The conservative arguments against the re-election of Barack Obama are unassailable. The purposeful dismantling of a once-great economy and the global demeaning of a once-great society are almost too obvious to require any further argument. If not stopped, it will not be long before the United States of America reaches a point of no return on the possibilities of both economic recovery and the recovery of the basic human freedoms that were once the very meaning of “America” to the unfree peoples of the world.
Years ago, as a graduate student, there were often weeks when I had more than one major assignment to complete—for example, a twenty-page essay on Tuesday and a three-hour seminar presentation on Wednesday. Struggling with the first project, barely finishing it on time after two or three difficult nights, I would find myself, on Tuesday afternoon, faced with the hellish prospect of Wednesday morning’s presentation, to which I had hardly given a moment’s thought. Dragging a pile of books from the library back to my little teaching assistant’s office or my little one-room apartment, I would hole up for the night and try to overcome the seemingly insurmountable. Every so often, I would take a moment to calculate how many pages of writing I needed to do per hour in order to finish on time—impossible! One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock: as the night progressed, depending on how the work was going, the feeling of desperation would sometimes become overwhelming. At a certain point, almost reflexively, I would bolt up from the desk and go for a walk, or lie down for a nap. I was aware that this would shorten further what little time I had left, making successful completion of the project even more unlikely. And yet I had no choice, as it were; I was in the grip of an agonizing state comprised of equal parts hopelessness, sleeplessness, and desire to hide from the reality of my predicament.
My fellow graduate students all had similar experiences in their turn, of course. In fact, some of us had a simple name for the extremity of feeling I have just described: We called it The Fear. As in, “At 4:00am, I had The Fear for about an hour.”
For conservative Republicans—those falling under the Tea Party umbrella, broadly-conceived—this is 4:00am. The Fear is setting in. “What if Obama wins? What if we nominate someone who can’t defeat him? What if we stand on principle with our favorite conservative candidate, and end up damaging the man who will, in all likelihood, actually be our representative in the presidential election? Isn’t it too late to hope to change the race in favor of the best conservative? Mustn’t we settle for what we can get this time around?”
Four more years of Obama would indeed be catastrophic. Four years of milquetoast Republicanism would, in the end, be equally catastrophic
Every student who has experienced it knows that the first few moments after The Fear sets in are the key to success or failure. Let’s say you are driven to lie down for a nap, like a lost mountaineer giving in to the feeling that if he lies down in the snow for just a moment, everything will be alright. If you do let yourself fall asleep for an hour or two—the easiest thing to do—you will wake up in an even more hopeless situation than you were in before The Fear got the better of you. You will have increased the incentive to give up altogether. You will start to tell yourself consoling lies. “Maybe I can go in there with the notes I have and just wing it,” you imagine. You know it’s a lie, but at this point there is no other choice, so you accept it. You accept failure. You give up.
Imagine, on the other hand, that after lying down in the dark for five minutes, your mind takes a different turn. Ideas related to your seminar project start swirling around in your head again. An avenue forward, a way to start the next paragraph, presents itself to you. You get up, turn on the light, pour yourself something to drink, pace around for a few minutes. You look at the clock. “I still have four hours.” You sit down, find the book you need to deal with first, and get back to work.
Conservatives who are beginning to hedge their bets on Bachmann, Cain, Santorum or Paul—who are beginning to tell themselves, not that they WOULD support Romney or Gingrich if necessary, but that they SHOULD start accepting that necessity now—are like the Fear-gripped student who takes a nap. They are refusing to face the truth that this time, when they wake up, it will be too late to salvage their work.
Four more years of Obama would indeed be catastrophic. Four years of milquetoast Republicanism would, in the end, be equally catastrophic.
Keeping things the way they are, “but at least not too much worse,” is no longer a sensible position. ‘The way things are’ can best be described as a precipitous fall. It is arguable that the greatest disaster for the nation in 2012 would be a Republican who proclaims himself to be—or whose record proclaims him to be—successful at working with ‘both sides of the aisle’; who has a record of changing his stance on positions that carry implications about his fundamental principles; who has obvious career ties to the Washington establishment (meaning to the leading bureaucrats and ‘opinion-makers’); who defends his policy positions primarily in terms of their alleged ‘results’, rather than in terms of their constitutionality; and whose political history reveals evidence of opportunistic ‘stands’ and flip-flops.
