The will to fight

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Does the Right believe it's right? Limbaugh's column [Has the Right lost its will to fight?] follows an op-ed posted earlier this week on washingtonexaminer.com by Americans for Limited Government Vice President Richard Manning [Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson lifts veil on Establishment GOP's Stockholm Syndrome]. Manning tore into former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson for criticizing Tea Party conservatives who, he claims, seek "to break with the past in a very different manner - repudiating 80 years of institutional development and reinventing American as a nation that rejects the substantive role for regulation or a social safety net.” In other words, Gerson implied that the Right should simply accept the steady centralization of government and erosion of individual liberty caused by the "progressive" policies of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ and Barack Obama. Outraged, Manning argues that the GOP should utterly reject "the Regulatory State [that] is killing our nation, destroying the very concept of private property and consigning us into a Kafkaesque world ruled by an army of Lois Lerner clones." Can the GOP survive itself? The Limbaugh-Gerson-Manning debate points to what is likely to be the defining issue of the post-2014 state of American politics. By over-reaching across the domestic policy board, Obama has all-but discredited Big Government as a viable governing agenda. The ugly consequences are accelerating as his second term enters its terminal phase. That reality makes the debate within and without the GOP over repealing or reforming the wreckage of the progressive era the decisive discussion in American politics for years to come. Participants and observers should act accordingly.  [Full Do Republicans want to repeal Democrats' disastrous Big Government or surrender to it?] Even as I gobbled up everything George Will wrote in the 80s and 90s, there was an undercurrent of liking big government too much that bothered me.  And George Will back then was pretty much the voice of conservatism.  Both Bush 41 and 43 were somehow able to incorporate big government into their brand of conservatism.  It was worrisome.  The Blogger "Spoons" and I argued over which of us had been the first person to call for Dubya's impeachment -- in early 2001! because of his proliferate spending (I'm sure it was me).  That canker blossom  has burst ,and there's pus everywhere.

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