Election Day: What’s at Stake

votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.

Over the past six years Obama and progressives partially achieved some of these progressive goals. Through legislation, executive orders, like-minded judges, and the interpretations of law by anonymous, unelected federal functionaries, Obama’s government has intervened in the automobile, finance, health care, and housing industries; hampered the explosive growth of the energy industry by reducing development on federal lands and waging a war on carbon; encroached on the states’ sovereignty through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the renegade Department Of Justice; and intruded into civil society and individual rights on issues such as contraception, traditional marriage, freedom of speech, and religious freedom.

Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending has exploded, increasing along the way the wider regulatory scope and intrusiveness of the federal agencies created to manage this transfer of wealth. Social welfare spending now approaches a trillion dollars a year, people claiming Social Security Disability insurance have increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11 million today, and the number of people getting food stamps has doubled to 46 million just over the last decade. These trillions in transfer payments represent a massive redistribution of property. According to the Tax Foundation, America’s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.

The increase in entitlement spending, however, has also required much higher budget deficits and an unprecedented peacetime increase in the national debt, which now stands at $17 trillion dollars, up from $10 trillion in 2008. From 2009-2012, Obama’s budgets averaged deficits of $1.25 trillion. This year’s deficit is projected to be around half a trillion dollars, but according to the CBO, deficits will return to the trillion-dollar mark from 2022-2024. And don’t forget, the costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt are projected to devour all tax revenues by 2030. This means that either taxes will have to be raised to ruinous levels, or even more money borrowed to finance the unfunded liabilities of those programs, which have been estimated at anywhere between $123 and $200 trillion. Ancient tyrants redistributed the property of just the living; the modern welfare state has managed to redistribute the property of the unborn citizens who will inherit this debt.

Both parties bear some responsibility for this mess, testimony to just how engrained the entitlement mentality and the acceptance of redistributing property are in today’s America. Yet the last 6 years have seen unprecedented expansions of this process, and demonization of those like Paul Ryan who propose even modest steps towards defusing this ticking fiscal bomb.

In foreign policy as well, Obama and the Democrats have shaped their actions according to the quasi-pacifist, “postmodern” ideology that distrusts using American power to protect Americans’ security and promote their interests. Instead, an America guilty of historical crimes, oppression, and exploitation must subordinate its power to transnational institutions like the U.N., and rely on diplomacy and multilateral coalitions that advance international interests, including those of our enemies and rivals, at the expense of America’s.

Thus Obama started his presidency with an apology tour, led from behind in Libya, and oversaw dangerous reductions in the military budget. He has abandoned Iraq, and left its fragile political order, purchased with the blood and money of Americans, stranded between the Iranian rock and the ISIS hard place. His feckless overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi has left that country a petri dish of jihadist bacilli, leading to the murder of an American diplomat and 3 brave warriors, and flooding the Middle East with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals. He has compromised and betrayed America’s allies like Egypt and Israel, and groveled before her enemies like Iran. His empty bluster on Syria and Ukraine has emboldened bloody tyrants like Assad and geopolitical rivals like Russia. All the while he and his foreign policy team have talked and talked and talked, a spectacle of gutless, futile diplomacy redolent of England’s in the 20’s and 30’s.

Yet all these actions and policies both domestic and foreign reflect a worn-out philosophy repeatedly repudiated by history. The progressive worldview of the Democrats is founded on the idea that increasing knowledge of the natural world, human nature and behavior, and social and political reality can drive human progress and improvement. Nature, people, and society thus can be directed towards the creation of an idealized world in which the tragic constants of human life––physical want, suffering, oppression, violence, brutality, inequality, and injustice––are eliminated. Just give power to the “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called them, the “technocrats” who possess this knowledge, and they will rearrange society in a way that achieves utopia––once, of course, religion, custom, and traditional wisdom are swept away lest their irrational prejudices and superstitions like “sin” and “good and evil” block humanity’s march to the brave new world. All that is needed is to increase the coercive power of the state in order to institute reforms and remove any obstacles to the efforts of technical elites to achieve these utopian boons.

