Soul and Sense

I have mentioned it here a few times, but it is essentially accepted belief among knowing circles that the Tea Party movement represents the soul that the Republican party has lost and needs transplanted back into it. But the Tea Party movement is not monolithic, it can also be viewed, in a small way, as the sense that the Democratic party has lost. "The Democrats have lost sense?" you may ask, after all, they are in undisputed power all over the country. Yes, they are in power but their creations - their ideas made real - are crumbling all around them. The largest liberal states (California, New York, Illinois) are crumbling under the weight of the cost of the Leviathan state apparatus, while others have hit such rock bottom that they have actually turned themselves over to Republicans (New Jersey). Public employee pension systems are so underfunded as to be unsalvagable. Liberal utopias are literally running out of cash (City of Los Angeles). The public education apparatus, aside from failing to deliver much in the way of decent education, is so bankrupt that they are resorting to shutting down 20% of the time. After destroying the American steel industry, textile industry and making air travel an unbearable experience, labor unionism has gone on to destroy, with the exception of Ford, the home-grown auto industry. The head-long, messianic pursuit of "affordable housing" engineered through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nearly blew up the financial system and threw us into a nasty recession. Galloping minimum wage requirements have left one quarter of our young people unemployed. In healthcare, distortions caused by a nonsensical tax code and metastisizing entitlements have broken the system to such a point that the government is attempting to unbreak it by illegally forcing citizens to purchase a product which they may not desire and will very likely be unsuited to their specific needs. Liberalism's institutions are all around us, built up tall, and they are promising to come crashing down on our heads. Yet mostly the response by those in power is to build them taller. Thus my assessment that those responsible for their construction have lost all sense. That is why, as fascinating as the internal struggle on the right side of the political spectrum is, an internal struggle that appears ever so faintly to be bubbling up on the left side of the spectrum is really going to be worth watching. Granted it is faint, but it is percolating and the signature race in which to watch this struggle is in the California primary for US Senate. Mickey Kaus has a strong message that Democrats ought to shed slavery to public sector unions and is taking that message straight into the hide of state-of-the-art Democrat Babs Boxer. Naturally, I am rooting for Kaus. We need more of these common sense Democrats and less of these barely veiled socialists like Boxer. A long time ago in a land far, far away not only did I vote for a Democrat, but was proud to vote for one...New Yorkers had the opportunity and the good sense to send a smart, yet eminently sensible guy named Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the US Senate and I was happy to be among them. Today DPM would be a pariah in his own party, and that in itself is the perfect summation and indictment of the modern Democrats. Could this be about to change? Stay tuned.