{"id":7978,"date":"2014-11-05T08:00:31","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7978"},"modified":"2014-11-05T08:00:31","modified_gmt":"2014-11-05T16:00:31","slug":"election-day-whats-at-stake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/election-day-whats-at-stake\/","title":{"rendered":"Election Day: What\u2019s at Stake"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 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\u2019s\u2013\u2013an 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019s\u00a0government 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\u2019\u00a0sovereignty 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.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending\u00a0has 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\u2019s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.<\/p>\n

The increase in entitlement spending, however, has also required much higher budget deficits and an unprecedented peacetime\u00a0increase in the national debt, which now stands at $17 trillion dollars, up from $10 trillion in 2008. From 2009-2012, Obama\u2019s budgets averaged deficits of $1.25 trillion. This year\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In foreign policy as well, Obama and the Democrats have shaped their actions according to the quasi-pacifist, \u201cpostmodern\u201d ideology that distrusts using American power to protect Americans\u2019 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s arsenals. He has compromised and betrayed America\u2019s 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\u2019s in the 20\u2019s and 30\u2019s.<\/p>\n

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\u2013\u2013physical want, suffering, oppression, violence, brutality, inequality, and injustice\u2013\u2013are eliminated. Just give power to the \u201ctechnicians of the soul,\u201d as Stalin called them, the \u201ctechnocrats\u201d who possess this knowledge, and they will rearrange society in a way that achieves utopia\u2013\u2013once, of course, religion, custom, and traditional wisdom are swept away lest their irrational prejudices and superstitions like \u201csin\u201d and \u201cgood and evil\u201d block humanity\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The progressives\u2019 hostility to free-market capitalism and fondness for dirigiste economic polices, for example, illustrate these philosophical assumptions. To progressives, \u201cincome inequality\u201d and economic winners and losers are intolerable injustices reflecting not the variations of talent, virtue, hard work, and luck among individuals, but capitalism\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cYou didn\u2019t build that\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cWhen you spread the wealth around, it\u2019s good for everybody\u201d rhetoric, recently endorsed by Hillary Clinton\u2019s similar claim, \u201cDon\u2019t let anybody tell you that it\u2019s corporations and businesses that create jobs.\u201d\u00a0Thus 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 \u201csocial justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s freedom, and sometimes has demanded their lives.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2009 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The 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\u2019s\u2013\u2013an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and […]<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[842,22,247,11,86],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-24G","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":752,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-gay-marriage-evolution-deception\/","url_meta":{"origin":7978,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Gay Marriage ‘Evolution’ Deception","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine In yet another act of election-year cynicism, Barack Obama has announced, \u201cI think same-sex couples should be able to get married.\u201d This statement follows similar pronouncements by Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. To hear Obama tell it, this change reflects his \u201cevolution\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":862,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-a-creature-of-the-corrupt-university\/","url_meta":{"origin":7978,"position":1},"title":"Obama a Creature of the Corrupt University","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The November presidential election was the favorite topic at the Freedom Center\u2019s West Coast Retreat last weekend. Amidst the prognostications and arguments about which Republican would or should get the nomination, or how pessimistic or optimistic conservatives should be about defeating the President, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7889,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":7978,"position":2},"title":"The Incredible Lightness of Being Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama\u2019s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clich\u00e9s of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away. First was the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/85-433x350.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":418,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-clear-alternatives-in-the-presidential-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":7978,"position":3},"title":"The Clear Alternatives in the Presidential Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night\u2019s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses limited\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8347,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/l-ron-obama-and-the-church-of-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7978,"position":4},"title":"L. Ron Obama and the Church of Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S.Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The HBO documentary about Scientology, \u201cGoing Clear,\u201d is a must-see. Not so much because it exposes Scientology as a moneymaking, totalitarian cult, something most people already have known for 50 years. 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