Obama’s re-election: a go-for-broke acceleration of the process of spending and regulating the United States into oblivion
Of course, Obama’s re-election could—depending on the make-up of the House and Senate—lead to a go-for-broke acceleration of the process of spending and regulating the United States into oblivion. What a mainstream Republican would do, on the other hand, can easily be seen by observing John Boehner’s House: A lot of Tea Party-courting rhetoric, firm-sounding hot air, followed by bills that seem to take baby steps forward, but turn out, upon examination, to amount to small steps backward. (Smaller steps than the Left would have taken, but in the wrong direction nonetheless.)
Now, for those who want to play this game of wishing the Tea Party victory down the road a few years in the name of ‘winning now’, consider what these two possibilities—President Obama vs. President Milquetoast—would mean for 2016. Another four years of Obama wreckage might leave the country beyond salvation, to be sure. On the other hand, if there were still a country left at all, and one not yet at the revolutionary stage, the climate would certainly be at least as ripe for a real constitutionalist as it is now, perhaps even more so.
By contrast, a mainstream Republican would give us four years of the peculiar form of ‘stasis’ I have described, i.e. four years of sitting helplessly in a hand-basket careering to that place where hand-baskets tend to go. And then what? In 2016, Republicans would face the non-choice of challenging their own president, or supporting Romney/Gingrich once again—while, in all likelihood, the Tea Party gradually lost all its steam, or was revived as a third party option. On this last point, recall that the Tea Party is largely a by-product of Obama’s socialist boldness; four or eight years of a nominally conservative Republican presidency (any Republican who wants support must call himself a conservative, of course, as the pragmatists are doing now) would likely sap all the enthusiasm and energy out of today’s burgeoning constitutionalist movement, or force it out of the GOP in anger. In either case, it would cease to be an effective force against the monster that is the U.S. Federal Government.
Equal to, or greater than, any other internal or external threat facing the United States is a debt that is quickly approaching—or has already surpassed—the permanently irredeemable stage. The federal government as it is currently configured has absolutely no intention of ever even trying to pay down that debt, which means that the government is comprised of community organizer types who want the U.S. to be bankrupt, careerists who are morally bankrupt, and nitwits. (There are a tiny group of principled men and women among the bunch, of course, but nowhere near enough to turn the tide without a lot more help.) The only solution, unlikely as it is necessary, is to stop allowing these people to borrow money.
There will be no next time for the Tea Party, the constitutional conservatives
Deferring genuine constitutional conservatism until next time allows the Washington machine to incur yet another kind of debt. In this case, the Tea Party plays bondholder, as the Republican Party Establishment borrows a little more time to destroy the nation slowly, with the interest rate being the truer conservatism promised to the Tea Party ‘next time’. As always with such borrowers, however, “a little more” is not a one-time plea, but a permanent mantra. Imagining that it will be possible to take back the GOP ‘next time’ presumes that the GOP will allow itself to be taken back next time. Why would anyone imagine that men who have no desire to pay down the actual financial debt will ever pay down this moral debt?
There will be no next time for the Tea Party, the constitutional conservatives. They must not make that lender’s bargain with the Establishment. Borrowing and lending are moral acts; they presume good faith on the part of both parties. Where there is no good faith on the part of the borrower, the lender who signs the contract is just a fool signing away his future.
The Tea Party has worked tirelessly and impressively for too long to give up now. When there is so much work to do, it is natural for The Fear to set in momentarily. How one responds to The Fear determines success or failure. How constitutionalists respond to The Fear now will determine success or failure on the grandest possible scale. Okay, you’ve had your five minute rest. Now it’s time to get up and get back to work—or you might as well stay asleep, because you won’t like what you see when you wake up.
