After all, the Entitlement Utopia is where they reside. What’s more remarkable is that a couple of years earlier the Bush Republicans should have introduced a brand new entitlement all of their own—prescription drugs.

Entitlements are the death of responsible government: they offend against every republican precept. Regardless of government revenues or broader economic conditions, they “mandate” spending: they are thus an offense against one of the most basic democratic principles—that a parliament cannot bind its successors. In a sense, they negate the American revolution.

They are taxation without representation—for, as we well know, no matter how the facts on the ground evolve over the decades, entitlements are insulated from both parliamentary oversight and election results. That is why the battle has to be won in the broader culture. Entitlements have to be delegitimized. “Human dignity,” writes Paul Rahe, “is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”¹² When the state annexes that responsibility, the citizenry are indeed mere sheep to the government shepherd.

DE-NORMALIZE

You can win this. Statists overreach. They did on “climate change” scaremongering, and the result is that it’s over. Hollywood buffoons will continue to lecture us from their mega-mansions that we should toss out our washers and beat our clothes dry on the rocks singing native chants down by the river, but only suckers are listening to them.

They overreached fiscally, too. On January 20, 2009, Year Zero of the Democrat utopia, it seemed like a smart move to make “trillion” a routine part of the Washington lexicon. After all, what’s easier to spend than a trillion we don’t have? If most of us cannot conceive of what a “trillion” is in any meaningful sense anyway, how can we conceive of ever having to “repay” a trillion? There was method in the madness of the Democrats’ baseline inflation. Yet they never quite closed the deal, and now all its many citations do is remind even the most innumerate that the Democrat project is a crock, and the word itself is merely shorthand for “money we don’t have and will never have.” The spendaholics tried to normalize “trillion.” They failed. Let’s keep it de-normalized and, while we’re at it, de-normalize “billion,” too—or, at any rate, “tens of.” Units that are beyond the size of your pocket calculator should not be part of the public discourse.

Nevertheless, both these victories were close-run things. Had it not been for the leaked emails of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit warm-mongers (showing the collusion and corruption of scientific “peer review”) and had it not been for a small band of grossly abused “climate denialists” to leak them to and get the word out, the Copenhagen deal might well have passed. Liberty cannot survive if only a few are eternally vigilant. We need more. We took our eyes off the colleges, and the high schools, and the grade schools, and these and many other institutions were coopted by forces deeply hostile to the American idea. So push back, beginning in kindergarten. Changing the culture (the schools, the churches, the movies, the TV shows) is more important than changing the politics.

An election is one Tuesday every other November. The culture is every day, every month, every year. Politicians are, for the most part, a craven, finger-in-the-windy bunch. Like Milton Friedman says, don’t wait for the right people to get elected; create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing.

DO

During Scott Brown’s insurgent election campaign in deep blue Massachusetts, he was joined at one rally by a rare non-Democrat celebrity, John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Claven on the sitcom Cheers. Back in 1969, it turned out, Mr. Ratzenberger had been at Woodstock. No, he wasn’t the bass player with Country Joe and the Fish, assuming they have a bass player.

Rather, he was a working carpenter. And four decades later, stumping for Brown, he offered the all-time greatest comment on those three days of “peace and love”:

This isn’t the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers.

This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock—I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.¹³

Oh, my. Was Mr. Ratzenberger an officially licensed carpenter? Maybe whoever leaked Joe the Plumber’s files could look into it.