The Wet Blanket Party

Joe Carter at First Things has begun a campaign for a new political party. He calls it the "Wet Blanket" party. I think he's on to something:

In the coming election we don’t need the second-coming of Teddy Roosevelt to fan the flames of National Greatness. What we need is a Coolidge clone that is able to brandish a wet blanket. In fact, we need a Wet Blanket movement—an enterprise of inactivity designed to sap any and all enthusiasm for political and governmental robustness.

Sadly, there is only one man who could lead such a movement and he died back in 1933. I’m speaking, of course, of our greatest modern president: Calvin Coolidge. The liberal journalist Walter Lippman, in his 1926 essay, “Calvin Coolidge: Puritan De Luxe,” wrote an unintentionally beautiful tribute to the patron saint of small-government conservatism that provides an outline for what is needed today:

"Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for the soft and easy desire to let things slide.

Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.

The White House is extremely sensitive to the first symptoms of any desire on the part of Congress or of the executive departments to do something, and the skill with which Mr. Coolidge can apply a wet blanket to an enthusiast is technically marvelous. There have been Presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge’s equal in the art of deflating interest. The mastery of what might be called the technique of anti-propaganda is worthy of prolonged study by students of public opinion.

The naive statesmen of the pre-Coolidge era imagined that it was desirable to interest the people in their government, that public discussion was a good thing, that indignation at evil was useful. Mr. Coolidge is more sophisticated. He has discovered the value of diverting attention from government, and with exquisite subtlety that amounts to genius, he has used dullness and boredom as political devices."

It is difficult to read this passage without a sigh of resignation. Our culture is able to provide us with innumerable dull and boring politicians. But how many have the ability to use tedium as a sophisticated political tool?

The rest of the post is equally amusing. I can almost promise that if you read it you'll be asking where you can go to sign up.