Over in the USA the Republicans – boosted by Tea Party energy – look set to win big tomorrow in the latest rounds of US elections.

Pundits pore away over why President Obama’s erstwhile omnipotent appeal has waned. Is he too aloof, too clever, too Left, too moderate?

Has he forgotten the most basic rule of politics, namely ‘bring the public with you’?

Or does he not care if the Democrats get thrashed tomorrow, since he has rammed through a vast ‘reform’ of US healthcare whose deeper social and bureaucratic effects will work in the Democrats’ favour for ever more?

Are the Tea Party ‘really’ racists? Fanatics backed by big business? Crazed addicts of Fox News?

Or an authentic expression of frustration with the way the USA is being run which signals a turn away from Big Government sooner or later?

Or all of the above?

It’s exhausting reading about all this from a healthy distance. The American public bombarded with TV ads and incessant political telephone calls adding insult to the country’s relative economic weakness must be heartily fed up.

The key point for me is that the Tea Party tendency forces to the fore a serious discussion about the role and size of government. 

Tea Party folk may not articulate a clear platform about what they want. But the one uniting theme is what they don’t want: Bigger and Bigger Government.

Give yourself a treat as US voting gets under way. Read this piece by Mark Steyn:

… the short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as from  time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm…

“We the people” has degenerated into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers”. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society. But today we’re all ignorant of the law, from the legislators who pass the laws unread to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end.

How can you not be? Under the hyper-regulatory state, any one of us is in breach of dozens of laws at any one time without being aware of it. In a New York deli, a bagel with cream cheese is subject to food-preparation tax, but a plain bagel with no filling is not. Except that, if the clerk slices the plain bagel for you, the food-preparation tax applies. Just for that one knife cut.

As a progressive caring society New York has advanced from tax cuts to taxed cuts. Oh, and, if he doesn’t slice the plain bagel, but you opt to eat it in the deli, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was required of the food.

… In such a world, there is no “law” – in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed by (d) your elected representatives.

Instead, unknown, unnamed, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats determine transgressions, prosecute infractions and levy fines for behavioral rules they themselves craft and which, thanks to the ever more tangled spaghetti of preferences, subsidies, entitlements and incentives, apply to different citizens unequally.

You may be lucky: You may not catch their eye – for a while. But perhaps your neighbor does, or the guy down the street. No trial, no jury, just a dogsbody in some cubicle who pronounces that you’re guilty of an offense a colleague of his invented.

This is soft tyranny – and, actually, not so soft…

Brilliant. Scarily brilliant.

The point is that the cumulative effect of all this neurotic regulation in the USA and Europe alike is politically, psychologically, pathologically oppressive. It saps the will of people. It demotivates. It breeds cynicism, fear, sneakiness.

It makes us worse as people.

The situation is clear, although Roger Scruton piles on the agony for us:

There is now a well-trodden career path from the politicized NGOs of the left, via the left-leaning quangos, to high office in the Labour Party and thence to the lucrative bureaucracies of the European Union.

The Parliamentary Labour Party now consists almost entirely of career politicians who have spent their lives spending other people’s money and providing ideological reasons for stealing more of it…

So I hope the Republicans score a vast victory tomorrow, as the best available way for voters anywhere in the democratic world to express their revulsion peacefully at this insane state of affairs. The Democrats and Obama alike don’t see any problem with government as Big as it is. Nor does much of the political establishment in the UK and across Europe.

After a significant Republican win the usual ‘gridlock’ will seize Washington. No doubt many of the new Republicans will quickly start to find reasons for continuing Washington’s corrupt ways. But not all. 

The tone will change. The Democrats will have to start looking at more libertarian options to have any hope of making a serious comeback soon.

President Obama perhaps will start to talk a lot more credibly than he has done so far about creativity and the role of entrepreneurship.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg will get a boost for their plans to carve back British government to the already bloated levels of a few years back. Perhaps they’ll get the confidence to go much further.

If a profound change of direction does not come?

Could the USA’s future be as bleak as Mark Steyn suggests?

Over 4,000 US soldiers died in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. Between 2006 and 2010, nearly 25,000 Mexicans died in drug violence. America has no “exit strategy” for Mexico, but Mexico has an express check-in strategy for America.

What is happening on the southern border is the unmaking of America. And if a state under siege cannot pass even the mildest law of self-defense, what then are its options..?

… There’s a fascinating book by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore called The Size of Nations, in which the authors note that, of the ten richest countries in the world, only four have populations above one million: America (300 million people), Switzerland (seven million), Norway (four million), and Singapore (three million).

Small nations, they argue, are more cohesive and have less need for buying off ethnic and regional factions. America has been the exception that proves the rule because it’s a highly decentralized federation. But, as Messrs Alesina and Spolaore put it, if America were as centrally governed as France, it would break up.

That theory is now being tested on a daily basis. The United States cannot continue on its present path and hold its territorial integrity…

Get out and vote, America.

Get yourself some new Hope, by demanding the only Change that matters. Vote to cut Big Government.