Meanwhile, it just so happened that Wednesday was also the day on which the run rate of interest on the public debt crossed the $1 trillionper year mark. That implies a fiscal catastrophe of staggering dimensions is fast barreling down the pike.
Yet in their closing statements did even one of the five candidates address this issue? Did these wanna be standard bearers for the Republican Party even know that the safeguarding of fiscal sobriety in the tussle of American democracy is the very reason for the GOP’s existence?
David Stockman’s Contra Corner
The GOP debaters in Miami Wednesday night might as well have been swathed in war paint. After two hours of endless blathering about Foreign Wars, Border Wars, Culture Wars, Drug Wars, China Wars etc. it was hard to form any other impression about the agenda of today’s GOP.
To be sure, Vivek Ramaswamy gets a hall pass on the matter because he did nail the worst warmonger in the group, Nikki Haley, with his “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” zinger. Indeed, the entire quote is worth replicating because it’s obvious that as a Republican no one ever heard of, Vivek hadn’t gotten the neocon memo about Washington’s duty to police the planet:
I want to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past. Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, people my age to die in wars that did not advance anyone’s interests. Adding $7 trillion to our national debt. And Joe Biden sold off our foreign policy. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, got a $5 million bribe from Ukraine. That’s why we’re sending $200 billion back to that same country.
The fact of the matter is, the Republican Party is not that much better. You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the UN, bankrupt or in debt, as was her family. Then she becomes a military contractor. She joins the board of Boeing and otherwise and is now a multi-millionaire. So I think that that’s wrong when Republicans do it or Democrats do it. That’s the choice we face. Do you want a leader from a different generation who’s going to put this country first, or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?
Still, there is actually something more deeply awry in Republican land than merely its zealous embrace of the neocon Forever Wars. The modus operandi that all the above-mentioned GOP wars have in common is the active deployment of government power to purportedly do good and thwart evil.
That is to say, the pitch amounts to “elect Republicans and we will power-up the state to make domestic society better and the world safer because we are more virtuous than the Dems”.
Yet what in the world does that have to do with the core anti-state mission of the Opposition Party in the contest of democratic politics?
After all, the do-gooder agenda has already been pre-empted by the Dems’ Government Party with its legions of liberal pols, well-fed interest groups and statist constituencies of every shape and form. There is no point now, and never has been, in me-tooism, RINO fakery and junior status in the Washington Uniparty.
So by definition, the Opposition Party needs to ground itself in conservative constitutionalism and advocacy for personal liberty and free markets at home and peaceful commerce abroad. Everywhere and always, therefore, the first priority of the Opposition Party must be shackling, minimizing, draining and constraining the power and resources of the state because by the very nature of the beast, government is self-aggrandizing and expansionary. And that’s most especially true on the Warfare State side of the equation.
Moreover, in the case of whatever societal problems the state might productively address, if any, the “Government Party” of the Dems will inherently grab first dibs. The Opposition Party will never out-bid them and shouldn’t try. As a matter of political competition, therefore, its strategy should be to throw endless shade on government and all its misbegotten works.
Accordingly, the Opposition Party’s brand should center on:
- Celebrating the capacity of private society, free markets, civil institutions, families, citizens and other non-government actors to achieve the goods things of life, which humans in all their varieties and stations inherently strive for.
- Debunking, exposing, attacking and ridiculing the inherent tendency of the state and its agencies and apparatchiks to abuse government power, waste the resources its has extracted from the public and to succumb to capture by nefarious actors, ranging from the military-industrial complex to Big Pharma, the farm lobby, the teachers’ unions and all the other feeders at the public trough.
Needless to say, the “war against….” rhetoric of today’s GOP embodies exactly the wrong tone and message. It essentially involves a misguided attempt by the putative “conservative” party to identify an alternative slate of societal problems which require government ministrations, albeit in a business-like Republican-style.
For instance, nearly to a man and woman, the five candidates took turns declaiming against the plague of fentanyl, promising to bring down the wrath of Washington on the alleged Chinese suppliers of the precursor components and the Mexican cartels which formulate it and bring it across the border. DeSantis even said he would “smoke” them on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande—the implied invasion of another country to the contrary notwithstanding.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 