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Victor Davis Hanson: Our American Catharsis - Will Obama-time be a transitory experience or an..?
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE ^ | April 9, 2010 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 04/10/2010 7:49:19 AM PDT by neverdem

Our American Catharsis

Will Obama-time be a transitory experience or an enduring tragedy?

 

For years conservatives have railed about the creeping welfare state. They have tried to tag liberals with being soft on national security, both for courting those who faulted America and for faulting others who courted it. The parameters of all these fights were well known, as talk radio, the blogs, and cable news hourly took up hammer and tongs against the creeping “liberal agenda.”

But for all the furor, there were few unabashed leftist gladiators in the arena who openly fought under the banner of radically transforming the country into something that it had never been. Bill Clinton was a centrist pragmatist who put Bill Clinton’s political interests well above any ideology. His brief flirtation with Hillary’s hard leftism was rendered inoperative after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. Indeed, Hillary herself eventually ended up running as a blue-collar, Annie Oakley centrist alternative to Barack Obama.

One-termer Jimmy Carter remained a Democratic embarrassment. He was elected on the fumes of Watergate — and through his own efforts at convincing voters for a few crucial weeks in the autumn of 1976 that his folksy Southern Christian Democrat persona was no veneer, but the natural expression of a true conservative.

By 2000 even Democrats talked more fondly in retrospect of the Reagan years than of the era of appeasement and stagflation of 1977–80. The old progressive dream of electing a genuine leftist president was rendered quixotic by the disastrous campaigns of Northern liberals like George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry.

All this is not to say that statism did not make advances. By 2008, almost 40 percent of the population was either entirely, or in large part, dependent on some sort of government handout, entitlement, or redistributive check. The size of government, the annual deficit, and the aggregate debt continued — no matter who was president — to reach unprecedented highs.

Nonetheless, until now we had not in the postwar era seen a true man of the Left who was committed to changing America into a truly liberal state. Indeed, had Barack Obama run on the agenda he actually implemented during his first year in office — “Elect me and I shall appoint worthies like Craig Becker, Anita Dunn, and Van Jones; stimulate the economy through a $1.7-trillion annual deficit; take over health care, the auto industry, student loans, and insurance; push for amnesty for illegal aliens and cap-and-trade; and reach out to Iran, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela” — he would have been laughed out of Iowa.

It was not his agenda but his carefully crafted pseudo-centrism that got Obama elected — that, and a dismal McCain campaign, weariness over the Iraq War, a rare orphaned election without any incumbent candidate, the September 2008 meltdown, and the novelty of the nation’s first serious African-American presidential candidacy.

Now, however, for the first time in my memory, the United States has an authentic leftist as president — one who unabashedly believes that the role of the U.S. government at home is to redistribute income in order to ensure equality of results through high taxes on a few and increased entitlements for many, while redefining America abroad as a sort of revolutionary state that sees nothing much exceptional in either its past role or its present alliances — other than something that should be “reset” to the norms embraced by the United Nations.

In sum, for years the loud Right warned Americans about what could happen should they vote for a genuine leftist. We mostly did not believe their canned horror stories. But now the country has got what it unwittingly voted for — and at last we have evolved beyond the rhetoric and entered into the real liberal world of the way things must be.

In just a year, the manner in which Americans look at things has changed radically. Something as mundane as buying a Ford or a GM car now takes on ideological connotations: The former company, in politically recalcitrant fashion, resists government takeover; the latter has been transmogrified from Michael Moore’s Roger & Me bogeyman into a sanctioned, government-subsidized brand. Toyota went from the good green maker of Priuses to a foreign corporate outlaw whose handful of faulty accelerators symbolizes the non-union threat to fair-play American production.

The whole notion of capital and debt has changed — mostly on the issue of culpability. Buying too much house at too high interest is the bank’s fault. Not being able to pay a debt is certainly negotiable and most certainly nothing to feel bad about. Maxing out credit cards and getting caught with high interest is proof of corporate malfeasance. Cash in the bank earns little, if any, interest. Owing lots of money costs little, and it does not necessarily have to be paid back, if one is able to stake a persuasive claim against “them.”

