People and countries change, as they must. But, as with [George] Washington’s axe, to change too much is to invite the possibility not merely of alteration, but of replacement. Predicated, as it is, on an established set of principles — rather than merely on geographical or racial fact — America could presumably reach a point at which it could no longer usefully be called America. How close to that point are we?
And as a reminder, the man writing this was formerly a citizen of Great Britain.
More:
...A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.
That fact is in complete contrast to the teachings of the MSM and the Democrats (is there any true distinction between the two anymore?) who proclaim that in order to win elections, the party has to "move to the center." Too bad the Democrats didn't follow their own advice in this election. And they still won anyway. (I still think, however, that there is something to be said about how the people understood their vote for Obama: Was it due to an agreement with his progressive liberal principles or that they "liked" him more than the other guy?)
Here's more:
The president has an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World. Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up? Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.
This is a great argument and is one Calvin Coolidge made all the way back in 1926: That there is no progress beyond the principles on which this country was founded upon. Progress in a "new science of politics" and other ephemeral progressive theories in effect actually represent the turning back of the clock to an earlier age when the light of reason and revelation didn't shine as brightly. One of the ironies of the Forward! campaign slogan (I think the addition of the exclamation point in mid-campaign was the clincher) the president used in 2012 was the fact that in principle, his policies represented things in an earlier age that, though maybe manifested themselves in different forms, the Founders had previously rejected.
And finally:
Once upon a time, when civic society flourished in Britain, it was uncontroversial to observe that to demur at government involvement in the achievement of an end was not necessarily to consider that end undesirable. Under Leviathan, such distinctions draw blank stares. In 2010, on the BBC’s Question Time — a British current-affairs show on which the guests trip over one other to display the appropriate degree of fealty to whichever orthodoxy is in the news that week whilst the audience tries to be as clever as one can be without doing any reading — the question of impending government spending cuts was raised. One audience member stood up and, waving her hands around, asked who would mow her elderly mother’s lawn if the government no longer did it. The audience clapped. The host looked serious. Not a single person on the panel said, “You!” Neither of the putatively Conservative guests even raised an eyebrow. A particularly oleaginous MP proceeded to tell her that it was a “good question.”
There is a lot of wisdom in here. Liberals seems to think that when conservative critique the growth of the federal government, they are also simultaneously critiquing the thing being done by the government itself. This might be true sometimes, but in many cases, conservatives are actually making their critiques from an argument based on federalism; that the federal legislature only has eighteen enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and that those powers not directly expressed were left to the states and, ultimately, to the people.
But I don't want to leave it simply at that. Too many conservative arguments seem to imply that there is either the citizen or the state. But there is a wide range of civic and social institutions like churches, volunteer organizations, boy scout troops, etc. that used to do many of the things that government now does.
And it is important to remember that federalism is not itself a principle of moral worth. It is, to use a phrase of James Madison's, an "auxiliary precaution" put in place to help keep the constitutional balance in equilibrium. Simply relying on the argument I laid out above (it is the typical argument I hear from conservatives these days) does not actually get to the root of the matter.
Conservatives have some thinking to do from here on out.
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