We're All Whigs Now

PROPHECY: IT'S GONNA BE A BLOW-OUT. This November, Republicans will take the House (by historic mid-term numbers) and the Senate (by more than a squeaker). Obamaism will be repudiated, lock, stock, and barrel. Most of this will be due to the insatiable appetite of the ruling class to take our money and not merely spend it, but flush it away on boondoggles that have cost us $1 trillion and resulted in a flat economy.

How is that possible? Because government cannot create long-term job growth. Certainly, it can mobilize people and money to build giant projects like the Hoover Dam or the interstate highway system, but eventually those projects come to a close and the workers are again looking for work. Only private enterprise is on-going, building businesses that will outlive their creators. Taxing one person to pay for another’s job is not job creation; at best it is an even economic exchange. At worst (and most commonly), it results in the impoverishment of both: the taxed worker has less money and thus his standard of living falls; the newly-hired worker has a tenuous job which is dependent upon the quickly-emptying pockets of the taxed worker. When the first loses his job, the second will eventually lose his as well, unless, that is, Congress discovers how to spend the money of those who are not yet born. Which they have.

This economic shell game has birthed the Tea Party, which is nothing more or less than an amalgam of angry people who feel they pay too much in taxes and receive too little benefit. More taxes, less services. More taxes, less security. More taxes, more politicians and bureaucrats, but less money to spend on the kids at Christmas. While most Tea Partiers are white-middle class mortgage payers, the fact is that most mortgage payers in America are white. So the fact that Tea Party conclaves reflect that racial makeup means nothing, only that the brightest anger with the government is focused in groups that pay taxes. But if the USA were France, the welfare class would also be marching. That will come next summer when the Republicans, perhaps properly chastened, begin cutting entitlement programs so our unborn grandchildren will not enter life as serfs.

But will the Republicans actually cut spending and entitlements? The fact that the average civil servant makes double what the private sector worker makes (after factoring in non-cash benefits) is the match that may light the fuse of real change. If a newly-empowered, Tea Party-flavored Republican majority says to America, “We intend to cut everything by X percent,” perhaps this will fly. Equal hardship is easier to bear than the class warfare now being waged by the Left. But if the GOP returns to their spendthrift ways, then this is my prophecy:

It is 1860 and the Whigs are no more.

The Whigs, you remember, were the political descendants of the patriots who formed our nation, and became the strongest opponents of the Democrat party between 1830 and 1950. They elected four presidents: William Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. The question of the expansion of slavery into the territories divided the Whigs and by 1856 they had crumbled, to be replaced by the fiercely anti-slavery Republican party. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was a Whig who left the party over the slavery issue.

In short, the Whigs fell behind the times and became irrelevant. They did not listen to the electorate.

If the Republicans, energized by the Tea Party activists, who clearly espouse Constitutional governance and a balanced budget, fail to follow these principles, then the Democratic slaughter of 2010 will be a pale precursor for the complete destruction of the Republican party in 2012, which will be replaced by a new party that more accurately reflects the wishes of the vast middle-American electorate: low taxes, low federal spending, less government intervention in our lives, and the reigning in of entitlements.

In November, the leaders of the Republican party, heretofore complicit in the Democrats’ economic crimes, will receive a clear wake-up call. It remains to be seen, however, if they will hear a bell or a death-knell. On that, my prophetic powers are weak, though my gut sadly reminds me that power corrupts. Therefore, what shall we call the new party? Any ideas?

Whatever it is, sign me up.