This is the history of governments,––one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Elsewhere they think they get their money’s worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better,––the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.
–– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics”

From his 2008 campaign stop in Ohio, where Joe the Plumber quizzed the senator about his tax plan, to his 2012 State of the Union speech, where Warren Buffet’s secretary served as a prop to underscore his predation on the wealthy, Barack Hussein Obama has consistently revealed his true colors. Against all fanciful theories, he’s not a stealth Muslim born in Indonesia, not a Chicago-style gangster politician, not a warmed-over socialist, not a Kenyan anti-colonialist, not a post-ideological pragmatist. Obama is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive.

The Great Recession occasioned a return to Robin Hood politics, spearheaded by a president who views society through the warped lens of classism: the 99% versus the 1%. Whether envy or compassion motivates him I cannot say, but it’s clear that Obama aspires to “spread the wealth around,” narrowing, if not flattening, the economic disparity between the Oracle of Omaha and his personal assistant.

Under this administration, the government attempts to steal from the rich, albeit legally, and give to the “poor,” which lulls a growing constituency to stay put, easily contented with their pottage of entitlements, rather than strive forward through industry and innovation. Entitlements don’t fall to the ground like manna from heaven. The free lunches consumed by bedraggled protestors in Zuccotti Park were paid with borrowed money––further proof of the saying popularized by Milton Friedman, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Obama has presided over the highest spending and deficits as a share of the economy since Harry Truman.

Alas, our nation’s creditors are not eternally patient. Even now, I can hear the zealous footsteps of the Chinese Shylock who will demand a pound of American flesh when we default on our debt. This Shylock won’t be mollified if the excuse for our profligate expenditures is that “I am my brother’s keeper,” a biblical expression that Obama frequently invokes and misapplies. To this excuse, China will rejoin: “The borrower is the slave of the lender” (Proverbs 22:7).

The cryptic content of Obama’s “HOPE” and “CHANGE” campaign posters are now understood. He’s trying to execute a century-old project to reify the American Dream through bureaucratic administration (read: coercion) rather than individual and communal liberty. Nothing has defined Obama’s vision more clearly than his December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. Channeling the original Bull Moose (Teddy Roosevelt), who delivered a famous speech there in 1910 on progressive nationalism, Obama said: “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.” The progressive doctrine of fairness violates our founding ideal of self-government––”Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Fairness and freedom are at loggerheads. The former requires an activist government that tries to guarantee equal outcomes through progressive taxation, economic regulations, and octopoid social-welfare programs, whereas the latter requires a decentralized government for the “little platoons” in society to create opportunities, whereby inequalities of wealth and property are inevitable conditions of life under the sun. Obama has failed America because as the government gets bigger the citizen gets smaller.

NOTE: Because 2012 marks a presidential election year, I motivated myself and some friends to evaluate the Obama presidency in 500 words. See the evaluation by Jake Meador.

Mark T. Mitchell, professor of political theory at Patrick Henry College (Purcellville, VA) and editor-in-chief of Front Porch Republic, says the current election cycle provides us an opportunity to examine what it really means to be “conservative.” If we listen to the Republican candidates, the word “seems to mean fiscally responsible, pro-market, pro-marriage, militarily strong, if not aggressive, all wrapped up in a thick coating of civil religion where American Exceptionalism blends seamlessly into the theology that God favors America above all other nations (with the possible exception of Israel).” Mitchell challenges this popular understanding, claiming that “many so-called conservatives and liberals are often singing the same song.” He administers a quiz that reveals our true colors:

Question 1. Do you speak, think, and act more naturally in terms of individual rights or in terms of duties and responsibilities?

Question 2. Do you have duties to the past? To those who are no longer alive? To those yet to be born? Yes or No.

Question 3. Humans are progressively getting better technically, socially, politically, morally. If this is not true, it is only due to the bad will of some. True or False.

Question 4. America is the last best hope of the world. True or False.

