Lefty Misses the Mark

In the Wall Street Journal today, Thomas Frank whines that the Left Should Reclaim 'Freedom'. He argues that those of us that are conservative or libertarian that are in uprising, as represented by the massive march on the National Mall on 9/12 this past weekend, against the idea of an ever-expanding federal government, are really people that should be identifying with the Left. In an astounding bit of swing-and-miss finger pointing, Frank posits

The reality of misgovernment, meanwhile, is not something you can grasp simply by donning a tricorn hat and musing on the majesty of Lady Liberty. It requires, among other things, close attention to the following irony: That many of the most destructive and even corrupt policies of the past few decades were engineered by exactly the sort of people who claim to be motivated by freedom and liberty. Our friends on the Mall no doubt imagine themselves as guiltless accusers, but if they really want to understand how our country got to this sorry state, they need to take a long hard look in the mirror.

Such a statement belies the fact that a vast accounting of the people involved in the Tea Parties over the past six months, leading up to the mass of humanity collecting in Washington, DC, are people that have literally never done anything political in their lives. These are people like me. Up until this past election, I had never voted in my life. I became intensely interested in our political atmosphere as I watched Barack Obama rise literally from a back-room political nobody, to the Office of President.

The phenomenon was astounding to me, as it appeared to me that he rode a wave of anti-Bush, anti-Republican hatred to the office, promising a new day, when what I saw was someone using that wave to slide a wholly new ideology into the top executive office. This spurred me to start this blog back in January. Some new political philosophy discussion needed to begin to take place, and I felt I could be a voice. Something that is not Left, and not Right, as we have come to know them, both of them corrupted and flawed and untruthful. A new way of thinking about politics has become necessary, and the more we discuss, the more we find that everything old is new again. We are relying on what should have always been relied on. Freedom. Liberty.

I believe change is necessary in Washington. And I think the hundreds of thousands of people that showed up there last Saturday believe change is necessary as well.

Thomas Frank is wrong to accuse us as being the people that have wrecked, Washington. We are not representative of the type of Big Government, defecit spending Bush-era Republicans. We are as angry at the Right as we are terrified of what the Left is trying to do. The "leaders" on the Right of late have abandoned the principles of Freedom and Liberty. It is time that they know it. We are those who have been idle. We are those who have kept to ourselves and lived our own lives. And now we are the beast that has been awoken.

Thomas Frank is right, though, however badly he missed the mark in his final statement. We have only to look ourselves in the mirror to find the people to blame. Our decades of inaction, of being the silent majority, must come to an end, and they are coming to an end. What is swelling is not a movement of the Republican Right, and cannot be a movement of the Democrat Left. It is a movement of a people that want their government to do what it was created to do: Protect our Freedom. Protect our Liberty.