Read What the (Bleep) Just Happened? Online
Authors: Monica Crowley
Given what the @$%&! has just happened, three particularly prescient past warnings stand out. The first, from Benjamin Franklin: “Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you.”
The second, from a generation after America’s founding. On June 1, 1837, Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster said, “There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.”
And the third warning came a little over a hundred years later. On June 25, 1940, former president Herbert Hoover took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and warned of the cataclysmic convulsions of statism that had rent apart Europe:
In every single case before the rise of dictatorships there had been a period dominated by economic planners. Each of these nations had an era under starry-eyed men who believed that they could plan and force the economic life of the people. They believed that was the way to correct abuse or to meet emergencies in systems of free enterprise. They exalted the state as the solvent of all economic problems.
These men thought they were liberals. But they also thought they could have economic dictatorship by bureaucracy and at the same time preserve free speech, orderly justice and free government. They were the spiritual fathers of the New Deal.
These men were not Communists or Fascists but they mixed these ideas into free systems. It is true that Communists and Fascists were round about. They formed popular fronts and gave the applause.
These so-called liberals shifted the relation of government to free enterprise from that of umpire to controller. Directly or indirectly they politically controlled credit, prices, production of industry, farmer and labor. They devalued, pump-primed and inflated. They controlled private enterprise by government competition, by regulation and by taxes. They met every failure with demands for more and more power of control. And they employed that handmaiden of power, named “Gimme a Billion, Quick!”
These leaders ignored the fact that the driving power of free economic life is the initiative and enterprise of men....
Initiative slackened, production in industry slowed down. Then came chronic unemployment and frantic government spending in an effort to support the unemployed. Government debts mounted. And finally government credit was undermined. Out of the miseries of the people there grew pressure groups—business, labor, farmers—demanding relief or special privilege. Class hate poisoned co-operation.
Does this sound unfamiliar to you? It was all these confusions that rang down the curtain upon liberty.
Sadly, President Hoover, it’s all too familiar.
Our own “carelessness and negligence” led to Obama’s rise, making us the “dupes” of this particular “designing man.” If we are to reverse the damage he has done and save the nation from his redistributionist abuse, we are going to need far more than a simple change in leadership in 2012 and beyond, as necessary as that is. We are going to need a “fundamental transformation” of our own: a transformation of our thinking, our expectations, and our understanding of what America is and what it should—must—be. In this fight for freedom, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.
But along with moral and practical outrage, we need to inspire hope. The faux “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for” hope Obama peddled in 2008 dissipated fast because he sold hope in
himself
, rather than in America
itself
.
Our brand of hope has always been based not on men but on an enduring truth: that government exists to protect and defend us from threats foreign and domestic and to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to compete—and that
we
, not the state, are responsible for the consequences.
It’s a hope found in our symbolic power as a beacon of liberty and in our real power as a superpower able and willing to defend ourselves, our interests, and the forces of freedom around the world.
It’s a hope echoed in the Bulgarian cabdriver’s plea to me: don’t let what has made and kept you exceptional slip away.
About a week before the presidential election in 1980, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter held their final debate. In his closing statement, Reagan looked directly at the American people and asked a few deceptively simple questions:
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?”
Reagan was the consummate Happy Warrior. He spoke softly, but he carried a big stick. He tapped into the sentiment held by most Americans who, after years of being trapped under big-government deadweight, yearned to breathe free again. And here we are, thirty years later, faced with the same questions. Only Barack Obama and the kooks aren’t your father’s Democrats. They are a wrecking crew who’ve learned not to repeat the timidity and compromise of your father’s Democrats.
That’s why the challenge for us is much more difficult than it was in 1980. The problems are bigger, the economic disaster more catastrophic, the debt so much bigger, government so much more monstrous, and American influence more weakened. We need to seize the moral and practical outrage we felt in 1980 and cube it because this time, the very essence of America is at stake.
That’s why we need to once again become a nation of Happy Warriors, armed with a positive battle cry of renewal, a set of policies, and a relentless optimism that will sustain us even through the harshest kook pushback and the dislocation of unraveling decades of their corrosive policies and entrenched redistributionist mentality.
Is America lost? Not yet, but the hour is late, and with each passing moment we get closer to the tipping point. If we are to find America again, we need to rediscover our inner Happy Warriors and get on with it.
Yes we can!
—Barack Obama to the American people, 2008
Yes we can, but …
—Barack Obama to Jon Stewart, 2010
A funny thing happened to Barack Obama and the leftists on their way to “fundamentally transforming” the nation: many Americans stood athwart history and yelled, “Stop!”
The Americans who make up the Tea Party take their job as sentinels for the nation seriously. If their leaders were going to rape the people, pillage the Treasury, and bankrupt the nation, they would respond with peaceful resistance. And so they did: Americans of all stripes began to organize regular Tea Party protests around the country. Town hall meetings held by members of Congress, usually sleepy affairs, became raucous events during which the people demanded answers about the abuses of power to which they were being subjected. Many of those Democrats, who had gleefully embraced the bust-a-gut spending and the redistributionist nightmare of ObamaCare, recoiled in genuine shock at the response of the people. Some of them refused to face the very people who pay their salaries. Some opted for quick press releases, while others attempted “virtual town halls.” But all were cowering in fear, hiding under their desks, wearing soiled Pampers with pacifiers in their mouths.