Here is his excellent conclusion:

It seems that those who call themselves conservatives and liberals today by and large emphasize their rights rather than duties; they show precious little concern for the past, both as a repository for knowledge or as a source of duties; and they tend to speak in the glowing terms of progress. Finally, they all too often lack the humility that the conservative feels deep in his bones. The conservative knows that all good things are at root a gift. This disposition of gratitude fosters humility, and humility is necessary if we are to live responsibly, for humility acknowledges limits and a denial of limits is a key feature of the liberal mind.

When we consider all of this in light of our current political climate, it becomes clear that the apparent differences between conservatives and liberals in America today are far less dramatic than we are often tempted to believe. What we have is a variety of liberals, some more radical than others, but a truly conservative position is illusive and, what is more important, probably not desired by most of the electorate; although, there is always a remnant, and this remnant, I believe, would grow if a truly conservative alternative was articulated in a clear and compelling way. Of course, Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News—those standard bearers of “conservatism”—will find this analysis implausible, for their deepest commitments are to the very things that are antithetical to a legitimate and historically informed conservatism. Nevertheless, any attempt to continue using this fine word should include a conscious effort to resist abusing it for the purpose of political gain. It is, after all, a word worth conserving.

Related:

• Front Porch Republic: Patrick J. Deneen, Is There a Conservative Tradition in America?
• Front Porch Republic: John Willson, Why I Am a Conservative
• The Atlantic: Conor Friedersdorf, What Americans Mean When They Say They’re Conservative
• The American Conservative: Richard Gamble, How Right Was Reagan?

In December 2011 President Obama visited Osawatomie, Kansas, summoning the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt who delivered a famous speech there in 1910 on progressive nationalism. Obama declared that economic inequality is “the defining issue of our time” and dedicated his administration to restoring fairness:

I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them.

When I reflect on C. S. Lewis’ words below, I wonder whether Obama conceives of equality as intrinsically good, whether he treats equality as “a medicine or a safety-gadget” or “an ideal,” whether the source of his demand for equality is “the desire for fair play” or “the hatred of superiority.” It is impossible to make definite judgments here, but I have my hunches about Obama.

I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
– “Equality” (1943)

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.
– “Equality” (1943)

The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority.
– “Democratic Education” (1944)

Resources:

• Washington Post: Glen Kessler, Obama’s Kansas speech: some suspect facts
• Wall Street Journal: Daniel Henninger, Obama’s Godfather Speech 
• National Journal: Ronald Brownstein, TR’s Two Legacies
• Washington Post: Obama’s campaign for class resentment
• National Review: Michael Knox Beran, Big Statism in Osawatomie
• National Review: Matthew Spalding, The String-Pullers

There are a lot of principled reasons to oppose the Obama presidency, not the least of which is “the worst fiscal record of any president in modern times.” I wonder how any person of faith could vote for Obama in light of his administration’s unprecedented and brazen assaults on religious freedom: first, the revision of the “ministerial exemption” in employment disputes, which was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 9-0 ruling; second, the mandate that religious universities, hospitals, and charities pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives, and abortifacients. Christians of conservative and liberal persuasions are rightly outraged. (Read this letter to the President by religious leaders in the Protestant and Jewish faith communities who are “deeply troubled” by the actions of the Obama administration.)

Other resources:

• First Things: Matthew J. Frank, What Comes After Hosanna-Tabor
• Public Discourse: Michael Stokes Paulsen, Hosanna in the Highest!
• First Things: Elizabeth Scalia, Obamacare’s Great Gift: Clarification
• Wall Street Journal: Peggy Noonan, A Battle the President Can’t Win
• Christianity Today: Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Evangelicals Mounting Concerns over Obama Administration’s Contraceptive Mandate
• Public Discourse: David Carroll Cochran, Religion and Freedom

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution

New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat challenges the facile characterization that liberals are in favor of community while conservatives are in favor of individuals. On the contrary, he argues that conservatives are also in favor of community. The question concerns which communities are better equipped at serving the common good: the federal government or “little platoons” (families, neighborhoods, churches)?

