by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.<\/p>\n Big Government<\/strong><\/p>\n Barack Obama is not very interested in tax reform, deficit reduction, or curbing annual spending. He believes in big government, and the bigger the better. His tenure is not so much a repudiation of Reaganism as it is of Clintonism, and the whole notion of keeping the annual growth of federal spending at or below 2 percent, balancing the budget, and declaring the era of big government over. Going off the cliff would give Obama the extra revenues from across-the-board tax hikes on the 53 percent that can fund further expansions for the 47 percent in federalized healthcare, food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance and in block grants to bankrupt cities, states, and pension funds. Gorging the beast always demands more revenue; and more revenue will always come from those who must \u201cpay their fair share.\u201d That is also a good thing in itself given the innately unfair compensation of the marketplace, which must be rectified by an intelligent, always-growing government, run by humane technocrats rather than grasping Wall Street speculators. In other words, why should we expect serious discussions on the deficit? When so many have so much less than so few, we have hardly begun the necessary \u201credistributive change.\u201d That is facilitated, not retarded, by large deficits and the need for much higher taxes on the fat cats who did not build their own wealth.<\/p>\n Anti-Israel<\/strong><\/p>\n One could make the argument that Barack Obama was the first president since Jimmy Carter to put daylight between Israel and the United States \u2014 both rhetorically and materially on issues such as settlements, the Netanyahu government, and disputes with the Palestinians. Yet Obama still received over 60 percent of the Jewish-American vote. That anomaly might suggest a number of things. For all practical purposes, the supposed Israeli lobby is now analogous to the fading Greek lobby \u2014 with similarly diminishing clout in foreign policy.<\/p>\n If Obama can still count on a strong majority of the self-identified Jewish vote, then he has established that US policy toward Israel is largely freed from domestic political concerns. Diehard support for Israel now no longer rests with the American Jewish community, though it may come from evangelical Christians and from Americans in general who prefer to support consensual governments in their wars against authoritarians. Obama correctly saw that, more than six decades after the creation of Israel, and a century after the great Jewish immigrations from Eastern Europe, many of today\u2019s American Jews are assimilated and intermarried, not all that familiar with Israeli issues, or simply no more aware of being Jewish than I am of being Swedish. That may be a good thing for the melting pot of America, but it is most certainly a different thing as far as US support for Israel is concerned \u2014 as we return to a pre-1967 relationship with a Jewish state that is increasingly on its own.<\/p>\n Weak Resistance<\/strong><\/p>\n The traditional conservative antidote to Obamaism has fallen short. That is, the arguments of principled conservatives about the perils of big government, redistributionist economics, and diminutions in personal freedom seem for a majority of Americans to be outweighed by the attraction of government subsidies and entitlements. If there is going to be a check on Barack Obama\u2019s redistributionist agenda, it will probably have to come from upper-middle-class independent voters and blue-state residents. Such Obama supporters may soon notice that the new federal and state tax rates, the envisioned end to traditional deductions such as those for blue-state high taxes and for mortgage interest, and means testing for most government services are aimed precisely at themselves. When the Palo Alto resident grasps that his total income- and payroll-tax burden will be well over 50 percent, his tax deduction for the mortgage interest on his million-dollar-plus, 1,000-square-foot home will be eliminated, and his $250,000 salary still gets him counted as \u201crich\u201d even after huge taxes and mortgage costs, we may see change \u2014 perhaps not in terms of the number of large swings in actual votes, but in the nature of campaign donations, political commentary, and campaign organization. Blue-state elites do not yet believe the voracious Obama tax monster is coming for them, but it is \u2014 as they will see.<\/p>\n The Enemy<\/strong><\/p>\n Barack Obama has successfully conducted a number of wars of hyphenated-Americans against the regressive establishment. When the Obama campaign asked supporters to check off which \u201cconstituency groups\u201d they identified with but did not include \u201cwhites\u201d or \u201cmen\u201d among the options, or when the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who gave the 2009 inaugural benediction, can declare without pushback that white people are going to Hell, or when one totals up the Obama administration\u2019s vocabulary of racial polarization (e.g., \u201cnation of cowards,\u201d \u201cmy people,\u201d \u201cpunish our enemies,\u201d \u201cput y\u2019all back in chains\u201d) and collates the invective with that of the Black Caucus and the likes of MSNBC, then we are headed for a backlash analogous to that of the 1970s among the white working class. In the new racialist landscape, is it any surprise that Jamie Foxx can joke about killing white people, or that Chris Rock can call the Fourth of July \u201cwhite people\u2019s independence day,\u201d or that Samuel L. Jackson can brag of voting along strictly racial lines, or that Morgan Freeman can equate opposition to Obama with racism, even as he reminds us that Obama is only half black?