From its unsightly inception, the Occupy movement effectively guaranteed its demise would follow poetic form, which is to say it would end, not with a bang but a whimper. Those who have tried to look beyond their manifestly jejune, self-serving, and tautological demands have found themselves in a vacuum, conspicuous for its absence of intellectual architecture.

Radio host Michael Medved, who routinely entertains oppositional voices, from the substantive to those with, to put it kindly, puerile arguments, interviewed one of the key organizers from an Occupy site in Hawaii. Medved provided an open forum to the man, a strategic gambit that the protester generously obliged by talking at length in circular logic, punctuated by a stunning misunderstanding of even the rudiments of economics.

When the media—which, along with New York politicians, have been intellectually supine throughout this debacle—was able to cull a fleeting sign of intelligent life from a protester, it predictably amounted to recycled bromides concerning “corporate greed,” reflecting a veneer thin appreciation of economic theory, much less history, beyond that of their twenty-something years.

If you have no understanding of how profoundly Western civilization has shaped our modern world—from the civic freedoms enshrined in Periclean Greece to the separation of powers and checks and balances in the Roman Republic—it’s nearly impossible to grasp how unlikely it is that the grand experiment called America came to be. From there, it’s only the non sequitur thinking of the Occupy sensibility that can deny that the United States is a paragon of civic virtues and economic success. Yet, in one remarkably obtuse gesture, punctuated by fewer intelligible words than a teething infant, they’ve managed to persuade even the skeptics among us that this newly minted generation is awash in a sea of self-generated ignorance.

The formulaic catchphrases emanating from Occupy’s alternate universe, which include ‘corporate greed and corruption,’ ‘corporations control America,’ and similar phrases, are unburdened by even cursory argumentation or evidence. Corporations, of course, exist for one reason only—to be profitable to their owners. Beyond shareholder profits, they employ people who spend and invest their money on a myriad products and services, and they invest in research and development to produce everything from the fabled microchip to life-saving pharmaceuticals.

Moreover, corporations are heavily regulated and taxed at thirty-five percent of earnings; multinationals must contend with the repatriation of income, which creates further tax burdens. Competition, which thrives despite government’s heavy hand, maximizes consumer choice while suppressing price increases to the extent possible. It’s truly a remarkable system that benefits everyone across the income quintiles.

That takes us to the core of Occupy’s contentions, to the extent they can be parsed—that is, income disparities. It’s an article of liberal faith that we’re all entitled to a list of guarantees, from housing to health insurance to their adroitly ambiguous phrase—a livable wage—this despite the absence of any such guarantees in our Constitution. 

But such quaint technicalities aside, we should begin by asking whether guarantees, beyond those mandated by Constitutional fiat, are, on balance, better or worse for human beings. The mid-sixties saw the birth of welfare, whose legendary failures were multiplied over the decades by well-intended but thoroughly obtuse efforts by Democrats to solve the unintended (but inevitable) by products created by—you guessed correctly—welfare. 

When we provide substantive rewards for phantom efforts we not only insult those we intend to help—in this case urban minorities—we effectively guarantee the inter-generational transfer of the pernicious culture that leads to a plethora of other social ills. In the process, motivation is blunted and a chronic bitterness develops, directed at ‘the system.’ But since liberalism’s largess is limitless, that stimulates further spending on programs designed to assist those deemed to be ‘at risk’—yes, the casualties of welfare.

If you recognize a pattern here you’re likely not a liberal. We humans don’t know much for certain, but we do know that the risk of failure is both a superb spur to excel and a fine teacher. Failure, which is the broad name we give to mistakes of a certain magnitude, provides a reliable, if painful reinforcement of what works and what doesn’t. But if you remove the risk of failure, you remove the potential for learning. 

Yet in the world of liberalism that’s a quid quo pro that rises to the level of a kind of perverse virtue. For most of us it’s anathema to the American way. But the Occupy movement—which constitutes on the order of one-twentieth of one percent of our nation—has succeeded in providing inadvertent lessons, not to mention entertainment.

The first is a reminder from Alexander Pope that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. With respect to income mobility, which the Occupy liberals ignorantly assume is fixed, we look to a 2007 Treasury Department study that demonstrates that 58 percent of households that were in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher level by 2005, and of households in the top 1 percent during the same time, more than 57 percent dropped to a lower income group. 

Moreover, a study by Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago concludes that despite government bailouts, in 2008 and 2009 the adjusted gross income of the top 1 percent—a disproportionate number of whom are employed in the financial sector—fell to 1997 levels.

Rather than focusing on how to degrade the income of the wealthy, the Occupy crowd would be more productive in examining how most middle income earners advance through the income quintiles. It’s the product of sustained hard work and sacrifice, over many years, and therein we find a truth about this group: When examined in detail, their protests seem intent upon circumventing and short-circuiting the admittedly demanding process of achieving a measure of economic security. 

To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s a prototypical, post-modern tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Those attentive to the unsubtle comments by our president concerning wealth redistribution, might recall the shocking glimpse he gave us into his kingdom where liberalism reigns unchallenged:

At some point, you’ve made enough money.

This article of liberal faith ought to be enshrined in graduate school economics text books because it succinctly captures the left’s twisted belief that the government has a right of first refusal on the income we earn.

The left’s arguments in support of a taxation horizon that never recedes have worn deep and tiresome ruts in our civic landscape. Common sense approaches to a restrained tax scheme, such as those made by William Murchison, demonstrate the steeply progressive curve of our current tax rates. Curiously, such arguments seem to find little political traction in America today. Let’s look beneath the surface and see what we can learn.

As Murchison tells us, the top 5 percent of tax payers earn 34 percent of the total Adjusted Gross Income but pay 58 percent of federal income taxes.   Yet that kind of statistic elicits only yawns among liberals. But those who have achieved a measure of success—i.e., the upper-middle class—understand the wholesale unfairness of over-burdening the productive with such patently redistributive tax schemes. 

The history of America’s antagonism towards taxation is unambiguous. One of the contributing factors of the Revolutionary War was the Stamp Act of 1765. It was a tax the British imposed to pay for troops stationed in North America subsequent to the Seven Years War, the local version of which was the French and Indian War. Suffice it to say, the protests were so swift—and violent—that the tax was never formally collected.

However, it should be noted that the primary objection was less a matter of whether the tax was justified but rather the fact that it was levied without representation. Of course today’s tax laws are written in the light of common day and passed by our esteemed elected officials, so that charge isn’t fair—right?

The problem is that over the course of the past century the principles our Founding Fathers fought for—and many patriots died for—have been muffled into a kind of civic silence. In their stead we’ve seen the hearty roots of a polity predicated on the alleged virtues of an expanded—read expensive, intrusive—role for government in our lives. Mind you, it’s been a tectonic, multi-decade progression, but its success rate can be correlated to a commensurate reduction in our collective understanding of why this nation was founded.

As that nascent ignorance grew, abetted as it was by an insidious, opportunistic, and illiberal motivation, government at all levels worked its way into every capillary of American life, and with it an implied—and hobbling—promise of safety nets and protections; the cradle-to-grave entitlements that are the current bane of Europe. The intellectual titan, Sen. Patrick Moynihan, was pilloried in the late sixties for arguing that welfare would destroy inner-city blacks and create the inter-generational transfer of poverty; history, of course, has proven him correct.

We can trace this inbred instinct to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, as well as the League of Nations, a governmental theme that was willfully expanded by FDR. Exploiting the crisis (sound familiar?), the latter worked tirelessly to recast the role of the federal government, making it a major player in our civic lives. That FDR’s policies merely protracted the Depression is only now coming to light, and the many myths that have been meticulously nurtured are finally being debunked.

However, over recent decades, the left has successfully seeded a lethal form of economic civil war, predicated on the wholly false notion that wealth is earned at the expense of others and that the only just recourse is to level the playing field through tax fiat. Besides creating a political feeding frenzy at the Adjusted Gross Income trough, that approach demeans the virtues of hard work and sacrifice which were the unstated but universally understood tools for advancement for the common man.

When discussing the first act of taxation before Congress in 1789, James Madison articulated a timeless American principle:

...a national revenue must be obtained; but the system must be
such a one, that, while it secures the object of revenue it shall not be
oppressive to our constituents.

Because Madison understood that taxes should not be a burden to citizens, this was an import tax, and indeed, the first national income tax wasn’t levied until 1913. 

In Thomas Jefferson’s Second Inaugural address, in 1805, he noted:

The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property…

The reticence and restraint of our Founding Father with respect to government intrusion, whether in taxation or regulation, is so amply documented as to be incontestable. 

As an intellectually anemic, but nonetheless culturally potent foil to that history, the left has woven into its entitlement narrative the force multiplier called economic envy. Its goal is a broad justification of ever steeper redistributive taxation, punishing the productive while characterizing those of lesser means as permanently mired in the lowest income quintiles. It’s a cynical and craven approach, but it perfectly matches their goal of a command economy with centralized controls. 

For those with an understanding of the sacrifices our forebears made in service to this Republic’s founding principles, the recent expansion of government and collateral inhibition of personal liberties is deeply alarming. Beyond the lasting injuries and insults to our nation, the fact that millions voted for a man whose values are so conspicuously outside the mainstream—and hostile to the common good—is itself astonishing.

The freedom to earn as much money as our God-given talents and hard work allow us, with minimal taxation and inhibiting government regulations, is at the core of what it means to be an American. That this president believes he has the right to redistribute our wealth based on his politically charged formula of choosing winners and losers, is an abomination—one that should motivate every patriot to make him a one-term president.

One of the resonating themes among many Republican candidates in the mid-term elections is the notion of American exceptionalism. Its roots date to 1630 and John Winthrop’s City Upon a Hill sermon which, in recent decades, has been the subject of intellectual scorn by liberals, conveniently forgetting its premise that the rich have a “holy duty” to provide for the poor.

Two centuries later, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian, toured America and produced his Democracy in America, a study of the unique nature of America’s democratic institutions, and its unwavering support of individual liberty and property rights, which includes this seminal quote:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.

Intellectual opportunists have exploited his work by cravenly arguing that it promoted the notion of Manifest Destiny, which for the left is code for the subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America. But that’s a gloss that malignly blurs its more fundamental legacy, which is the fact that America was founded on principles uniquely hostile to the feudalism, nationalism, and monarchical instincts that effectively guaranteed centuries of internecine warfare in Europe, punctuated with brief periods of peace.

Our Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of a nation predicated on the insistence that its truths were

…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.

Those principles, combined with the rule of law and protection of property rights, saved the fledgling nation untold internal conflict as it evolved over the centuries, pre-empting and cleansing it of a thousand natural shocks that nations are heir to. 

