The most inane insta-pundit commentary had it that the
2012 election “hadn’t really changed anything,” what with President Obama still
in the White House, the House still in Republican hands, and the Senate still
controlled by Democrats. The truth of the matter, of course, is that a great
deal changed, somewhere around 11p.m. EST
on Tuesday, November 7, when Ohio was declared for the president and the race
was effectively over. To wit:
Obamacare, the
governmental takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is now set in
legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers
of citizens into wards of the state has been given a tremendous boost — with
electoral consequences as far as the eye can see.
A war in the
Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later; as if the
previous three and a half years of fecklessness were not enough, the cast of
mind manifest in the administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi
will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they
have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defense. The
economic chaos resulting from military conflict in the Persian Gulf (and beyond)
will further deepen the European fiscal crisis while making an already weak
American economic recovery even more anemic.
The children and
grandchildren of November 6’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of
what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt, and may be an unserviceable
amount of debt, which in either case will be an enormous drag on the economy,
even as it mortgages America’s strategic options in Asia to the holders of U.S.
government bonds in Beijing.
The American
culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated
an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized
sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to
advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus
deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the
“dictatorship of relativism.”
Religious freedom
and civil society are now in greater jeopardy than ever, as what was already
the most secularist and statist administration in history will, unfettered by
reelection concerns, accelerate its efforts to bring free voluntary
associations to heel as de facto extensions of the state.
Nothing changed?
In a pig’s eye.
Europeans
understood this, immediately, even if large swaths of the American punditocracy
didn’t. One e-mail from Poland, the morning after the election, expressed real
fear for the future (as well my correspondent might, given President Obama’s
craven whisperings to Dimitry Medvedev that a reelected administration would
pull the final plug on missile defense in Europe, as Vladimir Putin has long
sought). Another, from London, suggested that Obama’s reelection was a
cataclysm for America similar to Henry VIII’s break with Rome: a
politico-cultural-economic game-changer the effects of which would be felt for
centuries. A Scottish friend (correctly) foresaw serious trouble for the
Catholic Church in the United States, to which he had long looked for models of
leadership in handling aggressive secularism.
None of this was
surprising, however. Five weeks before Election Day, I had lunch with the head
of state of one of America’s closest European allies. When I asked him how our
politics looked to him from a distance of some 3,500 miles, he replied, more in
sorrow than in anger, “America is missing greatness.” Americans dubious of what
they style “foreign entanglements,” who would otherwise shrug off such an
observation, might think twice about it in light of a second Obama
administration. For my luncheon host was not simply referring to a lack of
American leadership abroad; he was, in a single, poignant phrase, speaking of a
national will to diminishment that seemed to him evident in both the
astonishing possibility that a failed president would be reelected and the
equally surprising inability of that president’s opponents to make a compelling
case for change.
And here, too, is
something for Republican strategists to ponder while sifting through the
wreckage. Mitt Romney made himself a better candidate throughout 2012, and for
one brief, electric moment at the first debate, he seemed like a leader with
vision, passion, and wit. But a recovery of American greatness — cultural,
political, economic, diplomatic, and military greatness — was not the driving
theme of the Romney campaign. Not knowing Mitt Romney personally, I can’t say
whether this obviously decent and successful man simply lacked the
understanding necessary to make the case for true American renewal, as distinct
from the faux hope-and-change mantra that had seduced so many in 2008. But
whatever Romney’s personal inclinations, many Republican campaign managers and
consultants always seemed afraid of scaring the horses. Obama would be beaten,
they insisted, on grounds of competence, not by a campaign that called the
country to recognize that it need not settle for mediocrity, a campaign that
summoned America to new heights of achievement.
The themes for
such a campaign were not difficult to imagine; they could have been built
around a recasting of FDR’s four freedoms. Freedom of religion: No
government bureaucrat in Washington is going to tell your religious community
how to conduct its affairs. Freedom from fear: A Romney
administration will not tolerate the burning of American embassies and the
torture and murder of our diplomats by the thugs of al-Qaeda and their jihadist
allies. Freedom for excellence and accomplishment: Unshackling
American ingenuity from the restraints of government interference will unleash
new wealth-creating and wealth-distributing energies, even as that liberation
empowers the poor to lead lives of self-responsibility through honest and
dignified work. And freedom from unpayable debt: Your children and
grandchildren must not be buried beneath a sludge pile of extravagance sluicing
out of a national capital (and an administration) addicted to throwing oceans
of money at problems.
