Trying to puzzle out why it is that the country is entranced with political outsiders (how could it be that the country is in revolt against Obama? such a mystery … ), David Brooks paints a picture of an ordinary guy who’s worked hard his whole life only to discover “a political system that undermined the relationship between effort and reward.” (Brooks doesn’t say it, but the term for this is “liberalism.”) Brooks then goes on to bemoan the shriveling political center — “a feckless shell”:

It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.

But that’s not exactly right. It isn’t passivity or good manners that have left moderates in the lurch. What’s happened is that the moderates have become indistinguishable from liberals. Specter and Lincoln both voted for the stimulus plan, the bank bailout, and ObamaCare. None of them opposed Obama on a single significant legislative matter.

Brooks despairs that when the average voter looked for candidates “who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners.” That would be liberals or conservatives who don’t buy the statist, corporatist Obama vision. Brooks warns the hapless voter that he “is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. … Nothing will get done.”

But getting nothing done is the first step to reversing the damage wrought by the Democrats’ leftist splurge. Divided government and robust debate will slow and hopefully halt the runaway train. Now, if we had a less radical president, we might actually “get something done” — that is, reverse the excesses of Obamaism and return to fiscal sanity. (As a bonus, we’d begin to restore our alliances, get out of the business of sucking up to the “Muslim World,” and champion democracy promotion and human rights.) But that is for 2012. Step one is voting for non-statists who won’t roll over and play dead whenever Obama pushes for the next radical expansion of government.