The reaction to a hated and greedy Wall Street is now to be an omnipotent, all-wise, and all-caring state technocracy. Today there is nothing so simplistic as the actual “unemployment rate”; “jobs saved” by government borrowing is the better barometer of who is actually working and who is not. A $200-billion shortfall is a “deficit”; a trillion-dollar one is “stimulus.”

Not purchasing a cheap catastrophic-health-care plan is quite understandable. The Department of Motor Vehicles, Amtrak, and the Postal Service are models of what good government can do. Social Security and Medicare are not unsustainable or insolvent; those loaded adjectives are simply constructs of a wealthy class unwilling to pay the taxes needed to fund them.

Worrying about the deficit or national debt is a neurotic tic. Why fret, when millions in the oppressing class have enough money to eliminate these problems whenever we acquire the backbone to make them pay what they owe us? We are in a them/us, winners/losers zero-sum age, one in which a forever static pie must have its finite slices radically reapportioned.

Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were not paradigms of racial equality, as we once assumed. The new correct protocol of unity and togetherness is not to ignore race but to accentuate difference whenever possible. Thus we have a uniter and his flock talking of a “typical white person,” of white country folk who “cling” to their fears and superstitions, of “cowards” who refuse to discuss racial matters, of a “wise Latina,” of police who “stereotype” and act “stupidly,” and of polluters and high-school mass-murderers identified as typically “white.” In place of real civil-rights marches, we have psychodramas where congressmen wade into a crowd of protestors in search of a televised slur. To this president, the tea-partiers are sexually slurred “tea-baggers,” in his Manichean worldview of opponents to whom we are “to get in their faces” and “bring a gun” to their knife fight — all as we praise “unity,” “bipartisanship,” and “working across the aisle.”

Fourteen months ago, the number $250,000 meant little. Now the arbitrary figure is an economic them/us Mason-Dixon line seared into our collective thoughts. Those who cross it are the proven greedy who profit inordinately and must have their payroll, income, and health-care taxes commensurately increased. But those who earn below it are still kind and decent folk deserving of credits and entitlements.

I used to think that old-stand nations like Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Norway, and Poland were our natural friends by virtue of a shared Western heritage and values, commitment to constitutional government, and acknowledgment of a distinguished intellectual history. Today their leaders are to be snubbed, ignored, or lectured; we are unsure only whether their sin is post-imperialism, post-colonialism — or pro-Americanism.

In contrast, more revolutionary states that bore America ill will, and certainly despised George W. Bush, must ipsis factis have been onto something — and therefore can be courted. Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela are, at worst, misunderstood. At best, their strong leaders are somewhat sympathetic for their prior opposition to much of what America has done and stood for.

In 2008 I had no idea of what an “overseas contingency operation” or “man-made disaster” was. And even Michael Savage could not scare me into thinking that the U.S. government would attempt to try the beheader and architect of 9/11, the self-avowed jihadist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a civilian courtroom, replete with Miranda rights, lengthy appeals, and government-appointed lawyers — all that a couple of thousand yards from the scene of his own mass murdering.

The watchdog media have become a house kitten that purrs rather than barks at such radical change. Mass assemblies — so common in protests against wars during the last decades — are now racist and subversive. Grass-roots political expression like talk radio and cable TV is in need of government-enforced fairness. Hollywood no longer produces movies like the anti-war, anti-administration Redacted and Rendition; Knopf no longer publishes novels like Checkpoint; and there are, we may be thankful, no longer docudramas about shooting presidents — the latter would be both unpatriotic and clearly defined as hate speech. Filibusters are not traditional ways of checking Senate excess; the “nuclear option” is now a slur for legitimate majority legislative rule; and recess appointments don’t thwart the legislature’s will but resist its tyranny.