WHEN liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

Read the rest of the column to learn about how Obama’s health care plan intimates “a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.”

Read the text.

When I listen to the smart guys out there, I realize that America is still waiting for Godot in the 2012 presidential election. Ross Douthat of The New York Times argues that “a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap”: management, persuasion, and demagoguery. In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama “out-managed, out-inspired and out-demagogued both Hillary Clinton and John McCain. But the presidency, unexpectedly, has exposed his limits as a communicator. Now when Obama demonizes, it seems clumsy; when he tries to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Unlike Reagan and Clinton, the two masters, he seems unable to either bully or inspire.”

Obama has lost the magic touch. His mostly likely opponent, Mitt Romney, is “managerial to the core,” unable, so far, to persuade the conservative base of the Republican Party and constitutionally adverse to demagoguery. Therefore, Douthat says “the 2012 election is shaping up to be the most wearying sort of American presidential campaign: a clash of two managers, slogging their way toward a prize that a stronger candidate might have taken in a walk.”

Newt Gingrich, the Lazarus candidate, who has been resurrected from the dead at least twice, currently excels because of his congenital demagoguery. He acts as a conduit to Tea Party rage against political and media elites. A virtue in the primary season can be a severe liability in the general election. Gingrich would have trouble persuading independents, particularly women and minorities, and trouble managing his campaign, which is already under-funded and disorganized. Those who know Gingrich best – Congressional Republicans from the 1990s – describe his managerial style as undisciplined and erratic.

I am mostly in agreement with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who articulates the four-point agenda of his ideal candidate:

I want to vote for a candidate who advocates an immediate investment in infrastructure that will create jobs and upgrade America for the 21st century — ultrafast bandwidth, highways, airports, public schools, mass transit — and combines that with a long-term plan to fix our fiscal imbalances at the real scale of the problem, a plan that could be phased in as the economy recovers.

On the latter point, I am talking about the Bowles-Simpson bipartisan deficit reduction plan — or something equally serious and with a chance of bipartisan support. President Obama has proposed smart infrastructure investments, but he has not paired them with a credible long-term deficit-reduction plan, and the only chance of passage in Congress is to have both. Mitt Romney is not even close.

Christina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it best when she told this newspaper on Dec. 31 that the U.S. “faces two daunting economic problems: an unsustainable long-run budget deficit and persistent high unemployment. … Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. … We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity.  

“But we can’t focus on the deficit alone,” added Romer. “Persistent unemployment is destroying the lives and wasting the talents of more than 13 million Americans. Pairing additional strong stimulus with a plan to reduce the deficit would likely pack a particularly powerful punch for confidence and spending.”

Second, I want to vote for a candidate who is committed to reforming taxes, and cutting spending, in a fair way. The rich must pay more, but everyone has to pay something. We are all in this together.

Third, I want to vote for a candidate who has an inspirational vision, not just a plan to balance the budget. People will sacrifice to make this country great again if they think you have a real plan for American success in the 21st century. And that plan is obvious. We’re not going to be about launching one big moon shot anymore. We need to be building a country where everyone in the world wants to come to launch their own moon shot — their own company, their own start-up — because we have the best immigration policies, regulations, schools and incentives. We can’t tax or cut our way to prosperity and jobs. We have to invent our way there. We need both more “Made in America” and “Imagined in America.”

Finally, I want to vote for a candidate who supports a minimum floor of public financing of presidential, Senate and House campaigns. Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery. Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they’re right.

From The New York Times:

What the Right Gets Right
Leading liberal thinkers talk about conservatives are good for.
by Thomas B. Edsall

What the Left Gets Right
Leading conservative thinkers talk about what liberals are good for.
by Thomas B. Edsall

Ancient military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores what Pericles’ Funeral Oration (in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War) teaches us about “the American experience in our present age of uncertainty.” One lesson is gratitude for our ancestors:

After bemoaning the truth that the public commemoration of brave men should not rest capriciously on the rhetorical skill of a funeral speaker—a trope followed by Lincoln in his Gettysburg address—Pericles begins his speech with Athens’s ancestors, thanking them for two contributions. Earlier generations of Athenians had kept Athens safe from foreign and Hellenic aggression, and their sacrifice had allowed a more recent cohort to expand the city-state into an Aegean-wide empire whose benefits Pericles’ own generation could enjoy without the toil and danger spent in acquiring it.

