By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 24, 2013
The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama
is a man of the Left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the
commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address,
that is.
Where has everyone been these four years? The only
surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for
““malice toward none”“ ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal
manifesto.
But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had
unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four
years ago (February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest
social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”
Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially
nationalize health care, which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after
passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion
of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully
one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.
Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm
shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the
revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.
It was a paean to big government. At its heart was
Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and
(2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.
The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the
increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid —
is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created
when life expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical
technology was in its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and
technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone
knows that, unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.
As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already
begun that in his first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address
reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a
state-created green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s
regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today,
shale gas tomorrow).
The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and
economist) Václav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to
failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of
experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.
Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists
of any Obama interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was
spectacularly devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the
post-industrial democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an
increasingly insolvent entitlement state.
On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the
ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he
means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious,
cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of
the American system.
For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is
a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow
of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the
marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle
to grave — and the state.
In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a
direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had
proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the
problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology
— as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the
era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to
abolish welfare.
Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he
preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more
just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are
the great task of government.
Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of
America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed
the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new
Reaganite norm.
Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the
50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural
address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker,
his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next
four years, he will have earned the title.
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