Blogs For Victory

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The United States is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands.

America could mine more uranium, and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. American agriculture is blessed with the world’s best soils, most developed irrigation systems, and most productive and astute farmers.

There is as much sun and wind in the western United States as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need.

A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.

It’s time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit. Let’s also hope they want to hear a lot more about Gen. David Petraeus’ success, and a lot less of Madonna’s latest psychodramas.

But just as importantly, what Americans need now is leadership to get moving again — rather than more platitudes about hope, squabbling about race and gender, and endless rhetoric about who is really a maverick or a true conservative or the most liberal. What we need to know from our two presidential candidates are specifics about how to jumpstart America.

So, how many more barrels of oil, refineries and megawatts will America produce –and when and how? How much debt will the next administration retire — and when and how. How and when will our schools return to knowledge-based rather than the present (and failing) therapeutic curriculum?

Americans, in short, should be tired of hearing that we are a post-industrial, postmodern, post-anything society. Instead, we want to be known again as a can-do producer nation that sweats as much as it thinks. And the confident presidential candidate who can best assure us of that will surely win this election.

My answer, naturally, is that McCain is the better man to do these things – and, indeed, McCain has been tacking towards a new understanding of American strength, and the real point of American conservatism (it isn’t just a powerful military and low taxes – those are incidental to conservatism, not central). While there is a rank foolishness in Democratic class war rhetoric (especially when at least a plurality of the rich back the Democrats – and its probably an absolute majority), no conservative can view corporate America with anything other than dismay at the way they’ve made of mess of things in housing, automobiles and finance. We’ve been so busy, on the right, fighting the War on Terrorism and fighting off socialism that we’ve forgot that a two by four needs, at times, to be directed at corporate America, too. All conservatives, schooled as we are in understanding the inherent weakness of large bureaucracies, should understand almost instinctively that a large corporate bureaucracy is only slightly better than a large government bureaucracy.

It is time for us to really get America moving again – a comprehensive insistence that government get out of the way, but corporations be held to the highest possible standards of honesty; an insistence that the lawsuits stop; a demand that NIMBYism on things like oil drilling and refineries be slammed hard; a realistic approach which gathers our immense strength and applies it to our pressing problems. And, most importantly, a rigid defense of the family – against intrusive government bureaucrats and corrupt teacher’s unions, to be sure, but also against corporate greed which views the family 14 year old as a prime target for sex and violence marketing.

Its all of a piece – for many decades we were focused on defeating the USSR. Lately we’ve been concentrating on the War on Terrorism – but its does us no good to win the war abroad only to lose it at home. What America needs, from top to bottom, is conservatism – conservative economics, conservative morals, conservative government. McCain may be the man to do it, but Obama is definitely not the man for the hour. This is no time for intra-movement fights over alleged purity, but it is the time to fight it out on each issue for what is really best for America – conservatism.