By Charles C. W. Cooke
Saturday, November 10, 2012
An apocryphal tale tells of an American who claimed to
own George Washington’s axe. “Three times,” he exclaims, the axe has “had its
handle replaced, and twice had its head replaced!”
This is a joke that has been rendered in more serious
form by philosophers throughout the ages — perhaps most famously in Plutarch’s
Life of Theseus – and it may be time now to consider it in relation to the
United States. People and countries change, as they must. But, as with
Washington’s axe, to change too much is to invite the possibility not merely of
alteration, but of replacement. Predicated, as it is, on an established set of
principles — rather than merely on geographical or racial fact — America could
presumably reach a point at which it could no longer usefully be called
America. How close to that point are we?
I was born in England in 1984, two days before Ronald
Reagan was elected to a second term. As a small child, I watched the Space
Shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. I had an Apollo 11 lunchbox.
With varying levels of awareness, I saw the United States defeat Communism,
come to Kuwait’s aid in 1991, and rise to hyperpower status. During the 1990s,
I watched in awe as Silicon Valley revolutionized the world. Once, my father
told me that the difference between the average Briton and the average American
was that a Briton looks at a man driving a Ferrari and thinks, “What a
b*****d,” while an American thinks, “I’ll be him one day.” This my father
considered a great virtue — as do I. By the time that I was ten years old, I
didn’t just think that America was the world’s great hope, I knew it.
On frequent visits across the pond, I saw little to
disabuse me of these notions. America was just different: There was no crushing
class system, and it had a genuine and unique scope for immigrants to integrate
fully, and the virtue of living under the protection of the greatest
constitution in the history of the world. There was opportunity, too.
Christopher Hitchens, by no means short of talent, once wrote that he had been
compelled to move to America because “life in Britain had seemed like one long
antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry.” Britain treated me
well in a great many ways, but I understand what Hitchens meant: America is
mercifully lacking in gatekeepers.
Inevitably, this translates into politics. British
elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the
country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between
mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and
petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the
candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake
because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down
to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The
candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as “fairness”
and “investment” — and the never-ending substitution of the word “community”
for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your
country can do for you” line in a British political context because nobody
would understand what he was talking about. Only in America. Anyone can make it
there!
But, consider this: A president of the United States just
ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess,
exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification
of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest
group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming —
potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.
Worse, as David Harsanyi has observed, “the president’s
central case rests on the idea that individuals should view government as
society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity and the arbiter of fairness.”
This stunted and tawdry vision of American life was best summed up in his campaign’s
contemptible Life of Julia cartoon, which portrayed the American Dream as being
impossible without heavy cradle-to-grave government, and in which the civic
society that Tocqueville correctly saw as the hallmark of the republic was
wholly ignored — if not disdained outright. “Government is the only thing we
all belong to,” declared a video at the opening of the Democratic National
Convention. In another age, this contention would have been met with
incredulity and confusion; in ours, it was cheered.
So, too, were the two central achievements of Obama’s
first term: the spending of an unprecedented amount of borrowed money on the
president’s political allies, and the turning of the health-care system over to
the bureaucracy in a “reform” that, inter alia, stipulates that to be alive is
to owe something to Washington. The latter move involves a claim on the people
that no free government should ever make, and that no American government has
ever made before. For these grave missteps, the president suffered an epic loss
in Congress in 2010. The revolt looked promising, but then — for whatever
reasons — he was reelected. Now, Obama has the chance to remake the Supreme
Court and remake America’s Constitution, too. Who doubts he will take it?
If we are to lose America as it has been, could we not
ask that it be lost to something better than this? Our president, a Narcissus
masquerading as a Demosthenes, makes big speeches packed full of little ideas,
and he is applauded wildly for it. His, says Marco Rubio, “are tired and old
big-government ideas. Ideas that people come to America to get away from. Ideas
that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of
helping the world become more like America.” I will vouch for the verity of these
words. I have watched how these sorry ideas play out in the real world, and it
is not pretty: They make people’s lives worse, and yet simultaneously convince
them that any reform will kill them — a fatal combination. Americans should
avoid this path sedulously, for that way lies decline.
Rubio is correct in another assessment. How small Barack
Obama’s politics are! How deficient and outmoded are his ideas; how limited his
understanding of America’s value; how dull his magniloquence. The president has
an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World.
Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or
Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up?
Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in
love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.
And yet, he has now won twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde,
to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him
twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) This year,
certainly, was not the perfect storm of 2008. Then, novelty and redemption
played a role; this time, an insipid bore ran on an openly statist platform and
won the day in a country that is supposed to be “center right.” Maybe it no
longer is. In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably hadn’t
worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward, America chose a
different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says a lot about a people. The
central problem, then, is not that Obama will be president for the next few
years, but that the American people — knowing him — chose to reelect him. Even
if this is put down to a failure of Romney’s turnout operation or Hurricane
Sandy or Obama’s brilliant targeting, it does not say much for their commitment
to classical liberalism that a significant group of Americans stayed away from
the fight because they didn’t like Mitt Romney. That this was not a clear-cut
repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.