<\/p>\n Many of us had hoped that the phenomenal rate of intermarriage and assimilation had made the old racial rubrics anachronistic, if not irrelevant, but Obama has managed in brilliant fashion to resurrect them in terms of minority groups\u2019 having grievances against the assumed white majority that does all sorts of awful things, from arresting children on their way to purchase ice cream to stereotyping people solely on the basis of race.<\/p>\n It was almost surreal to watch the pre-November 6 media and political commentariat daily allege racism and attempts to prevent minorities from voting, only to witness their post-November 6 jubilation that Obama\u2019s reelection had given America a reprieve and proven the power of the Other to express itself at the ballot box. When asking a would-be voter to show his a driver\u2019s license is declared tantamount to voter intimidation, while 59 Philadelphia precincts collectively reporting a margin of 19,605 to 0 against Romney is merely proof of the president\u2019s popularity in minority communities, then we have a growing divide that will not be assuaged by cheap \u201cno more red state\/blue state\u201d rhetoric from those who help to foster it.<\/p>\n A Demagogue Inspires Envy<\/strong><\/p>\n In the new climate of \u201cfat cats,\u201d \u201ccorporate jet owners,\u201d \u201cpay your fair share,\u201d \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that,\u201d and \u201c1 percent,\u201d the more Americans have, the more they are envious of those who have more. One might have thought that the technological revolution, in combination with the welfare state, had redefined poverty altogether in ways that the fossilized entitlement bureaucracy could hardly grasp. Certainly, a Kia, an iPhone, and a big-screen television do not disqualify one from the menu of American entitlements. That today\u2019s earner or recipient of $35,000 in wages or entitlements has better appurtenances \u2014 in terms of computer power, phone, and car \u2014 than the $250,000 earner of 30 years ago means little. The point is not that the modern iPhone gives the poor man access to more knowledge than the entire RAND Corporation had 50 years ago, but that the contemporary RAND Corporation has more access than what an iPhone can provide, leaving its owner in relative terms still poor. That today\u2019s Kia is better in many ways than yesterday\u2019s Mercedes matters little \u2014 it is still not today\u2019s Lexus. One of the great lessons in the age of Obama is that wealth and poverty will always remain relative. Happiness is now defined not as having the basics I need, but as ensuring that someone else does not have more. Obama has successfully appealed to the oldest and basest of human emotions \u2014 envy and jealousy, masked with the notion of enforced fairness \u2014 and for now they trump even the human desire to be free.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[49,47,46,96],"tags":[12,1026,1027,1020],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2u","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":307,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/let-obama-be-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":0},"title":"Let Obama Be Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services After his party's devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/two-three-many-obamas\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":1},"title":"Two, Three, Many Obamas","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas \u2014 to such a degree that we don\u2019t know which, if any, is really president. I think the president believes that private-equity firms harm the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":536,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/100-days-is-a-long-time\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":2},"title":"100 Days Is a Long Time","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The presidential election is less than a hundred days away. President Obama and Mitt Romney are roughly even in the various polls, with Obama holding slight leads in the key swing states. A lot can happen in a hundred days. Napoleon went from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5966,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-president-won-sort-of\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":3},"title":"The President Won–Sort Of","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The administration spent the last six months of the campaign in cover-up mode. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online On September 11, 2012, Barack Obama was 1 point ahead of Mitt Romney in the ABC and\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0polls. He was scheduled to meet Romney in three weeks for the first\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2488,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-president-in-recovery\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":4},"title":"Is the President in Recovery?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services President Obama does not care much about deficits \u2014 other than worrying that big debt might matter in his re-election campaign. In his first three budgets, Obama borrowed nearly $5 trillion. Currently, the government is borrowing about 45 percent of everything that it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Debt and Deficits"","block_context":{"text":"Debt and Deficits","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/politics\/debt-and-deficits\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":173,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-kingdom-of-fairness\/","url_meta":{"origin":154,"position":5},"title":"The Kingdom of Fairness","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services We are still borrowing more than $1 trillion a year. Barack Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt in just his first term alone. Such massive borrowing is unsustainable. 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