By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Hillary Clinton is a seasoned liberal politician, but one
with few core beliefs. Her positions on subjects such as gay marriage,
free-trade agreements, the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iraq War, the Assad regime
in Syria, and the use of the term “radical Islam” all seem to hinge on what she
perceives 51 percent of the public to believe on any given day.
Such politicians believe truth is a relative construct.
Things are deemed false by politicians only if they cannot convince the public
that they are true — and vice versa. When the majority of Americans no longer
believe Clinton’s yarns about her private e-mail server to the point of not
wanting to vote for her, then she will change her narrative and create new,
convenient truths to reflect the new consensus.
Donald Trump is an amateur politician but a politician
nevertheless. He is ostensibly conservative, but he likewise seems to change
his positions on a number of issues — from abortion to the Iraq War — depending
on what he feels has become the majority position. And as with Clinton, Trump’s
idea of truth is defined as what works, while falsity is simply any narrative
that proved unusable.
Politicians glad-hand, pander, and kiss babies as they
seek to become megaphones for majority opinions. But ideologues are different.
They often brood and lecture that their utopian dreams are not shared by the
supposedly less informed public.
To gain power, of course, ideologues can temporarily
become political animals. Barack Obama ran in 2008 on popular positions such as
reducing the national debt and opposing gay marriage and immigration amnesties,
only to flip after he was re-elected and no longer needed to pander to
perceived majority opinions.
But otherwise, Obama the ideologue seems to believe that
big, redistributive government is always necessary to achieve a mandated
equality of result — regardless of whether it ever works or should work in
reality. He opposes a reduction in capital-gains tax rates even though he
concedes that such cuts might bring in more revenue.
The administration has deemed the Affordable Care Act
successful even though Obama’s assurances that it would lower deductibles and
premiums, give patients greater choices, and ensure continuity in medical
providers and plans have all proven to be untrue.
No matter: Obamacare fulfills the president’s
preconceived notion that state-mandated health care is superior to what the
private sector can provide.
Abroad, Obama starts from the premise that an overweening
U.S. is not to be congratulated for saving the world in World War II, winning
the Cold War, and ushering in globalization. Instead, its inherent unfairness
to indigenous peoples, its opposition to revolutionary regimes and its supposed
interventionist bullying disqualify it from being a moral and muscular leader
of the world.
As a consequence of all this, facts often must be created
to match pre-existing ideology.
A homophobic, radical Islamic terrorist in Orlando
shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he mowed down the innocent in a gay nightclub. He
called 9-1-1 to make sure the world knew that his killing spree was in service
to the Islamic State. And in the midst of his murdering, he even called a local
TV news station to brag on his jihadist martyrdom in progress. No matter. To
Obama, who asserts that radical Islamic terrorism, which he refuses to identify
in such terms, poses little threat (far less of a threat, he has said, than the
dangers posed by accidental falls in bathtubs), the Orlando shooting was
instead a symptom of a lack of gun control or endemic homophobia — anything
other than what the killer himself said it was.
Guns, of course, had nothing to do with the 3,000 people
killed on 9/11, with the Boston Marathon bombing, or with recent terrorist
attacks in Oklahoma and at the University of California at Merced perpetrated
by blade-wielding assailants. Tight restrictions on semi-automatic weapons
could no more stop shootings in Europe than stop an epidemic of inner-city
shootings in Chicago. No matter: The Orlando shooting must be ascribed to the
availability of guns rather than to radical Islamic terrorism.
In both word and deed, Iran, Cuba, and Turkey are
revolutionary societies in turmoil that have often voiced anti-Americanism. But
to Obama, who at times has warmed up to all three, those regimes fit his
deductive notion that America’s past behavior has earned it understandable antipathy
from countries with legitimate grievances.
Bipartisan analyses agree that the withdrawal of all
troops from Iraq in December 2011 threw away the victory obtained by the
American surge of 2007, eroded the foundation of the nascent Iraqi democracy,
and helped to birth and empower the Islamic State.
But to an ideologue such as Obama, the withdrawal simply
reflected a universal truth that the U.S. must get out and leave the Middle
East to its rightful owners — even if the president has been forced to send
nearly 5,000 troops back into Iraq.
In general, politicians are rank opportunists, but at
least most of them are malleable and attuned to public opinion.
But ideologues are far more anti-empirical — and thus
dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment