Here are some more thoughts from people much smarter than me on the meaning and significance of Obama's Second Inaugural. The first from Scott Johnson at Power Line:
I think it would be a serious mistake to ignore or fail to attend closely to President Obama’s second inaugural address. It speaks to his ambition, his assault on the founding principles, and his attempt to realign the electorate on a misreading or misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the meaning of the founding principles. Attention must be paid. See, e.g., Yuval Levin’s “Obama’s second inaugural.”
As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern American liberalism lie in Woodrow Wilson’s assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.
Wilson’s expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama’s disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson’s views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” To achieve “redistributive change,” the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress.
Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the “second Bill of Rights” that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.”
Now comes Obama to give us progressivism and welfare state liberalism falsely staked on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Elsewhere Obama has frankly rejected the concept of “absolute truth” as inconsistent with democracy. In his second inaugural address, however, Obama places the Declaration’s “self-evident truths” up front and seems to place his stamp of approval on them, so long as one is not paying too much attention.
In Obama’s telling, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” have dropped out. Before you know it, devotion to the founding principles serves up the welfare state, the campaign against global warming (evolved into “climate change”), gay marriage, open borders and something to ameliorate long lines to vote. We shall overcome.
While Woodrow Wilson gave us “the living Constitution” — the Constitution unmoored from its ascertainable meaning and constraints — Barack Obama gives us a living Declaration of Independence. Those self-evident truths are an evolving thing.
Obama has cleverly left many believing in his strict adherence to the Declaration when he has actually undermined the very grounding of those principles. For Obama, the Founders principles are fulfilled through unabated action by the government. As Scott has pointed out, the Laws of Nature and Nature's God do not show up Obama's Declaration. Instead, the grounding of these rights (which Obama never calls natural) are implied to be created from the will of the citizens themselves.
Another view from Ken Masugi at the Liberty Law Blog:
Lincoln’s own ambition led him to restore the Constitution and the glory of George Washington—perpetuating the nation became his expression of “towering genius,” his source of fame.
Obama’s ambition is of a different sort, somewhat easier to execute than Lincoln’s. The object of his second term, and likely of his political career, is to do what eluded Franklin Roosevelt—to destroy the Republican Party and, more important, to delegitimize the conservative and libertarian beliefs and policies that it advanced. Obama’s address attacks the wellsprings of liberty and limited government in the political philosophy of the American founding.
Obama puts a personal twist on a patriotic tenet: “We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago….” He then quotes the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Obama projects himself, with his mixture of races and faiths and his atypical name, as the model of the American creed. (By contrast, Lincoln had noted the Germans and French in his audience who would be included in his reading of the Declaration.) To attack his view of the Declaration is to attack him personally—not a winning strategy. Obama is interested in perpetuation—how do we “continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” Throughout the address he relates the word with the deeds, as in the beginning of the Gospel of John, though he does not go as far as Roosevelt in his First Inaugural, comparing himself with Jesus driving out the moneychangers.
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Proceeding to attack, Obama draws from the classics of Democratic Party rhetoric, including Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 campaign address “What is Progress?” (an attack on the founding) and Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign and inaugural speeches. (I do not deny he has other leftist sources for his learning, but these suffice.) He is also well aware that the most effective partisan speeches are those that appear nonpartisan, as we see in Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural—of course we agree on the first principles of our government! Of course we may continue to disagree on some things. Though he declines to equate conservative Republicans with fascists (as FDR did in his 1944 State of the Union Address), he will use the bulk of his speech to imply they are to be as disdained as the traitorous “Tories” FDR ridiculed in 1932. Otherwise, we cannot continually make “ourselves anew.”
Three-fourths of the speech of about 2100 words is given to a series of false choices—in paragraphs beginning with “Together, we” or “We, the people.” Obama even revived his most notorious campaign bluntness of “you didn’t build that:” “No single person can … build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.”
The purpose of these assertions is not to make arguments but to read dissidents out of the country, out of the company of respectable people—much as the Tories fled, the Federalists crumbled, the slaveholding regime was destroyed, and the moneychangers driven from the temple. Each time the victors revived the Declaration of Independence, or a compelling interpretation of it, to justify a new political arrangement. Obama sternly declares the enemies of the people to be out of touch if not downright unpatriotic—an elite party, discriminating in favor of a tiny portion of wealthy, favoring superstition over science, obsessed with guns, opposing women’s rights and health, and of course racist, bigoted, and behind the times. The rights the founders gave us imposed a duty to fight these latter-day traitors.
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