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Anti-Government Liberalism
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Hurricane Katrina has revived a sentiment long dormant on the national level: anti-government liberalism. For the last twenty-fove or thirty years, as Democrats controlled either the House or the Presidency and conservative victimization continued, it was the province of the out-of-power Republicans to rail against a mythical cabal of federal bureaucrats and the pile of red tape they built. Every failure of government was magnified and blamed on a large, unwieldy, intrusive government. But today, the shoe is on the other foot. The federal governemnt is controlled by the Republican party, soup-to-nuts. Instead of command-and-control regulation getting in the way (oh, wait, the good people of Creekstone Farms remind us that still happens), our government's failings now stem from a return to the nineteenth century spoils system. "FEMA" will become a new Democratic code word for conservative incompetence the way "the VA" was for or "House post office" described liberal incompetence, and will take a place next to "the CIA" in politically-tinged hip-hop.

This sort of opposition to government-for-government's-sake had been subordinated to Clinton's build-trust-in-government agenda. Anti-government liberalism remained restricted to urban liberal detest of the po-lice and anti-corporate lefties. Clinton was a tough-on-crime, pro-business Democrat, so you didn't hear much on the subject. But now it's out in full force, and it's time for the country's center-left party to tap into that force.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 08:50 23 September 2005