Three-Card Monte and the One-Party State

How lionlike the Democrats sound as they circle around Social Security, roaring their defiance! After years of servility some of them even dare to shake their fists at Alan Greenspan and hurl insults at the man. When the chairman of the Federal Reserve put in a decorous word for Social Security "reform" in February, House minority leader Harry Reid made so bold as to call Greenspan a "hack." Paul Krugman, who primly chastised Ralph Nader back in 2000 for wanting to "re-educate" Greenspan, now pelts the chairman with rotten cabbages on an almost weekly basis in his New York Times column.

Presumably, enough Democrats realize that if they can't be seen as putting up a fight on Social Security, then the last supposed major reason for anyone to support their party will have disappeared. (To anyone claiming choice to have an abortion is as powerful a reason, I offer the obvious, which is that the Republicans will never formally move to rescind the legality of abortion. They will merely continue in the enterprise, in which countless Democrats have colluded, of making it harder and harder for poor women to get one.)

The etiquette of substantive one-party rule in America requires us to overlook the facts that the preliminary salvos advertising the need for Social Security "reform" were launched by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and that under Bill Clinton privatization was so far advanced that the secret team under the supervision of Lawrence Summers, then in Clinton's Treasury Department, was discussing how to number the individual retirement accounts. Fortunately, Monica Lewinsky caught Clinton's eye, and before long he had impeachment and the need for friends to his left at the front of his mind.

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