Many had hoped that Tuesday would be 1980 revisited. It
was not. Instead, in its effects at least, it was more like 1945 in Britain, in
which year the Labour party was elected and began to put into place the foundations
of a government-owned and -run health-care system that would quickly displace
the established church as Britain’s national religion. (If you question the
believers’ zeal, take a look at the frenzied NHS worship at the Olympic opening
ceremony.) As Mark Steyn has correctly observed, in Britain as elsewhere, the
National Health Service paved the way for a “permanent left-of-center political
culture” that obtains regardless of who wins office. Obamacare will now go into
effect, and Americans will soon feel entitled to its fruits. Those who doubt
that this will have a deleterious effect on American republicanism have clearly
never been bribed with their own health care. Almost certainly, Obamacare will
fail. And then, as always, it will be replaced by something even further left.
For the model, see Obama’s record on student loans.
Economic gravity will prevail, as it always does, and it
will eventually yield another conservative president. Indeed, the nature of the
two-party system all but guarantees it. But this won’t do much good in and of
itself. The growth of the state is a one-way ratchet, and its size and
intrusion are almost never retrenched. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788 that “the
natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain
ground.” “A government bureau,” added Ronald Reagan, “is the nearest thing to
eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
How true these words are. Mrs. Thatcher, fittingly
lionized by those on the right, certainly achieved a lot. But she could do
nothing about Britain’s creaking welfare system or its antediluvian National
Health Service. Nobody can. Nobody would even try. (Consider what an Augean
task it is even to get people seriously to discuss Medicare’s disquieting
trajectory.) Mrs. Thatcher’s party is well named: They are, quite literally,
the “Conservatives,” and their role now is simply to run the government better
than the socialists. Britain once had an Empire that stretched across one
quarter of the globe; it provided the world with a common language, many of its
institutions, global trade, and cricket; we did Great Things at home and
abroad. Now, we wrangle over whether state spending should be 39 or 40 percent
of GDP, and we hold the prime minister personally responsible for hospital
conditions hundreds of miles from London. It’s debilitating.
Once upon a time, when civic society flourished in
Britain, it was uncontroversial to observe that to demur at government
involvement in the achievement of an end was not necessarily to consider that
end undesirable. Under Leviathan, such distinctions draw blank stares. In 2010,
on the BBC’s Question Time — a British current-affairs show on which the guests
trip over one other to display the appropriate degree of fealty to whichever
orthodoxy is in the news that week whilst the audience tries to be as clever as
one can be without doing any reading — the question of impending government
spending cuts was raised. One audience member stood up and, waving her hands
around, asked who would mow her elderly mother’s lawn if the government no
longer did it. The audience clapped. The host looked serious. Not a single
person on the panel said, “You!” Neither of the putatively Conservative guests
even raised an eyebrow. A particularly oleaginous MP proceeded to tell her that
it was a “good question.” I threw a coffee cup at my television.
“In August 1914,” wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor, “a
sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the
existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live
where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.” A
century later, he does not even expect to have to tend to his own family’s
garden. That’s some shift in the Overton window.
I quite earnestly believe in all of the stuff that I’m
not supposed to. I believe that America is exceptional; that it is an
objectively better nation than any other that has ever existed; and that it is,
as it was explicitly designed always to be, the last, best hope for mankind. As
Winthrop’s sermon poetically put it, America is the “Shining City upon a Hill,”
there so that men without liberty have somewhere to turn and a light that they
might follow. I followed that light — 3,500 miles from my friends and my family
— because I believed that my life would be better here, because I wanted to be
free, and because I felt that under American liberty I would be able to be
myself more honestly and more fully. There is nowhere else I could have gone.
Alas, there is nothing written in the stars that says
that America will always be America. “Rome,” as Joseph Heller brutally reminded
us, “was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was
destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do
you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the
earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in 25 million years or so.”
There will be little virtue in America if it becomes a larger version of Britain,
but with free speech and the right to bear arms.
On Tuesday, America took another giant leap away both
from its revolutionary mission and from the classical liberalism that it has
successfully incubated for so long. This is a rotten thing for America, and
also — though it might not realize it — for the world; for, like Anthony
Blanche, Evelyn Waugh’s “aesthete par excellence,” should the United States
descend into the mire, it will “take something away with it.” If America ceases
to be America, it will “[lock] a door and hang the key on a chain.” And then?
“All [its] friends, among whom [it] had always been a stranger,” will realize
they need it. I know I do.
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