Are Republicans all washed up?
Is fiscal responsibility gone with the wind? Are schools where children learn hard science, math and how to write well passe? Will health care forever be dished up by our government, along with food stamps and housing and tens of millions of laws about what light bulbs we must buy, what shopping bags we are forbidden to use - and so forth and so on?
Plenty think our best days are behind us. America the beautiful and America the strong is history. Yet, this man - a former Communist! - thinks that those of us who cherish freedom and personal responsibility and so many of the qualities enshrined in our Constitution can once again become valued and respected.
A few years ago, David Horowitz and I sat down for lunch in Pico Kosher Deli, the best kosher deli in the known universe. I knew that David used to be a high-profile leftist who, somewhere along the line, reexamined his politics and his values and became a conservative. When I asked David what made him lose faith in liberalism, David pulled a classic silent movie double take, almost spilling his matzo ball soup.
“I was not a liberal,” said David.
“Um, but I thought…”
“I was a communist.”
Indeed, David Horowitz was deep red, an activist who, tragically, came to see the radical left for what it was: ardent true believers who will not hesitate to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette. The broken egg, in David’s case, was Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper who, on David’s recommendation, worked for the Black Panthers. When she discovered irregularities in the Panther books, she was murdered.
David knows that the party of John F. Kennedy is dead. It is now the party of socialist progressives, the party of Barack Hussein Obama. And unless Republicans understand that they are engaged in a life and death struggle cultural and political, America will decline and collapse into one-party, Democrat-Socialist rule.
Democrats will fight to the death to prevent poor parents from getting vouchers to provide their children with the same education that well-heeled Democratic legislators provide for theirs. This is a moral atrocity. This is an issue to get angry about and mobilize constituencies over. This is an issue that could drive a Gibraltar-size wedge through the Democratic base. But Republicans are too polite to do that.
This is merely the most obvious atrocity that Democrats are committing against America’s impoverished minorities. Subverting family structures through a misconceived welfare system, encouraging food stamp dependency, providing incentives to bring into this world massive numbers of children who have no prospect of a decent life just to earn a welfare dollar. These are the corrupt fruits of Democratic welfare policies which are spiraling out of control. Republicans criticize these programs as “wasteful.” They need to start attacking them as destructive, as attacks on the human beings who are ensnared by them.
The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies that ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately. Government welfare is not just wasteful; it is destructive. The public school system in America’s inner cities is not merely ineffective; it is racist and criminal.
I have not yet read all of Horowitz' treatise. Just from the beginning, however, I know he's right. People have to understand that the policies of the left are wrong because they damage people - and that principles of conservatism and libertarianism can help all of us - irrespective of background and color and religion. We have to figure out how to communicate it. But we can do it - because we must.
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