The Alibi of Tyrants

America's Trajectory Toward Statism

By: Andrew Deaton

With every general election seemingly since the dawn of time we have been given the ultimatum that this one – whatever quadrennial is at hand – is the most important election in decades, or our lifetime, or ever. When an incumbent is running for a second term, he will quietly imply that the new vote is the one that really matters (though he made the same claim four years prior). To be sure, most candidates at all levels of government use this tactic mainly as a rhetorical device to drum up support through intimidation and couldn’t care less whether they have any lasting impact past their term or not.

                                

However, it is in a very real way true that every upcoming general election is the most important one yet. The others are all on record; this is the one that is undecided. The past is safely known; the future is uncertain. It is important to understand, though, that the upcoming 2012 general election does in fact have its own historical bearing that is different not only in degree but also in quality from all prior elections taken as a whole. There are three primary reasons for this uniqueness:

The choices are about as far from one another as we’ve ever seen and are almost totally mutually exclusive. This election presents two fundamentally distinct alternative candidates which represent one of the greatest disparities in potential consequences our nation has ever faced in an election. Yes, Romney’s political platform is infected with the insidious undertones of statism, but his moral platform has a tone which is incongruous with Obama’s and which I think will to a great degree iron out many of the faults of his political platform.

To reelect Obama/Biden is to pass the point of no return while Romney/Ryan represents a golden opportunity for America that McCain/Palin and the like never hoped to match. The incumbent, if reelected, will push our nation past the tipping point in a tradition that most certainly did not begin with him, but which is perfectly embodied by him. In short, if Obama/Biden is reelected, the next primary election in 2016 might very well not be so important simply because we will have signed our own last will and testament by reelecting him now. His being barred from a third term is irrelevant; his reelection this year will set a tone that the next president in 2016 will find impossible or nearly so to unravel, even assuming that a future president is sincerely committed to doing so. The upside is that Romney/Ryan represents a dormant but still alive view of American greatness which I believe will represent the first steps in a revival of a positive political course for America, which we have not seen on the ascent in over a century. We have an actual choice for the first time since Reagan and Mondale faced off in 1984.

We can’t procrastinate about the decision any longer. Treading water is not an option. We either vote to seal our nation’s fate, or we vote to revive the faint echoes of the Founding Fathers’ vision which represent everything great about this nation, about Western civilization and about mankind.

Our current president’s overarching theme, his avowed raison d'être, is to equalize all individuals. After all, it is right there at the opening of the Declaration of Independence: All men have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This enumeration is based on the views of John Locke, an English philosopher of the 17^th century who was a massive inspiration for the Founding Fathers and might be seen as one of the philosophic pioneers who made the United States possible. Locke and the Founders, however, meant these rights to guarantee opportunity – i.e., leave individuals alone to succeed or to fail on their own merits – rather than guaranteeing success, which would contradict the “opportunity” interpretation reducing men to the status of wards of the state. Nowadays, we can see that the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to feel some sort of entitlement to the products of others, said entitlement to be brokered and enforced by the state. Barack Obama is merely the tip of the iceberg that is sinking the ship. It is important that American voters understand that his doctrine is not a fluke. There is a wealth of history to demonstrate the definite and powerful trend of statism’s increase in America and that it is directly causal of America’s decreasing greatness in the world, with Obama being the final nail in the coffin.

The political theme of Obama’s presidency traces back to a hairline fracture in the integrity of the Constitution itself, a fracture so seemingly innocuous as to go unnoticed by the Founders. That fracture is the commerce clause of the Constitution (article 1, section 8, paragraph 3). It gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”. The paragraph prior gives us no lead to this and the paragraph which follows changes the subject; in short, no clear context is given as to what exact means Congress is allowed to employ to this end – and statist politicians since have made damn sure that none has ever been given. The specific power used time and again to increase governmental purview is the phrase regarding power over commerce “among the several States.”

For the most part, the cancerous clause remained in remission until 1890 when Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in a nutshell made the federal government the ultimate intercessor over the entire American economy. The first, but neither last nor most deft, champion of Representative Sherman’s cause was Teddy Roosevelt (served 1901-1909), who used as scapegoats the great tycoons of that period to corral votes through his infamous campaign of “trust busting”. His campaign rested on the complete lie that “robber barons”, the industrialists, were expropriating the wealth of citizens. The most famous of those persecuted tycoons, John D. Rockefeller, was once summed up by a contemporary as seemingly the only person on Earth unaware he had come to dominate the petroleum industry since he kept his prices so low and his products so accessible. Teddy Roosevelt’s successor and protégé, William Taft, continued his mentor’s crusade and busted even more trusts than the master of the bully pulpit.

