Townhall...
Our Reactionary
President
By Victor Davis Hanson
6/16/2011
Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of
the United States. Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the
good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy,
not an open mind, once guided government.
Take the economy. The 1980s implosion of communism in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union proved that state control of the means of
production guaranteed poverty and worse. The current insolvent and
fragmenting European Union, and the stagnant economics of the exploding
Middle East, remind us that state socialism does not work.
Why, then, would Obama, in horse-and-buggy fashion, go back to such
fossilized concepts as absorbing the nation’s health care system,
increasing the federal government’s role in the economy by taking over
automobile corporations, borrowing $5 trillion to spend on new
entitlements, or proposing an array of much higher taxes -- all in a
vain effort to ensure an equality of result?
Almost every key indicator of the current economy -- unemployment,
deficits, housing, energy -- argues that Obama’s reactionary
all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.
In a bygone era without full workers’ compensation, unemployment
insurance and overtime pay, big unions ran the United States. Today
less than 7 percent of Americans belong to them.
Yet President Obama wants to block the Boeing aircraft company from
opening an assembly plant in South Carolina, on the grounds that it is
a right-to-work state and new assembly workers might be free to reject
union representation. The administration is now allowing union-backed
Democrats in Congress to block free-trade agreements with Colombia,
Panama and South Korea in order to limit competition with domestic
unionized industries.
Apparently the decades-old idea that globalized free trade encourages
competition, enhances productivity, lowers prices for strapped
consumers and helps developing nations never existed.
Obama is still bragging about massive federal subsidies to the wind and
solar power industries, while making it nearly impossible to obtain new
leases for fossil fuel exploration. Yet for all the billions spent, the
percentage of new energy produced by subsidized high-cost “green”
projects has not changed much.
Meanwhile, revolutionary breakthroughs in the exploration for and
recovery of natural gas, oil, tar sands, shale oil and coal deposits in
just a year or two have vastly expanded the nation’s fossil fuel
reserves and the ability to produce clean energy from them.
It turns out that the U.S. may be the world’s new Saudi Arabia when it
comes to known reserves of all forms of gas, oil and coal. As our
president still harps on solar panels and windmills, private enterprise
on its own is exploring new ways of powering industries, homes and cars
with cheap and plentiful natural gas -- hoping to free us from
dependence on OPEC.
On illegal immigration, the president sounds like he’s a calcified
relic from the 1960s, as he evokes the southern border in terms of
civil rights and racial prejudice. Those blinders explain why he
recently suggested that Latinos “punish” their supposed conservative
“enemies,” and quite falsely claimed that the border fence was
completed, despite the wish of his Republican opponents supposedly to
add moats and alligators. All that rhetoric sounds like it came from a
beads and bell-bottoms ‘60s campus activist, not the 21st century White
House.
In the coming decades, the United States will need new legal immigrants
-- those of all races and from all places of origin who are skilled and
highly educated, or who have capital. The new critical benchmark to
keep America competitive will be an immigrant’s merit -- not just his
race, family ties, proximity to the border, or his use as a pawn in
partisan politics.
The United States is now a multiracial society, one never more
intermarried and assimilated. Yet this administration still acts as if
particular racial groups are forever ossified in amber, and so deserve
particular racial set-aside spoils. The attorney general weirdly talks
of “my people.” The president himself offered a campaign video in 2010
targeted in part to those defined by their race, as part of a larger
strategy to appeal to racial block voting. Promises of more federal
entitlement money are still couched in thinly veiled racial terms -- as
if there is no awareness that five decades of such Great Society
programs have done much to ensure dependency and destroy the
traditional inner-city family.
“Hope and change” turned out not to be a liberal call to consider new
ways of solving problems. It was not even a conservative slogan to keep
all that has worked well in the past.
Instead, Barack Obama proved to be an old-fashioned reactionary. He
hoped to change things back to the politically correct 1960s and 1970s
way of doing things -- whether it ever worked or not.
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