The Big Idea

Jane Galt compares the ideas of the left and the right in America.

Conservatives have a few things that pretty much all of them can agree on: the lower taxes are, the better; government programmes and regulations often create more problems than they solve; keep your damn hands off our guns. Pretty much everyone from the Libertarians to James Dobson and Co. can get behind this platform, and sell it to the American public. You can even add "The US military should be able to kick the [expletive deleted] of anyone who threatens us in any way" and keep all but the most hard-core Libertarians. I'm sure there are a couple of other things you could throw in, and still get a platform that is reasonably large, coherent, and agreeable to not only pretty much the entire conservative movement, but a fair number of moderates besides. There are lots--LOTS--of things that the conservatives disagree on, from gay marriage to flag burning. But there are enough that the conservative movement can craft a mission statement and sell it to America.

What's the liberal Big Idea? Raise taxes? I'd say pretty much all the liberals I know are for that . . . but raising taxes, even "raising taxes on the rich", is not an ends, but a means, unless you're the kind of emotional toddler who wants to take other people's things away just because you can't have them. And the left (into which I throw moderate Democrats, just as I'll throw moderate Republicans on the right) does not agree what it wants to do with the taxes it raises. The DLC types (and swing voters) want to close the budget deficit in a (IMHO futile) attempt to build the Clinton legacy. The left-liberals want a big government health care programme, and other sorts of Great Society style social programmes. The far left wants . . . ohhh, a lot of things, but they're not going to get any of them, so that hardly seems relevant.

The idea that the left is defined not by what it stands for, but for what it stands against has been percolating for a while.

I've been seeing a lot of evidence of it in my alternate life on SantorumBlog. Senator Rick Santorum is the new Jesse Helms. No matter what he does, the left hates him. Now he's up for re-election, the Democrat's establishment candidate is not really their kind of guy (pro-life... also pro-Alito). As you can imagine, they're not for Bob Casey. They're against Rick Santorum.

Kind of like Rick Lazio was. He ran against Hillary Clinton in 2000 for the Senate. Yeah, you remember him. Right?

Politics Posted by AlexC at February 23, 2006 11:57 AM