Yet today, many, including, apparently President Obama, remain unconvinced of America’s exceptionalism. Who can forget his cynically dismissive comments last year:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

It reduces the civic sanctity of Jefferson and Madison’s vision to a jingoistic kind of arch nationalism in service to hegemonic, imperial instincts. Indeed, the modern liberal sensibility either studiously overlooks or is ignorant of the unprecedented framework of American government. Its tripartite structure of checks and balances, its Bill of Rights that suppresses government’s inherent propensity subjugate its citizens, and the ingenious expatiation of its core principles as articulated in “The Federalist Papers, simply have no rival in history.

All of this is of no apparent consequence to the modern liberal. Last week, Politico ran a piece by Michael Kinsley titled “U.S. Is Not Greatest Country Ever.” He distilled the left’s genetic disdain of American exceptionalism by defining it as “the theory that Americans are better than everybody else.”

You see, individual freedom, open markets, the rule of law, and property rights, which our Founders believed are universal, God-given precepts, are of no value to liberals since, in their view, they project an image of global hubris and superiority. 

Since early last century Freedom House in New York has documented the ineluctable movement of nations from despotism to freedom, with the number, on balance, growing each year. Liberals would do well to follow that global progress, understanding that its success is due to the importation of America’s principles of individual liberty and the rule of law.

Its many imperfections notwithstanding, America has, and will continue to be a nation blessed by God. Although we can’t imagine the current Democratic White House incumbent saying it, we should not forget that nearly fifty years ago, at President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, the voice of steely resolve rang out across the nation:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Paradoxically, the Democratic Party leadership today (and its minions in the mainstream media) seems at least indifferent—and arguably hostile—to the American exceptionalism that has informed this nation’s character and successes since its inception. 

Whether that’s attributable to a misinformed view of America’s intentions on the global stage or a post-modern denial that any nation is greater than another, mainstream Americans across the political spectrum do understand—and support without apology—America’s founding principles, which make her truly exceptional among all nations.

It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since the close of the election and already we’re hearing the predictable siren song of bipartisanship from the vanquished. Although President Obama and his war-weary troops are in a profoundly weakened position, they know their best offense is a good defense.

So Obama’s message, issued through his unavoidable filter of arrogance, is that he’s looking forward to “working with Republicans.” Thanks to a re-energized conservative base, before the evening ended yesterday, Speaker-elect John Boehner made it unambiguously clear that it’s Obama who must “change course,” because that’s what the American people want.

Yet if you read the likes of E.J. Dionne, the Ever-ready battery’s poster boy for Progressivism, Obama’s policies—the healthcare “reform” juggernaut and the stimulus (read deficit) bill—were right and necessary, respectively—he simply failed to defend them. The next step in Dionne’s smoke and mirror world? More of the same:

Now Obama needs to offer proposals that advance the common interest and progressive ideals in ways that force Republicans to pay a price for opposing them.

If, after nearly two years of deficit spending and moving the debt ever closer to GDP, you feel there’s a disconnect between “the common interest” and “progressive ideals,” you’re on to something. As for the price Republicans might pay for opposing a further expansion of government, there is absolutely no downside to testing, once again, the depth of common sense of the common man.

It’s an apparently indestructible article of liberal faith that “equality” trumps opportunity and rewards, because despite this election’s message—that government should not and can not create equality—Dionne trots out the same threadbare argument:

Progressives believe in a government that promotes modestly more equality…

That’s code, of course, for income redistribution from the productive to the less productive. That one person, through hard work, sacrifice, talent, or some mix thereof, might be more successful than the next guy is simply unacceptable to the liberal sensibility, and Obama’s determination to level the playing field by fixing the race will never change.

Dionne finishes his dreamy narrative by inadvertently stating one truth:

The real showdown takes place in two years…

And, the battle must begin now, with Republicans forcing the debate—of whether the American people want more government spending, deficits, debt, a growing regulatory burden, linked to Obama’s cynical, craven goal of a Social-Democratic state in America—or whether this election was a rebuke to everything this president and Congressional liberals stand for.

With the mid-term elections just a few days away it’s instructive to listen for signs of life from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. However, you won’t need a deep-space listening device to hear House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who single-handedly redefined political comedy by telling us that “We haven’t really gotten the credit for what we have done.” Well, the Speaker can rest assured that the credit is coming in just a few days.

However, among other entertaining (read stunning) revelations is her assertion—ever faithful to the Obama party line—that their message just can’t get through. The president, close observers of the political process will recall, gave 53 health care speeches in 50 weeks in advance of the Congressional vote. Yes, there has been a din of messaging, but it’s almost entirely from this administration which never seems to grow tired of the sound of its own voice.

But beyond their astonishing argument that it’s more a matter of selling their accomplishments than their product itself is the unbounded nature of their arrogance. Even Bill Clinton, a man with a Rushmore-like ego, made a one-eighty course correction to win a second term; this lot’s willful tenacity is case-hardened with an arrogance that’s simply impenetrable. 

In a statement that lets in a ray of luminescence, Pelosi stated that she’s very proud of the liberal label. In San Francisco, which competes with New York—where they’re actively considering banning salt—for razor-edged liberal stupidity, she’s clearly in a majority. But, as Gallup polls have demonstrated, liberals represent just 18 percent of the country, with conservatives hitting 42 percent and moderates 35 percent.

