By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Although there's still a great deal to be learned about
the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many
ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is
becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the
rationale for his presidency.
"We're portrayed by Republicans as either being
lying or idiots. It's actually closer to us being idiots." So far, this is
the administration's best defense.
It was offered to CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson by an
anonymous aide involved in the White House's disastrous response to the attacks
in Benghazi, Libya.
Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it
deserves. People want to connect dots, but that's only possible when you assume
that all events were deliberately orchestrated by human will. This is the
delusion at the heart of all conspiracy theories, from Kennedy assassination
crackpots to 9/11 "truthers".
Behind all such delusions is the assumption that
government officials we don't like are omni-competent and entirely malevolent.
The truth is closer to the opposite. They mean well but can't do very much very
well.
This brings us to the flip side of the conspiracy theory
-- call it the redeemer fantasy: If only we had the right kind of government
with the right kind of leaders, there'd be nothing we couldn't do.
It's been a while since we had a self-styled redeemer
president. John F. Kennedy surely dabbled in the myth that experts could solve
all of our problems, though much of JFK's messianic status was imposed on him
posthumously by the media and intellectuals. You really have to go back to
Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson to find a president who pushed the
salvific powers of politics as much as Barack Obama.
His presidency has been grounded in the fantasy that
there's "nothing we can't do" through government action if we just
put all our faith in it -- and, by extension, in him. We are the ones we've
been waiting for, he tells us, and if we just give over to a post-political
spirit, where we put aside our differences, the way America (allegedly) did during
other "Sputnik moments," (one of his favorite phrases) we can give
"jobs to the jobless," heal the planet, even "create a kingdom
[of heaven] right here on Earth."
For Obama, the only things separating America from
redemption are politics, specifically obstruction from unhinged Republicans and
others clinging to outdated and vaguely illegitimate motives. Opposition to gun
control is irrational because the "government is us." Reject warnings
"that tyranny is always lurking," he told the graduating class at
Ohio State, because a self-governing people cannot tyrannize themselves.
But, suddenly, when the administration finds itself
ensnared by errors of its own making, the curtain is drawn back on the cult of
expertise and the fantasy of statist redemption. Early on in the IRS scandal,
before the agency's initial lies were exposed, David Axelrod defended the
administration on the grounds that the "government is so vast" the
president "can't know" what's going on "underneath" him. Of
course, it was Obama who once said, "I know more about policies on any
particular issue than my policy directors."
That is, when things are going relatively well. When
scandal hits the fan, he goes from "the government is us" to talking
of his own agencies the way a czar might dismiss an injustice in some Siberian
backwater. The hubris of omni-competence gives way to "lighten up, we're
idiots."
Many of his defenders now rush to insist that it's unfair
to hold him to too high standard. He's just a man, just a politician. Well,
duh.
Meanwhile, Obama insists that he is outraged. And, if
sincere, that's nice. But so what? What the president seems to have never fully
understood is that the founders were smarter than he or that the American
people aren't as dumb as he thinks we are. His outrage is beside the point.
A free people will have legitimate differences on
questions of policy. A government as vast as it is -- never mind as vast he
wants it to be -- is destined to abuse its power, particularly in a climate
where a savior-president is incessantly delegitimizing dissent (and
journalistic scrutiny). Government officials will behave like idiots sometimes,
not because they are individually dumb but because a government that takes on
too much will make an idiot out of anyone who thinks there's no limit to what
it can do. That alone is good reason to fear tyranny. Indeed, it would be
idiotic not to.
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