The change from 2008 to 2010

By Ben Shapiro from the day after the elections, a good column, filled with vivid metaphors and quotable phrases, about the differences between the American electorate in 2008 and the American electorate in 2010.

Some samples:

• There’s a reason that the Democratic Party counted on college students to an inordinate degree in 2008—they required the mush-filled skulls of enthusiastic non-taxpaying pseudo-intellectuals to lead the way.

• In 2008, we closed our eyes and jumped. In 2010, we realized that we were, like Wile E. Coyote, clinging to a tree branch suspended above a 10,000-foot chasm.

• But Americans understood. We were driving toward Europe. We were driving away from our history.

  And we saw, growing in the windshield, the looming spectre of the European socialist experiment. We saw Greece, where union contracts and government debt had bankrupted an entire nation and turned it into a raging band of disaffected leeches. We saw France, where high taxation, low work hours and early retirement had turned one of the oldest members of Western Civilization into a cauldron of whining.

• The American people [in 2010] voted for gridlock, almost literally embodying the William F. Buckley definition of conservatism, standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”

• …for the moment, let us recognize how far we have come in just two years: from the precipice of national teenage oblivion to the foundations of a new American adulthood.

I think he’s being overly optimistic in the last bulleted passage, but that is another question.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2010 09:10 AM | Send