TWILIGHT OF THE TWITS :

Why are conservatives winning? (Dick Morris, June 21, 2002, Jewish World Review)

Leftist parties have always focused on economics in general and income redistribution in particular. Indeed, most modern social-democratic parties were founded as a political expression of the labor movement's demand for industrial fairness. When such parties existed before the age of the unions, labor has taken them over, as with the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century United States.

But economics no longer work as a key political issue. Globalism determines the winners and losers of the economic game much more than any national policies. International bankers are replacing nation-state presidents and premiers as the key movers and shakers in the markets. The left's agenda is a fantasy. Voters realize that a promise to raise incomes is as serious as one to change the weather. (Indeed, with the saliency of global warming and climate change as issues, perhaps the weather is more amenable to political intervention.) [...]

Can the left come back? Absolutely. [...]

The enterprising Social Democrat will find a plethora of values positions on which to run in place of the traditional bread-and-butter issues. Global warming, pollution, education standards and healthcare reform, for example, are great issues for any liberal candidate.

So the West (the former Christendom) perceives itself as locked in a twilight struggle with Islam, which, rightly or wrongly, casts its jihad as a holy war. Parties of the Right--parties that use the ancient code words of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and racism--are resurgent in Europe. Americans of all stripes, from liberals to libertarians to, of course, conservatives, are marching in lockstep in a war against Islamicist terror, the American polity more unified in this time of war than in any conflict since WWII. The entire language of our politics has been returned to that of an earlier day. Gone are the one world platitudes of FDR, replaced by the racialist and imperialist exhortations of Teddy Roosevelt. Not only is multiculturalism a dead letter, there's near universal support for monoculturalism--and that one culture is ours.

Having greeted their theses with derision when they were propounded, we all now embrace the two most profound conservative cultural critics of recent decades, accepting, as Samuel Huntington, said that this is a Clash of Civilizations and, as Francis Fukuyama said, that the West's form of liberal capitalist protestant democracy represents the "End of History", the ideal system of human governance. And, combining the two, we demonstrate a growing willingness to hasten other civilizations towards that end. After nearly a century of liberalism, humanism, anti-imperialism and the rest, a time during which intellectual elites had little difficulty dismissing conservative warnings about the erosion of Western Culture, there's suddenly a mammoth lurch back to the Right, an eager defense of the traditional culture that must now be seen as having uniquely provided the basis for the End of History and as having given us the wherewithal to triumph in the Clash. It must come as no surprise that in concert with this megatrend there's been a rise in the political fortunes of political parties of the Right and a precipitous decline of parties of the Left, who have after all been busy for a century telling us that culture doesn't matter and that our civilization is no better than any other. As the great Malcolm X said : "the chickens have come home to roost".

And how does Dick Morris believe the Left can latch onto this phenomenon? By advocating environmental issues, education spending, and greater social welfare benefits. Is it possible to more completely misunderstand the world around you? Dick Morris, like his vile acolyte Bill Clinton, is an unserious man who was well-suited to an unserious time--the 1990s. The Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson were roundly condemned when in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 they suggested that it might represent an angry God's judgment upon a people and a culture that had debased themselves. Yet, who among us did not feel a surge of some inchoate emotion that told us that at last we had a serious purpose to pursue as a nation? Who in those heady days and after did not feel that America and her people were better on the 12th than they had been on the 10th? Who in these months has not hugged a child closer, been nicer to a neighbor, thought more deeply about our place in the universe, been, quite simply, a better, more worthy, person than they had been? Who did not hear and respond to President Bush's summons to be once again a great people and to be steadfast in our defense and vindication of our too degraded culture?

And Dick Morris thinks that what we want right now is environmentalism, socialism, and the like? Dick Morris looks out across the vast American vista and he sees a people coming toward Washington with hands outstretched. A child of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s he knows them to be coming to make demands on government, to declare, like Bellow's Henderson the Rain King : I want, I want, I want... But the world has shifted out from under him. Those outstretched hands belong to people saying : I have, I have, I have, I have so much more than I need and I want so much to share. Some of the hands bear bread and some bear arms, but all seek, as Americans have so often before, to do for others, either to free or to feed the people of Afghanistan and beyond. They wait to be summoned to some great task, to be asked to go beyond themselves. It's unlikely this moment will last. It's unlikely they'll be asked to be great, to, for example, give up their dependence on government. But the opportunity is here. And all the Dick Morrises of the world can think to do is offer them a pay off?

Thank God the Age of Morris and Clinton is over. Good bye and good riddance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 21, 2002 11:07 AM