The Ground Zero Mosque.
Not only has the emperor no clothes, he seems to have lost his ever-loving mind.
In the space of two elections, the myth of the Democrat Triumphant has been exposed. The coup de grace might well have been an omnibus stimulus, an omnibus health care bill or just those “stupid” Cambridge police. To be certain, it doesn’t help to be in the minority of nearly every national debate (even if you are controlling both legislative houses and the executive).
The Ground Zero Mosque debate should at least rank among the top ten losers. According to Katie Couric, apparently we’re all either Islamophobes, Obamaphobes or “both.” Surely, it has to be one, the other, or both. What else?
Most of the country opposes the erection of a mosque, two blocks from where eighteen Muslims flew a plane into a symbol of American liberty. Yes, this is sentimental and purely emotional. Yes, there is a legal right to build the mosque. Yes, America is imperfect. Yes, we’re sick of qualifying every reaction to every Muslim with a nod to Political Correctness.
Has the building of a mosque ever been protested anywhere in the entire United States, ever? Not that I can recall, at least not with the force of cross-partisan, cross-cultural, cross-religious, cross-racial, national opposition. Sixty-two percent of Americans, 58% of New Yorkers and 77% of mainstream voters oppose its being built (a CNN poll has opposition as high as 70%). Is it because that many people are Islamophobes?
Did President Bush not qualify that Islam is a religion of peace and not terrorism everytime he spoke of 9/11 and terrorism? Did we not elect a man with an Arabic name and Muslim roots? Have we any laws proscribing Islam, its practice or its adherents’ civil rights? Is there any analogy between this and the anti-Catholic laws and campaigns of the 19th Century? Or between this and the anti-Semitic episodes of American history?
The Imam who wants this mosque built has described his intention as benign: he wants reconciliation and healing. Yet most of the country seems to think it’s an insensitive and offensive action. Looks like his objective has failed. Why then go ahead with this? Why not find a different site? Clearly, reconciliation and healing was not his actual intention; for, to achieve those objectives, he would have to begin by building the mosque elsewhere.
Sixty years after the fact, people would be offended at the idea of a German Embassy next to Treblinka, a U.S. military base at Hiroshima, or a Japanese museum and cultural center at Pearl Harbor. Not all Germans were Nazis, not all Americans support dropping nukes, and not all Japanese people are kamikaze fighters.
But that’s not the point, is it? There are German embassies in Poland, and U.S. military bases in Asia, and Japanese museums in America. But the planners of these buildings opted out of trampling on local and national sentiments.
But rather than defend national sentiments, President Obama delivered a lecture on religious freedom and constitutional rights. Of course, many things are legal and constitutionally protected. I could probably get away with dressing up like Adolf Hitler before I go buy milk and eggs. But, interestingly, we get the exact opposite response whenever a key constituent is offended. What happened to sensitivity and political correctness? Or is it only politically incorrect to offend Muslims (not Christians, 9/11 family members or the entire corpus of the American polity)?
On the Losing Side of History.
A political party is an empty shell.
For too long, Democrats, in one form or another, have been marinating in their political élan, stored up over multiple American generations. They’re so unaccustomed to articulating their philosophy and ideology because, for a while, America generally shared it.
In 1800, the Democratic-Republicans squeezed out the Federalist Party and proceeded to take nearly every Congress until the Civil War. But by then, the party platform had morphed. Slavery and secession may yet be the greatest loser-arguments in American history. From 1855 to 1933, the new Republican Party took the House 26 times and the Senate 31 times – Democrats took the House 13 times and the Senate 8 times during the same period. From Lincoln down to Hoover, 12 Republicans became president, compared with 4 Democrats (and Andrew Johnson only won as Lincoln’s Vice President, and was later impeached).
By the turn of the century, both parties more or less favored the liberal economic theories that dominated the Industrial Age. The Social Democrats and Christian Democrats of Europe, with their third-way between the Statist, Marxo-Bismarkian liberalism (short hand: Socialism) and laissez-faire liberalism didn’t hit America, where laissez-faire dominated.
