WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Our President The WASP. “President Obama’s vision of a strong central government leading the people along the paths of truth and righteousness has ‘New England’ stamped all over it. Puritan Boston believed in a powerful government whose duty was to promote moral behavior and punish the immoral; by 1800 many of the Puritan descendants were turning Unitarian and modernist, but while they lost their love of Christian doctrine they never abandoned their faith in the Godly Commonwealth and the duty of the virtuous to make the rest of the world behave.”

To be fair, using drones to do so was Obama’s contribution.