Prof. Paul A. Rahe: After 30 years of ineptitude and betrayal by Republicans in Name Only, "The iron is hot; it is time to strike"

As Angelo M. Codevilla argues with great eloquence in the current issue of The American Spectator, we may have two parties but we are governed by a single political class, and most Americans recognize that neither party actually represents them.

The first obstacle might seem to be insuperable. As a number of critics of my book pointed out, and as one such critic, William Voegeli, has argued with considerable verve in his fine new book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, it is hard to imagine that today’s conservatives can succeed where Reagan failed. There are, however, two reasons why we should think the improbable now within our grasp. In two different regards, we are now better situated than was Ronald Reagan.

First, where he had Carter, we now have Barack Obama. President Carter lost in 1980 because he had persuaded the American people that he was not up to the job. President Obama has, to be sure, done the same thing – but he has also done something else of very great importance. As the emergence of the Tea-Party movement demonstrates, he has alarmed Americans. They fear that his policies will ruin their lives, and they fear in a tangible way that he is intent on taking away their liberty. His predecessors were surreptitious; he has chosen audacity. And in threatening to take access to medical care out of our hands into those of his minions, he strikes at our freedom to manage our own lives in a fashion that only the willfully blind can miss.

Second, the welfare state that Barack Obama inherited from his predecessors is bankrupt. The birthrate in this country has dropped, and our fellow citizens are living longer lives. As a consequence, there has been a dramatic decline in the ratio of those working to those retired; and, this year, for the first time, the Social Security Administration is paying out more than it is taking in. Medicare and Medicaid are similarly insolvent. To maintain the current system, it would seem to be the case that we would have to raise taxes drastically – but we cannot do that, as Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt proved in the 1930s, without restricting economic growth, and, in the absence of economic growth, we will be unable to support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As Richard Lamm, a Democrat who served three terms as Governor of Colorado, recently observed, “The New Deal is demographically obsolete. You can’t fund the dream of the 1960s on the economy of 2010.”

In short, the first of the two obstacles I identified in my book is no longer what it was. More Americans fear federal intrusiveness than would like more; their fears are palpable; and their alarm coincides with a crisis likely to be fatal to the welfare state. We can no longer pay civil servants as we have; we can no longer maintain Social Security in its current form; and we can no longer sustain Medicare and Medicaid. Something has to give. Even if Barack Obama had not thrown away a trillion dollars in so-called “stimulus” measures designed to reward constituencies supportive of his party, even if Congress had not enacted a healthcare reform guaranteed to radically increase costs, we would have had to face the facts before long. As things stand, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel have brought things to a head. In their zeal not “to waste” one crisis, they have precipitated another – the crisis of the administrative state.

The second obstacle – the one posed by the ineptitude of the Republicans in Congress and by their repeated betrayal over the last thirty years of the people whom they pretend to represent – is more serious. Here lies a problem that must be addressed. And the clock is ticking. The first Tuesday in November draws nigh, and this problem must be solved within the next few weeks or the moment will pass and the opportunity will be lost. The iron is hot; it is time to strike.