Serious Moral Populism

There is a Chevron station that I drive by on my way to and from work every day.  It's usually the one at which I fill up my little roller skate of an economy car when I'm down to the fumes.  I used to have to fill up weekly because of my former near-hundred mile per day roundtrip commute; for the past five years my office has been a mere fifteen minutes from my house, and I now only need to get gas in or around once a month.

Still, I can trace the seasons by watching the pump price tote board go up and down: spring, it goes up; summer and fall, it goes down.  This reflects the fluctuating demand for gasoline, as people generally do more driving when its warmer and the kids are out of school than they do when "the weather outside is frightful."

The last few weeks, however, that pump price tote board has read like a gauge in a Warner Brothers cartoon - you know, the one whose numbers start moving faster and faster and faster until they momentarily freeze into letters that say "Amazin', ain't it?" before resuming their dizzying blur.  One day last week I drove by in the morning, saw the price per gallon had risen a nickel from the evening before, and THAT evening, after half-jokingly speculating that the price probably went up another nickel during the day, I found that I was wrong - it had gone up SIX cents.  Eight and nine cent rises in a single day are becoming commonplace.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you haven't already seen.yourselves.  I'm less than sure, but still willing to bet, that most of you behold that, grit your teeth through "shell"ing out fifty to seventy-five bucks for a tank that only cost a third that much just a few years ago, and don't instinctively think, "Boy, this sucks; I sure hope the Democrats in Congress pass an energy bill that will restrict domestic oil supplies EVEN MORE, and sock those robber baron oil companies with one tax after another that will drive up their pump prices EVEN MORE, and force those robber baron oil companies to lower their prices so that I can relive the glory days of sitting in line for most of a day waiting to fill up my tank with fumes.  Boy, those were the good old days."  Instead you probably bewilderedly wonder why we can't simply expand our domestic energy supplies so that we're not so hopelessly dependent upon international paragons of virtue like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela for the very lifeblood of our economy and our military.

Welcome to the club, gentles.  A club that includes such luminaries of wisdom and common sense as the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger:

Did you catch what Henninger said at the end?  Czar Vlad in Moscow and the ChiComms in Beijing watching our energy debates, beholding BOTH political parties competing with each other to see who can lock up our domestic energy resources tighter than a bull's ass in fly season, seeing how desperately unserious, even infantile, we've become, and concluding not only that America doesn't want to be a world power anymore, but "can be taken" - as in conquered.  And of course, Uncle Hugo and Adolph Ahmadinejad are watching closely as well, doubtless doubled over in laughter at the spectre of "the Gringo Satan" voluntarily bankrupting itself and its own people for the sake of pagan mysticism masquerading as "climate change".

Another elite member of the club, Victor Davis Hanson, takes particular note of the emphasized passage above and turns a notorious rhetorical truncheon of the Left against its creators:

The other day in a poor part of Central California, I talked with a number of folks at a rural gas station. Most drove second- and third-hand pickups, large cast-off sedans or used SUVs.

They didn't have the cash to buy a new fuel-efficient Honda or Toyota. And they were now spending a day or two of their wages just to fuel their cars.

But I also fill up three hours away on the San Francisco peninsula. High-priced hybrid cars and new more-efficient SUVs are everywhere. After listening to these quite different motorists, I can confirm: The wealthier and better-educated seem less concerned about gas prices.

From my informal conversations, I'd go even further: The wealthy, especially political liberals, also like that high-priced gas translates into less burning of fossil fuels by others and will help accelerate research into alternative energies.

But what these elites don't seem to realize is that the energy policies they advocate are paralyzing almost everyone else - and that the truly ethical and environmental solution would require embracing positions long considered anathema to traditional liberalism.

You can see where VDH is heading, and it is glorious, oh yes:

The debate in Congress over more refineries and nuclear-power plants; drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off our coasts; and developing oil shale, tar sands and liquid coal has been a predictable soap opera: Grasping Republicans supposedly wish to enrich energy companies, while idealistic Democrats want only to protect the environment. But those stances, hatched in the days of $1.50-a-gallon gas, should be revisited in light of different moral considerations.

One is fairness to the poor and middle class. Like it or not, radical environmentalism appeals to an elite not all that worried when gas prices rise or electricity rates go up - since fossil-energy use goes down.

But a paradox is that most environmentalists think of themselves as egalitarians. So, instead of objecting to the view of a derrick from the California hills above the Santa Barbara coast, shouldn't a liberal estate owner instead console himself that the offshore pumping will help a nearby farm worker or carpenter get to work without going broke?

