Much has been made of the GOP’s ineffectiveness at halting or reversing President Obama’s agenda, at the party’s failure to live up to the expectations that propelled it to the victories in 2010 and 2014 that produced the Congressional majorities in place today. People have expressed deep disappointment with the Republican leadership for not “standing up” to Obama, no matter that, without supermajorities, the options are very limited.
The root of this disappointment is a mistaken view of the current political landscape. People tend to view conflicts in the short term. In the language of war, they’re likely to see the current clash as a battle. This is the mistake. The conflict at hand, the one between relentlessly creeping statism and attempts to restore liberty and limited government, is a siege.
The Constitution is a fortification against the unfettered rapacity of statist hordes. It was erected as a structure to limit government, to restrict government to a defined set of roles and duties, and to prevent government from encroaching on the liberties of individuals. It needed some fixing up, most notably around the time of the Civil War, but in general it did a decent job for more than half the nation’s history.
The siege began in earnest at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Sixteenth Amendment, which permitted taxation based on income, was initiated in 1909 and ratified in 1913. This created a massive new revenue stream for the federal government, and has enabled government’s growth to its current leviathan size. The Seventeenth Amendment, which took the election of Senators out of the hands of state legislatures and made it a popular vote, was itself a response to statist corruption, but by severing the connection between senators and state governments ultimately generated a huge power shift from the states to the federal government. These amendments coincided with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who was an overt statist who led a massive expansion of the federal government’s size and scope.
The siege abated under President’s Harding and Coolidge, who shrank government dramatically, but came back in full force under FDR, and has but for a few speed bumps continued unabated ever since.
The national debt, a measure of government’s irresponsibility, has been growing inexorably and increasingly rapidly since the Johnson administration. At the beginning of the Bush administration, it was $5.7T, and at the beginning of the Obama administration, it was $10.6T. It currently stands at just over $19T. We’ve been told by Keynesian economists that government spending has a beneficial effect on the economy, but despite all this spending we today stand in an extended period of economic malaise teetering on the edge of another recession with a national debt that recently exceeded 100% of GDP. Combined with the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, that debt works as sappers do, undermining the integrity of the nation’s economic edifice. At some point, the walls will collapse from a lack of foundational support.
Lest we think it’s only about spending, consider the regulatory engines of the siege. Liberty took a brutal hit during Obama’s first two years, with the Affordable Care Act’s government takeover of 1/7th of the economy, adding to and compounding the damage done by decades of relentless and ever-growing regulatory assault whose birth can be traced to LBJ’s Great Society.
The walls of liberty were fortified a bit during the two mid-term elections in 2010 and 2014, when the Tea Party movement emplaced some liberty-loving congressmen and tipped the balance away from the more statist party, but the edifice has continued to suffer under the relentless and multi-weapon barrage from statist artillery.
Sieges can be withstood by two means: by outlasting the enemy’s resolve and supplies, or by the arrival of reinforcements from outside. At our current juncture, our only hope lies in the latter. The defenders of liberty’s walls are not only being assaulted from without, they are being sabotaged and betrayed from within by those who have professed loyalty to the tenets of liberty. The Tea Party freshmen, elected to fight back big government and endless taxation, were told to sit down and shut up by the Congressional leadership their election elevated to the majority. Old-guard Republicans, themselves big fans of statism as long as they’re the ones in charge, haven’t shown a great deal of interest in honoring the wishes of those who put them back in charge. They talk the talk, and pretend to ally with the freedom fighters, but have turned out to be either bystanders or collaborators.
What does this mean for the current election?
- Recognize that we need to work within the existing fortifications. Our winner-take-all system heavily favors a two party outcome, and we’re far more likely to survive the siege by staying within the existing walls of one of the parties than by trying to build a new fort from scratch.
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Expel the collaborators. The most statist members of the GOP should be voted out, and hopefully replaced with representatives that will actually fight for liberty. Some losses may have to be tolerated until reinforcements arrive, but removing the internal threats is vital. Similarly, don’t bring new collaborators inside the fortification, merely because they’re not quite as bad as the people on the outside.
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Recognize that the siege will last a long time, far longer than this election cycle and the next administration.
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Accept that there are limits to what can be done until the reinforcements arrive, and strategize accordingly. A holding strategy with targeted skirmishes is far better than a suicidal, Gallipoli-like charge at the enemy.
Restoring liberty is a long-term challenge. It behooves us to remember that. Focusing only on the short term, i.e. the next election, can not only lead to despair, but distract us from working towards the ultimate goal.
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