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.