On November 3^rd, this is a lesson that might finally seep into the liberal sensibility. That it’s taken this long is further testimony to the resiliency of myth. In recent years Western Europe has performed a great global service to those with political memory deficits. They’ve demonstrated that the Social-Democratic dream of an early retirement age with robust, cradle-to-grave entitlements, just can’t be sustained. 

Once the fiscal and actuarial realities set in the lessons will follow. They include the virtues of individual responsibility, personal freedoms, and the value of learning through failure—which are apparently lessons inaccessible to the American liberal. Indeed, they are deeply enamored of centralized control, of public policy that prescribes or proscribes behavior, and of an Everest-like tax structure to support it. 

However, as our president and Congressional liberals prepare to disappear into their self-imposed political asylum, the nearly 80 percent of Americans who consider themselves conservative or moderate should pledge to never again allow this myth to take another breath.  Indeed, if the likes of Merkel and Sarkozy, Germany and France's leaders respectively, can suffer the slings and arrows of electoral scorn by starting the process of dismantling their vast and oppressive entitlement infrastructure, surely our newly elected Congressional leaders can rise to the challenge. 

Witnessing the riots in France as its citizens begin to contemplate the reality of working until sixty-two versus sixty, is a reminder that we depreciate cultural traditions and the expectations they naturally generate at our peril. We’ve stood by and watched the endangered virtues of duty and obligation approach extinction, where individual accountability is malignly blended into a collectivism whose goal is the highest level of mediocrity we can achieve. It takes a special delight in expanding the common denominator of our efforts in support of a multi-tiered safety net because it’s assured no one—in particular no minority—can make it on his own.

The cultural sub-strata that feed liberalism’s Social-Democratic instincts are in a state of slow transition. But, not unlike increased longevity, it’s a multi-generational process and the real-time reinforcement for good behavior at the individual level always seems to pay modest dividends. But, it’s only when we understand that those who minted the virtues did so in the crucible of brutally hard work and daunting sacrifice, and yes, on the battlefield in service to future generations (i.e., ours) that we can achieve the clarity of purpose and resolve so necessary to our cause.

Fantasies in the private world of individuals are nearly always tempered by reality. However, in the political world they’re often abetted by the historical revisionist’s willfully skewed understanding, which leads to errors ranging from simple political overreach to a fundamental denial of the electorate’s will.

In a feat remarkable even among the intellectual elites, President Obama has managed to span the entire spectrum, from an astonishingly arrogant overreach to malignly nullifying the will of the electorate. There’s a faithfully linear relationship between the degree to which politicians impose policies—versus deftly dovetailing them with the electorate’s will—and their fixation with the notion that declining polling numbers are really just a matter of a garbled message.

Beyond being exasperating for all Americans save the eighteen percent who call themselves liberal, the cumulative impact of the past two years serves as a timely reminder that enduring values and principles have a lengthy half-life. Indeed, despite the fact that they were expounded in the late 18^th century, those of our Founding Fathers resonate today as though the ink were still wet.

In contrast to the modern liberal’s wholesale abuse of history, the message codified by our founders, whether in the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, or our Constitution, is an adroit distillation of two thousand years of history. Indeed, they cull from the annals of ancient Greece and Rome the basics of republican governance and grafted it onto a strong tripartite constitutional framework, one which provides unprecedented freedoms—and responsibilities—with a panoply of related guarantees.

Among the many founding principles today’s liberal misconstrues is that government supersedes the people. With their attendant preoccupation with prescribing behavior that redounds to their political goals, which reflect an abiding endorsement of the bureaucrat they trust over the individual they can’t control, they seem instinctively inclined to flout the founders’ intellectual will.

Many commentators and analysts on the left are genuinely surprised at the deep political divide in our nation. That the Tea Party movement has successfully highlighted and accentuated it has moved them along the continuum from mystification to anger. You can see it in one degree or another in the writings of people from E.J. Dionne to Thomas Friedman, and, with minor variations, the theme is the same: the Tea Party movement is a non-organic, politically extreme attempt to circumvent the Democrats’ good will.

But let’s return to the distinction between policy and communication, and the Obama administration’s argument that the American people are being fearfully driven to the Republican Party. To begin with, it’s predicated on the insulting implication that we’re a nation of nitwits with the memory of a mayfly. 

In Massachusetts over the weekend he again insulted voters by asserting that the upcoming political bloodbath is due to us being “hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.” It doesn’t take a political cryptologist to see a pattern here. Recall his condescending broadside against the good people of Pennsylvania, those who cling to guns and religion, and his reflexive judgment against the police who arrested the professor of African-American ancestry, but his skittish reticence to blame Islamic extremism for murderer at Fr. Hood.

It’s an offensive irony that won’t be lost on voters in two weeks. We’ll save Obama’s incapacity to deal with evil for another day, but his thorough-going ignorance of economics deserves comment. Recently published books on the Great Depression have amply demonstrated that the Keynesian policies of President Roosevelt merely protracted unemployment and suffering. The stagflation during the Carter years, followed by double-digit growth beginning with President Reagan, have further acquitted the argument keeping taxes low and government spending in check.

Yet Obama and his Congressional liberals refuse to admit that their dream of reviving the economy through excessive taxation and government spending was, in fact, a fantasy, one that’s kept 15 million unemployed and seen GDP dwindling to 1.6% in the second quarter.

