Flight from Trantor

Is Europe growing up?

With the news that the Swedes are cutting tax rates to promote growth and the election results in Germany moving that country solidly to the center-right, I have to think that Europeans may be getting a little nervous.  The Obama-led American retreat from world leadership is going to demand more responsibility from the Euro-weenies. 

Can this be all bad?  I don't think so.  During the Bush years and all the whining from "spoiled teenager-like allies" about Iraq and American unilateralism, several sober observers suggested that we withdraw out military from western Europe and parts of Asia, and let the whiners go it alone.  Isn't that what is happening now, albeit not out of outrage at the ingratitude of other states, but from our own narcissism?

"I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party..."

...says Camille Paglia. So did I, and I also was an enthusiastic participant in '60's lefty activity.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

It is, and maybe all it means is that my Goldwater-Republican grandfather was correct, and we were all just useful idiots.