Anything goes

As Friedrich Hayek observed in  The Road to Serfdom leftist ideas demand the end of truth.  He devoted Chapter 11 to the topic.  We've been treated to a first hand ongoing demonstration of this principle thanks to the efforts of our leftward leaning Democratic leadership and their partners in the mainstream press.  When Daniel Henninger made related observations in his Opinion Journal essay, Has Washington Gone Insane?, he didn't make the connection to Hayek's "End of Truth".

Rational problem-solving generally requires adhering to the rules of the game, and in politics those rules are often informal. One such rule in Washington is that a politician is as good as his word. Perhaps nothing has been more destructive to Washington's current ability to function than the belief that "Bush lied" about WMD, most notably Joe Wilson's foundational charge in the New York Times that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger.

This persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission, had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries that allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security or homeland security.

Mr. Henninger is willing to give credit where I would not.  He seems to believe partisan Democrats are interested in rational problem solving.  I do not.  There is only one problem our Democratic leadership hopes to solve and that is the problem of getting elected back into the majority.  The ballot box has not been kind to them, and it gets unkinder as the party drifts further and further left.

Out of habit maybe, they try to reverse this development by taking a very leftist tack.  Lefty ideas were never all that popular with Americans, so if there's to be any hope they'll gain acceptance, they must be disguised.  Here is how Hayek put it in "The End of Truth", in The Road to Serfdom.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before.   The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to he new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen.  And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.

Think of the good old days of plentiful Democratic majorities, when spending increases that didn't measure up to Democratic ambitions were called "cuts".  Think of the phrases "social justice" and "freedom from want".

Democrats have been in the minority for some years now, their decline coinciding with the erosion of mainstream press power to shape public opinion.  It's not enough in these days to merely mislabel things.  It just doesn't work the way it once did.  The Democrats and the press have been on such a downward spiral, desperation is coloring their attempts to put on the brakes -- so much so that we now often see outright dishonesty.  Think of Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and the forged TANG memos.  Think of the illegal disclosure of the top secret NSA terrorist surveillance.

To today's Democratic leadership this is all just part the mission -- the mission to get back in charge.  They have no goal more important than this, and to achieve it, anything goes.  As Mr. Henninger put it, they "think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries." Except that, over on the Left they've never felt constrained by any such boundaries. Theirs is a higher calling.  With the Democratic leadership firmly controlled by the Left, the party has adopted that higher calling.  The Democrats must save the country.  They must save it from... Well judging by their use of words, I guess they understand they have to save it from a majority of Americans. 

Look out.  Anything goes.