History Today features an overview of Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), one of the greatest English political philosophers. “While there has been growing interest in some aspects of his philosophy,” says the author, “he still remains in the shadows.” Here is a much-quoted passage from Oakeshott’s lecture, “Political Education.”

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every inimical occasion.

I welcome this “traditional manner of behaviour” in our political life, although it seems rare, even among so-called “conservatives.”

Charles Krauthammer on how Obama envisions himself as the Reagan of the Left:

Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish welfare.

Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of government.

Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite norm.

Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have earned the title.

Ross Douthat offers “three reasons why Obama might not be remembered as the kind of ‘liberal Reagan’ that he seems to be today.”

1) Obama’s political victories are clearer than his policy accomplishments. The question of whether Obamacare will be implemented has been answered; the question of whether it can survive its own design flaws has not. The question of whether Obamanomics would be rejected by the public in the short run has been answered; the question of whether it can produce the kind of longer-run growth that previous generations of Americans took for granted has not. (The sluggish economic recovery barely figured into the second inaugural, and the president talked more about green industrial policy than about the plight of the unemployed.) The question of whether Obama’s foreign policy would avoid major disasters and be an asset in his re-election bid has been answered; the question of whether his navigation of the Arab Spring and his attempts to contain Iran will look skillful in hindsight has not. Obama plainly turned the social issues to his party’s advantage last year (with a major assist from Todd Akin). But a tentative and ambiguous pro-choice trend in public opinion after a long period of pro-life gains does not mean that liberals have won the abortion wars, especially given that the main policy shift of the Obama era has been an uptick in state-level abortion restriction. And even on gay marriage, where most observers — myself included — assume that the Obama era will be remembered as genuinely transformational, that transformation has only actually been achieved in nine of the fifty states.

None of this means that Obama won’t ultimately being remembered for policy triumphs as clear the victory over stagflation or the successful resolution of the Cold War, or that his presidency won’t cast a long, Reagan-like shadow over subsequent policy debates. But we don’t know that yet: The current recovery is no Reagan boom, it will be years before we can tell if the Affordable Care Act lives up its name, and plenty of surprises may await in the next four years. And remember — if passing major legislation, building a stable-seeming coalition, presiding over okay-but-not-great growth and winning a hard-fought re-election were enough to earn a spot on Rushmore, George W. Bush’s face would be being chiseled there right now.

2) Liberalism, no less than conservatism, is riven by internal contradictions. The Obama majority does indeed reflect the diversity of twenty-first America, just as its enthusiastic boosters claim: It’s the party of Silicon Valley billionaires and immigrants who work at Wal-Mart, of public sector employees and affluent dual-earner professionals, of the secular academy and the black church, of the multiracial Southwest and white New England. But for political parties as well as human societies, diversity is as often a weakness as a strength, and it’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where the Democratic Party of the near-future fractures along lines of race or geography, class or culture.

These crack-ups could happen over issues where the party seems superficially united at the moment, like guns and immigration and environmentalism, or they could happen over issues where the divisions are already there for everyone to see, like Medicare and Social Security. They could divide the party’s shrinking-but-still-large pool of white voters from its minority constituents, or they could divide minority voters from each other on one or more of the many issues where the interests of all Hispanics, all African-Americans or all Asians do not obviously align. Above all, they could force Democrats to choose, decisively and disruptively, between their traditional identity as the party of middle-class entitlements and their current identity as the party of low taxes on everyone except the richest of the rich — a choice that the Obama administration has thus far deliberately postponed.

3) The Republican Party is, in fact, capable of change. These potential fissures within liberalism won’t matter if the G.O.P. remains as hapless as it is today. And there’s a increasingly popular strain of opinion on the left that holds that Republicans are now structurally incapable of moderation, reform and self-correction — that the grip of ideology is too strong, the demands of the base too intense, the party’s distance of twenty-first America too great. If this view is right, the G.O.P. is almost irrelevant to liberalism’s fortunes, and Obama’s political legacy is really only threatened by “black swan” events like suitcase nukes and 2008-style financial panics.

