Some of that is anger at particular policies — Iraq, the immigration
bill. Much, though — a rising proportion, I believe — is systemic: a
feeling that the elites are now running the show for their own
interests, Latin-America-style, with not much regard for ours. As [one
of my readers] correctly observed: "The low paid politician has
vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by
government service."
Here is Paul Johnson in Modern Times :
Like FDR, he [i.e. John F. Kennedy] turned Washington into a city of
hope; that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked
for employment.
What I am seeking is an anti-JFK — a candidate who will transform our
nation's capital from a city of hope for middle-class intellectuals,
into a city of despair for them. The despair of those intellectuals, I
am increasingly convinced, is the hope of our nation. Looking at all
but one of the Republican candidates (and, it goes without saying, all
but none of the Democratic ones) I see nothing in prospect but a new
draft of office-seeking intellectuals, primed and eager to bring us
new expansions of federal power, new pointless wars, new
million-strong reinforcements for the Reconquista, new thousand-page
tax loopholes, new inducements for idleness and crime, new
humiliations for the saps who follow rules and obey laws. Sadly and
reluctantly at last, I include the S.O.B. in that "all but one."
* * * * *
From Kimberley Strassel's piece in the Dec. 14 Opinion Journal:
Paul rallies heave with voters waving placards and shouting "Liberty! Liberty!"
Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?
Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of
swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules,
and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected
elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and
teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever
more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open
borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our
sense of nationhood ("Press one for English …"), of speech codes and
race lobbies and judicial impositions.
If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I'm
for liberty, too. That's why I'm for Ron Paul. And why do we have
75,000 soldiers in Germany?