The mark of a great leader and an even greater people is precisely such reverence for the past—not a vague past, but one of real people who lived, suffered, achieved, and died for others. In our age of presentism and pride in our high-tech affluence—in which Americans use the standards of the contemporary university to judge prior generations as inferior to our own sensibilities in terms of race, class, and gender equality—such blanket praise of our ancestors seems reactionary and illiberal. After all, the President of the United States has recently apologized for American behavior of a half-century earlier in Iran; for supposed past indifference to the Palestinian issue; for maltreatment of Native Americans, blacks, and other minorities; and for dropping the atomic bomb in World War II. Nowhere does Barack Obama hint that he himself—so unlike the anonymous of the past whom he easily castigates—might lack the physical stamina or bravery to withstand a bout with pre-antibiotic diphtheria, to drive a mule team in summer across the Utah desert, to survive a Banzai charge on Okinawa, or to retreat from the Yalu River in November 1950.

Instead, all the tragedies and physical torment of past generations of Americans are reduced into vague nothingness, and our predecessors have become almost cardboard cutout figures, judged as sympathetic or repellent based on the twenty-first-century politically correct morality of an affluent metrosexual culture which would likely fail the challenges of danger, torment, and hardship that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans routinely overcame. Nowhere do we even attribute the magic of cell phones, jet travel, or modern medicine to an inherited intellectual and scientific foundation that was the legacy of the collective lives of long-dead Americans, who suffered greatly and gave us much.

Pericles’ point was not that the Athenians of a distant age who founded the empire were perfect, only that they had bequeathed a powerful Athens that the present generation apparently benefitted from and enjoyed. To fault the gift would be as illogical as it would be ungracious. A modern American update would be to lavish praise on the generations that defeated the British, Mexicans, Spanish, Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Soviets, and thereby passed on a free America, which we find far preferable to the defeats envisioned by our former enemies. The degree to which many Americans were at one time racist, sexist, or brutal would, then, be overshadowed by the fact that they were both better than the alternative of the times and had enough confidence that their own survival—and only their survival—would create the conditions for subsequent self-introspection, critique, and certain moral improvement.

There is also an element of old-fashioned manners in Pericles’ speech wholly lacking in modern platitudes: the recipient does not critique the benefactor’s gift as being not quite what he might have wished—unless he wishes to refuse it altogether. Or in blunter parlance, a Periclean American president would not have apologized for our fathers’ sins because he would have understood that they were dwarfed by the freedom and prosperity that our generation inherited from them.

Indeed, if our American inheritance were so bad, then we would be under no obligation to be tainted by it and could simply refuse the heritage altogether—and at our own, rather than our ancestors’, expense. Why not now expand present-day Indian reservations to include entire states where Native Americans could return to their own migratory past and indigenous alternative lifestyles? Why not refuse to use the water, power, or flood prevention capability of a Hoover Dam that so disfigures the natural course of the Colorado River? If modern man had so mindlessly destroyed John Muir’s scenic Hetch Hetchy Sierra Nevada valley, why then would not liberal San Franciscans rally to dismantle the dam, or at least today refuse to accept drinking water delivered from such a vast public project of scarifying dams and canals? Pericles’ point, of course, is not that a present generation cannot critique prior ones, but that it should do so in a manner that weighs concrete benefits versus abstract burdens.

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Shelby Steele, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, offers the most trenchant critique I have read on the Obama presidency and its failures:

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama’s character, today’s left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his “hope and change” campaign slogan came to look like the “hope” of overcoming American exceptionalism and “change” away from it.

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

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