Obama may just be right about one thing for a change – it is not his fault that the recent Obama scandals are plaguing the American people – and I would agree, because it is our fault.
In his January 20 inaugural address in 1981, President Reagan reminded a nation of the ideals that are at the very core of the American national identity and philosophy, and we were sorely in need of reminding that:
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.
It is a simple logic born out of the “Age of Reason,” resulting from the observation of a Natural Law that has followed humankind throughout civilization, which says that governments of kings oppress, and no man is above corruption, thus must be restrained.
Yet, progressivism has once again “tempted” us to “believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule,” so many Americans resolved to defer to “an elite group” the ever-necessary task of safe-guarding liberty. It was an unnatural deference, and now, we must deal with the very natural consequences that have followed.
Barack Obama, not surprisingly, was not the man who many Americans hoped for him to be; a man of virtue, integrity, of just character with an intuition to preserve and protect his fellow-Americans. I could point to personal traits, past comments, and considerations unique only to Barack Obama in an effort to make the argument that all of this is a willful ill-intended attempt to destroy the America many on the right identify with – and I would be right – but it distracts from the argument that is not only right, but a winning argument for the right.
Whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney is President of the United States, government’s nature is to be tyrannical. There is a reason that Ronald Reagan is heralded still as the greatest President of the 20th century by Americans – all Americans – and remains the standard-bearer of the Republican party today.
He was different; a man of virtue, integrity, of just character with an intuition to preserve and protect the liberty of his fellow-Americans – and most of all – Americans could trust in him to do so, because he never did anything to break that trust.
This is not only rare for a modern leader, it is rare for any leader of anytime, and indeed, Ronald Reagan not only understood he needed to have a distrust of government, but a healthy distrust of himself as a government official. He understood the “Crisis and Leviathan,” or the natural tendency of government to manufacture and/or exploit crisis for the despotic purpose of power concentration. In his unofficial “farewell speech” at the Republican National Convention in 1992, he addressed this conscientious effort to not exploit his fellow-Americans:
And whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way.
President Reagan, despite what the media at the time tried to portray him to be, was an ardent and brilliant student of history – especially American history. He wholly understood that the essence of American exceptionalism, began at the moment our Founding Fathers decided that they would appeal to our “best hopes” and not our “worst fears,” our “confidence rather than” our “doubts.” This is not the norm in human history. It is not the norm to allow God-given natural rights to be freely enjoyed in our natural state of liberty when under government.
In this context, an American context, who is truly at fault? We, as Americans, have allowed duty and responsibility to be freed in every aspect of American society. It has had consequences that have been so far-reaching that it spans across every aspect of American life from the breakdown of the American family to the unsustainable national debt. It is all connected by the unwillingness of a people to re-take responsibility, and safe-guard what is only our’s to safe-guard – our personal liberty and safety.
But, unfortunately, we have not for sometime now. Barack Obama is a big government progressive, and this is what he believes to be the natural order, “the rich and well-born” make all of the decisions for the rest of us. That is not American.
However, neither is the lack of responsibility among American citizens, or the willingness to acknowledge that perhaps this deference to government may result in dire consequences, or costs to the preservation of liberty.
But costs there have been, and those costs have been high. Because we have been willing to tolerate such encroachments out of our own convenience, our leaders feel little to zero desire to take responsibility for any of the latest Obama scandals, and they will not until we force them to, which we cannot do until we re-take responsibility ourselves.