But just because the G.O.P. looks like it could spend a generation in the wilderness doesn’t meant that it actually will. National parties exist to win national elections, and that incentive alone often suffices to drive changes that the party’s interest groups and ideological enforcers dislike. For every case like the Republicans of the 1930s and the 1940s, the Carter-Mondale-Dukakis Democrats, or the British Tories between John Major and David Cameron, there’s another case where a party that seems to have lost its way completely turns out to be one successful campaign, one appealing nominee or one change of circumstances away from a comeback. In modern G.O.P. history alone, the Goldwater rout was swiftly succeeded by the Nixon realignment, and the various Gingrich-era debacles by the rise of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” We are only one presidential term removed from the latter rebranding, and the idea that it cannot happen again (albeit hopefully along somewhat different lines) seems ahistorical and naive. Yes, obviously, the Republican Party might remain a mess for years to come. But liberals who expect that continuing conservative dysfunction will help cement Obama’s legacy are betting on a trend, not counting on a certainty.

I’ll end where I ended one of last week’s posts, with two numbers: 51 and 23. The first is the percentage of Americans who told Gallup they were “very satisfied” with the country’s direction in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s second term; the second is the average who said the same last month. Liberalism’s current ascendance is undeniable, and the president’s goal of a transformational presidency is plainly within his reach. But until the second number rises closer to the first one, those transformations will remain at least partially reversible, and Obama’s quest to become liberalism’s Reagan will be incomplete.

Related:

• New York Times: Ross Douthat, Obama as the Liberal Reagan, Revisited
• Wall Street Journal: President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address (text and video)

In Commentary, Peter Wehner addresses the intellectual evolution of conservative thinker George Will. The early George Will advocated strong government conservatism:

A purpose of politics is to facilitate, as much as is prudent, the existence of worthy passions and the achievement of worthy aims. It is to help persons want what they ought to want. Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passion.

* * *

we need a public philosophy that can rectify the current imbalance between the political order’s meticulous concern for material well-being and its fastidious withdrawal from concern for the inner lives and moral character of citizens… we must rethink today’s constricted notion of the legitimate uses of law.

* * *

The institutions that once were most directly responsible for tempering individualism – family, church, voluntary associations, town governments – with collective concerns have come to seem more peripheral. Using government discriminatingly but energetically to strengthen these institutions is part of the natural program of conservatives… If conservatives do not want to use government power in behalf of their values, why do they waste their time running for office? Have they no value other than hostility to government? … National character is a real thing, molded in part by law and politics, and it is not made of marble.

* * *

Much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.

* * *

The theory was that if government compelled people to eat and work and study and play together, government would improve the inner lives of those people.

The later George Will advocates limited government conservatism:

And these [natural] rights are the foundation of limited government – government defined by the limited goal of securing those rights so that individuals may flourish in their free and responsible exercise of those rights.

* * *

A government thus limited is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness or excellence the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions – private and voluntary ones, especially religious ones – that supply the conditions for liberty.

* * *

A nation such as ours, steeped in and shaped by Biblical religion, cannot comfortably accommodate a politics that takes its bearings from the proposition that human nature is a malleable product of social forces, and that improving human nature, perhaps unto perfection, is a proper purpose of politics… Biblical religion should be wary of the consequences of government untethered from the limiting purpose of securing natural rights.

The contrast between George Will then versus George Will now raises the important question, Should statecraft be soulcraft? Strong government conservatism answers “Yes” while limited (or libertarian) conservatism answers “No.” What is your answer, and why? I am undecided on this question, sometimes persuaded by the former camp and others times by the latter. This much is certain to me: The mission of the Church is soulcraft. I entrust my soul to the church, not government. Of course I am not one of those anti-government conservatives. Obviously the government has a key role in promoting the common good, but I have not figured out how much of a role.

