May
13
Change This
May 13, 2008 |
The first ten articles on the Real Clear Politics homepage are about the presidential election, and several of the others are tangentially related. This is about par for the course. The election dominates all media coverage, both in the old-time media and in the blogosphere. Simply put, you cannot escape this monster, and there are still a little less than SIX months until the general election.
So you might say we might be getting a little burned out on this election thing, and indeed in casual conversations with many of my friends the notion that we’re tired of this election comes up, before we of course spend several minutes talking about it.
I’m beginning to think that Americans are as tired of this election as they are of reality television shows. Both are blights upon our culture, and yet in reality we can’t seem to get enough of either.
My personal fatigue and frustration goes beyond the election. The presidency-centric system that has developed since the reign of King Delano I is the bane of my existence. It is tied hand-in-hand to the growth of the federal government. The president today stands like a Rousseauean grand legislator, supposedly embodying the will of the people, intent on catering to their every whim. This was Woodrow Wilson’s vision, and it has come to pass.
Sadly, we want this. When I started writing my dissertation seemingly a lifetime ago, my main thesis was how Jefferson’s political philosophy was so contrary to that of the rest of the Framers. It was, but now I have come to realize that we are truly a Jeffersonian country because we want to be. And though Thomas Jefferson would have been theoretically appalled at the rise of the power of the federal government and the presidency, these developments are a result of our turn towards Jeffersonianism (but I’m not going to go further down that wormhole in this post). As Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, Americans have embraced that particular political philosophy (liberal fascism) because they want to. We desire to have the federal government cater to our every whims. We want the government to bail out people who foolishly took on mortgages that they couldn’t really afford. Oh, sure we feign some outrage at government largesse, but the public at large is not willing to make the necessary changes to truly lessen our reliance on government.
Which leads me to Barack Obama. Obama’s unceasing yammering about “hope” and “change” has duped some otherwise intelligent people, but in reality no candidate represents the status quo as much as Barack Obama. Obama represents the same big government mentality that has permeated our national culture for a century. He is the very symbol of the Washington idea that there is no problem that the feds cannot solve.
Rationalists (as Michael Spicer would use the term) believe that the administrative state can be tuned just so in order to build a quasi-utopian society. Is there no doubt that Barack Obama is a rationalist in this sense? In what significant way does Obama depart from the sensibilities of the Progressives, or of Woodrow Wilson, or of FDR? In other words, how does Obama deviate from the Washington orthodoxy of hyper-rationalism? He doesn’t. Obama thus represents a continuation of the same old idea that Washignton politicians and bureaucrats can ultimately solve all problems, answer every crisis, and build a utopian society.
Change is not spouting 100-year old ideas with a really enthusiastic cadence. Obama may be a great preacher, but he is preaching from the same social Gospel of every reformer dating back to demagogues like William Jennings Bryan.
No, real change would be a presidential candidate who dared to say that he cannot solve every problem, or who proposed a fairly humble platform. But change must also come from outside the system. How can we possibly anticipate the rise of such a politician when we continue to hang on every utterance of every candidate? Our glorification of the presidency is a continued hinderance to a return to the ideals of the Framers. Even conservatives mistakenly place too much faith in the outcomes of elections. While we can’t ignore the election or pretend that there is no significant difference between the two major candidates (assuming it is Obama and McCain), the ultimate success of our mission will only be realized when we don’t have to spend every waking minute worrying about who will win in November. To make these elections less important we first need to minimize our reliance on and expectations of the federal government. That is the real change that we so desperately need.
And I fear it is the change that will never happen.
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