Monday, July 15, 2013

Are the Democrats in Trouble?

One thing our Democratic friends are good at is putting on a brave face.  What me worry about Obamacare, about the deficit, about entitlements, about the government employee pension crisis?

But Democratic actions belie the bravado.  How come President Obama quietly postponed the start of the employer mandate for Obamacare?  How come President Obama needed to gin up black rage with the Martin-Zimmerman case?  How come Harry Reid needs to go for the "nuclear option" to end filibusters of presidential nominations?

Maybe Democrats aren't marching down the field making first downs with minorities, women, the educated, and young people quite like The Emerging Democratic Majority told us was happening.

There are lots of things going wrong with America that would be all over the news if a Republican president were in the White House.  Minorities, for instance, are doing badly in the semi-recovery.  Of course they are.  It's because they got suckered into the housing bubble; it's because they have weaker skills; it's because they have weaker families; it's because they rely too much on government.

Same thing for women.  They have been drinking the government KoolAid and don't seem to understand how careers, the sexual revolution, and the collapse of marriage turns women into state-dependent cogs and sex objects.

Same thing for young people.  Like many before them, they believe the lies their teachers tell them and blindly conform to the corrosive gang mentality of every youth cohort.

As for the educated:  We know why they have been trending Democratic.  It's partly snobbery, because your average educated person doesn't want to be included among the bumpkins.  It's also because the educated fill a lot of the credentialed jobs in big government from regulatory scientists to social workers picking up after the underclass.

But the truth is that the Democrats are betraying all of these groups: minorities, women, youth, and educated.  The truth is that government dependency is a dead end, and it always has been.

These groups will all eventually realize that they have been had, but it will take a while.  That's the nature of a secular religion.  You have to see your life in ruins before you begin to grasp everything you were told was a lie.

The basic lesson is simple.  It is the mistake of assuming that you can get what you want by force.  Those that live by the sword will die by the sword.  If you use big government to get what you want you are using the dead hand of force to get a living in the world.

But government is always running down, according to George Gilder in Knowledge and Power.  The way to prosperity is through the surprise and the learning that you get from entrepreneurs coming up with creative new ideas.

When you are a minority without city skills just trying to figure out how to thrive in the city it is natural to look for a strong patron to ease your way.  When you are a woman coming out into the public square it is easy to go with the politicians that care about women.  When you are a young person you are enslaved to the zeitgeist as you try to fit in.  But it's all a chimera.  The modern world doesn't work that way.

The modern world works by the invisible hand.  You learn a skill, you try to offer it to the world.  The better you serve other people, the more you will get your reward.  It is a very difficult thing to learn, this idea of surrendering to the market.  It seems foolhardy to trust to the strangers of the marketplace.

But that is what everyone must do, especially the little darlings of the Democratic coalition.

And as they individually wake up, and become people of the responsible self like the rest of us, they will peel away from the Democratic Party and the Democrats will get more and more desperate.

That's a shame, because it means that in the summer of Zimmerman and scandal and shameless identity politics, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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