The progressives’ hostility to free-market capitalism and fondness for dirigiste economic polices, for example, illustrate these philosophical assumptions. To progressives, “income inequality” and economic winners and losers are intolerable injustices reflecting not the variations of talent, virtue, hard work, and luck among individuals, but capitalism’s rigged rules and privileging of profit over people. Use the power of the state to amend those rules and to intervene in the market through regulations, tax policy, and the redistribution of property, and you can eliminate those injustices. Thus Obama’s “You didn’t build that” and  “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” rhetoric, recently endorsed by Hillary Clinton’s similar claim, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Thus the relentless public demonization of the wealthy and corporations, and the attempt to use regulatory and taxing power to siphon off their capital and put it to achieving the progressive vision of “social justice.”

What is at stake this election day is whether or not Americans will reject this ideology and the policies it creates. It is about starting to restore to our politics prudence, humility, respect for traditional wisdom, and common sense. It is about recognizing that an irreducibly complex and quirky human nature and behavior are not infinitely plastic and so cannot be shaped according to the abstract visions of technical elites armed with an intrusive power that compromises our freedom. It is about accepting the tragic truth that the freedom to choose how to shape one’s life means that bad choices will create bad consequences, and so individual freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility for those bad choices. It is about accepting that suffering and failure are not unjust anomalies to be engineered from human existence, but non-negotiable givens of human life, and thus will never be eliminated, but only mitigated. And it is about remembering that every attempt to create heaven on earth has had to diminish the people’s freedom, and sometimes has demanded their lives.

In short, what is at stake is the return to the ideas about human nature and existence upon which the Founders built the American order and its guarantee of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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  • http://gerardjackson.com/ gerard jackson

    A fundamental problem is that Republicans have never mounted an effective economic case against the policy of always raising taxes and government spending. It would appear that the classical economists were much better in this respect than any of the GOP’s economic advisors. Thanks to these economists British governments kept taxes, debt and spending within very narrow limits to a remarkable degree and with the general support of the public.

    Until Republicans learn to explain in simple terms to the American people why these reckless financial policies will eventually ruin them Americans will continue to elect Democrats and RINO’s will continue to collaborate with them. Simply chanting Laffer curve and tax cuts simply won’t cut it.

    • Shel Zahav

      The American public doesn’t understand any of this. The real problem is that almost all politicians are bought off. They argue only about who pays them and who gets the favors.

      • http://gerardjackson.com/ gerard jackson

        The American public doesn’t understand because no one has
        explained it to them. Conservative outlets have done an extremely poor job of getting the real economic message out. I think this is because they too have a very poor grasp of the economic forces at work. They do not seem to understand that economic growth is forgone consumption, which means that the more government consumption you get the less growth you will get.

        I suspect that many so-called conservative politicians have bought the fallacy that government spending is an important component of economic growth. It is not. Part of the problem is that too many of these people think of wealth-consuming monstrosities like Obamacare as a managerial problem rather than an economic problem.

        • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

          You are describing Establishment Republicans, not Conservatives.

          • http://gerardjackson.com/ gerard jackson

            I never make the mistake of confusing the likes of Rove with conservatives. The GOP establishment seems to think only in terms of numbers and winning: never in terms of principles or the need to genuinely inform the American public. They should, in a sense, treat every day as an election day.

          • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

            I see I was mistaken – welcome to the Conservative club! And it’s true that Conservative need to articulate their message better. But most of all, we need to eliminate the RINO/Establishment blockade that stands between us and the Democratic Left.

    • WW4

      The average person is swamped with costs, chief among them health care and education. Even those of us who have been saving/investing for decades aren’t looking at quite the retirement cushion we’d hoped for starting out. And young people are simply looking at an edifice of debt when they should be looking to beat the world. These are all daily stressors for people who do play by the rules, who have made the sacrifices and who live responsibly within their means.