Going further:

• CSPAN: George Will on Religion in Politics at Washington University in St. Louis (December 4, 2012)

James Piereson reviews Charles R. Kesler’s I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism:

The great political battles in the United States during the nineteenth century were never ideological contests in the modern sense but rather controversies fought over the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of the founding fathers. Political contests over expansion, the Bank of the United States, slavery, secession, and the regulation of commerce were fought out along constitutional lines. The politicians and statesmen of that era were not divided into liberal and conservative camps; those terms had little meaning in nineteenth-century America. Abraham Lincoln was not thought of as a “liberal,” nor were slave owners derided as “conservatives.” Both sides of that controversy appealed to the Constitution or to the Declaration of Independence to defend their positions.

The Progressives introduced an ideological element into American politics by detaching their arguments from the Constitution and grounding them instead in claims about progress and historical development. Progressives (they were not yet called “liberals”) asserted that the Constitution, with its complex framework designed to limit government, was out of date in the modern age of science, industrialism, and large trusts and corporations. Constitutionalists looked backwards to the founding fathers; Progressives looked forward to a vast future of never-ending progress and change. The founding fathers and their nineteenth-century successors anchored popular government in a philosophy of natural rights; Progressives looked to different foundations in history and development. Progressives could not get rid of the Constitution, but they could reinterpret it to allow for more federal action to regulate the trusts, resolve industrial disputes, and engineer progress. Thus was born the idea of a “living Constitution,” an open-ended and flexible document readily adapted to changing conditions.

The Progressives were proponents of scientific government, not necessarily of popular or representative government. They disdained legislative bodies with their vote-trading and petty disputes over constituent interests; thus, they looked to the presidency rather than to the Congress for national leadership in the direction of reform and progress. The president spoke for the people or the nation, Congress spoke for special interests. Progressives wanted to delegate power to administrative bodies, commissions, and bureaus staffed by disinterested experts who could apply up-to-date knowledge to solve new problems. The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board were Progressive initiatives. The Progressives dreamed of a time when political contests among rival interests would give way to impartial administration by experts and judges trained by and recruited from the best colleges and universities in the land. Academic institutions, as Mr. Kesler points out, would go on to play a major role in the evolution of liberalism.

* * *

If the New Deal stands out as the great triumph of modern liberalism, then the Great Society represents its signal tragedy and failure. This was the period, as Mr. Kesler writes, when “the radicalism that was latent all along in liberalism broke free of its faith in progress, science, and the democratic process itself.” Johnson’s failures arose from overreaching ambitions and the delusion that all human problems, even those of the spirit, must find solutions in politics and government programs. Yet, as the author argues, this kind of over-reaching is endemic to modern liberalism. It was already present, for example, in Wilson’s claims about progress and change and also in FDR’s unlimited agenda of positive rights. Liberalism both lives and dies off promises it cannot fulfill.

– “He was the change” (The New Criterion)

Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, quotes postwar conservative writer Peter Viereck:

The Western heritage is not diversity alone nor unity alone but diversity within unity. Being a Christian-Hebraic-Roman-Hellenic amalgam, with inner contradictions sometimes reconciled but sometimes not, the Western heritage allows for a generous dose of tolerant pluralism. If you make no allowance for pluralism and and aim at too much unity, you will get no unity at all; you will only provoke the same internal strife and chaos that you condemn in those who seek too little unity.

McCarthy concludes:

The art of politics—especially for the traditional conservative, who shuns utopian dreams of making men all alike, whether in class, creed, virtue, race, or anything else—has always been the art of integration: reconciling hoi polloiand hoi aristoi, the rich and the poor in the Greek city state; reconciling Catholic and Protestant, Scots and English in the United Kingdom; keeping intact the polyglot empire of Austria-Hungary or the racially and regionally divided United States. The challenges the U.S. faces today are not different in kind from those that other polities have confronted in the past, with various degrees of success; conservatism’s task is to serve as the pin that holds together a society in whirl.

