Ready for a march: Health care debate paves way for conservative populist revolt

There will be a march in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12 to protest recent federal government actions — runaway spending, unsustainable borrowing, trillions of dollars in debt being passed on to future generations, attempts to nationalize health care and enact a ruinous cap-and-trade bill, the bailouts — and I will participate alongside thousands of other South Carolinians.

America's tradition should always be one of expanding individual liberty, but in recent years, we have seen our federal government veer dramatically from the principles on which it — and this nation — was founded. And what we have seen in the past 200 days has been shocking. Our elected leaders seem hell-bent on deforming the relationship between the citizen and the state.

I'm glad to see senators and congressmen so shaken by the raw town-hall meetings held in recent days to debate the proposal to nationalize health care (one-sixth of our nation's economy). These politicians are not used to dealing with outraged individuals who have finally had enough, and their education on how far the policies now being pushed in Washington have drifted from the American mainstream is long overdue.

The politicians in Washington tell us this anger is not genuine, that it is being whipped up by special interest groups. They're wrong. I know that they're wrong because I hear that anger at the community forums I regularly hold in Beaufort County. Folks from all over our county — from Hilton Head Island to Bluffton, from Port Royal to Beaufort to Fripp Island — are furious. They realize something that makes America unique in the world is being lost.

Actually, it's those politicians who are beholden to the special interest groups. They have the usual suspects on board — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the American Hospital Association, America's Health Insurance Plans and the AARP, which is leaning toward an endorsement. But what they don't have are the people those groups say they represent.

Look at the AARP. It has kind words for a health care plan that would cut several hundred billion dollars over 10 years from Medicare, even though that plan is opposed by seniors more than any other age group. My constituents in Sun City, who speak eloquently and intelligently against the plan, are a far more authentic voice for seniors than the leadership of the AARP busy selling them out.

And as members of Congress are discovering during their recess, cutting deals with the special interest groups' lobbyists to cram nationalized health care down the throats of Americans will not be enough — not when they're facing a genuine grassroots revolt by people who are being ignored by everyone who is supposed to be representing them.

The populism we are now witnessing has long been part of American politics. And while liberal intellectuals preach the virtues of populism when their leaders direct it against "the malefactors of great wealth," they cry foul when it is turned against the aggrandizing of federal power.

The stakes now are very high, and Mark Steyn puts it well: "When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher — and you make it very difficult ever to change back. Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea — of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest — or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult."

Those of us heading to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12 seek to remind our elected federal officials of those "animating principles of the American idea." Of course, they might well decide to continue "annexing all the responsibilities of adulthood" (Steyn again). But if they do, the flames of the conservative populist revolt will burn even brighter, and there will be hell to pay come election time.

Tom Davis is the South Carolina state senator for Beaufort County.