Beast of Burden

From Real Clear Politics: The Democratic Party Adds Nothing to the National Debate by Robert Tracinski.

Like many on the right, I have been deeply unsatisfied with the Republican Congress. The Republicans, I thought, ought to lose enough seats in the November congressional elections that they feel they've been punished for runaway federal spending.

But as the election gets nearer and I think more about what is at stake, I have come to realize that the best outcome is for the Democrats to lose. The Democrats' failure to regain control of either house of Congress would be a good start. But an unambiguous and humiliating defeat--even a loss of Democratic seats in the House and Senate--would be much better.

The best thing we can do in this election is to crush the left--because the Democratic Party adds nothing of value to the American political debate. ...

In the American system, of course, we don't vote for parties but for individual candidates. So if your local congressional candidate has championed a particularly evil political agenda, is under indictment, or is named "Katherine Harris," then by all means vote for the other guy. But if your local House and Senate candidates are unexceptional--and too many of them are--then your vote is really about which party should have the power to appoint committee chairmen, hold hearings, issue subpoenas, and steer the nation's legislative debate. And the Democratic Party no longer has anything of value to offer. ...

[I]f you want to have a debate over how to fight and win the War on Terrorism, you'll have to have it within the right. The left contributes nothing but proposals for surrender, appeasement, and passivity. As far as the war is concerned, that "D" next to a candidate's name on the ballot stands for "defeat." ...

The more the left fades from the scene, the more the national political debate will be a debate within the right. The American system is not friendly to monolithic one-party rule. The moment one party begins to dominate, it tends to split apart along its internal fault lines. The more the Republicans dominate American politics, therefore, the more intensely they will debate among themselves ...

I can't guarantee that such a debate would produce the best result--I would like to see the emergence of a small-government, pro-immigration, pro-war, secular right--but I can guarantee that such a debate would be more interesting and much more productive than the debate we're having with the left right now.

Posted by Forkum at October 3, 2006 05:21 PM