George Will on the Philosophical Roots of Our Constitutional Republic

...vs. Barack Hussein Obama:

Four years ago, Barack Obama was America’s Rorschach test, upon whom voters could project their disparate yearnings.

True...

To govern, however, is to choose, and now his choices have clarified him. He is a conviction politician determined to complete the progressive project of emancipating government from the Founders’ constraining premises, a project Woodrow Wilson embarked on 100 Novembers ago.

As such, Obama has earned what he now receives, the tribute of a serious intellectual exegesis by a distinguished political philosopher.

In “I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism,” Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna College rightly says Obama is “playing a long, high-stakes game.” Concerning the stakes, Obama practices prudent reticence, not specifying America’s displeasing features that are fundamental.

Shortly before the 2008 election, he said only: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming” America.

Tonight, consider Obama’s acceptance speech in the context that Kesler gives it in the American political tradition.

Progress, as progressives understand it, means advancing away from, up from, something.

But from what?

(*PAUSE*)

From the Constitution’s constricting anachronisms.

Yep. That's how progressives - Leftists - view our Constitution.

Nope. The Constitution's Amendment process is too unwieldy... too cumbersome... instead the Left rely upon anti-constitutional Supreme Court decisions which reflect "pragmatism" at best, naked ideology at worst, and also anti-constitutional power grabs by one or both houses of Congress and/or by the Chief Executive.

In 1912, Wilson said, “The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” But as Kesler notes, Wilson never said the future of liberty consisted of such limitation.

(*PURSED LIPS*)

Instead, he said, “every means . . . by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government” should be used so that “individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties.”

Rights “adjusted and harmonized” by government necessarily are defined and apportioned by it.

Wilson, the first transformative progressive, called this the “New Freedom.” The old kind was the Founders’ kind — government existing to “secure” natural rights (see the Declaration of Independence) that pre-exist government. Wilson thought this had become an impediment to progress. The pedigree of Obama’s thought runs straight to Wilson.

(*NOD*)

And through the second transformative progressive, Franklin Roosevelt, who counseled against the Founders’ sober practicality and fear of government power: “We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal” and are making government “an instrument of unimagined power” for social improvement.

The only thing we have to fear is fear of a government of unimagined power: “Government is a relation of give and take.” The “rulers” — FDR’s word — take power from the people, who in turn are given “certain rights.” This, says Kesler, is “the First Law of Big Government: the more power we give the government, the more rights it will give us.”

(*SIGH*)

It also is the ultimate American radicalism, striking at the roots of the American regime, the doctrine of Natural Rights.

Remember this when next — perhaps tonight — Obama discourses on the radicalism of Paul Ryan.

(*NOD*)

As Kesler says, the logic of progressivism is: “Since our rights are dependent on government, why shouldn’t we be?”

(This is the real meaning of Obama’s most characteristic rhetorical trope, his incessant warning that Americans should be terrified of being “on your own.”)

Obama, the fourth transformative progressive, had a chief of staff who said “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

And what kind of shape is Chicago in nowadays with that same former Obama chief of staff now running that city as its mayor?

More than a century before that, a man who would become the first such progressive said that a crisis is a terrible thing not to create. Crises, said Wilson, are periods of “unusual opportunity” for gaining “a controlling and guiding influence.” So, he said, leaders should maintain a crisis atmosphere “at all times.”

This... is... history! This is real, my friends. It's not simply by chance or "accidental" omission that unless you're an American history buff you were taught little about the ideological roots of Woodrow Wilson's presidency.

Campaigning in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, the third consequential progressive, exclaimed through a bull horn: “I just want to tell you this — we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.”

My friends... there's a reason why the federal government borrows 43-cents of every dollar it spends. There's a reason some of our largest and most politically influential states - mainly "blue" states - have such entrenched fiscal dysfunction with the crisis so bad in several states that municipal governments themselves have declared bankruptcy!

LBJ learned this progressive vernacular from his patron, FDR, who envisioned “an unlimited civilization capable of infinite progress.”

Poet Archibald Mac­Leish, FDR’s choice for librarian of Congress, exemplified progressives’ auto-intoxication: America has “the abundant means” to create “whatever world we have the courage to desire” and the ability to “take this country down” and “build it again as we please,” to “take our cities apart and put them together,” to lead our “rivers where we please to lead them,” etc.

This last was obviously prior to the creation of the EPA...

(*WINK*)

In 2012, Americans want from government not such flights of fancy but sobriety; not ecstatic evocations of dreamlike tomorrows but a tolerably functioning today; not fantasies about a world without scarcities and therefore without choices among our desires and appetites but a mature understanding of the limits to government’s proper scope and actual competence.

Tonight’s speech is Obama’s last chance to take a first step toward accommodation with a country increasingly concerned about his unmasked determination to “transform” what the Founders considered “fundamentals.”

Whatever President Obama says tonight... we know what he's about... we know what he believes... and we've had almost four years to absorb the results.

God help this once great nation.

Those people who will vote for President Obama's re-election in November...

(*SIGH*)

...they're either ignorant or else they are anti-Constitutionists. This isn't meant as an "ad hom." I state this as a matter of historical, definitional truth.