Like a macabre mixture of an Edgar Allen Poe tale and a Bob Dylan lyric, the House of Obama is teetering in the wake of its self-created winds of change, transformation and decline. Yet in the face of America’s diminution the president appears more concerned with improving his golf game or continuing his perennial political campaign. Is this mere presidential disinterest, incompetence or something more sinister?
A Bipartisan Elite
At the heart of President Obama’s promise to fundamentally transform the United States is a new paradigm of national division. While American history has been periodically beset by racial and class partitions or conservative versus liberal fissures, never have ordinary citizens felt as isolated or as alienated from their ruling class as they feel now. This division is the work of a bipartisan political elite that transcends the major branches of government.
Thousands of former Congressmen, Senators and other government officials now collect millions in deferred income as lobbyists and CEOs of the same crony capitalists they governed as public servants of the American people. This vested Washington tradition of personal patronage explains the need to stifle any populist uprising or movement against their lucrative status quo. It also explains why the full power of the government and the mainstream media has been directed against groups that have resonated with American voters such as the Tea Party.
Professor Angelo M. Codevilla intellectualized this fundamental change in America’s political landscape in his 2010 book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America And What We Can Do About It. According to Codevilla, American society is now divided into the Ruling Class and the Country Class. Codevilla focused not just on Democrats, but also on establishment Republicans, crony capitalists on Wall Street and the mainstream media.
To add insult to injury, the ruling class considers the average American retrograde, racist and dysfunctional. Barack Obama easily plugged into this ready-made paradigm with a new energy and a solid determination to accelerate the gradual transformation of American policy, attitudes, thinking and morals in one swift ideological move that if left unchecked will reverberate down the corridor of history for generations.
An Audacious Prophecy
When Barack Obama promised the American people in 2008 that he would not only change the country but also transform it, the vast majority of people had no idea just what he meant. As lofty as his promises and speeches were, they purposefully lacked concrete details. As the aphorism states, the devil is in the details.
To the uninformed, change is always something for the better while transform evokes videogame images of robots squashing and crushing other machines and occasionally entire cities. With the public’s short attention span and stark inability to connect the political dots, the thought of specific details easily eludes them.
Plutarch, the first-century Greek historian and moralist, said that a society that has become libertine is in its next- to-last stage before its final descent into tyranny. President Obama inherited a nation that had spent 50 years squandering its commitments to family, faith and traditional morality. Since his inauguration in 2009 Obama has accelerated the nation’s rush to a moral Armageddon with his support of abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, gun control and the deterioration of America’s domestic and foreign security.
As his administration’s shady details come to light, Obama appears to be different from all other democratically elected candidates. With each new policy and promise he has implicitly prophesied the decline of his own country. Political scandals have appeared in several executive departments such as the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, to name just a few. The country’s financial pressures, economic setbacks and loss of global respect raise the situation to perilous levels. When coupled with the president’s near-total disregard for the United States Constitution, it becomes clear that America could easily fulfill Plutarch’s bold prophecy.
The Rule of Disorder
A free and ordered society lives by established rules. If Democrats want to radically transform America into something that its founders never intended, they must first render its rule of law irrelevant. President Obama did not originate the living constitution but its notion of constant change perfectly suits his political and moral paradigm. The living constitution is founded on the notion that its words have no permanent meaning. Absolute truths do not exist—only the preferences of the present. Each new generation is free to mold the constitution to fit the essential needs of their times.
According to this theory the constitution evolves, spontaneously changing and necessarily improving over time. In this setting the Supreme Court is akin to a Grecian oracle and is far more important than the actual words and intentions of the founding fathers. Newly discovered rights, penumbras and verbal emanations have become the law of the land.
President Obama has taken the living constitution to its nihilistic end by purposely circumventing or ignoring any situation that does not suit his purposes. His first step on the road to constitutional irrelevancy was ignoring basic contract law during the bailout of the automotive industry in 2009. He made certain that the unions were taken care of first and pushed the bondholders to the end of the line. He has repeatedly warned Congress that he will use his executive orders, his czars and regulatory agencies if it fails to comply with his demands. In foreign affairs he only seeks advice and consent from Congress when it fits his grand agenda.
Written in the Stars
Since the 2008 election an aura of pessimism has permeated American society. Conservatives wonder where the next Edward Gibbons or Oswald Spengler will come from to chronicle America’s decline and fall. This gloomy reality is no longer a mere possibility but appears to have been written in the stars.
Mortgage defaults, bank failures, job losses, business reductions and the spectre of the most expansive increase of government spending in history have negatively impacted the nation. Since taking office Obama has run the national debt up to almost $17 trillion, an increase of nearly 70%. Food stamp recipients have soared to 47 million Americans.
Neither incompetence nor ignorance is at work here. The steady decline of the American economy is the result of progressive policies that have sapped the country’s economy and callously undermined the people’s confidence in their economic system. Obama has used the notorious Cloward-Piven strategy to promote economic and social change through the exploitation of misfortune, national crisis and disorganization as his central instrument of America’s transformation. As an undergraduate at Columbia University in the 1980s Barack Obama would immerse himself in the socialist theories of the university’s Marxist professors Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The Cloward-Piven strategy, which dates back to 1966, seeks to hasten the destruction of capitalism in America by expanding the welfare system to the point of collapsing the economy and implementing socialism by nationalizing major sectors of private industry.
The Politics of Equality
To effect change, Obama often relies on the politics of equality. By simply evoking its doctrinal magic Obama has used equality as his sacred mantra to rally people to his support. Like change it is another vague principle based on a too-literal understanding of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike the founding fathers, when Obama speaks of equality he means wealth equality, which requires redistributing the wealth of the rich and the middle class to what has become a permanent subclass of poor and dependent Americans.