In other words, the last 14 months have been a catharsis of sorts. At last the world of Rush Limbaugh’s fears and Sean Hannity’s nightmares is upon us, and we can determine whether these megaphones were always just alarmists — or whether they legitimately warned of what logically would follow should faculty-lounge utopian rhetoric ever be taken seriously. Europe screamed for a multilateral, multipolar, non-exceptional America. Now in place of the old Johnny-on-the-spot NATO colossus, they are quickly getting what they wished for — America, the new hypopower. Perhaps the European Rapid Reaction Force will take on the Milosevices and Osamas to come.

Keynesians have sermonized for decades about a truly appropriate mega-debt. Now we’re quickly on the way to achieving that vision, to testing just how much debt a country can incur and still survive. If Reagan and Co. talked about “starving the beast” — cutting needless government spending by first reducing tax revenue — this is the age of “gorging the beast”: borrowing and spending as much as possible to ensure later vast increases in taxes, and with them proper redistributive change.

Politics is high-stakes poker with real losers and winners, not a mere parlor game. The country voted for the party of Pelosi, Reid, and Obama, and for once such statists are governing in the manner of their rhetoric. Time will soon tell whether this strange American experience is transitory and so becomes a needed catharsis, or whether it will be institutionalized and thus result in an enduring tragedy — this rare moment when the dreams of a zealous few are at last becoming the nightmares of a complacent many.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: american; catharsis; enduring; experience; obama; obamatime; tragedy; transitory; vdh; victordavishanson
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1 posted on 04/10/2010 7:49:19 AM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem
whether it will be institutionalized and thus result in an enduring tragedy

Even if we vote a hell of allot of them out in November, it will be an enduring tragedy for a while. It takes time to right a ship this big with the damage these loonies have done.

2 posted on 04/10/2010 7:54:19 AM PDT by b4its2late (A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own.)
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To: neverdem

It’s time to counterattack hard. Not just stop Obama and Pelosi, but to truly roll back the creeping leftist revolution of the past 20 years or so. November will tell all.


3 posted on 04/10/2010 7:55:01 AM PDT by DesertRhino (I was standing with a rifle, waiting for soviet paratroopers, but communists just ran for office)
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To: neverdem
..had Barack Obama run on the agenda he actually implemented during his first year in office — “Elect me and I shall appoint worthies like Craig Becker, Anita Dunn, and Van Jones; stimulate the economy through a $1.7-trillion annual deficit; take over health care, the auto industry, student loans, and insurance; push for amnesty for illegal aliens and cap-and-trade; and reach out to Iran, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela” — he would have been laughed out of Iowa.

The money quote.

4 posted on 04/10/2010 7:57:24 AM PDT by libh8er
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To: neverdem
"The watchdog media have become a house kitten that purrs rather than barks at such radical change. "

The BEST line I've heard about the media.

This is a good article, well worth the read.
5 posted on 04/10/2010 7:59:56 AM PDT by FrankR (Those of us who love AMERICA far outnumber those who love obama - your choice.)
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To: neverdem
this rare moment when the dreams of a zealous few are at last becoming the nightmares of a complacent many.

Great description.

6 posted on 04/10/2010 8:00:39 AM PDT by kabar
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To: libh8er

The sooner we forget this turd the better.


7 posted on 04/10/2010 8:01:14 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks (Impeachment !)
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To: b4its2late

When the beggars starve because we producers have dialed it back to pruducing only enough for ourselves (go Hugh Akston!) the situation will resolve itself. My charitable donations are OVER.


8 posted on 04/10/2010 8:02:26 AM PDT by nina0113
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To: neverdem

I believe Bill Clinton has always been numbered with the hard Leftists. Just look at the same kooks that surrounded him who ended up with Zer0.

Clinton was savvy enough to know that they did not have all of the pieces in place to make a takeover work. Zer0 did think all the elements were there, complete with orchestration of economic bubbles in housing and by helping light the fuse to a bank liquidity crisis with the removal of funds from NY banks on 9-15-08.

