“The world is changed. … Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
Profound trepidation mars a conservative’s interpretation of recent events. The presidential debates are finished and Barack Obama remains solidly ahead of John McCain in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. This fact has convinced many Democrats that the election is now over. Certainly they may be guilty of overconfidence, but it is not premature to speculate as to how an Obama presidency will impact the nation.
Formidable will his influence be — particularly in light of the Democratic Party’s 2006 takeover of Congress and the possibility that the left could obtain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. No doubt November could spawn a monster as many fantasies could become reality. One of Obama’s (numerous) mottos is “Yes, We Can.” Should the pseudo-liberals find themselves in control of both the legislative and executive branches of government, my senator’s words will prove prophetic. In all likelihood, the change he proposes will be real and infinitely believable. Perhaps he wasn’t just whistling Ludacris all along.
John McCain said “Senator Government” in reference to his opponent the other night, but this verbalization was more Freudian slip than mistake. The next four to eight years will mark the country’s perpetual union with the Leviathan. Even worse, should retirement or death change the makeup of the Supreme Court, the political left will have a stranglehold on America. We will lurch portside at every junction. With all three federal branches under their control, what awaits us is the type of change only Jimmy Carter, Nancy Pelosi, and Al Gore would welcome.
By 2012 or 2016, the alteration of America’s fabric will be severe and profound as we will have socialism in our time. Even though political leftists abhor the word, socialism is entirely in keeping with their cherished preferences and initiatives. They salivate over the notion of omnipotent government and wish to regulate the citizenry in innumerable ways. This is evident in their stance on an individual’s negotiations with his or her employer, their ability to say “no” to union membership, and the absurd belief that carbon dioxide — a life-sustaining chemical compound we exhale — is a “dangerous pollutant” in need of environmental removal.
Aside from a woman’s right to murder her offspring, there is nothing in this land that Senator Obama and his ilk do not wish to command and control. Indeed, not until Hillary Clinton was dispatched over the summer did the presidential frontrunner ever once embrace a centrist position. Obama has never seen a tax cut he liked or a federal program he wanted to eliminate. He is what he is: a leftist’s leftist.
Today we stand on the brink of socialism. During the recent loan crisis, Representative Jeb Hensarling dubbed the monstrous bailout package — that the government volunteered us to finance — something that places us on “the slippery slope to socialism.” He was right; although, one could make a convincing argument that we have been sliding in that direction since 1989.
Already Washington is buying up banks. Given their current interventionist stance, nothing will stop our kleptocratic elites from slowly taking over the auto industry or any other entity judged “too big to fail.” To neo-socialists, government does not exist to serve the people. The people exist to serve the government. Everything we earn and own should be available to the federocracy as tribute. What becomes of our savings is none of our business.
According to the Index of Economic Freedom, combined governmental expenditures now equal 36.6 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. Recent events could cause the figure to leap to 40 percent. At what point does America officially become a European-style socialist state? Whenever I pose this question to leftists no statistical answer is forthcoming. Congressman Barney Frank whitewashes this line of inquiry by describing government as “simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” which in no way limits how invasive or totalitarian such a government is permitted to be.
Despite trying to corner the market on the independent vote, Barack Obama has been surprisingly transparent about his desires. In a now-famous lecture given to “Joe the Plumber,” the would-be messiah revealed that he is ideologically incapable of unmooring himself from the leftist worldview. He told his new acquaintance: “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
Obama wants to spread the wealth around by … giving it to the government. This is akin to saying that you want to save grandma from worrying about the stock market so you suggest that she take a weeklong vacation to Las Vegas. Anybody with any experience in the public sector will scoff at the idea that tax dollars give others a “chance.” While some vicarious benefit does occasionally transpire, in most cases all that massive expropriation manages to do is to give bureaucrats a chance to succeed. Barack Obama can refer to theft as “opportunity” if he likes, but it remains robbery.
Furthermore, how does someone making money diminish the financial prospects of anyone else? It doesn’t unless one holds beliefs in Marxism, a pernicious doctrine wherein the phenomenon of economic growth is denied. In lieu of Obama’s words to the plumber and the past utterances of his wife — “The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more” — it appears that Obama’s socialist mindset lurks closer to the surface than he cares to admit.
We are at the threshold. Increased regulations, earning confiscations, misappropriations, and the Draconian measures inherent to expanded government will impoverish everyone and imperil our liberty. Obama will morph the impending recession into a depression. How surprising it is that economic turmoil benefited him in the polls. The assumption that voters should turn to the political left in a time of economic crisis makes about as much sense as extinguishing a fire with lighter fluid.
Regardless of what soothing phrases pseudo-liberals may mouth, a lust for power fuels their every endeavor. As a result of judicial decisions, legislative changes, and cultural upheavals, the coronation of Barack Obama will accelerate the erosion of our freedoms. Authors Brian Anderson and Adam Thierer, in their new book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom, outline the bewildering fronts upon which our individual autonomy is under attack.
The manifesto’s position is that those regulations celebrated by advocacy journalists and Democrats everywhere will be applied not only to the economy but to the realm of political speech as well. Diversity of thought is not something in which the left has an interest due to their positions faring poorly when people are allowed to criticize them.
As a means of altering the status quo and tilting the landscape in a favorable direction, anti-liberal politicians will lobby for the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine, and there appears to be no reason why a President Obama would squander any capital by vetoing such a measure. As Anderson and Thierer note, “these proposals expose the left’s true goal: to regulate private media outlets comprehensively and drive out those owners who dare to offer right-leaning alternatives.”
The left will cloak their fetish for censorship in the language of “justice, fairness, openness” and “equality,” but this rhetoric is a subterfuge. The Democrats will eliminate opposition speech due to an authoritarian need to dominate others. In the words of the authors: “All the opinions that the left’s media critics favor are now readily available to us on multiple platforms. But that’s not good enough, it seems: they won’t rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content they prefer.”
What the left will never comprehend is that the same Leviathan they inflate as a means to vanquish their foes will one day turn on them. As President Gerald Ford once put it, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” It appears that Barack Obama’s politics are new chiefly because they eschew the acknowledgment of history. Should he win the upcoming election, the nation will have to pay dearly for his ignorance. Hopefully, unlike with the bailout, his victory will be a debt America never has to face.
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