Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama has given us his analysis of why his party is headed for significant losses in the election nine days hence.
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," said the president for whom politics did not seem so tough in 2008, "and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared."
In other words, the voters can't see straight.
But maybe it's the Obama Democrats who are so scared they can't see straight. John Maynard Keynes famously said that practical men of business are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. In this case, it seems that practical men of politics may be the slaves of some defunct political scientists and historians.
Those political scientists and historians, inspired by the Progressive movement and New Deal of the last century, taught that history inevitably and properly moves left. It is a story of progress from little or no government to big and bigger government.
Bigger government, in this view, helps the ordinary citizen who is otherwise at the mercy of the masters of the marketplace. And those citizens will be grateful, especially in times of economic distress, to the politicians who expand government ever further.
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