Hubris

Hubris. Get to know that word. It's going to be a popular one in a few years for describing the Democrat party.

For several years, the Democrat party was in opposition. Republicans either held the legislative houses or the Presidency. However, the Democrat party has not been in opposition since 2006 and now are control both the executive and the legislative branch. The problem is that for the past few years they have continued to act as an opposition party, even after they gained Congress. Their main theme was not active government and leadership, but opposition. The 110th Congress was widely recognized for its inactivity, especially in the face of some dramatic difficulties in America. Yet their problems were always pinned on the Republican party, not the actual problems themselves. If only the Republicans weren't in the way, they could make things better. They should have been more careful about what they wished for.

The Democrats are now exceedingly in control and they must perform. There are no more excuses. However, they have not been acting as a governing party or practicing good governance. They are unschooled in the discipline of power. This is not the first time this has happened in politics. In 1979, Joe Clark and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada rose quickly to power and gained control of the government for the first time in many years. Once in power, their actions were undisciplined and too drastic (slogan was "Short term pain for long term gain") and by 1980 were booted out and power firmly returned to the Liberal party for another four years. They were simply unprepared to actually govern as they were only prepared to oppose.

Today, in the Washington Post Eugene Robinson wrote about the backwardness of the Republican Party. He wrote,

"What I've been hearing from Republicans in both the House and Senate has been a kind of attenuated, distorted echo of the economic doctrine that the party has preached, if not always practiced, since the Reagan years. It's perfectly appropriate, of course, to ask whether a specific spending proposal would have the desired stimulative effect; indeed, some items were removed from the stimulus bill for that reason. But underlying the Republican criticism has been a familiar formula: more tax cuts, fewer spending initiatives.

But Americans know that this philosophy has already taken us as far as it could. Americans know that taxes can be cut by only so much before the federal government's effectiveness inevitably suffers."

He eventually concluded, "There is abundant evidence suggesting that we are in a new political era with new rules and a new lexicon." This is going to be the downfall of the Democrats.

Democrats have mistakenly identified their electoral victory as an absolute triumph of their ideas. They are not just the ones in power, they are morally, intellectually, and politically right. Republican ideas and criticisms are not to be heeded because they are from an entirely alien era.

In a January 17 article in the Washington Post, Peter Beinart wrote about how President Bush had been right about the surge and the Democrats needed to accept and acknowledge that for their own sakes. He wrote,

"Because Bush has been such an unusually bad president, an entire generation of Democrats now takes it for granted that on the big questions, the right is always wrong. Older liberals remember the Persian Gulf War, which most congressional Democrats opposed and most congressional Republicans supported -- and the Republicans were proven right. They also remember the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, when prominent liberals predicted disaster, and disaster didn't happen.
Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right."

Democrats are mistaking popularity for moral rectitude. This hubris will lead them into trouble. They will be lucky if it doesn't take them down by 2012. Beyond that, the response will be decisive. Lets just hope their irresponsibility doesn't cost us all.

For your further contemplation, I'll add yet another block quote.
“It is just like the case of a man who learns by heart the angers and desires of a great, strong beast he is rearing, how it should be approached and how taken hold of, when – and as a result of what – it becomes most difficult or most gentle, and, particularly, under what conditions it is accustomed to utter its several sounds, and, in turn, what sort of sounds uttered by another make it tame and angry….Knowing nothing in truth about which of these convictions and desires is noble, or base, or good, or evil, or just, or unjust, he applies all these names following the great animal’s opinions – calling what delights it good and what vexes it bad. He has no argument about them but calls the necessary just and noble, neither having seen nor being able to show someone else how much the nature of the necessary and the good really differ….So, does this man seem any different from the man who believes it is wisdom to have figured out the anger and pleasures – whether in painting, music, or, particularly, in politics – of the multifarious many who assemble?” Plato, Republic