– “Outsider Conservatism” (The American Conservative)

Ross Douthat, opinion writer for The New York Times (written before the election): “Yes, he ran a terribly unimaginative campaign on policy, by turns vague and contradictory, offering boilerplate one moment and fuzzy math the next. But he was a non-ideological manager trying to lead a party torn by ideological civil war — a party that by rights should still be in the wilderness, working through what went wrong in the Bush era, and that lucked into its 2010 and 2012 opportunities rather than deserving them. A great politician might have been able to done better under these circumstances, finessing the party’s divisions, reimagining its message, and pulling a realigning election out of the air. But many politicians could have done worse — losing either the base or their path to the center, and gaining a landslide loss for their efforts. Given Romney’s temperament, his skill set, his background, maybe this was the best he could have done with the materials he was given. . . . . Every losing presidential candidate probably believes that with a few breaks they could have won, but if Romney loses that will be truer for him than it was for Mondale or Dukakis or Dole or even John Kerry. Precisely because he has come so very close — leading in the national polls for two weeks, just a point or two off in the swing states he needs to win at various moments, lacking only some final hinge moment or stroke of luck — if he ultimately loses it’s hard to imagine him being remembered as dismissively as most failed contenders tend to be remembered. He won’t be eulogized as a beautiful loser like McGovern or Goldwater, remembered fondly by pundits and idea people on both sides of the aisle, but he also won’t become a punchline or a tragic figure or a ‘let’s forget that ever happened’ kind of candidate. He’ll be in a class by himself — remembered, I suspect, the way everything in his background suggests he’d want to be remembered: As the man who outworked all his rivals, the losing nominee who left it all on the field, and the Republican who gave the once-untouchable Barack Obama the race of his political life.”

Editors of The American Conservative: “After every election half the country sighs with relief while the other gnashes its teeth. What remain constant as Republicans and Democrats rotate through office are the intractable difficulties the nation now faces. From budget surpluses and confidence in perpetual prosperity at the end of the 20th century, America has arrived at trillion-dollar deficits and an economy razed by the Great Recession. The ‘indispensable nation’ that emerged the indisputable victor in the Cold War 20 years ago is today a superpower still, but one mired in the longest war of its history—in Afghanistan, no less, graveyard of the Evil Empire—a superpower strategically adrift in a disordered new world of drone killings, terror, and rising regional powers. What America needs most amid all this is conservatism: not the ideology of any party, but a disposition to conserve, and wisely invest, our national capital. The capital in question is not merely financial; Lord Salisbury, in an earlier era of humanitarian intervention and empire, warned against squandering ‘military capital’ on unnecessary and unwinnable conflicts. More important yet is our civilizational capital—our habits and laws as a people, the written and unwritten Constitution. How has it fared? Our civil liberties and the civic fabric of American life have lately been torn to rags by both parties. Confronted by systemic crisis, the parties prescribe a quick fix—quack remedies from invading Iraq to subsidizing Solyndra—while a people hard pressed by diminished opportunity and dwindling incomes stands ready to accept whatever is offered. This is a mistake: careful analysis and consideration, a competent diagnosis, must precede any cure. . . . The watchword is realism—in foreign policy, in economic reasoning, and in life. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it,” urged Karl Marx. But change—’regime change’ as practiced by President Bush, for example, or the ‘change’ Barack Obama promised in 2008—is never salutary reform unless one first understands the realities of the situation. For America today, that means taking a hard look at our strategy and diplomacy toward others, at our monetary system as well as our taxes and spending, at our social order and popular culture, and at religion and philosophy, examining all of these things not through the lens of partisan politics but with a keen critical eye.”

