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Landslide on the horizon.

Landslide on the horizon.

I lived through the 1980 election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was struck at the time by the fact that next to no one among the political scientists who made a living out of studying presidential elections, communism in eastern Europe, and Sovietology saw any of these upheavals coming. Virtually all of them were caught flat-footed.

This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication. But the apparent stability of the system had lured them into a species of false confidence – not unlike the false confidence that fairly often besets students of the stock market.

There were others, less expert in the particulars of these systems, who had a bit more distance and a bit more historical perspective and who saw it coming. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a prescient book entitled Can the Soviet Union Survive 1984? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn predicted communism’s imminent collapse, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected that the Soviet Union would soon face a fatal crisis. They were aware that institutions and outlooks that are highly dysfunctional will eventually and unexpectedly dissolve.

In my opinion, none of the psephologists mentioned above has reflected on the degree to which the administrative entitlements state – envisaged by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and expanded by their successors – has entered a crisis, and none of them is sensitive to the manner in which Barack Obama, in his audacity, has unmasked that state’s tyrannical propensities and its bankruptcy. In consequence, none of these psephologists has reflected adequately on the significance of the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement, on the meaning of Scott Brown’s election and the particular context within which he was elected, on the election of Chris Christie as Governor of New Jersey and of Bob McDonnell as Governor of Virginia, and on the political earthquake that took place in November, 2010. That earthquake, which gave the Republicans a strength at the state and local level that they have not enjoyed since 1928, is a harbinger of what we will see this November.

I agree. However, the author misses one point. There is no guarantee that the American public will vote rationally. Obama might still win. However, the big government welfare state that he and the left believe in is still bankrupt and about to fall apart, no matter what happens in November. The only real question is whether we will honestly face the disaster brewing before us and begin the process of fixing it now, or we will make believe it isn’t there and allow it to overwhelm us in its collapse.

Either way, the federal government is about to go bankrupt, and if we don’t do something about it that bankruptcy will take everything else down with it.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • Jim

    Robert-
    Given our exchange a couple of days ago about lack of “middle,” one of the few things we agree on other than Peter Green, Ry Cooder, and the Mets, thought you might find this article interesting which was on Politico today.
    http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79504.html?hp=t1

  • jwing

    The Left’s flawed arguement and false logic carried to the extreme: We can end unemployment by making everyone a federal, state or local government employee. It’s so simple and the problem of unemployment is fixed. If people don’t want to work…that’s fine too, we’ll just add them to the welfare rolls thereby buying their vote and maintaining control over them while continuing to paint free marketers, conservatives and libertarians as dangerous, mean and evil.

  • JGL

    I have been listening this morning to Mike Loughgrin on the Brian Leher show, he stresses how the Republican party will not compromise

    with the Dems. (It would be prefered to just let them do as they please, that is the democart interpretation of compromise)

    He calls the Tea Party a wholly ownd component of the Republican party.

    And he calls the questioning of Huma Abadin and her Muslim Brotherhood connected family and being Hillary Clintons assistant,

    un sophisticated and rediculous. (unsophisticated is a favorite put down term of the liberal, its suppose to make you feel infeirior)

    He is a Democrat and propses that the founders wanted compromise.

    I have a different definition of compromise.

    The only solution to this situation is to defeat the other side in the election, take hold of power and right what must be righted as it is seen

    from a more conservative perspective and then create “compromise”.

    Your point that the people may reelect Mr. Obama is well taken and should scare the hell out of everyone.

  • I saw it. I also saw this (http://minx.cc/?post=331766), which suggests the disappearance of the undecided voter is bad news for Obama. As Malor notes, “Actually, it more likely indicates that the President is losing badly. This election is a referendum on Obama; if there are fewer undecided voters than usual, it’s because they’ve already made up their mind in the midst of his anti-prosperity presidency and the general economic slump.”

  • JGL

    PS: The objective, critical thinking optimist in me says that Obama will be soundly rejected by the American people and lose by 7 to 10 points.

    That is of course assumes no Chicago tabulations.

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