In the South, the Democratic platform was largely wedded to the politics of Reconstruction. In the North, “Bourbon” Democrats like Grover Cleavland cozied up with Rockefellers and Carnegys just like the Republicans. These Democrats were anti-imperialists and supported a gold standard.
But waves of immigrants created a vacuum of unrepresented urban workers, living on subsistence wages and looking for a political voice. Labor unions sprung up and the urban masses began to identify with populist, anti-business movements like the Free-Silver campaign. Some, like Samuel Gompers, swung straight for socialism.
Democrat Williams Jenning Bryan opposed the Bourbon Democrats and reacted to the detached moneyed-interests that controlled both parties. The debate he sparked over free silver pitted the creditors of the North against debtors of the Old South, and Midwestern farmers. Coincidentally, it pitted worker against big business. Coincidentally, it pitted the Jim Crowe South against the robber baron North.
The collapse of the Republican dominance was inevitable. In the early part of the 20th century, Democrats regrouped into a confederation of disenfranchised workers, immigrants, urbanites, and farmers, the lower and middle classes, and found stranger bedfellows in the Jim Crowe South.
With the Depression came a new era of Democratic dominance. From 1933 to 1995, Democrats held the House 29 times and the Senate 26 times – Republicans held the House 2 times and the Senate 5 times during the same period. Rightly or wrongly, Democrats won the debate over government expansion after the Great Depression, and kept winning it throughout the Cold War. Absolute power manifested in their monopolization of media, academia and government. There was no one left to counter and no one to obstruct the growth of big Democrats and their big government.
Although they narrowly escaped taking the historical blame for segregation (advocated by Southern Democrats), their political capital would be exhausted over five or six decades of fiscal recklessness. Democrats bought the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So that by 1980, Democrats had to start bouncing checks.
Social Security was crumbling, debt, inflation and the deficit were all soaring, jobs were hemorrhaging and the social experiments proved insolvent and unsuccessful. Democrats lost control of the debate on economics, foreign policy and social values. In 1980, Republicans netted 12 Senate seats and more than 30 House seats (although Democrats kept the House for another 14 years after this.) Ronald Reagan swept through 44 states, carrying 489 of 538 electoral votes. In 1984, he took 49 states and 525 electoral votes. (Mondale kept his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia). It remains the biggest electoral landslide ever.
So great was the shift in popular sentiment on the issue of government power, that even Democratic President Bill Clinton gave Reagan a nod – albeit, a qualified one – in his second inaugural speech, reaffirming Reagan’s 1981 declaration that “the era of big government is over.” Still, Clinton’s nod was not enough to quell the popular will. In 1994, Republicans seized the House and Senate in one fell swoop: they netted 54 House seats and 11 Senate seats.
Twelve years later, a layer of sewage had risen up and settled atop the Republican Congress. The platform seemed stagnant and disinterested in the desires of the American people. Nancy Pelosi declared that she and her ilk had come along to empty the swamp. They miscalculated the public will.
2006 and 2008 were not aberrations; rather they were misinterpretations. Many Independents and Conservatives opposed the war in Iraq, the reckless spending of the Republicans, amnesty, and, the overall disinterest in reigning in big government. The Republican ascendency of the 1980s and 1990s was a mere coincidence of the small-government, populist take over of the Republican Party. And the Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 (mild by historical standards), were mere coincidences of the rejection of George Bush’s Republican Party. Obama’s historic campaign prolonged this wave of coincidental support.
History has yet to decide whether a lasting victory will be handed to the Republicans. Will they corner the political landscape for decades to come? Who knows. American political history is a cornucopia of fruits and nuts. Sometimes, they become so moldy and rotten that they can no longer be dusted off and tried anew. Time will tell if the reenergized Republican Party is the (mobile) home of Sarah Palin, the broken down hobble of John McCain or the impenetrable fortress of Paul Ryan. Maybe there will be a new party altogether.
But one thing is for sure: unless he get’s back to reality and back with the mainstream of thought, the era of the big Democrat is over. The pendulum has swung away from him once more.
Let the mosque near Ground Zero be another warning: wrong, again Mr. Democrat.