Charles Krauthammer, opinion writer for The Washington Post: “They lose and immediately the chorus begins. Republicans must change or die. A rump party of white America, it must adapt to evolving demographics or forever be the minority. The only part of this that is even partially true regards Hispanics. They should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example). The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back. For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement. . . . The country doesn’t need two liberal parties. Yes, Republicans need to weed out candidates who talk like morons about rape. But this doesn’t mean the country needs two pro-choice parties either. In fact, more women are pro-life than are pro-choice. The problem here for Republicans is not policy but delicacy — speaking about culturally sensitive and philosophically complex issues with reflection and prudence. Additionally, warn the doomsayers, Republicans must change not just ethnically but ideologically. Back to the center. Moderation above all! More nonsense. Tuesday’s exit polls showed that by an eight-point margin (51-43), Americans believe that government does too much. And Republicans are the party of smaller government. Moreover, onrushing economic exigencies — crushing debt, unsustainable entitlements — will make the argument for smaller government increasingly unassailable. So, why give it up? Republicans lost the election not because they advanced a bad argument but because they advanced a good argument not well enough. Romney ran a solid campaign, but he is by nature a Northeastern moderate. He sincerely adopted the new conservatism but still spoke it as a second language. . . . The answer to Romney’s failure is not retreat, not aping the Democrats’ patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism. Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.”

Michael Gerson, opinion writer for The Washington Post: “[Edmund Burke] saw social change as a constant. The goal was to ease a nation’s way through change while retaining what is strongest in its traditions. Burke insisted that the present was better than the past and that the future could be better still if change were grounded in a society’s basic character. And he believed that politics had to suit a society’s real circumstances, not an idealized version of them. This is the conservative task over the next few years: not to preserve a rigid ideology but to reconstruct a political appeal along improved but principled lines. . . . Conservatives will need to define a role for government that addresses human needs in effective, market-oriented ways. Americans fear public debt, and they resent intrusive bureaucracies, but they do not hate government.”

George Will, opinion writer for The Washington Post: “America’s 57th presidential election revealed that a second important national institution is on an unsustainable trajectory. The first, the entitlement state, is endangered by improvident promises to an aging population. It has been joined by the political party, whose crucial current function is to stress the need to reform this state. And now the Republican Party, like today’s transfer-payment state, is endangered by tardiness in recognizing demography is destiny. . . . This election was fought over two issues as old as the Republic, the proper scope and actual competence of government. The president persuaded — here the popular vote is the decisive datum — almost exactly half the voters. The argument continues. As Benjamin Disraeli said, “Finality is not the language of politics.”

George Will, opinion writer for The Washington Post: “With much work — the most painful sort: thinking — to be done, conservatives should squander no energy on recriminations. Romney ran a gallant campaign. Imitation is the sincerest form of politics, and Republicans should emulate Democrats’ tactics for locating and energizing their voters. Liberals have an inherent but not insuperable advantage: As enthusiasts of government, to which many of them are related as employees or clients, they are more motivated for political activity than are conservatives, who prefer private spaces. Never mind. Conservatives have a commensurate advantage: Americans still find congenial conservatism’s vocabulary of skepticism about statism. And events — ongoing economic anemia; the regulatory state’s metabolic urge to bully — will deepen this vocabulary’s resonance.”

David Brooks, opinion writer for The New York Times: “During the 2012 campaign, Republicans kept circling back to the spot where government expansion threatens personal initiative: you didn’t build that; makers versus takers; the supposed dependency of the 47 percent. Again and again, Republicans argued that the vital essence of the country is threatened by overweening government. These economic values played well in places with a lot of Protestant dissenters and their cultural heirs. They struck chords with people whose imaginations are inspired by the frontier experience. But, each year, there are more Americans whose cultural roots lie elsewhere. Each year, there are more people from different cultures, with different attitudes toward authority, different attitudes about individualism, different ideas about what makes people enterprising. More important, people in these groups are facing problems not captured by the fundamental Republican equation: more government = less vitality. The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites. Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it. Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs. For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.”

Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church: “Our hope is not in the man we put in the White House but in the Man we put on the Cross.”