      Forget the mind-numbing “lower taxes” crowd–the “shrink government” crowd needs to make that case plain as day to the average person, and they need to stop “telling” as if these things are articles of faith and start “showing” these things as applied to real life. Many people simply don’t understand how a top-heavy federal government invites cronyism and a regulatory environment that benefits only those cronies, while we suffer and stagnate for it. But to explain this properly means there are oxen to be gored, and not just government oxen–those are politically easy. But there is no one in Washington willing to turn down the big money that keeps this in place.

      And if we can’t do that, we may as well go the European route.

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      The bigger problem is the failure to mount an effective moral case against the welfare state and the income redistribution that feeds it. Republicans like Paul Ryan are good enough at the accounting questions, but their passionless green eyeshade approach (“We can’t afford this program”) will always lose to the Democrats’ “Mean old Republicans are trying to take Johnny’s school lunch away”.

      Even the simple fact that continued deficit spending will cause collapse has a moral dimension: the Democrats want he spending to buy votes, and Republicans are generally too chicken to say this out loud. When Mitt Romney did, rather ineptly (the “47%” remark), it was widely regarded as a gaffe. The only “gaffe” was that he expressed himself poorly.

  • Shel Zahav

    There is very little at stake since most of the Republicans are indiscernible from Democrats. As our Founding Fathers told us, government’s normal way is to usurp and hold power. So, even if Republicans are elected, most will stop talking about repealing Obamacare and will tell us about reforming it — meaning, keeping it and the money it confiscates from the citizenry. Same for amnesty. Same for everything else.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Paul-Marks/1266358046 Paul Marks

      You may regard yourself as an enemy of the RINOs but (sadly) your words are wonderful for them. You spread cynicism and despair – thus depressing conservative turn out in States such as Kansas. And the RINOs will say “look the people do not want smaller government, Governor Brownback has been defeated” and they will say “look the people do not want Obamacare repealed – they have sent Mr Orman to the United States Senate”.

      • Shel Zahav

        I don’t believe I have that kind of power.

  • Seymour Friedel

    With all the voter fraud we have plus the liberal mind set that says everything i just fine and the fact Republicans are hardly better, there is little that ill change. I measure a country by how often Nancy Pelosi gets re-elected. And by that measure we are in terrible shape.

  • http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/ Jason P

    I was going to write how the Republicans aren’t much better and I expected push back. Instead I’m delighted to see several others making this important point.

    1) Obamacare. I don’t expect repeal under Republicans. Besides, O’care is the tip of the iceberg. We need a law that outlaws state-level mandates so that each individual can tailor insurance contracts to their own needs. We need a law that allows tax parity for non-employer based health insurance.

    2) Housing finance. We have to stop subsidizing easy credit. Let’s get the federal government out of housing and housing finance. Close the FHA, wind down Fannie and Freddie, prohibit the Fed from buying mortgage-back securities, wind down tax subsidies for mortgages (or better yet allow tax deductions for rent).

    3) Immigration. You know what we need.

    4) Student loans. Caps on the amount of indebtedness. Hold colleges responsible for the shortfall when loans are in default. This can be done by voluntary means–no future loans until they pay the short fall.

    5) Education. Eliminate all federal involvement. Opposing Common Core isn’t enough. Remember “No Child Left Behind”? We have to stop experimenting with the lives of our children.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Paul-Marks/1266358046 Paul Marks

      Actually the Republican candidates (for Governor and United States Senate and ….) in States such as Kansas AGREE with you on much of this. Yet the effect of your words will be to depress conservative turnout – thus allowing the RINOs to say “look the people do not want smaller government, Brownback has been defeated, they want us to work with Obama – Mr Orman has been sent to the United States Senate”. This is the effect of people who refuse to help (because you do not think candidates are not pure enough) – you make future candidates LESS pure (you move the agenda in exactly the opposite way to the way you want) It is incredibly depressing.

