Okay, so John Boehner is out.
What does it matter if he stays? Nothing good is likely to come of it; certainly, nothing good has come of it thus far. What does it matter if he leaves? There is little hope that Republicans will use his departure to accomplish anything good.
The stark reality of the situation is that the Republican Party is broken. Most Republicans are simply progressives who view the past with slightly more fondness than liberals, or who retain an eye toward a few pertinent aspects of reality. By this, I mean most can be identified as traditionalists or neo-conservatives.
If you doubt that these two camps are the same as progressives, consider this. Our Founders believed that liberty and security were a zero-sum game; you had to give a little bit of freedom to be secure. Progressives believe exactly the opposite: freedom is security. This is fundamentally the position of warmongering, uplift-desiring, Patriot-act-supporting neo-conservatives.
For traditionalists, as for progressives, it is key that history progresses by building on old things. The Founders, in contrast, believed that you built things on principles. To which do traditionalist conservatives look when making their stand, history or principles?
For traditionalists and neo-conservatives alike, the idea of liberty—that is to say, self-government—is too abstract to be effective. They focus on the practical. They focus on what they can reasonably expect to get done. But if what you get done is not principled, what is it? Can you really say it is good? Or is it just a lesser form of tyranny, a softer form of despotism?
This is the legacy of John Boehner and the Republican Party as it stands today: soft despotism. Constantly bowing to what is “practical” at the expense of principles has not gotten us a single good thing in government in the last decade, if not longer. Come to think of it, when was the last victory for freedom in American government?
As long as we reject the idea of abstract liberty, we will never find our way out of the fanciful world of “practical liberty” and positive rights. So long as no one takes a stand on principles, we will have no one to flock to when our wishes and ideology fail.
I, for one, am tired of the pleasant tyranny of the administrative state. I am tired of security at the expense of my liberty. I have no expectations that that a principled stand will result in any meaningful change in the near term, but I am tired of laying down my liberty for the empty promise of a morsel of sanity. A part of me rejoices at the fall of Boehner and his spineless ilk because I am ready to take a stand. A part of me cries because I know that his fall will hardly result in anything of the kind.
John Boehner and his kind will come and go. There are too many others just like him. The march of progress will likely continue. And all the while we will continue down a road of insanity.
To steal from Kipling, we will deny that water will wet us and fire will certainly burn, for these ideas are “lacking in uplift, vision and breadth of mind.” Instead, we will continue to take our stand that wishes are horses and that pigs have wings.
So John Boehner is out. So what? Don’t hope for much. If you feel as I do, the real question is: where are you going to stand?