Comment on Belmont Club "Horowitz on Obama"

Subotai Bahadur (a BC poster) poses an interesting problem, “We are two very different nations and cultures uneasily occupying one country” sounds familiar. America has sailed into the same emotional territory occupied by the Israelis and the Philistines. One hundred and fifty years ago the Democrats refusal to trust in constitutional protections and process coupled with their paranoid refusal to share the political stage tore the nation apart. Subsequently their superior skills at recruiting immigrants, despite their nativist roots, and the over reaching of Republicans (Rum Romanism and Rebellion backfired) saved the Democrats. Later under FDR they learned that by focusing on the goal of building a coalition rather than the task of restoring prosperity they could become the semi-permanent party of government. Now they are again edging towards a scorched earth campaign to eliminate the honest and the productive, because they are honest and productive. They cultivate the permanently alienated at home and import more to base their power on the aggrieved, because the aggrieved can be a constituency that will not assimilate away from them. The Republicans are left with America’s Israelis in the figurative sense. The productive, the law abiding, the temperate, are becoming an isolated minority in their own country. The current attachment of most American Jews to the Democratic Party is an historical aberration that will eventually be resolved but unfortunately it will probably be to late. The Democratic coalition are both figuratively and literally America’s Philistines.

Jan 19, 2009 - 6:54 pm