      • http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/ Jason P

        I’m not so sure about that. Remember the politicians are cognizant of the problem of “voter turnout.” They have to aim for two marginal audiences: moderates who will swing both ways, diehards who will only vote for one Party and might stay at home. They talk about getting out the vote. If they fear diehard boycotts more than moderate swings to the other side, they’ll stick to principles.

        Look what happened to George H Bush. He made one emphatic point: “Read my lips …” He lied and lost to Clinton. Since then no Republican dares to raise taxes and many take the Grover Norquist’s pledge. Principles matter … and we have to make sure politicians know that.

        You are right only in the case of utopian libertarians who say Republican will never be good enough. You can write them off. But fence sitting pro-liberty Republicans do have an effect.

      • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

        The strategic problem is a little more complicated than that. There are going to be times when we must refuse to support a Republican who is merely the lesser of two evils, if that will convince the GOP Establishment that it must accept a Conservative candidate to get our support. Frankly, I think the problem is complicated enough that I don’t want to try to settle it here – it depends on whether voting for the generic Republican helps or hurts the Conservative cause, and that depends on just how supportive the candidate would be of the Conservative program. A fitting subject for a future article, actually.

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      Good program. Remember to distinguish between Republicans and Conservatives – the two are not synonymous. Conservatives will be largely sympathetic to your program.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Paul-Marks/1266358046 Paul Marks

    Kansas is an obvious State to watch – if the “Progressive” alliance of Democrats and Republican “moderates” (traitors – RINOs) is successful, then reformers will lose heart. They will conclude that the people do not really want smaller government.

    • WW4

      Kansas will indeed be watched: it will be the poster child state for Democrats to point to conservative policy failure.

      • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

        There are no “conservative policy failures”; only a failure to implement conservative policies.

  • cree

    The political astute portion of the electorate who are anti-left know how bad the situation is for the nation. That awareness must keep ever in mind our succeeding generations. If we know things are bad for us in the now, if this election does not create a starting point for a committed, Constitutional only restoration goal of continuing achievement, the republic will be lost to them.

    What our founders/framers of our Constitution created was for us. History proves the validity of their blueprint for a functioning and truly effective and acceptable government the people prospered under and exceeded like no other in history.

    Reversing the federal government’s usurpation of powers to only the enumerated by law powers decreed in our Constitution is going to a long and very daunting task. It is hard for me to imagine it is possible. But, I truly feel it must be done, for posterity’s sake. I hope this day marks that course redirection; let history record again the destiny of liberty’s want.

  • http://www.clarespark.com/ Clare Spark

    If conservatives stay home and fail to vote, I will assume that American exceptionalism is dead, and that fascism is on the way. See how we might look at the American past without idealizing it here: http://clarespark.com/2013/02/27/american-exceptionalism-retold/. “American exceptionalism retold.”

  • Paul of Alexandria

    Guys, we keep talking about the Republicans as “them.” They will be until we take the party over, in the same way that the Progressives took things over. Simply crying about it won’t help.

    • http://www.stubbornthings.org NAHALKIDES

      Indeed, a Conservative takeover of the GOP is priority-1.

  • HettyT

    Excellent, concise article, Mr. Thornton.

  • bklyn farmer

    FrontPage readers: Vote then post.

  • Kafir911

    “The death of Rome fascinated 18th century thinkers. Rome’s greatness and its eventual fall were caused by the character of its people. When the people became too luxury-loving, too obsessed with refinements and social distinctions, and too effeminate to take up arms on behalf of the state, their politics became corrupted, selfishness predominated and the dissolution of the state had to follow, Rome fell not because of the invasions of the barbarians from without, but because of the decay from within.” -”The Idea of America”, pg.325, Gordon S. Wood.

  • MrUniteUs1

    Congratulations Republicans.