If there is a way for the Republican Party to win the November election, Professor Hanson just punched its ticket: economic populism.  Not the kind that blames "Big Business" for all of society's ills and problems; that promises to somehow make the lives of  the "poor" and "middle class" better by jacking up tax rates on the "rich"; that assures us we can maintain our accustomed standard of living and high-tech, energy-intensive lifestyle off of windmills and sunbeams and penguin dreams and stranger things and driving electric cars equipped with three-hundred mile extension cords and herding us all onto bicycles and into mass transit trains like we were all deported to frakking Vietnam or some other commie hellhole; all while the neoBolshevik elites retain THEIR SUVs and THEIR private jets and THEIR secret tax breaks and shelters and so on and so on in an orgy of self-indulgent, "thee and not me" hypocrisy whose shamelessness is bottomless and insatiable.

No, THIS economic populism would put its crosshairs precisely on this autocratic liberal double-standard and rally Us, The People around the question of why we have to have holes blown in OUR household budgets based upon hoaxes of drowning polar bears and climatological Armageddons no "scientist" can prove and forty-year-old hysterical envirocliches, all to cover a stupendous arrogance that presumes to dictate to the rest of us what THEY think is best for us, rather than let us run our OWN lives, thank you very much, and make it easier and more affordable to make our OWN decisions about what kind of car to drive and how much to drive it and how high to turn the thermostat or the AC.

And then there's Barack Hussein Obama, who is not only in favor of making the problem of runaway energy costs even worse, but has already decided on our behalf that it "isn't a problem" at all: 

Yeah, all you "clingy" rubes, bumpkins, and other untermenschen; spiraling prices at the pump AREN'T A PROBLEM; they're a BLESSING.  You'll LIKE having to donate a minor organ every time you fill up; it helps feed the unemployed, and soon you'll join them and have a guaranteed source of food, and you won't need those nasty, pollution-belching, gas-guzzling old cars anymore because my administration will provide you with nice, clean public transport to the welfare office every day, where you will worship my image and give THANKS for all I have done for you.

Can you say "out of touch" like he was suddenly beamed into the middle of intergalactic space?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell - who, recall, is expected to be defeated for re-election by a nameless Donk in a state that is "redder" than Mike Huckaplucka's neck - may be figuring out the enormous electoral potential of the word "DRILL!":

That is PRECISELY the message the GOP needs to take to the American people and pound into the ground for the next five months: the Republican Party wants to bring down energy prices by making it possible for us to generate more energy of our own here at home, providing free market economic relief to hard-pressed "paycheck to paycheck" American families.  But the Democrats want to keep energy prices high and rising out of sight because they've decided that the economic interests of the American people are less important than the polar bears and snail darters and reepicheeps and klongats and veruul and sehlats that you're murdering with each drive down to Blockbuster for the weekly family video.  And they think they have the right to tell you what your economic interests are.

To paraphrase John Lithgow in 2010, if the vote is my family versus the sea otter, I vote my family.  And so, I think, would a majority of the American people.

But such a winning message has to be led by the Republican Party's presidential nominee.  It has to be a unified national meme that "trickles down" from the top of the ticket to benefit all the down-ballot 'Pubbies as well.

And what is the stance of the Republican presidential nominee on THE populist issue of 2008?:

Mike Goldfarb: Some people are perplexed by your rhetoric on global warming. Is this one of those ‘no surrender’ issues, or is there room for discussion?

McCain: There’s always room for discussion. But I don’t know how any conservative can not support cap and trade. We did it with acid rain. The Europeans are putting it into effect. It’s a capitalist process that encourages green technologies. If we’re wrong, all we’ve done is adopt green technologies, in an effort to give our kids a greener planet.

As far as ANWR is concerned, I don’t want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I don’t want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has suggested drilling in the Everglades, or the Grand Canyon, or down Rabbit's hole in the Hundred Acre Wood.  And "pristine" ANWR is so cold, bleak, and barren that it - and its oil, if Lord Queeg has his way - might as well be on Mars.  Heck, spilling oil all over it would probably increase its "pristineness".

That was five months ago.  His tune hasn't changed:

He said that he opposed drilling in ANWR for the same reason that he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon… I believe this area should be kept pristine.” (Proposed oil and gas exploration in ANWR would only affect 2,000 of its 19 million acres, or 0.01%.)

The wedge issue of the election (well, okay, along with five robed, dhimmized oligarchs unilaterally deciding to announce the surrender of the United States to al Qaeda), and Maverick is going to throw them both away, thinking he can win by becoming more like Barack Hussein Obama instead of Ronald Reagan, whose "foot soldier" he claims to be.

We are soooooo screwed.

And I don't just mean from the pump handle making us walk funny.