POINT: Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation. – Michelle Obama
COUNTERPOINT: Every welfare state has been introduced by wholesale trampling of traditions—which have grown naturally. The German Nazis under Hitler, the Russian Communists under Lenin, and the American New Dealers under Roosevelt have all sneered at the old ways of doing things. Religious, political, and economic traditions all come in for a drastic overhaul—or an attempt at drastic overhaul. Change in many cases seems to have been made for change’s sake itself, which the newcomers to high places sometimes behaving like guilty youngsters climbing up to the cookie jar, who want to see how much they can get away with. – Paul A. Sexson and Stephen B. Miles, Jr., The Challenge of Conservatism (1964)