The good news, of course, is that in about two weeks the people will again assert their primacy over government for and by the government. It’s a well-earned correction that provides further evidence—as though more were needed—that our Constitutional Republic is the best guarantor of freedom in history.

You may have heard the chorus of political analysts who argue that President Obama is “in over his head,” that he doesn’t understand the implications of his foreign or domestic policy agenda.  As a predicate to this discussion it’s important to distinguish between a president’s reading of foreign policy history and economics and his willful prosecution of a political agenda at once hostile to founding principles and the future of the nation.

In the case of Mr. Obama it’s clear that the prism through which he views American—and world—history is something of an anomaly.  Unlike any previous president, he sees America as an unexceptional member of the world community, and is far more interested in ensuring that we fit neatly into the mix of nations—civilized or not—rather than acquitting the core principles and values that have made this nation the greatest the world has ever known.

Indeed, Obama brings a curious mix of embarrassment and moral equivalence to his job as America’s chief ambassador, quick to chastise our behavior and reticent to advance our national interests.  Domestically, Obama has championed an agenda that, astonishingly, contradicts both fundamental economic common sense and key tenets of our Constitution and founding documents, beginning with Federalist 45 and the 10^th Amendment.

Despite that, we can be thankful that his governance has been a genetic blueprint of his core values, not the trans-partisan, post-political, airy stuff of his campaign.  Indeed, had he spent the last eighteen months governing as the politically ecumenical moderate he professed in the campaign, Republicans’ prospects of winning a Congressional majority—and, the potential for making him a one-term president—would be substantially reduced.

By now it’s clear that political hubris is the lifeblood that motivates Obama and his liberal brethren.  When intermingled with an abiding, if cynical distrust of the common man, the two are a potent weapon for political immolation.  Another conspicuous trait is his curious faith in government as the preferred way of improving Americans’ lives.  In truth, mainstream Americans are more apt to see government as the lumbering, over-fed Leviathan that excels in belated and misguided responses to our economic woes.

It’s become transparently obvious since Obama took office that his primary preoccupation is political control, with the goal of prescribing preferred behaviors in every aspect of our lives, from our choice of light bulbs to our selection of health insurance.  Indeed, his adroit rhetoric aside, he has demonstrated his preference for an autocratic inflexibility and disdain for ideological diversity which betrays a noxious hostility to individual freedom.

Yet this isn’t indicative of being in over his head because he fully understands what he’s revolting against and what he’s advocating.  That the consequences of the latter are patently hostile to this nation is a byproduct he either ignores or trivializes, depending upon his fluctuating level of petulance. 

It’s a sign of exactly how far liberalism has wandered into the political hinterland that so many on the left refuse to recognize how this administration is charting a course for America that is at once contrary to virtually every founding principle and injurious to its economy, while placing its security in jeopardy. 

When combined with its goal of Balkanizing America over race and income, arguing, as they do, that the former is dispositive of values and the latter “unfair,” it’s clearly toxic to our collective civic and cultural health.  Fairness, as close observers of liberal strategy know, has been transformed from equal opportunity to equal outcomes, which conveniently ignores innate talent, hard work, and sacrifice.

Moreover, the left has seeded its twisted pedagogy into our public school curricula, teaching our children that our Founding Fathers were racist before instructing them about our remarkable tripartite system of government, our unprecedented freedoms, and rights that are granted by God, not man.

Not unlike every period in our history when leaders raised stupidity to virtue, we won’t have a full accounting of the damage this president has done until long after he’s left office—which, we can be thankful, is only 897 days away. 

In the interim, like-minded Americans across the political spectrum will reassert their will by electing fiscally responsible candidates to Congress in November, while beginning the arduous task of dismantling the unconstitutional health care “reform” legislation that was forced upon us.

Indeed, for the first time since this dark, cumulus cloud began hovering over our nation, we’re seeing signs of blue sky on the horizon.  It’s a testimony to the recuperative powers of our Republic that the moment a civic malaise strikes—this time in the form of our hard-edged liberal president and his minions in Congress—with it comes the silent but potent antidote that reanimates the indomitable will at the core of every American patriot.

As we celebrate our nation’s victory for independence, it’s healthy to step back from the canvas of the current admininstration to better understand the genesis and current context of its policies.

In the area of national security and military intervention, it’s been a fascinating exercise in political forensics to witness the response to President Obama’s firing of General Stanley McChrystal. If history demonstrates anything it’s that its lessons are perpetually susceptible to revision based on new evidence and more informed analysis. So it is that over the centuries, the credibility of Herodotus’ rendering of the Peloponnesian War has attenuated, while that of Thucydides is deemed more persuasive.

Moreover, the deeper one delves into the tiered nature of history, the clearer it becomes that discrete causes for events are the exception rather than the rule. A prototypical example is the causes of the Great War, now known as World War One. The standard causal explanation, which has demonstrable credibility, is the abysmal complexity and countervailing influences of the treaty arrangements that prevailed in advance of war. 

The issue of Belgium’s neutrality obligations date to the 1839 Treaty of London, which isn’t commonly discussed except in the more erudite—that is, unread—texts. However, it wasn’t merely Belgium’s neutrality that was guaranteed under Article VII of the treaty, but rather the grim obligations of the signatories in the event of foreign invasion.