No, Hillary, as you well know, there is no “vast right-wing conspiracy”, but the vast conspiracy on the Left has shown itself and the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, along with their national political and cultural heritage, has now been engaged. To Zer0, Bill, Hillary, Nancy, Rahm, John F’n Kerry and the rest of the radical leftist gang, I hope you lose miserably.


9 posted on 04/10/2010 8:03:14 AM PDT by RatRipper (I'll ride a turtle to work every day before I buy anything from Government Motors.)
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To: neverdem
An excellent essay with so many great points. Here's one I especially liked:

The watchdog media have become a house kitten that purrs rather than barks at such radical change.

Thanks for posting.

10 posted on 04/10/2010 8:03:17 AM PDT by Flycatcher (God speaks to us, through the supernal lightness of birds, in a special type of poetry.)
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To: neverdem

Victor says it so well. It is terrifying to me what portends if we can’t stop this tsunami of destruction of the USA.


11 posted on 04/10/2010 8:03:56 AM PDT by Dudoight
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To: neverdem

“Northern liberals like George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry.”

Any one of these would seem conservative compared to the Usurper at 1600 PA Ave now.


12 posted on 04/10/2010 8:11:17 AM PDT by GGpaX4DumpedTea (I am a tea party descendant - steeped in the Constitutional legacy handed down by the Founders)
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To: Eric in the Ozarks

His retinue will remain among us! It won’t be over for a while.


13 posted on 04/10/2010 8:11:26 AM PDT by Wontsubmit
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To: neverdem

14 posted on 04/10/2010 8:11:37 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3 (Obama is everything Oklahoma is not.)
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To: neverdem

So, so, sad. They only way they could ever get up to bat was with a decoy. If we don’t stop it this November, many will become a 2000’s version of the 1600’s Pilgrims looking for a place to start over.


15 posted on 04/10/2010 8:13:54 AM PDT by major-pelham
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To: DesertRhino
back the creeping leftist revolution of the past 20 years or so.

More like the last 100 years ...

16 posted on 04/10/2010 8:14:17 AM PDT by bassmaner (Hey commies: I am a white male, and I am guilty of NOTHING! Sell your 'white guilt' elsewhere.)
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To: neverdem

>Will Obama-time be a transitory experience or an enduring tragedy?

There’s the possibility that he’s a transitory experience into enduring tragedy...


17 posted on 04/10/2010 8:26:37 AM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
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To: neverdem

Obama is where this nation has been headed for one HELL of a long time.

Obozo isn’t the point at which people should start paying attention about a possible crash...Obozo IS the crash.


18 posted on 04/10/2010 8:29:40 AM PDT by TalBlack
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To: DesertRhino

An arrest of Obama and Pelosi would be a good start. Make them accountable.


19 posted on 04/10/2010 8:32:55 AM PDT by freekitty (Give me back my conservative vote; then find me a real conservative to vote for)
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To: neverdem
They have tried to tag liberals with being soft on national security, both for courting those who faulted America and for faulting others who courted it.

The problem with the 'Pubbies is that they are too afraid of making the Dems mad at them. I don't get it. The Dems already hate them and treat them as America's "whipping boy", how much worse could it get if the Dems "get nad at them"?

IMO, we need some conservatives who aren't afraid of the Dems or the pres and are willing to get in the gutter and duke it out with the Dems. For too long, the 'Pubbies have proven that they aren't up to a good fight and the Dems know that when they get face time in the news and spread their lies, the 'Pubbies will cave.

I'm tired of being represented by people who are wimpy and afraid of their own shadows. They not only brought the current situation on America by abandoning their conservative principles when they had the House, the Senate and the WH, they squandered every opportunity available to fix the problems that existed then. Instead, they "partnered with the Dems" (so they wouldn't be mad at them) and let the Dems wag the majority 'Pubbies.

The problem we face this November is that there aren't enough replacements with strong conservative values to reverse the damage the Obot Party has done before the Obots can do more.

20 posted on 04/10/2010 8:38:13 AM PDT by DustyMoment (FloriDUH - proud inventors of pregnant/hanging chads and judicide!!)
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