Blog at One: Still Preaching Hope

This blog, one year later, still believes the combination of capitalism and democracy, leading to peace, will bring us a better world.

There’s nothing wrong with Tories--those who defend established institutions. We’ll always have Tories. But it helps to be clear just who the Tories are.

In 2007, the Democrats are defenders of the present, and the Republicans are the force for change. How can this be? Don’t Democrats stand for égalité, which we hardly have, and Republicans for liberté, a word used to justify capitalist oppression? Yes, but liberty, freedom, is about each person having their own ideas, making their own way in life, and for most of the world, this is our as yet unrealized dream.

The irony of “equality,” and the irony is rich indeed in the whole history of Marxism, is that somebody has to make life equal. Enter government, to “level the playing field.” The idea of someone else making our life better is as ancient as Plato's Republic. In the 20th Century, it's the Big Idea that failed.

In the Democrats’ ideal world, the “levelers” are the best and brightest. They graduate from the best schools. They win top jobs on merit. They gain power in the battle against capitalists by acting on behalf of the masses, i.e., they are “the vanguard of the proletariat.” They are academics, government servants, journalists, lawyers, NPO executives, Hollywood writers, actual mass leaders including union leaders, leaders of minority groups, women leaders of the Democratic Party. They rule on our behalf, a national elite, operating under the motto of the National Honor Society, noblesse oblige. They are Tories, protecting the status quo, threatened by independent-acting masses.

The Democrats are Tories not only in being our elite, but also in giving their affection to Europe. European elite education. European sophistication that has moved beyond Christianity. European socialism; European welfare statism. European love of small or non-existent families. European abhorrence of war and killing. European disgust with common Americans. Most of all, Europe’s sense that the elite has earned its leading role, and must either civilize or otherwise bend under those who threaten it. There is entitlement, and there are illegitimate pretenders to power.

So little of this description fits Republicans like Reagan, Bush, or Giuliani. But for Democrats, it works—Democrats like Kerry, Gore, Edward Kennedy, Howard Dean, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barbara Boxer.

Republicans were the dominant party in America when America was a string of small towns (Main Street, Sinclair Lewis, 1920). Towns had a hierarchy, but everybody went to the same church, the same school, the same socials. They talked to each other. They helped each other. Farmers were freemen, they weren’t tenant farmers like those who farmed for Tories. No, this was America, the land of the free!

Democrats are associated with cities, and the party grew with the importance of cities, the industrial revolution, immigration. Today, immigrants find it hard to relate to small-town, homogeneous Republicanism. They are more comfortable with cities. Cities are bigger, more impersonal, seemingly more in need of government and elite rule disconnected from the masses. Cities are European.

The suburbs are America’s political battleground. Suburbs’ link to central cities is obvious. But people move to suburbs because they yearn for the intimacy and caring of small town America.

The media and the entertainment industry are so city, so Tory, that to them, America’s Republican base is invisible. It's "fly-over country." I believe the Tories fear their loss of power, fight change, and feel despair where Republicans see hope.

Since Reagan’s election in 1980, Republicans have stood for hope, for the better life that comes from free economic competition, free choice in education, less government, increased individual responsibility. And Republicans support the hopeful world that comes from spreading democracy abroad. Since Reagan arrived in 1980, Republicans have had two bad elections—1992, when Bush 41 failed to make the economy work, and last year, when Bush 43 failed to win in Iraq. Otherwise, because Republicans offer hope to Tory cynicism and fear, and because Americans remain a hopeful people, Republicans have once again become America’s party.

Obama is right. The people want hope.