T. Roosevelt passes on his policies to successor William Taft.

When Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (served 1933-1945), took the helm, he had a brazenness regarding economic regulation that T. Roosevelt would not have been able to imagine. While the Sherman Act had been seen by prior administrations as a basis for reactive measures against trusts, FDR changed the government’s power over the economy to be direct and proactive. “Central planning” was the theme of FDR’s administration, blaming unchecked competition as having been the cause of the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, stated in 2009 after having already assumed his office that he had found the Federal Reserve – his own institution, which holds a monopoly on monetary policy – to have been responsible for the Great Depression. So much for central planning.

FDR’s snake oil remedy was to consolidate the entire American economy under myriad three-letter acronyms which were to be ultimately headed by him. Essentially, no distinction can be made between FDR’s economic policy and Benito Mussolini’s fascist corporatism, wherein all economic sectors are organized into “corporations” (basically, political constituencies) to better serve as apparatuses of the state. Harry S Truman, upon succeeding FDR, continued his late superior’s campaign to nationalize the economy.

A decade later, Lyndon B. Johnson (s. 1963-1969) attempted to assimilate FDR’s “New Deal” into his own “Great Society”, as he called it. Already America was going broke from the unprecedented bloating of the American government, and LBJ’s “Great Society” was at least largely a failure even in the most optimistic (read: naïve or dishonest) circles. Meanwhile, LBJ and then Nixon (s. 1969-1974) let America suffer her first ever defeat abroad in Vietnam. It was a self-defeat caused solely by the fact that our successive commanders-in-chief wanted to avoid agitating the Soviets who sponsored our enemies in Vietnam and saw the waging of a “low-intensity” conflict as the way to go. This conflict was not legally a war since it was never declared by Congress and was ultimately just a deadly, farcical political tool for which American men and women gave their lives. However, for those servicemen, that “conflict” seemed a hell of a lot like war without the tickertape parade upon arriving home.

America was quickly losing her moral fortitude at home and abroad, and men looked more toward the government to fix the problem, not seeing the blatant fact that it was bloated government that led to this loss of nerve, the same quality that anticipated the fall of ancient Athens. When Jimmy Carter (served 1977-1981) took office, he appeared to be America’s attempt to punish herself for her newly adopted senseless guilt. He was the epitome of it. He felt the need to confess to Playboy that he had lusted after many women and then proceeded to chide the nation in his infamous malaise speech which meant nothing and went nowhere. He backed his words with action in that he decided during the Iranian hostage crisis to castigate Americans for the Islamic Revolutionaries' crimes by placing an embargo on importing Iranian oil which had actually been expropriated - "nationalized" - from the West. When he finally decided to “respond” to the Iranian hostage crisis by attempting a rescue operation, it was perfunctory, poorly planned, poorly executed and resulted in needless American deaths. In short, it was a repeat of Vietnam in microcosm.

George W. Bush (served 2001-2008) was essentially Carter’s protégé from across the ages. The attacks of September 11, 2001 – for me, yesterday – was the defining moment of his presidency, but in the worst and most senseless way imaginable. While it should have been the moment when he asked for and received a Congressional declaration of war – unlike the apologetic Vietnam nation-building debacle – on Afghanistan and followed his “Axis of Evil” speech with strikes on all other terror-sponsoring states, he instead characterized our enemy as “terrorism”. The enemy is, of course, not terrorism, which is a method of warfare, not an ideology and certainly not the set of adherents to an ideology. The enemy is Islamism, the followers of a doctrine that seek the conquest of Western civilization and its replacement with religious theocracy.

Former President G.W. Bush meets with current President Obama in the Oval Office in Nov. 2008.

However, channeling Johnson and Nixon from Vietnam, and most symbolically Carter’s entire presidency, Bush adopted the American crown of thorns, which we wove for ourselves, and evaded the fact that Islamism had initiated the use of force against us. Instead, he turned our airports into prisons for Americans and signed the PATRIOT Act which turned all of America into the prison yard. In the domestic realm, when the 2008 economic meltdown occurred, he saw it necessary to tap into the FDR-Truman doctrine and strap the American auto and banking industries with his own crown of thorns.

Now, what relevance does all of the above have to the election of 2012? The point is that Barack Obama has over a full century of momentum behind his doctrine. He is the culmination and executor of the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, and most of all FDR. He is going to finish the self-flagellation of America that Carter and Bush lacked the stomach and cunning to finish. In the domestic realm, he has bound hand-and-foot the automotive, insurance, banking, medical, and energy industries – which in turn binds the rest of the American economy to him. In the foreign realm, he has time and again genuflected America toward Mecca for the sake of the Islamists who daily hurl threats, bombs and bullets at America and have made it clear that we can sate them only by our being annihilated. What is his plan if not the good of the people that he so commonly invokes? The hint is given to us by Albert Camus: “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” Read Patrick’s “Letter from the Editor” below to know the details, the motivation and the final goal of Obama's plan and why Romney, while flawed, is still a better candidate.