Which is the More Plausible Apocalypse?
A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80.
The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn.
Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples.
It’s a wonder Dobson didn’t just subcontract out this work to Tim LaHaye of Left Behind fame–but then again, even LaHaye’s been going “off message.” Of course, Dobson’s letter looks downright public-spirited compared to other tactics of the right, such as faked attacks and depictions of Obama as an avatar of Islamofascism.
Jeffrey Rosen raises the possibility of a different electoral apocalypse that may be a tad bit more plausible than Dobson’s eschatology:
An Obama victory would maintain the current balance of the Court, while a McCain Court could create a solid conservative majority. . . .Before the crash of 2008, the previous two most serious depressions in U.S. history–in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–triggered populist economic regulations by Congress and the states to protect citizens from the excesses of industrial capitalism. In both eras, conservative Supreme Court majorities struck down those regulations–from minimum-wage laws to parts of the New Deal–as an affront to property rights and limits on federal power. This triggered a political backlash from Americans convinced that the decisions were bad for the country. The greatest danger posed by a McCain Court is that it might revive those now-discredited ideas.
Broadly, many conservatives want to second-guess the states when they pass progressive regulations–involving affirmative action, economic redevelopment, and gun control–while deferring to the states when they pass regulations favored by social conservatives. . . . This year, liberals are in a perilous situation, where a conservative president could create a conservative Supreme Court majority for decades to come.
Where is the “Dobson letter” for liberals this year? I’d love to see a comparison of whatever fundraising letters are sent out by the ACLU and similar groups to Nostradobsonus’s libertine dystopia.