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Let Tuesday Come
Mark Steyn, writing over at National Review last year, on the fall of Detroit:
To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan….
Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.'” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis.
Which brings us to this election.
Some good Republicans will be re-elected governor on Tuesday — Scott Walker of Wisconsin comes to mind — and the GOP will probably pick up a few seats in the House. But what now seems very likely to happen in the Senate could prove little short of revolutionary.
Half a dozen young Republican senators have already demonstrated their utter unwillingness to accept the status quo of slowly conceding power, programs, and taxpayer funds to the “elite/union/dependency axis” that Mark describes above, as the GOP did far too often during the Bush years and as some in GOP wished to continue doing under Obama. Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, John Barasso of Wyoming, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire: all have proven their determination to insist on reform, to the point of making themselves unpopular, if necessary (think here of the filibusters by Rand Paul and Ted Cruz).
On Tuesday, the country is likely to send these senators company: Joni Ernst of Iowa, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Cory Gardner of Colorado. They may lack the fiery rhetoric of Ted Cruz, but they, too, are determined to bring the status quo to an end. They don’t want to cut deals. They want to break furniture.
Tuesday can’t come fast enough.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user Steve Cukrov.
Published in General
From your keyboard to God’s laptop.
Peter: Don’t tease me like that. For a moment, I had a flicker of hope that Steyn had returned to NR. Alas, the essay was from 2013. I still hold out hope for a rapprochement. Maybe when the Mann case is over, and a certain managing editor has moved along…
Controlling the House and the Senate during President Obama’s last two years would be like sitting idly in Detroit’s decrepit opera house with the carpenters and painters while we wait on the union electrician to stop punching holes in the walls and making a mess of the wiring. If we’re lucky, he won’t burn the place down before the repairs can begin.
Good point, but the upside is that rejecting good and wanted legislation has its costs. And the Dems really are out of ideas beyond various kinds of warfare. The up-and-comers Peter mentions have some marvelous, practical, smart ideas for moving the country along. I’m excited to see what they’ll do. We really are the party of solutions. Can Obama triangulate and allow some progress for the country? I have my doubts, but if he doesn’t, his party pays a price. And Dems in Congress have reason to buck the wishes of an unpopular president if they care about reelection. Buckle up. Things are about to get exciting, as if they weren’t already!
From Chicago I look north to Detroit and hope that that isn’t my future too – ie a once great city declining to the point of marshy onions and prairie grass popping through the concrete of deserted quarters of the city. I’m not too hopeful, though, looking at the state of the opposition here and the continued existence of people clinging on to the machine that has long since ceased to serve their interests. As long as things hold up well enough for my kids to get through school then me and the missus can shake the dust of this broken state off of our shoes once and for all. Sad.
Not just here in Chicago, but all over: we have to find some way of breaking the fond remembrances people have for the various machines their families were once a part of. How to do that? Your guess is as good as mine.
On the plus side, Detroit gives us a real world look at how nature reclaims urban environments. Perhaps History/Discovery will document what it really looks like when we abandon our concrete and buildings.
Republicans in the House have been proposing relatively uncontroversial legislation for years now without Democrats taking any heat for rejecting it. In fact, Boehner and Republican leaders won’t even bring this stuff to the floor half the time.
My own Congressman Ted Poe along with some others proposed years back sell off some federal lands to citizens and direct the proceeds to the national debt. That’s pretty mild, as legislation goes. Yet how many voters even heard of the idea?
Yeah, I’m with Matt – NR is not what it was in 2013 – bring back Mr Steyn!
The Left likes to claim that “only in America” would a city like Detroit be “allowed” to collapse.
It isn’t true.
Communities of various sizes have collapsed many, many times throughout history, for a wide variety of reasons. War, plague, famine, etc.
The really weird, and exceptional, thing about Detroit is not the fact of its collapse.
What makes Detroit different is the fact that the collapse is being sustained, funded, and subsidized, by parties for whom collapse is beneficial.
In the past, when a community collapsed it would either be abandoned (Easter Island, Petra, etc) or a new community would be built on the ruins (most European cities).
By contrast, billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent annually to keep Detroit in the state of decrepit suspended animation to which it has become accustomed.
That is what is new, and only in America, but not really, since Canada subsidizes failed native reserves and east coast fishing communities, and I’d wager that Australia and New Zealand spend whack-loads of cash to keep their aboriginal communities in a similar state of suspended animation.
So, only in the Anglosphere? Did Aldous Huxley call it when he described how the society in Brave New World keeps the Savage Reservation around as a sort of theme park?
Not likely. I first came across Mark Steyn while he graced the pages of the National Post. He was there in solidarity with the best newspaperman in the Anglosphere, Conrad Black (possibly excepting Rupert Murdoch). Once Black was ousted, Steyn also left and hasn’t been back, even though the ousters are long gone.
He later showed up at Maclean’s magazine (Canada’s answer to Time), which had been taken over by Black’s editorial staff. He stuck with them until the mess with the Canadian Human Rights Commission nearly had him banned for life, and Maclean’s on life support for having dared to print him. I would imagine that a numbers of frictions appeared during that event.
Steyn appears to value personal loyalty beyond all other factors, which is generally a good thing. The down side is that in a media market not normally friendly to conservatives, it does rather limit the options.
On the bright side of Canadian print journalism, Frank Magazine is publishing again!
I thought we were supposed to forget Mark Steyn ever existed, let alone refer to him positively.
Chernobyl did this first, and in some ways did it better, since at least they don’t even pretend it’s a functioning city and therefore the critters (which really aren’t glowing and don’t have three eyes) are much more free to live their lives undisturbed my human interference.
I’m surprised the anti-human primitivists haven’t caught on to this phenomenon by conspiring to nuke government-owned forests.
This is my fondest hope, but it’s just a hope. Will we get Christmas presents or a lump of coal?
Only one way to tell.
What Derek Simmons said.
Lets hope the wishy-washy job-loving establishment republicans will grow a set and actually try to DO something to move America forward in the face of media assistance of Obama’s aspirations.
Republicans aren’t allowed to vote tomorrow. They will be in violation of President Obama’s quarantine order:
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/obama-declares-november-4th-a-national-day-of-quarantine-t15094.html
It’s actually for their own good, since they refuse to participate in free health care.
Funny you should say that – The Weather Channel has that very program on tonight. About Detroit and 2 others (I left at the commercial break after Detroit; I think Cambodia was one of the other two).
I’d rather we not send people to Congress to do “constructive” things. I want them to de-construct much of what’s already been built.
The problem is that there are very few negative consequences for going along and getting along, once you’ve won your seat. I want people in office who really would rather be doing something else with their lives, but feel the need to work to contain the leviathan.
Those people are rare. I think that’s why conservatives often end up on the losing side of things. We’d really prefer to live our own lives. Progressives want to run them for you, so they are motivated to get legislation passed that does just that.
Playing defense all the time only works when you’re ahead. Way ahead.
I know: a truly great day. Great memories of it from the first run…
Was leafing through the latest issue when I was up to my Dad’s in Ottawa over Thanksgiving. Need to get a subscription for myself.
This week’s edition, in which they reprint the most idiotic tweets from “respected” journalists on the day of the Parliament Hill shooting, is pretty great.
The number of times journalists used the word “confirmed” regarding information that was later found to be completely untrue is pretty astounding.