LEADVILLE, Colo.—The elections are behind us, and yet some of you are still squirming in your chairs over the results, feeling a little anxious (those of you suffering from withdrawal; something’s wrong with you). Other folks are just ready to move on, plugging their TVs in again, and around here we’ve even resumed conversing with strangers.
So I shouldn’t mess with the vibe. “Jim, c’mon, cut us loose. Do one of those biofuel columns again, or maybe one on whether those curved sneakers can actually get me in shape without a gym membership.”
Alright, settle down. We’ll certainly dabble in these priorities, but it’s only fitting that I give my opinion about “What just happened?”
With economic and stimulus bailouts, increased encroachment on private industry, and health care reform, a first step to public option national health care, the Democratic Party illustrated an approach to governing that at its core emphasizes government expansion and taxpayer-funded entitlements.
Democrats had the power but lacked support for their agenda. They mistook the American people’s rejection of the previous administration and Republican control as an acceptance of the Democratic Party’s progressive agenda.
Let’s go back a bit, for reference. Before World War II (WW II) both Democratic and Republican parties represented traditional American values and culture, which generally expected citizens to carry their own weight and be responsible to family, friends, neighbors, and community. They embraced the U.S. Constitution’s official recognition of a "Creator” playing a role in human existence, providing fundamental rights to all human beings.
You were born with them, not allowed them by man.
The American way was an attitude that expected limited government intrusion on the road to happiness and prosperity, to live life as he/she saw fit. The individual and the private sector were emphasized as natural resources for innovation, ideas, and development.
Post WW II World
Post WW II, America found itself rebuilding enemy and allied nations, and resolving disputes as the world’s new “sheriff.” In the subsequent Cold War, America was also THE deterrent to the global spread of communism—a very real threat at the time.
Concerned by the expansion of U.S. military and intelligence presence worldwide, the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, and war and human suffering in general, many liberal-minded citizens sought alternative solutions and questioned the establishment, culminating in the social unrest of the 1960s and the rise of leftist radicalism in America.
As traditional American institutions and orthodox views were targeted, many leftists explored, and even embraced, socialist, Marxist, and communist ideals. These progressive thinkers were attracted to utopian and egalitarian themes and often resented what they called the “imperial” role of America.
Am I equating American leftists to Chinese or former Soviet Union communists? No. Americans can be attracted to the romantic ideal while ignoring history’s brutal reality. I believe that to be the case here.
This attraction took firm hold in academic and artistic communities, where its cultural influence grew as it gradually spread to the rest of our culture, our educational system, the arts, popular entertainment, and news media.
Politically that thinking found a home among leftists in the Democratic Party, culminating recently in the democratically-controlled Congress’s progressive agenda and approach to governing. Rejection of this approach and the elements behind it is what happened on Nov. 2.
It isn’t a rejection of Democrats. It is a rejection of these progressive ideals and principles, and their contradiction to our traditional American view of the role of government, of who we are … and what we’re about.
A sentiment which apparently is still alive and kicking. Hard.
Now, about those fancy curved sneakers…
