by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of the United States. Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy, not an open mind, once guided government.<\/p>\n
Take the economy. The 1980s implosion of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union proved that state control of the means of production guaranteed poverty and worse. The current insolvent and fragmenting European Union, and the stagnant economics of the exploding Middle East, remind us that state socialism does not work.<\/p>\n
Why, then, would Obama, in horse-and-buggy fashion, go back to such fossilized concepts as absorbing the nation’s healthcare system, increasing the federal government’s role in the economy by taking over automobile corporations, borrowing $5 trillion to spend on new entitlements, or proposing an array of much higher taxes \u2014 all in a vain effort to ensure an equality of result?<\/p>\n
Almost every key indicator of the current economy \u2014 unemployment, deficits, housing, energy \u2014 argues that Obama’s reactionary all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.<\/p>\n
In a bygone era without full workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and overtime pay, big unions ran the United States. Today less than 7 percent of Americans belong to them.<\/p>\n
Yet President Obama wants to block the Boeing aircraft company from opening an assembly plant in South Carolina, on the grounds that it is a right-to-work state and new assembly workers might be free to reject union representation. The administration is now allowing union-backed Democrats in Congress to block free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea in order to limit competition with domestic unionized industries.<\/p>\n
Apparently the decades-old idea that globalized free trade encourages competition, enhances productivity, lowers prices for strapped consumers and helps developing nations never existed.<\/p>\n
Obama is still bragging about massive federal subsidies to the wind and solar power industries, while making it nearly impossible to obtain new leases for fossil fuel exploration. Yet for all the billions spent, the percentage of new energy produced by subsidized high-cost “green” projects has not changed much.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, revolutionary breakthroughs in the exploration for and recovery of natural gas, oil, tar sands, shale oil and coal deposits in just a year or two have vastly expanded the nation’s fossil fuel reserves and the ability to produce clean energy from them.<\/p>\n
It turns out that the US may be the world’s new Saudi Arabia when it comes to known reserves of all forms of gas, oil and coal. As our president still harps on solar panels and windmills, private enterprise on its own is exploring new ways of powering industries, homes and cars with cheap and plentiful natural gas \u2014 hoping to free us from dependence on OPEC.<\/p>\n
On illegal immigration, the president sounds like he’s a calcified relic from the 1960s, as he evokes the southern border in terms of civil rights and racial prejudice. Those blinders explain why he recently suggested that Latinos “punish” their supposed conservative “enemies,” and quite falsely claimed that the border fence was completed, despite the wish of his Republican opponents supposedly to add moats and alligators. All that rhetoric sounds like it came from a beads and bell-bottoms ’60s campus activist, not the 21st century White House.<\/p>\n
In the coming decades, the United States will need new legal immigrants \u2014 those of all races and from all places of origin who are skilled and highly educated, or who have capital. The new critical benchmark to keep America competitive will be an immigrant’s merit \u2014 not just his race, family ties, proximity to the border, or his use as a pawn in partisan politics.<\/p>\n
The United States is now a multiracial society, one never more intermarried and assimilated. Yet this administration still acts as if particular racial groups are forever ossified in amber, and so deserve particular racial set-aside spoils. The attorney general weirdly talks of “my people.” The president himself offered a campaign video in 2010 targeted in part to those defined by their race, as part of a larger strategy to appeal to racial block voting. Promises of more federal entitlement money are still couched in thinly veiled racial terms \u2014 as if there is no awareness that five decades of such Great Society programs have done much to ensure dependency and destroy the traditional inner-city family.<\/p>\n
“Hope and change” turned out not to be a liberal call to consider new ways of solving problems. It was not even a conservative slogan to keep all that has worked well in the past.<\/p>\n
Instead, Barack Obama proved to be an old-fashioned reactionary. He hoped to change things back to the politically correct 1960s and 1970s way of doing things \u2014 whether it ever worked or not.<\/p>\n
\u00a92011 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of the United States. Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy, not an open mind, once guided government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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":[536,271],"tags":[12,84,1057,149,234,1028,268,336,88,223,1056,1052,67],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Ig","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":314,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ahistorical-krugman\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":0},"title":"The Ahistorical Krugman","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Paul Krugman\u00a0weaves a fantasy tale\u00a0of how high taxes, big unions, and government regulations created a booming 1950s economy \u2014 the implication being that in reactionary fashion we can now in a second term return to our heyday under Obama\u2019s envisioned union support, growth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-hypocritic-oath\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Hypocritic Oath","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis in collective morality, damning straw men \u201cthem\u201d who engage in such ethical lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides \u2014 and then, to national quiet, doing more or less the exact things he once swore\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Second Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"Second Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/second-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/two-three-many-obamas\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":2},"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":3398,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-doctrine\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":3},"title":"The Obama Doctrine","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The Obama Doctrine is simple: Proclaim a utopian policy, and then pray that most of the people who hear it are Neanderthals who will ignore it. Having said one thing, doing quite another is not only thereby okay, but also absolutely essential. Keep\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "First Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"First Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/first-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2736,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reelecting-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":4},"title":"Reelecting Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online We are beginning to see the contours of the upcoming 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama. Whether always officially sanctioned or not, Obama\u2019s campaign will focus on three general themes: a) the 2008 meltdown of the economy on Bush\u2019s watch; b) conservative heartlessness\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":55,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/europes-wishes-came-true\/","url_meta":{"origin":2744,"position":5},"title":"Europe’s Wishes Came True","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 31, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly \"war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2745,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2744\/revisions\/2745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}