Friday, July 20, 2012
“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your
own. . . . If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.
There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create
this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t
build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
The president’s defenders have claimed he either misspoke
last week at a Roanoke, Va., campaign event or that what he said is true. Both
defenses have merit. Obama surely didn’t mean to say something that politically
idiotic so plainly. And it’s true that no man’s accomplishments are entirely
his own. We’re all indebted to others, and we all rely on government to provide
some basic things. Only the straw-men conservatives of Obama’s imagination
yearn for an America with no roads and bridges.
At best, Obama’s “gaffe” is a banal truism, and if the
president’s praetorians want to defend him on grounds of platitudinous
banality, fine. But even they have to know in their hearts that this is a
pathetic maneuver, given that the reason they’re rushing to defend Obama in the
first place is his commitment to the very philosophy they deny he’s espousing.
This is the great irony of Obama and his defenders. He is
a progressive ideologue and a passionate believer in “social justice,” and
that’s a large reason why his fans love him so. But if you ever say that he is
what he is — if you take his words seriously — they ridicule you for believing
he’s anything other than a pragmatist and a moderate.
Meanwhile, what many conservatives don’t appreciate is
that Obama is not some otherworldly radical, importing foreign ideas, but that
he in fact fits within an old American intellectual tradition. Indeed, you
might even call him a reactionary progressive; he seeks to restore the
assumptions and priorities of the Progressive Era.
Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism,
spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the
“individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality
has been formed.” For the progressives, society and government were almost
interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher,
believed that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the
only means to create “free” individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn’t
the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state.
Progressives invented the idea of the “moral equivalent
of war” as a means of inciting citizens to drop their personal priorities and
rally around the state for a government-defined “cause larger than themselves.”
Obama came into office under the motto “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”
and has been looking for “Sputnik moments” ever since in a search for a way to
rationalize his agenda.
To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion,
it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of government. He often invokes the
Hallmark-ized biblical teaching that “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my
sister’s keeper” as a means to rationalize not personal action but government
action. (Obama’s own half-siblings have received little attention from their
very wealthy and famous relative.)
Progressive minister Walter Rauschenbusch famously
declared that only the “God that answereth by low food prices” should be God.
You might say that under the Obamacare vision, only the God that answereth with
free birth control should be God.
In the slideshow “The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign
celebrates a progressive vision of citizenship where all of a hypothetical
young woman’s accomplishments are co-produced by the state: “Under President
Obama, Julia decides to have a child.”
It’s all of a piece with Obama’s conviction that “a
problem facing any American is a problem facing all Americans.”
The problem facing Obama is that there’s a reason the
American people never fully embraced the progressive vision. The idea driving
America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the word
“individual” appears in there doesn’t make it a selfish ideal; it means it’s a
vision of liberty. We each find our happiness where we seek it. For some that’s
in business, for others the arts, or religion or family or a mix of them all.
And very often our happiness depends upon the satisfaction we feel at having
conquered problems on our own.
Under President Obama, that sense of happiness is a
mirage, because everything is a co-production of the state.
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