#3 Jerry Pournelle has a recent reflection on the Tea Party movement: if we don't have a viable two party system, a way to turn out unsatisfactory political leaders without the election being taken as an invitation to remake the fundamentals of the nation -- as the 2008 election was interpreted as a mandate to turn the nation into a European model socialist state with socialized medicine and expanded welfare and a huge increase in the portion of GDP disposed of by the government, with full Industrial Policy and the rest -- we are in deep trouble. If each election is an institutional revolution, and the stakes escalate with each election until losing the election is ruin for a large number of people -- the subsequent history is pretty clear. Institutional civil war is not stable.
Conservatism is enjoyment, not permanent revolution. It took a while to get into this hole. It will take longer to get out. First we stop digging. Then we begin to dismantle parts of the huge structure. But we must not do it by turning out all the civil servants. Devolving many of their tasks to lower levels, subsidiarity and transparency, those are vectors. The Department of Education is, I think, an exception; but most government programs began with good intentions, few of those who run them for us are villains, and people made dependent on government cannot simple be turned out to starve. Transitions take a long time: what's important is to get the vector in the right direction, and it's very likely that the only way to do that is to completely change the leadership in both parties. We have to make elections a way to choose those who will lead, not simply choose between the Creeps and the Nuts. |