Peeling away yet another layer, Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, subsequent to the latter’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914, was less a matter of upholding its treaty obligations than with Britain’s fear of Germany’s control of Belgium’s sea ports. A key message in matters as complex as war is that we must move well beyond the gloss of casual observation into the sub-text of nuanced motivations.

To that end, and regardless of the historical incident in question, it’s wise to discern patterns of events that evolved over time, ones that indict or reward strategic prescience and the relative efficacy of outcomes. With respect to war, and in contrast to the modern liberal who naively endorses soft power, Plato’s maxim prevails: “It’s only the dead who will see the end of war.”

Axiomatic in the equation is that a consensus among historians typically fractures beyond the empirical description of events. For example, there is little disagreement regarding the effectiveness of weapons and tactics in the Hundred Years War, but the legitimacy of Britain’s claims on the French throne and the inbred role of dynastic succession as well as Salic Law, are debated to this day.

On a broader scale, however, the sway of culture and the values that underwrite it is, perhaps, more challenging to decipher, especially when its proximity is so close that it taints our lens. Besides understanding history’s many lessons, it’s at least as important that we recognize the insidious and noxious cultural influences in our midst, so we can quickly neutralize and correct them. 

Against that background, it’s particularly curious that the deeper message in Mr. Obama’s firing of General McChrystal has been largely overlooked. Even in a military that has suffered at the emasculating hands of political correctness, weakness is correctly understood as a trait our enemy will reflexively exploit. Dating to the appeasement of Hitler before World War Two, as well as the studied reticence to confront Communism under Stalin and fascism under Mussolini, modern liberalism created a template for weakness in foreign affairs that is as resilient today as it is damaging to national security.

Facile analysts in the mainstream media were quick to compare Obama’s decision to President Truman’s firing of Gen. MacAurthur, asserting that both generals were insubordinate. However, the code of military conduct in a civilian model is the low-hanging fruit of this matter. The deeper and more instructive lesson is that the acerbic battle between Truman and MacArthur signaled the genesis of the American left’s descent into national security irrelevance, this despite Truman’s unwavering opposition to Communism.

Indeed, under the political aegis of the newly formed Progressive Party in 1948, Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice-president, began shaping a foreign policy framework that willfully failed to recognize the threat of Communism. With few exceptions, the ensuing decades have witnessed the tectonic depreciation of the Democrats’ steely defense of freedom under FDR against Hitler and the Japanese. 

The glaring sub-text, which has been scrupulously overlooked by the mainstream media, is that Obama’s firing of McChrystal was merely the latest example of a clash of national security polities. 

Liberals, whom Obama faithfully represents, disdain all war and have what amounts to a genetic predisposition to avoid it at all costs. The clear message in the Rolling Stone interview is that McChrystal’s staff profoundly disagreed with the president’s stringent rules of engagement. even in the context of a counter-insurgency strategy, which predictably hobbles our military’s efforts. In this instance the dots are pre-connected to MacArthur’s caustic criticism of the Progressive Party’s evolving appeasement of Communism, and Obama’s approach to our current war is just as feckless.

When combined with his instinctive inability to call radical Islam by its proper name, Obama’s apology tour, his obeisance to the tyrants of Iran, his stunning indifference to Russia’s evolving autocratic, anti-democratic policies, and his benign response to North Korea’s resurgent belligerence, merely reanimate the policy of Democratic appeasement that began decades ago.

Mainstream Americans have a hard-wired understanding that a policy of weakness is doomed to fail. This is a fundamentally flawed approach to dealing with our enemies, and the left’s unambiguous role in perpetuating it with strategic policies at odds with our national security interests, is as dangerous as it is ignorant of history.

One of the enduring traits of modern liberalism is its striking incapacity for introspection.  Examples are so numerous as to be embarrassing for anyone save those who breathe the rarefied air of the left.  Indeed, even more remarkably than their indifference to border security, the oversized footprint of government, their transparent support for teachers unions which trump the needs of inner-city children, or their astonishing rejection of American exceptionalism, is their low wattage belief that they’re not really liberal at all.

Those old enough or sufficiently well read, may recall New Yorker critic Pauline Kael opining after President Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, with equal measures of candor and veneer-deep insight, that she didn’t know anyone who voted for him.  For those not cloistered in the beltway, who don’t frequent the Georgetown cocktail circuit, or inhabit one of the many intellectual echo chambers such as the upper-West side, watching liberals struggle to frame themselves as moderates is as intriguing as what Robert Hooke glimpsed through his microscope in the 17^th century.

As stunning as their denial of traditional—read efficacious—American values, is the alternate universe they inhabit, where good intentions supplant strategic diplomacy.  Even the likes of the moderate Foreign Affairs understands that the Obama administration’s fifteen month program of delay and denial of the Iranian threat is intended to establish the predicate for Iran’s entrance into the nuclear club.  Indeed, the insular diplomats—forgive the redundancy—at State are convinced that a nuanced blend of sanctions will eliminate Iran’s thirty-year goal of regional hegemony.

Returning to domestic policy, despite their sheepish and revealing confessions that they hadn’t read the new Arizona illegal immigration law, Attorney General Holder and Department of Homeland chief Napolitano argued that it’s fundamentally unjust.  We can add to that deplorable mix of willfulness the U.S. diplomat who actually apologized to the despots in China for the law. 

