I haven’t written much about it lately, but I really do think the Democrats are in for a historic ass-whipping this fall. (In case you missed it, this lifelong Democrat thinks so too.)
More than anything else, it’s because they seem to have lost sight of what most people want most: stability. They want the world to be more or less the same when they get up in the morning as it was the night before, and they’d prefer that it not be very much different next week or next year, too. Why? Because if everything is liable to capricious change, there can be no confidence that the plans and projects and investments you make today will bear fruit in the future. This in turn forces everyone to shrink the circle of engagement, to hoard their assets, and to worry more and more only about the present.
Edmund Burke, who understood that a healthy society is “a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn”, describes what happens next:
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.
A few years ago I wrote that society is a viscoelastic liquid, like Silly Putty: if you deform it slowly enough, you can mold it into any shape you like — but if you stretch it too rapidly and sharply, it will snap. Perhaps the Democrats want it to snap; I’m sure that at least some of them do. They should be careful what they wish for.