"Safe" from Government. The Radical Right seems to think that only other people are watched by Government and their own freedoms will never be imperiled, no matter how large the Government gets. How foolish.
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Big Government is almost synonymous with the Left, and the Republicans are making Government ever larger and more intrusive, despite campaigning endlessly on rhetoric about shrinking government down to size.
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A prime example is an Associated Press story hilited on AOL yesterday.

Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith has an unusual bedfellow in the Supreme Court fight over her late husband's fortune: the Bush administration.

The administration's top Supreme Court lawyer filed arguments on Smith's behalf and wants to take part when the case is argued before the justices. * * *

A federal bankruptcy judge sided with Smith in the fight over her late husband's estate, awarding her $474 million. That was reduced to about $89 million by a federal district judge, then thrown out altogether by a federal appeals court.

The issue before the high court is one only lawyers would love: when may federal courts hear claims that are also involved [in] state probate proceedings. Smith lost in Texas state courts, which found that E. Pierce Marshall was the sole heir to his father's estate.

The Bush administration's filings in the case are technical. Without getting into the details of the family squabble, Solicitor General Paul Clement said that the justices should protect federal court jurisdiction in disputes.

Hmm. A former Texas governor is causing his Solicitor General to side with the Federal Government to invade the jurisdiction of Texas courts and overrule Texas courts as to the disposition of the estate of a Texan. That's conservatism?
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Bush I instigated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which enormously increased the power of the Federal Government to tell states and localities what to do as regards "disabilities", permitted fat people to claim that being gluttonous pigs is a "disability" that entitles them to special treatment, produced billions of dollars of frivolous lawsuits, and required states and localities to spend tens of billions of dollars on "accessibility" improvements to infrastructure, none of which have been reimbursed by the Federal Government.
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Bush II instigated the "No Child Left Behind" law that has invaded an area of exclusive state jurisdiction, education, and saddled states and municipalities with many more billions of dollars of "unfunded mandates".
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Since localities, counties, and states are largely dependent upon property taxes for their base revenues, these unfunded mandates — a favorite tool of the Big Government, Federal empire-building people: states and localities are to pay for their own subjection — such infrastructure improvements have contributed, in some places substantially, to a sharp rise in property taxes.
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The Bush II spending spree has produced the largest budget deficits in the history of the world, which means that in future years more and more of the Nation's wealth will be devoted to interest on the national debt, and the Feds will divert an ever-larger share of the Nation's resources to unproductive interest payments.
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All the while the Bushies are making Government ever bigger and greedier of both money and power, they talk the talk of "smaller government"!
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Radical Rightists of the fiscal-conservative camp are horrified but have allowed themselves to be co-opted into co-conspiring in the growth of Government by the marriage of fiscal profligacy to social conservatism. The cost of stopping homos from marrying is to see the Federal Government grow ever bigger, ever richer, ever more irresistible.
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Indeed, the whole gay-marriage issue is a case in point: regulating marriage has always been a state power. The "conservatives" want to take that power away and substitute a uniform national (that is, Federal) marriage law! Yet "conservatives" don't see this is a power grab against the states. Amazing.
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Equally amazing is the apparent 'understanding' of the Right that they will always control the national government. Elections make no difference. The stupid will always be conned successfully, and Republicans will always control the White House and Congress. Alternation in power between Republicans and Democrats is a thing of the past. The Democratic Party is a spent force that will never get its act together, never find a way to show the poor white-trash base of the Republican Right's primacy that they have been played for fools by people who hate them. We will have one-party rule forever, and that one party will be the Republicans. Well of course it will.
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Never mind that the Supreme Court, even under a conservative majority, might strike down redistricting plans that entrench incumbents.
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Never mind that throughout our history the two major parties have always alternated in power. The Republican Right seems to believe in "the end of history".

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." (quoted from "The End of History?", 1989)

The man who coined the phrase "The End of History", as above, Francis Fukuyama, found that the phrase was often misunderstood (as well it might be), so clarified it three years later:

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

For Rightwing Republicans, it is plain that they have bestowed upon mankind "a form of society that satisfie[s] its deepest and most fundamental longings", and there will be no backsliding, no alteration of their utopia: Republican-dominated electoral democracy in politics and free-run capitalism in economics will always rule the world.
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"Liberal democracy" as generally understood is not the same as "liberalism" — the Republican Right will be relieved to hear — but it does give Western societies the mechanism by which problems of economic and social inequality can be addressed and fixed. But the Republican Right loves inequality, the starker the better! Unfortunately for them, the greater the gap between The Rich and The Rest of Us becomes, the more likely it becomes that there will be an electoral revolt, and a new group of people will be installed to correct the imbalance.
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Even if the present Democratic leadership is feeble and unappealing, who says they will remain in the leadership? And even if the Democratic Party should indeed prove to be a spent force, there is nothing to prevent it from being replaced by a new party. Remember the Whigs? They were the other major party in our two-party system before the 1860s, but vanished into history. That did not mean the two-party system and alternation between parties vanished. The Republican Party replaced them, and the alternation in power continued.
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I cannot believe that the Liberal Left will always be feckless and useless, disorganized, divided, and permanently in the minority. If they (we) have to abandon the Democratic Party wholesale and create a new, aggressive party filled with new people and new ideas, we will do so.
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And when that new group, be it a reinvigorated Democratic Party or a new major party, comes into power, it will have a vastly more powerful Federal Government to use to crush the Right with. Warrantless searches thru bank accounts, domestic and offshore, telephone conversations and emails, computer and paper files; arrests without warrants; incarceration without trial or attorney for years — all the powers of Huge Government that the Radical Right is using and entrenching now can be turned against them in the future.
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Don't you just love the future?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,172.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:14 PM