Patience, Tea Partiers: Time Is On Your Side
22nd July 2011
George Will puts Obama in context.
Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.
July 22nd, 2011 at 09:38
Shades of Karl Marx asserting the “inevitable” collapse of capitalism…
Seems pipe-dreaming is not the exclusive preserve of the socialists.
July 24th, 2011 at 17:43
Proclaiming that Obama is the new Gorbachev does not lead to the conclusion that time is on his opponents’ side. It’s true that Gorbachev and his system collapsed, but so did the country they were in.
July 24th, 2011 at 18:38
Well, that depends on how you define “country”. The system collapsed, and the Empire collapsed, but the country (Russia) is alive and well and firmly under the thumb of Czar Vladimir (Putin).
“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”…
July 24th, 2011 at 20:10
Two out of three, Dennis. The country is alive and under the thumb of Putin, but it is not well. As Diane just said, it is basically a thugocracy these days.
July 25th, 2011 at 09:14
Irony is a subtle tool often wasted on the literal.
The phrase “alive and well” is a literary device. Russia is today a thugocracy. The Soviet Union was a thugocracy. Since it appears that thugism is in no danger of dying, it is therefore doing well. Since thugism is the ruling principle of governance in Russia, and has been since time out of mind, Russia is also doing well, or at least as well as it ever has. It did not “collapse” with the fall of the Soviet system, nor does it appear likely to do so–more’s the pity.
July 25th, 2011 at 15:37
Meanwhile, back at the context, proclaiming Obama as the new Gorbachev does not mean that time is on the Tea Party’s side. They got rid of Gorbachev, but the problems didn’t go away with him.
July 25th, 2011 at 15:44
Also, the Soviet Union wasn’t a thugocracy; it was an evil empire. The current Russian thugocracy has just as much corruption and tyranny, but less of other countries’s money and goods and food. This is a net loss for people in Russia. (Well, except for the shoes. Being deprived of Bulgarian shoes is not a burden.)
Also, the Americans used to be afraid of the Russians. They’ve been supplanted as the bogeymen of the world by … Afghanistan? How embarrassing.
July 25th, 2011 at 20:16
No, I would respectfully disagree.
They’ve been supplanted as the bogeyman by “Muslims”, which is a much more satisfying concept in that it’s so nebulous that we don’t have any of those pesky facts to interfere with our paranoia.
July 27th, 2011 at 10:12
Agreed. It remains true that calling Obama the new Gorbachev is not good news for the Tea Party, because the ouster of Gorbachev did not do the Russians any good.
(Did the rest of the world a lot of good, though.)