The Fight of the Century

Over at NRO, from inside the beltway itself, comes an historic fight, a fisticuffs to end all fisticuffs, a knock-down drag-out sure to leave all others behind and weeping for second place: Washington vs. the People!

This has nothing to do with what party is in power. That’s why Americans should not mistake this for a battle between Republicans and Democrats. They should understand that it is a fight between Washington and everyone else.

The Senator speaks the truth. And it's remarkable how quickly this type of candor gets you ostracized from polite society (not that Washington would know much about polite society). If you want to cut any budgets, anywhere, be prepared to get labeled as an anarchist. The "progressive" worldview is aghast at the notion that government might be overtly or even intrinsically bad. What's one IRS scandal over roughly a century of awesome, expanding centralized power? Who cares about drone strikes galore when you've got the greatness of Obamacare to lull you to sleep at night? In reality, it's not likely that many lefties will see the recent government overreach bombshells as anything "bad." The scandals are just a mildly inconvenient side-effect of a government that, in all honesty, should be much larger, thank you very much.

And it's not as if conservatives have much skin in the government-reduction game, either. When the 2012 Super-Evil Super-Villian of Super Evil Villainous Conservatism announces that he will be retaining a number of crucial aspects of a disastrous big-government health care reform, you know you've lost the fight. Obama's reelection was, in part, a referendum on how well liberals can style conservatives as Ayn Rand lunatics when the latter wants to cut $1 from the federal budget. Why even bother? If anyone were even paying attention to the actual politics involved---as opposed to Mitt Romney's car elevator or Michelle Obama's crazy-cool vegetable garden---then they'd notice the inherent non-differences of the two parties. But then who would they vote for?

Which is why Senator Lee is correct: it's not partisan but all-encompassing. Most of the salient ideological differences between the warring factions have been eliminated; there would be no place for a Calvin Coolidge in the Republican party these days, or even a Republican primary, and the modern-day Democrats are probably to warmongering for their predecessors' taste. When the political class agrees on as much as it does today, then it's going to start looking for a new faction to go to war against. That would be you and me. Whatever party is in power, it certainly has nothing to do with us.