temporary bubble in China is not evidence to the contrary.

If the Left is able, once again, to convince enough voters that they are simply offering smart, pragmatic government, then America will continue down the statist road to financial collapse. We've already been downgraded, and it won't be long before we reach junk bond status, and the interest rate hikes will kill us financially. If the Right doesn't pull together philosophically and create a true opposition to statism and diligently fight to limit government power and create a free market, then the same thing will happen.

The Left is pressured to lay its cards on the table by its base, so I don't know how much room it has to practice the art of obscurantism. The Right is pressured to stand on principles and quit capitulating to the Left. The bases of both parties are making it hard for politicians to hide in the Center, feather their nests and slowly grow the power of the State. Statism's insidous evolution has reached a turning point at which we'll go all in and allow the State to control absolutely, or we'll start the process of roll-back. The Left has framed the process of roll-back as reactionary and obstructionist, but statism has become traditional -- since the turn of the 20th century, statism has evolved as our system of government -- a mixture of socialism, state-capitalism, fascism -- just a mixture of intervention, planning and engineering. So, in a weird way, the Left are the conservatives attempting to conserve the statist system.

The Right, the new, limited government Right, is the dynamic movement, attempting to change the tradition, to liberate the economy, to transform our relationships with foreign nations, to allow freedom of choice. The old, conservative forces are fighting against dynamic, systemic change -- they want to maintain the statist system which keeps government in control of the economy and, ultimately our lives.

The Paul supporters have it right -- this is the revolution.