Can Republicans ride the wave?

• Author: Arnn, Larry P.
• Position: American Thought - Wave election

WE HAD a wave election a few months ago. For those of a conservative disposition, it was a satisfying wave. According to political analyst Michael Barone, this wave was like several recent wave elections in its magnitude and decisiveness. There was a wave in favor of the Republicans in 1980 and again in 1994. There was a wave in favor of the Democrats in 2006 and again in 2008. There was a wave for the Republicans in 2010. There was a stalemate in 2012. Now there is a Republican wave launched by the 2014 midterm elections. Looked at one way, these waves appear more like tides, ebbing and flowing.

These waves have something to do with a change in opinion over the last 50 years. Increasingly large majorities of the people consistently profess themselves afraid of their government. They think it too big. They think it does not account to them--that it is beyond their control and does not operate with their consent. They think it should be smaller, even if that means they receive fewer services. It seems that the growth of government has not made people feel safe, secure, or happy.

Nonetheless, two of the recent waves elected people who support larger government, and Americans continue to depend upon government more than ever. At all levels, government consumes something close to 40% of the economy, and that does not count regulatory costs, which are nearing two trillion dollars. People seem to be groping for a solution to this, and they do not seem to think they have found it.

This picture is not unprecedented. In the period leading up to the American Revolution, loyalists (or Tories) contested with revolutionaries, and these two groups alternated having the upper hand between 1763-76, and even later, after the war had begun. The people were making up their minds about something fundamental, and a consensus was slow in forming.

In the period before the Civil War, there were those who advocated destroying slavery in the slave states, where the national government's constitutional authority to do so was weak or nonexistent. There were others who supported slavery where it existed, and even the extension of slavery into new regions. Others still would find some compromise that would do the least dramatic possible thing, and then there was the new Republican party, founded to stop slavery's expansion and seek a constitutional path to its eventual abolition. This, too, was a fundamental question, and it took a long time and eventually much blood to decide.

This controversy over slavery grew up in the course of one generation. One may mark it by two of the most important statutes in American history--the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Northwest Ordinance brought the territory that became Michigan and other states into the Union, and it was the first time that a government like ours, ours being the first such government, had grown. It did not choose to grow by establishing colonies, but rather by treating the citizens of the new regions as full citizens as quickly as they could get organized.

The Northwest Territory had belonged to Virginia, and Virginia, a slave state, on the motion of Thomas Jefferson, a slave holder, gave the land to the Union for free on condition only that there be no slavery allowed in it at any time. Although Virginia also insisted on a provision...