CAMPAIGN COUNTDOWN: IT STARTS WITH THE MONEY Print E-mail
Steyn on America
Monday, 25 October 2010
All this week at SteynOnline, we're looking at what I regard as the key issues in this year's big vote. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so drop us a line at Mark's Mailbox. We're starting today with the most basic issue of all: We're broke.
Ive spent much of this election season overseas, a long way from internal polls for this or that House district, so Im not too focused on the fortunes of particular Republican candidates or particular Democrat incumbents. But nor is a big chunk of the electorate: A Republican victory is not the end but merely the means. The Tea Party and other members of Americas beleaguered productive class decided that this time round it suited them to work within the diseased husk of the GOP. This is really the last chance for the unloved Republicans. If the party establishment is sufficiently dimwitted to see November 2nd as the restoration of the 2004-2006 GOP, they will be setting up the conditions (as Rush has already argued) for a serious third-force challenge in 2012. That would be less convulsive than a remoter though still possible scenario: If the Democrats manage to hold onto power by openly funding spoiler candidates, they would be discrediting the entire electoral process, and setting up pre-revolutionary conditions. In other words, it would be very easy for both parties to confirm the suspicion of a very disenchanted electorate that the system no longer allows for serious course correction.
And, without serious course correction, America is doomed. It starts with the money. For dominant powers, it always does from the Roman Empire to the British Empire. Declinism is in the air these days, but for us full-time apocalyptics were already well past that stage. In the space of one generation, a nation of savers became the worlds largest debtors, and a nation of makers and doers became a cheap service economy. Everything that can be outsourced has been manufacturing to by no means friendly nations overseas; and much of whats left in agriculture and construction to the armies of the undocumented. At the lower end, Americans are educated at a higher cost per capita than any nation except Luxembourg in order to do minimal-skill checkout-line jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology. At the upper end, Americas elite goes to school till early middle age in order to be credentialed for pseudo-employment as $350 grand-a-year diversity consultants (Michelle Obama) or in one of the many other phony-baloney makework schemes deriving from government micro-regulation of virtually every aspect of endeavor...