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: “Christians must never see political action as an end, but only as a means. We can never seek salvation through the voting booth, and we must never look for a political messiah. Nevertheless, Christians do bear a political responsibility, established in love of God and love of neighbor. We are rightly concerned about this world, but only to a limited extent. Our main concern is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Scot McKnight, author and professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary: “Participation in our election dare not be seen as the lever that turns the eschatological designs God has for this world. Where is our hope? November 6 may tell us. What I hope it reveals is that: Our hope is in God. The great South African missiologist, David Bosch, in his book Transforming Mission impressed upon many of us that the church’s mission is not in fact the church’s mission but God’s mission. Our calling is to participate in the missio Dei, the mission of God in this world. So, at election time we can use the season to re-align our mission with the mission of God. Therein lies our hope. Our hope is in the gospel of God. God’s mission is gospel-shaped. Some today want to reduce gospel to personal salvation while others want to convert into public politics and secularize the kingdom of God. The gospel is about Jesus the King and the gospel is about kingdom citizens living under the king regardless of who is in ‘power.’ Therein lies our hope. Our hope is in the gospel of God that creates God’s people. God’s gospel-shaped mission creates a new people of God. In fact, the temptation of good Protestants to skip from Genesis 3 (the Fall) to Romans 3 (salvation) must be resisted consciously. The gospel creates kingdom citizens who indwell the church and live that vision. We need to soak up how God’s gospel-shaped work always and forever creates a gospel people. The first thing God does with Abraham is to form a covenant people, Israel, and Jesus’ favorite word was ‘kingdom’ and Paul was a church-obsessed theologian-missionary. Herein lies the challenge at election time. We are tempted to divide the USA into the good and the bad and to forget that the gospel has folks on both sides of political lines. Even more: we are tempted to think that the winners of the election are those who are blessed by God when the blessing of God is on God’s people. God’s gospel-powered mission creates a new people, the church, where we are to see God’s mission at work. Therein lies our hope. Our hope is in the gospel of God that creates a kind of people that extends God’s gospel to the world. Chris Wright’s big book, The Mission of God, reminds us that election is missional: God creates the people of God not so the people of God can compare themselves to those who are not God’s people, but so that God’s people will become a priesthood in this world to mediate the mission of God, so that all hear the good news that God’s grace is the way forward.”

Michael J. White, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Arizona State University:

The social and political success of Christianity brings to the foreground, in particular, questions about the source of political authority and the legitimacy of political institutions. The concept of the Christian ecclesia, the church or community of the faithful, can confront the secular polis or state in a variety of ways: as a political rival; as an authoritative but benevolent senior partner (or subservient junior partner) of the secular state in the enterprise of attending to the welfare of the state’s citizens; as embodying a moral (or political) ideal against which that secular state may be measured; or as a spiritual community set apart from all secular states, the concerns of which are of an order entirely different from the concerns of such states.

— From “Christianity: A Political Religion?” in Political Philosophy: A Historical Introduction: Second Edition (Oxford)

SCOTUS Ruling on the Affordable Care Act: The Basic Facts

• The individual mandate requires Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. UPHELD.
• Insurance companies cannot disqualify people who have a preexisting illness. UPHELD.
• Insurance companies cannot raise rates on the chronically sick. UPHELD.
• Children can remain on their parents’ plans until the age of 26. UPHELD.
• Force the states to expand Medicaid to cover more of the poor. STRUCK DOWN.

Writing the 5-4 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argues:

Our permissive reading of these powers is explained in part by a general reticence to invalidate the acts of the Nation’s elected leaders. “Proper respect for a co-ordinate branch of the government” requires that we strike down an Act of Congress only if “the lack of constitutional authority to pass [the] act in question is clearly demonstrated.” United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629, 635 (1883). Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

* * *

Because the Commerce Clause does not support the individual mandate, it is necessary to turn to the Government’s second argument: that the mandate may be upheld as within Congress’s enumerated power to “lay and collect Taxes.” Art. I, §8, cl. 1.