The fact that it merely recapitulates federal law, and even mandates a trigger allegation before law enforcement officers can demand proof of citizenship, is apparently immaterial to them.  Well, seventy percent of Arizona citizens feel differently, and it’s clear the majority of Americans are four-square behind them.

All of this is backdrop to the recent elections, beginning months ago in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and ending with Rep. Joe Sestak;’s upset over three-decade incumbent turncoat Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary for the Senate.  Mainstream media headlines reported Sestak’s victory as anti-incumbent movement, taking convenient political cover by euphemizing the electorate’s message. 

The truth, for those who left their rose-colored glasses on the dresser, is that this is a mandate against everything Obama stands for, including his nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill, his misguided pledge to close Guantanamo Bay prison, his thoroughly ill-informed desire to “spread the wealth” by taxing success, his battalion of unelected Czars, his despicable apologies for America’s alleged transgressions, and, of course, his health care “reform” bill that’s guaranteed to expand government, increase taxes, and do nothing to inhibit costs.

The vast expanse of fly-over country gets all of this, but for reasons best left to future political anthropologists, the liberal gene has a reliable blind spot which ensures they overlook the obvious.

What’s missing from the liberal elites’ understanding of mainstream America is that they prefer a government that unobtrusively—and with a modicum of competence—handles the basics:  security at the national level and functional street lights at the municipal level. 

But dating back to the New Deal, the left’s dream of a dominant role for government in our lives--to self-interestedly remove the obstacles and provide an ideologically preordained education for our kids--has overlooked a simple American maxim that led to the creation of this great experiment:  We instinctively view government with a well-founded skepticism and distrust.

The textbook examples of hydra-headed government growth, mismanagement, and its limitless capacity for inefficiencies are New York, New Jersey, and California.  Those states are hemorrhaging red ink with Greece-sized debt, pension obligations, and a level of union control that would make the Mafia green with envy. 

However, underlying the fiscal malaise that’s infected every state to one degree or another, is a nascent cultural entitlement, compliments of the left, which has depreciated the virtues of individual sacrifice and accountability in favor of a consensual, government-centric power grid. 

Moving into the sub-strata of the disease, we find an inbred, recalibration of hardship and sacrifice. The grim economic and civic challenges that were met and overcome by those in previous centuries when, to quote Thomas Hobbes, life was “nasty, short, and brutish,” have been replaced by a chronic querulousness for obstacles ranging from a demanding boss to a terminal illness.  We’re all now living in a life of Dickensian hopelessness. 

The previously endangered virtues of duty and obligation have become quaint, historical relics and public policy has faithfully reflected it with certain entitlements that define “children” as those up to age twenty-six.  Our public education system has successfully supplanted traditional values with a kind of a post-modern cultural anarchy where the only truths are those imputed by the individual, a polity which students question at their peril. 

Bringing the picture into real-time focus, Arizonans are now excoriated for finally taking the feds to task by enacting their own set of laws to stem the millions the state is spending on illegal immigrants.  Indeed, there is a deep and abiding ignorance afoot that conflates border control with xenophobia or racism for craven political advantage.

Americans are, in fact, a beneficent people, on balance tolerant of others of good will.  However, those who would take advantage of our magnanimity should understand that there are consequences for their abuse.  It’s instructive that groups in states as politically diverse as Texas and Minnesota are expressing their strong support for Arizona’s law because they correctly understand that the federal government’s recent abdication of responsibility for border control is at once unjust and costly.

We can fairly blame not just the Obama administration but also his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose unwavering strength on national security stood in stark contrast to his spinelessness in dealing with illegal immigration.

The reason the tea party is approaching the political stratosphere is because regular Americans see something fundamentally—and profoundly—changing in their nation and feel absolutely no power to control it.  From taxes to debt to entitlements to health care, and foreign policy predicated on a chastised America, it feels as though public policy is being deliberately manipulated to centralize political power, redistribute wealth on a grand scheme, to reward the politically preordained.

This isn’t a cultural or political paranoia, it’s real, for anyone paying close attention to the past fifteen months.  As Ken Blackwell documents in his new book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build and Imperial Presidency, there is a well-defined plan to subjugate individual and market freedoms and consolidate power among a political elite.

Our best hope is to return Congress to those who understand that they work for the people, which means electing those in the vein of Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Marco Rubio, and eliminating those whose every waking moment is dedicated to the twin goals of government expansion and re-election.

It usually takes longer than fifteen months for a new president to reach the record low polling numbers that are hanging, cumulus-like over Mr. Obama’s head, but it’s clear that he’s worked tirelessly to earn them.  Therefore, it should come as no surprise that about 80 percent of Americans now distrust the government.  As Andrew Kohut, president of Pew Research Center, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Republicans stand to gain more than Democrats from this deepening disdain of big government.

Dating to our Founding Fathers’ visceral distrust of centralized power, Americans have consistently expressed an instinctive aversion to concentrated political power.  For those who have studied our founding documents, in particular the prescient, enlightened Federalist Papers, it’s obvious that our government’s tripartite structure and resilient checks and balances were deliberately designed to diffuse power and restrain the fashionable—read fleeting, dangerous—passions of the day. 

America has sustained assaults similar to those Obama has burdened us with and, given the electorate’s primal antipathy to large-scale government incursions into free markets with its collateral erosion of individual rights, we will likely survive this as well. 

