George Will: How Liberals Lost America

"Thomas B. Edsall of The New Republic, in "Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power," argues that inexorable social forces, augmented by the conservatives' superior reservoirs of anger, ruthlessness and cynicism - he neglects only the word "wickedness" - favor Republicans, "the party of the socially and economically dominant."

...The GOP, he says, courts whites "whose interests are overwhelmingly focused on tempering, if not altogether rolling back, the civil-rights movement." Please. Who favors rolling back guarantees of voting rights and equal access to public accommodations?

If Edsall really thinks Republicans are marching efficiently in lock step, he has missed bitter intraparty arguments about spending, immigration and nation-building. He says the conservative agenda is "to dismantle the welfare state." Oh? With a prescription-drug entitlement that is the largest expansion of the welfare state since enactment of Medicare in 1965? With a 38 percent increase in discretionary domestic spending unrelated to homeland security - including a 135 percent rise in the Education Department's budget - since 2001?"

And regrettably, it was the only way to counter the All You Can Eat liberal philosophy that threatened to Clintonize us into oblivion. The single most important issue of the day is how to fight the war we are now engaged in. How to kill the enemy and protect Americans. The Bush Administration was forced to keep the sheeple fat and happy in order to prevent the rush back to Blowjob Will and the Hillary Brigade style of government that left the economy in shambles and the nations defense in tatters.

"...Edsall notes that one-third of American children - and almost 70 percent of African-American children - are born to unmarried mothers. Then, in an astonishing passage about this phenomenon, which is the cause of most social pathologies, from crime to schools that cannot teach, he explains how Americans differ concerning what he calls "freedom from the need to maintain the marital or procreative bond."

"To social conservatives," he writes, "these developments have signaled an irretrievable and tragic loss. Their reaction has fueled, on the right, a powerful traditionalist movement and a groundswell of support for the Republican Party. To modernists, these developments constitute, at worst, the unfortunate costs of progress, and, at best - and this is very much the view on the political left as well as of Democratic Party loyalists - they constitute a triumph over unconscionable obstacles to the liberation and self-realization of much of the human race."

Looking for the real reason for the rise of "Red America"? Read that paragraph again."

Yes. The diminishment of family values has left certain classes of Americans rudderless and criminal. To cure such ills, Democrats suggest a further dilution of the family. Because, they believe, it would be far easier to keep them entitled, fat and happy and at home, where they can cause less trouble. "Liberation and self-realization" is just another way of saying Peasants kept forever beholding to the state are easier to manage, and so what if a few of them need to be jailed now and again.