Republicans, however, were put on notice too. The Tea Party did not originally grow out of opposition to the agenda of Obama and the Democrats. It first grew out of a failure of the establishment
Republicans
to stand for constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets. If the GOP had always stood strong for those principles, there would have been no need for a Tea Party. The Tea Party originated to put a spine back into the Republican Party, to get it to return to constitutional truths. Every time establishment Republicans get defeated, as did Gerald Ford in 1976, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and John McCain in 2008, conservatism always finds a way to come roaring back and give the tired old GOP a course correction.
The Tea Party has establishment Republicans worried, of course, because they fear the end of the big spending gravy train, traditional “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” style of negotiation, and the upset of their comfortable status quo. It has already succeeded in replacing establishment Republicans such as Kentucky’s Trey Grayson and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter with principled conservatives Rand Paul and Pat Toomey.
But above all, the Tea Party strikes real, deep, profound fear in the hearts of the kooks. Without wealth redistribution and economic control, they are nothing.
The irony is luscious: Obama and the kooks came to Washington to “fundamentally transform” things, and while they did, they also gave rise to an even more powerful force that changed things in the polar opposite way. The Tea Party forced not only a pullback of the Left’s objectives but a realignment of the way taxpayer money was treated. Gone were the days of the Ted Kennedy three-martini deal-making lunch and the cavalierly spent trillions that went along with them. Gone too was the famous Ted Kennedy/Chris Dodd Waitress Sandwich that always accompanied said three-martini deal-making lunch. Instead, at least some greater awareness of fiscal responsibility and spending restraint took their place.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. As Obama’s kook march pressed on, more and more Americans began forming a line of resistance. We put the “but” into “yes we can, but …”
We are witnessing the great final battle between the statist, wealth-distributing, central-economic-planning ideology of Barack Obama versus the dynamic, free market, individual liberty, limited government philosophy of traditional America. It’s a battle between the kooks and the rest of us. It’s a battle between Robin Hood and Captain America. Which side will win?
The path back to America must, of course, begin with replacing Obama as president. The country’s foundational principles cannot withstand his relentless assault for much longer. If he and his team are allowed another term, they will, in the words of Obama himself, “finish the job.” By that, he means finishing off the country. Whatever he will not be able to get through the standard legislative process, he will effect through executive fiat. And without the worry of reelection, there will be no stopping him.
So Job One must be to “de-kookify” our leadership. After “de-kookification,” we must move to salvage the nation from decline and decay.
Where do we begin? The world is a complicated place, rife with complex problems to which there are no easy solutions. Usually, there are also big trade-offs in any course of action, in which certain principles and goals have to be sacrificed in service to others. What follows is not meant to be a comprehensive, detailed, or exhaustive set of policy prescriptions. Instead, it’s a general look at how to begin to restore America. As John Milton wrote in
Paradise Lost
, “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” We mustn’t let the difficulty of the task discourage or deter us. The kooks have been 100 percent committed to their project, and we must be 100 percent committed to our restorative one. We must gird Captain America with every possible tool to use in his battle against the kooks’ demented Robin Hood.
America at Home
. As we survey the domestic damage of the past few years, we’ve got to recognize that the first step is to prevent more harm from being done. That means taking the keys of the kingdom away from the skinny socialist and his toxic band of radicals.
Next, we must counter class warfare with a prosperity vision for America. We must adopt commonsense economic solutions that will put the U.S. economy back on its traditional rocket path. This is the strength of America. It is the source of our greatness. My Bulgarian cabdriver gets it. The American people get it. Billy Idol gets it. Obama and the kooks get it; they just wage war on it.
No great nation can remain so if its people are burdened with shouldering the irresponsibilities of the state. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his First Inaugural Address in 1801, “[A] wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
In order to restore the nation, we must remove the sources of economic destruction and uncertainty and replace them with policies that will inspire certainty, confidence, and optimism. This will require a multilayered attack on the Obama agenda and institutional inertia while simultaneously advancing pro-growth, deregulatory, and limited government policies. In other words, doing the exact opposite of what Obama has done and using a blueprint similar to what President Reagan used to spur the tremendous economic recovery of the mid-1980s. Reagan’s emphasis was on
economic liberty
, and that’s the way forward today, just as it was thirty years ago.
Out of the gate, we should demand from our leaders a fundamental attitude adjustment on spending. By adding to the deficit, the feds are stopping businesses from borrowing to create jobs and blocking consumers from getting the capital they need. Treasury debt is up by about 40 percent over the past few years while commercial and consumer debt is down by roughly 20 percent. There’s very little movement in the broader economy largely because the government is monopolizing the loan window. The entire economy is tied in to the spending levels of Washington.