The lazy days of late August
The Obama administration has become boring in the lazy days of late August. Name an issue and you know what Obama’s position will be with great certainty because his policy decisions have spoken for themselves — this is in sharp contrast to the enigma that Obama seemed to many a year ago. VDH provides a little historical context:
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.
Usually such ideologies do not take hold in America, given its tradition of liberty, frontier self-reliance, and emphasis on personal freedom rather than mandated fraternity and egalitarianism. At times, however, the stars line up, when a national catastrophe, like war or depression, coincides with the appearance of an unusually gifted, highly polished, and eloquent populist. But the anointed one must be savvy enough to run first as a centrist in order later to govern as a statist.
Given the September 2008 financial meltdown, the unhappiness over the war, the ongoing recession, and Barack Obama’s postracial claims and singular hope-and-change rhetoric, we found ourselves in just such a situation. For one of the rare times in American history, statism could take hold
It seems so impossible, as well as un-American and just plain tacky, to think we have a President who is the Hugo Chavez of the North. But from Obamacare, the nationalization of vast swaths of American industry, and Obama’s creepy responses to Honduras and Iran, the policy choices speak for themselves. Ugh. (BTW, when President Obama’s nice July 4 speech failed to even once use the words “freedom” or “liberty”, it’s pretty clear where the fellow is not coming from.)
Final point. We read with some amusement a post at Powerline criticizing President Obama for letting the Attorney General be the fellow responsible for going after the CIA, and not manning up to the decision himself. We saw this event a little differently. The White House’s statement was meant to imply that George Bush wrongly influenced Justice Department decisions, and that Obama, by contrast, is fair and good. It is poll-tested rhetoric from the WH media department that has no meaning other than as rhetoric — that is Obama’s characteristic modus operandi. The philosopher Plato had his number 2500 years ago.. This fellow Obama is very obvious and none too subtle, and it’s clear that quite a few Americans have caught on, hopefully not too late.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Wonderful: we have an unreconstructed sophist in the office of the most powerful person in the world.
August 28th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
You obviously prefer a Bush-polluted nation where inequality has again reached the grotesque levels of the robber barons of old. Their “liberty” proved to be a much greater threat to the freedom of typical Americans than anything our government has ever imposed. Remember the Homestead Strike and the Pinkerton private police force.
Paul Krugman is much closer to the truth than is the contemporary sophist (and demagogue) VDH, as this shows –
“Over the really long term, however, the U.S. government will have big problems unless it makes some major changes. In particular, it has to rein in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending. That shouldn’t be hard in the context of overall health care reform. After all, America spends far more on health care than other advanced countries, without better results, so we should be able to make our system more cost-efficient. But that won’t happen, of course, if even the most modest attempts to improve the system are successfully demagogued — by conservatives! — as efforts to ‘pull the plug on grandma.’ “
August 29th, 2009 at 4:58 am
@Steve:
You complain about robber barons in the Bush administration and then quote approvingly from a former advisor to Enron?
(Incidentally, I love how Democrats voted for a colossal increase in Medicare spending (thanks, Teddy!) and then, a few years later, complain about how Medicare is suddenly costing us more money.)
August 29th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Steve, would you consider Charles B. Rangel a “robber baron” or just a robber?