However, what’s most alarming about this administration’s aggressive arrogation of states’ rights and wholesale lack of respect for the will of the people is its transparent motivation to exponentially expand federal power, which is based on a cynical distrust of the individual.  His plan is a deliberate attempt to create a command economy with the levers of power controlled by elitist, unelected liberal marionettes.   

As the Congressional Budget Office recently reported, given the government’s current unfunded obligations, the percent of Gross Domestic Product consumed by government spending will have to rise from 19.1 percent to 25.2.  At that level, the Obama administration’s cumulative deficits from 2009 to 2020 will be $12.7 trillion, with the annual deficit at $1.25 trillion or 5.6 percent of GDP.

Underlying Obama’s blitz on freedom is the ersatz guilelessness he employs when contradicting himself.  Knowing he had no intention of abiding by it, in September of 2008, candidate Obama said:

Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any tax increase.  Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.

A report from the House Ways & Means Committee’s Republican members shows that since January 2009 Congress and the president have enacted $670 billion in tax increases.  At least fourteen of those tax increases, according to the report, break the president’s pledge.  A total of $316 billion of the new taxes will impact middle-class families.  Yet he flatly denies any contradiction and his minions in the mainstream media have developed a deft sub-text that belies any lingering pretext of journalistic objectivity.

There was a time not long ago when America’s culture of rugged independence flourished, when risk and consequence weren’t anathema, and when dependence upon government was a sign of weakness.  Thanks to the left’s legendary insistence that we can’t succeed on our own, and that we deserve a job and health insurance as a matter of birthright, the shame and stigma that fell, penumbra-like over the decision to take a government handout, is now conspicuous by its absence.

Indeed, now there’s a culturally induced feeding frenzy, with each constituency lobbying for its brazenly self-interested cut of the government’s dependence inducing largess.  The past fifty years has produced a nation of public funded addicts which blunts motivation and anesthetizes innovation.

Why this malaise isn’t apparent to more Americans, not to mention politicians, reflects the fact it has worked itself into every crevice of our cultural thinking.  I am not confident it can be halted, much less reversed, especially since the political courage needed to so is in such short supply.

For the few who are unconvinced that President Obama is the quintessential, post-modernist liberal, his decision to fundamentally weaken the nation’s nuclear weapons program, should tip the scale.

Much of the harsh criticism of his revision of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) focuses on the assertion that the U.S. will no longer threaten to use nuclear weapons against the signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if they are in compliance with the NPT’s obligations.  As nuclear weapons expert Henry D. Sokolski notes, this is tantamount to saying we “would not consider threatening to use nuclear weapons against states we never had any intention of ever targeting, such as Brazil.” 

As is so much of Mr. Obama’s political oeuvre, this isn’t even symbolically significant; rather, it’s an effete and feckless symptom of his studied disdain for American exceptionalism.  But the most disturbing change in the NPR revision is the mandate that the U.S. will freeze the modernization of its current nuclear inventory. 

That means Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea will continue their modernization efforts, and Iran will remain on its trajectory to obtain its first weapon, most likely within a year.  Obama’s lethal policy shift is yet another unforced error and a deliberate, elective emasculation of America.  Indeed, whether it’s Mirandizing radical Islamist terrorists, his pledge to close Gitmo (while returning hostiles to the battlefield), his acerbic treatment of Israel’s prime minister, his effective acquiescence of Iran’s Ahmadinejad, or his apology tour in which he excoriated America, it’s all about strengthening our enemies and weakening America and her allies.

The folly of Obama’s new policy statement is irrefutably evident by the past quarter century of nuclear non-proliferation policy:  To wit, the unprecedented reductions in warhead inventories has only been in states with the least likelihood of using such weapons in an offensive posture.  Indeed, during that morally sanctimonious 25 years, the likes of North Korea and Iran were busy building a nuclear capability, the former having achieved its goal some dozen or more years ago.

Besides proscribing the modernization of our nuclear arsenal, itself a remarkably daffy idea, the president has substantially advanced his strategic myopia by foreswearing a nuclear response to a massive biological or chemical attack on the U.S. 

The first lesson of national strategic defense is an impenetrable ambiguity with respect to one’s retaliatory response to any serious attack.  On a more local level, it’s the same the reason that the 40 or so states that have allowed concealed carry permits experienced an average 8 percent reduction in violent crime in the first twelve months after passage—criminals, or belligerents, simply don’t know whether their aggression will be swiftly neutralized by a Glock 9mm with jacketed hollow points or a .45 ACP.

The truth is that there is no historical evidence whatsoever that proliferation—conventional or nuclear—in nations without a framework of civic controls, has ever been inhibited by the unilateral disarmament of a superpower nation such as the U.S.  Moreover, Obama’s small-minded and superfluous motivation to establish the U.S. as a moral exemplar by this action belies the fact that it was America that twice saved the world from global domination by the forces of evil.  And, as our veterans and the graveyards strewn across the globe will attest, we’ve never asked for anything in return.

In 1983, at the top of Obama’s lofty, radical agenda was the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.  Second on his list was his almost evangelical desire for nationalized health care.  He believes, not without some justification, that he’s begun the process to achieve the second goal, and now he believes he’s begun the process to achieve the first. 

His thoroughly misinformed health care ‘reform’ efforts will only compromise the quality and timeliness of medical care without any cost reduction; in sharp contrast, his messianic efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons will strengthen the strategic advantage of rogue regimes and make America more vulnerable to their predations.