The Magnitude of Tuesday's Results

President Barack Obama [spent] his first Saturday after winning reelection on the golf course."

 -- Daniel Halper

 

 

For anyone who "may need to hear a warning spoken in a British accent to truly comprehend the magnitude of Tuesday's results," Keith Koffler recommends this "eloquent lament" of Charles C. W. Cooke:

 

... 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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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....

.... 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.

 

 

 

Meanwhile,

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military has fired a missile into Syria, the first time Israel has been drawn into the fighting in the neighboring country. The military said it fired the missile as a warning shot on Sunday after a stray mortar from Syria hit a military post in the Golan Heights.

Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war [Six Day War] and subsequently annexed it....

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Mr. Cooke's lament is the same one many of us have gnashed our teeth over for a good many years. It all comes down to the fact -- confirmed by Tuesday's vote -- that there has been, in our lifetimes, a sea change in the American character. The Greatest Generation -- the generation that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and, some years later, the Evil Empire -- is the same Generation that -- in one of modern history's most astonishing ironies -- spawned the Flabbiest Generation, a generation of weaklings and whiners so emasculated by ignorance that many of its members don't know the first thing about Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or the Evil Empire. Obama, himself a profoundly miseducated and ignorant man, is a member of that generation. The challenge for those of us who revile the Flabbiest Generation and everything it stands for is to find a way to undo the ravages of the internal war against America that began in the 1960s and has never abated. From most of the commentary written by conservatives since Tuesday's defeat, it's pretty clear that no one has the foggiest idea how to begin tackling that challenge. That's because the task before us is not only unprecedented in American history, but quite possibly insuperable. That task is to find a way to change the American character from Flabby back to Great. Until we figure out how to do that -- if it's even possible -- we will continue to be strangers in our own home.