Would it have
worked? Who knows? But the issues would have been sharpened; the fake issues
(“war on women,” “tax breaks for the rich,” etc.) might have been marginalized;
and a lot more energy — real political energy, not just energies bent on
denying Obama a second term — might have been unleashed.
The countercase,
it must be admitted, has something to be said for it. Not the countercase of
the culture-wars-averse campaign consultants, but a countercase that would run
something like this (and that illustrates another great change, not initiated
on election day but confirmed by the results):
Whatever the
clumsiness of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark, the hard fact of the matter is
that a critical mass of Americans are now so dependent on government (either
directly or through public-sector unions) that any appeal to a larger national
vision, much less a vision of personal responsibility, is impossible. So try to
make the case that a Romney alternative to Obama will fix things without
fundamentally altering the relationship between individual citizens (and
families) and the post–New Deal, post–Great Society American welfare state.
There is, in hard
truth, something here. That half the country was prepared to reelect a
manifestly failed president whose personal incapacities, like the incapacities
of the bloated governmental bureaucracies over which he presided, were on full
display in the weeks before the election, and in venues ranging from North
Africa to Staten Island, is a very disturbing “indicator,” as the pollsters
like to say. That a goodly proportion of that half of America seemed
susceptible to the Obama campaign’s class warfare is also disturbing. But perhaps
most disturbing of all is the exit-poll data showing that a healthy majority of
the electorate believed Obama more capable than Romney of handling foreign
crises: and this, after the lethal fiasco of Benghazi, itself the embodiment of
an ideologically driven pusillanimity in foreign policy that has been on
display since the president’s apologize-for-America tour at the beginning of
his first term. “Missing greatness,” it turns out, is not just a function of
who’s in charge. It’s a result of democratic citizens’ not paying attention. Or
worse, it’s the result of citizens’ suffering such severe ideological glaucoma
that they cannot see what is in front of them.
What has obviously
changed, in other words, is American political culture: and it is hard to make
a case that that change has been for the better. Shortly after Ohio sealed the
deal on Election Night, a friend (who earlier in the evening had said that she
was having a hard time recognizing the country she grew up in) sent me an
e-mail with a salient Tocqueville quote:
In the United
States, the majority rules in the name of the people. This majority is chiefly
composed of peaceful citizens who by taste or interest sincerely desire the
good of the country. . . . If republican principles are to
perish in America, they will succumb only after a long social travail,
frequently interrupted, often resumed; they will seem to be reborn several
times, and they will disappear without return only when an entirely new people
has taken the place of the one that exists in our day.
So let’s spare
ourselves the Bertolt Brecht bromide about a displeased government getting
itself a new people, which is precisely the opposite of the point here, and
ponder the serious question raised by Tocqueville, and put in more contemporary
terms by another of my day-after-the-election e-mail correspondents, a former
senior White House official:
Is it time 1) to
conclude that what began in 1992 has provided 26 years of confirmatory evidence
that the American experiment in ordered liberty has given way, decisively and
irrevocably, to a crass and stupid commercial (and sexualized) culture, under a
technical-administrative state, guided by the view that man is the measure of
all things, and 2) to consider a refocusing of political efforts to the local
level, which has its own problems of corruption, stupidity, and loss of
tradition and virtue, but in some cases may permit of a politics in some
measure noble and worthy?
Unwilling to go
quite that far into the Slough of Despond, I nonetheless recognize (and
commend) the seriousness of the questions posed by these two friends. For while
the surface manifestations of national politics (the presidency, control of the
houses of Congress) may look “the same” to the less lucid elements of the
punditocracy, the question of whether we have become, if not “an entirely new
people” (pace Tocqueville’s warning), then a deeply divided people,
one large part of which is now wedded to government in ways that gravely erode
civic virtue, surely must be part of the post-2012 conversation.
And even if our
cultural slide into a cheerful Gomorrah is not, as my second correspondent
suggested, “irrevocable,” the effects of the culture of the imperial autonomous
(and government-subsidized) Self on our politics must be reckoned with, as
Republicans, conservatives, and all those who felt a real emptiness settling
upon them at 11 p.m. EST
on Tuesday night think through the economic reconstruction, the restoration of
fiscal sanity, and the exercise of global responsibility that must be part of a
post-Obama America, now unhappily deferred until at least January 2017.
It takes a certain
kind of people, living certain indispensable virtues, to make the market and
democracy work so that justice, prosperity, and human flourishing are the net
results of freedom. That elementary truth — recognized by the Founders, ignored
by the newly reelected administration, and avoided by libertarians and
Republican campaign consultants — has to be at the center of the conversation
about the American future, and about playing good defense during the next four
challenging years.
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