progressives

Promises, promises, promises. It is the season for political promises.

America seems to be an increasingly politically polarized society.

Every American learns in grade school of the three-part structure of the U.S. government: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

The main difference between Hitler’s form of national socialism and Mussolini’s concerned the meaning of “nationalism.”

Commentators from the political “left” as well as the “right” have attempted to analyze and dissect the rise and appeal of Donald Trump. The reality is, I would suggest, is that he represents the essence of the modern interventionist state, with its regulated economy and redistributive politics.

What does freedom mean? What is the purpose of government? And what should be the government’s relationship to each of us as individuals and as members of society as a whole? These issues recently came up during a dinner conversation with a new acquaintance with whom I’d not previously had such a discussion.

I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.”

Last week the Center for American Progress released a health care reform plan it claimed should draw bipartisan support because it includes Republican ideas. The first four words of an Associated Press article reporting on the plan were “Borrowing a Republican idea.”

To coin a phrase, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. has forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know. His familiarity with great ideas and thinkers, his personal ties to some of the most important conservatives in recent history (Ronald Reagan visited his home!), and his affable writing style — not to mention that he founded the publication I write for — give me pause when considering even a modest contradiction of the man.

Despite the war-like hostility of the Obama administration to the traditional carbon based energy that fueled the industrial revolution, the entrepreneurship and modern technology of America’s private economy is producing a boom in oil and gas production that is overwhelming President Obama.

Achieving and sustaining such economic growth should be the central focus of national economic policy, for it would solve every problem that plagues and threatens us today.

The last remaining glimmer of Obama’s political capital and personal appeal, and thus his ability to help vulnerable Democrats in the 2014 elections and beyond, is flowing into the septic tank of Progressive history.

The Douglas County election results can and should sow similar efforts around the country to reclaim local institutions to protect freedom and demonstrate effective self-government.