Using the same perverted notion of equality Obama has extended government privilege to other so-called out- groups, such as feminists, homosexuals, illegal immigrants and other minorities, to the detriment of the general welfare of American society. His false notion of equality has given the country, contrary to its traditional standards and beliefs, affirmative action, political correctness, same-sex marriage and women in combat.
Economist Thomas Sowell has often reminded Americans that when minority groups are favored as part of a multicultural fantasy, societies generally lose their equilibrium in a fit of violence, economic chaos and social disintegration. Such self-created crises provide left-wing governments with the excuses they want to extend their power and control over the population.
Domestic War Powers
Millions of Americans realize what Obama is doing to the country. He disdains his critics as obstructionists who frustrate his dreams for America. In direct contrast to America’s global enemies, Obama is not at all timid in attacking his enemies within. Columnist David Harsanyi has called Obama’s domestic war powers The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Instead of the Biblical Conquest, Famine, War, and Death, Obama’s cavalry of national transformation is charging blindly ahead as the national debt, government dependency, foreign retreat and death.
Harsanyi believes the nation has already gone over the fiscal cliff because a $17 trillion deficit drowns future generations in a sea of red ink. Millions of Americans believe that government owes them health insurance, student loans and free birth control while they are increasingly impervious to the pernicious creep of the bureaucratic state and the alarming escalation of unsustainable spending and debt.
American Exceptionalism rankles the very fibers of Obama’s being. He believes that America has been too powerful and it is time to surrender much of its global legacy. Under his feckless leadership America’s once-exalted position as the unquestioned leader of the free world has been greatly reduced. In 2009 Obama put on an act worthy of Sir Laurence Olivier and groveled on the global stage, begging forgiveness for America’s imperial sins. Pundits such as Norman Podhoretz understand and praise his skill in purposefully weakening America on the world stage.
Obama has also encouraged, promoted and advanced policies of the culture of death that have destroyed millions of unborn children and now threaten the longevity of the nation’s elderly with legalized assisted suicide, death panels and passive euthanasia.
The Crown Jewel
One of the most significant transformations enacted by the Obama administration has been its hijacking of the nation’s health care system. Under the myth that 30 million Americans were suffering without health care in America, the president has worked assiduously to achieve the crown jewel in the Marxist tiara that frustrated liberals since the last Roosevelt administration.
This was just the first of many lies that the administration has used to foist its agenda on a largely unsuspecting country. While 30 million may have been without health coverage—for many adults this is their own choice—no American goes without access to emergency health care. By law hospitals and emergency rooms have to treat anyone who walks through their doors in urgent need of medical care.
The 2,700-page health care bill called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was swiftly passed virtually unread or debated and only after the Democratic leadership cajoled, bribed and threatened its membership into passing the bill. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi exposed the vacuous thinking behind the bill when she said with the false sense of urgency that characterized the president’s first administration, we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it.
Touted as a cure-all for the country’s shaky health system, the ACA has not lived up to any of Obama’s lofty promises. Its cost estimates were grossly understated, much like the Johnson administration’s fudged numbers on Medicare in 1965. Many patients will lose their existing insurance because the bill incentivizes business to pay the mandated tax instead of insuring employees. In addition, many employers will reduce workers’ hours to part-time to avoid the need to insure them. Even ACA proponents like Montana Senator Max Baucus call it a train wreck waiting to happen.
The furious aftermath of the ACA has exposed the issue’s only truth—ObamaCare was designed to fail from the outset. Democrats want it to fail so they can install a single-payer system like that which has nearly destroyed medical care in Canada and Great Britain. Single-payer is a system in which only the government pays for health care for its citizens, not private insurance plans. If that happens all Americans will be at the mercy of the government and the so-called death panels, which will make life and death decisions.
A Corrupt Bargain
The worst transformation that has infected American society is the change in its basic self-image. Concern for fellow Americans no longer rules the American conscience. Pride in one’s work is not an honored value under Obama. Many Americans no longer try to solve problems on their own or rely on their families. They now rush willy-nilly to some government agency or dial 911 to enlist the help of the so-called experts.
In the 1930s few self-respecting American workers would have accepted the dole or even charity. Today nearly a third of Americans depend on food stamps, welfare, disability payments, or some other form of government support. Government welfare has become a right that people think they deserve just because they are poor. Many are born into poverty and follow their progenitors into the same welfare-based life just as many immigrants joined the fire or police departments 100 years ago. Poverty has become a family tradition and a permanent address.
Government welfare has corrupted more than poor people. Washington has a program or a grant for just about everyone—student loans, farm subsidies and coporate welfare. Washington considers it a sacred duty to decide everything from what Americans eat and what light bulb they use to what kind of car they drive and how they plan for retirement.
Obama has attempted to effect still more change by undermining the Christian religion, especially Catholicism. In his largely anodyne commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, according to author Russell Shaw’s 2013 book American Church, Obama began with a materialistic argument that faith must necessarily admit doubt because it is a belief in things not seen. He urged Notre Dame’s students not to believe with certainty anything that has to do with religion.
Obama’s religious cynicism is symptomatic of his belief that practical atheism is the de facto state religion in America. The price for full participation in America’s economic, political and social life is for Americans to agree to conduct themselves as if God did not exist. They can go to church on Sundays, but their faith should not have any bearing on what they do during the rest of the week. This view has put the Church and Obama’s House on a collision course with regard to ObamaCare and its immoral provisions. Soon the Church will have to choose between its teachings and participation in the medical field.
Will Obama’s winds of change obliterate the America most people cherish or can like-minded Americans bring down the House of Obama and stop his poisonous changes? History will eventually decide!
A+! Fantastic article. You have tapped into the hearts and minds of more and more Americans. Thank you for the truth!