The Government’s tax power argument asks us to view the statute differently than we did in considering its commerce power theory. In making its Commerce Clause argument, the Government defended the mandate as a regulation requiring individuals to purchase health insurance. The Government does not claim that the taxing power allows Congress to issue such a command. Instead, the Government asks us to read the mandate not as ordering individuals to buy insurance, but rather as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.

The text of a statute can sometimes have more than one possible meaning. To take a familiar example, a law that reads “no vehicles in the park” might, or might not, ban bicycles in the park. And it is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so. Justice Story said that 180 years ago: “No court ought, unless the terms of an act rendered it unavoidable, to give a construction to it which should involve a violation, however unintentional, of the constitution.” Parsons v. Bedford, 3 Pet. 433, 448–449 (1830). Justice Holmes made the same point a century later: “[T]he rule is settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.” Blodgett v. Holden, 275 U. S. 142, 148 (1927) (concurring opinion).

* * *

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain in- dividuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax. Be- cause the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.

In the dissenting opinion, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito argue:

The issue is not whether Congress had the power to frame the minimum-coverage provision as a tax, but whether it did so. In answering that question we must, if “fairly possible,” Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932), construe the provision to be a tax rather than a mandate-with-penalty, since that would render it constitutional rather than unconstitutional (ut res magis valeat quam pereat). But we cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not. “ ‘ “[A]lthough this Court will often strain to construe legislation so as to save it against constitutional attack, it must not and will not carry this to the point of perverting the purpose of a statute . . .” or judicially rewriting it.’” Commodity Futures Trading Comm’n v. Schor, 478 U. S. 833, 841 (1986) (quoting Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U. S. 500, 515 (1964), in turn quoting Scales v. United States, 367 U. S. 203, 211 (1961)). In this case, there is simply no way, “without doing violence to the fair meaning of the words used,” Grenada County Supervisors v. Brog- den, 112 U. S. 261, 269 (1884), to escape what Congress enacted: a mandate that individuals maintain minimum essential coverage, enforced by a penalty.

* * *

The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.

The Court regards its strained statutory interpretation as judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision.

The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is, does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

Primary Sources

• Text of Full Opinion (pdf)
• Annotated Ruling
• SCOTUS Dissent: Selections

News & Analysis

• WSJ: Supreme Court Upholds Mandate as Tax
• WSJ: Roberts Straddles Ideological Divide
• WSJ: Q&A: What It Means for Consumers 

Opinions – Against the Ruling

• WSJ: The Editors, The Roberts Rules 
• WSJ: The Editors, It’s Up to the Voters Now 
• WSJ: John Yoo, Chief Justice John Roberts and His Apologists
• WSJ: James Taranto, We Blame George W. Bush 
• WSJ: Stephen Moore, The ObamaCare Tax
• WSJ: James Freeman, The Ultimate Bush Disaster
• National Review: The Editors, Chief Justice Roberts’s Folly
• National Review: Yuval Levin, The New and Even Worse Obamacare
• National Review: Mark Steyn, Constituitonal Contortions
• National Review: Larry Kudlow, John Roberts Is a Super-Taxer
• NY Times: Ross Douthat, John Roberts’s Political Decision; Yes, Liberals Won; The Price of Health Care
• American Conservative: W. James Antle III, John Robers’s Betrayal
• National Affairs: James C. Capretta & Robert E. Moffit, How to Replace Obamacare

Opinions – For the Ruling

• Weekly Standard: Adam J. White, Marshalling Precedent: With Nod to Predecessor, Roberts Affirms Mandate
• Weekly Standard: Jay Cost, What did SCOTUS just do?; The Case for John Roberts
• National Review: Michael Knox Beran, Why Roberts Was Right
• Washington Post: Ezra Klein, The Political Genius of John Roberts
• Washington Post: George Will, Conservatives’ Consolation Prize
• Washington Post: Randy Barnett, We Lost on Health Care, But the Constitution Won
• Washington Post: Charles Krauthammer, Why Roberts Did It
• Washington Post: Charles Lane, John Roberts’ Compromise of 2012