IS THE PRESIDENT SELF-DESTRUCTIVE? – AT 12:40 P.M. ET:  People ask why Obama is trying to push through an unpopular health-care bill, possibly committing political suicide.  Mark Steyn, in a superb analysis, has a very persuasive answer:

Why is he doing this? Why let "health" "care" "reform" stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it's worth it. Big time. I've been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally "conservative" parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let's not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a "conservative").

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

And...

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily "compassionate" statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life.

Finally...

...government health care is not about health care, it's about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

COMMENT:  Steyn is right.  Put the structure in place, especially a structure that people come to depend on, and it's almost impossible to remove that structure.

The Democratic Party is far to the left of where it was decades ago.  It has a dream of an even larger government.  It has a dream of a "bad" United States being curtailed internationally.  Both those dreams may be realized unless this train can be stopped.

March 7, 2010