The Wheels Come Off

Since practically the first day of the Obama administration, one of the big questions has been how far down the road to serfdom Democratic senators and congressmen were willing to go in order to satisfy the President's ambitious, if initially vague, plans for an unprecedented expansion of federal power. Many went quite a long way down that road - some enthusiastically, others with great misgivings - but all are now facing the wrath of voters who have detected the smell of a socialist rat in the hope-and-change bouquet. The repercussions are already being felt: Republicans have taken the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, a Republican has won the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy (the political equivalent of landing a marlin with a fly rod), Harry Reid is a dead man walking, Granny Boxer's reelection bid is threatened, and several Democrats in the Senate and House have either decided to return to private life, or are weighing the option. A year after the most over-hyped election victory in history, the Democrats are reeling; and the G.O.P., which was last seen lumbering off to the elephant graveyard, is gaining not only in actual victories, but in generic party-preference polls.

All of which goes to show that it is almost always an exercise in futility to write the obituary, or pronounce the permanent victory, of any movement, cause or political party. The flame of belief will always burn sufficiently hot to sustain a minority in defeat, and hubris will just as frequently set the overconfident victors up for a fall. There are still Nazis in the world, and probably more communists at any dozen American universities you'd care to name who ardently believe in the tenets of Marxism than there are in North Korea. And even when a particular political theory falls into disfavor, the emotions, beliefs, desires (and not infrequently, the neuroses and ignorance) that gave it life will generally latch on to something similar - e.g., green has become the new red, the totalitarian impulse shifting from dreams of the workers' paradise to dreams of the Garden of Eden variety.

So, while it is good to see the Democrats momentarily thwarted in their long-term goal of permanently codifying the nanny state, this turn of events does not, in and of itself, prove that the Reagan years were anything more than the Indian summer of individual liberty and free enterprise. Somerset Maugham once wrote, "If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." The key is constant - not cyclical - vigilance; we may not always be able to count on the incompetence of Big Brother.