Missing greatness: What Obama’s re-election means

The truth of the matter, of course, is that a great deal changed, somewhere around 11pm on Tuesday, 7 November, when Ohio was declared for the president and the race was effectively over. To wit:

• Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy, is now set in legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers of citizens into wards of the state has been given a tremendous boost – with electoral consequences as far as the eye can see.
• A war in the Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later; as if the previous three and a half years of fecklessness were not enough, the cast of mind manifest in the administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defence. The economic chaos resulting from military conflict in the Persian Gulf (and beyond) will further deepen the European fiscal crisis while making an already weak American economic recovery even more anaemic.
• The children and grandchildren of 7 November’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt, and may be an unserviceable amount of debt, which in either case will be an enormous drag on the economy, even as it mortgages America’s strategic options in Asia to the holders of United States government bonds in Beijing.
• The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”
• Religious freedom and civil society are now in greater jeopardy than ever, as what was already the most secularist and statist administration in history will, unfettered by re-election concerns, accelerate its efforts to bring free voluntary associations to heel as de facto extensions of the state.

Nothing changed? In a pig’s eye.

Europeans understood this, immediately, even if large swaths of the American punditocracy didn’t. One email from Poland, the morning after the election, expressed real fear for the future (as well my correspondent might, given President Obama’s craven whisperings to Dimitry Medvedev that a re-elected administration would pull the final plug on missile defence in Europe, as Vladimir Putin has long sought). Another, from London, suggested that Obama’s re-election was a cataclysm for America similar to Henry VIII’s break with Rome: a politico-cultural-economic game-changer the effects of which would be felt for centuries. A Scottish friend (correctly) foresaw serious trouble for the Catholic Church in the United States, to which he had long looked for models of leadership in handling aggressive secularism.

None of this was surprising, however. Five weeks before Election Day, I had lunch with the head of state of one of America’s closest European allies. When I asked him how our politics looked to him from a distance of some 3,500 miles, he replied, more in sorrow than in anger, “America is missing greatness.” Americans dubious of what they style “foreign entanglements,” who would otherwise shrug off such an observation, might think twice about it in light of a second Obama administration. For my luncheon host was not simply referring to a lack of American leadership abroad; he was, in a single, poignant phrase, speaking of a national will to diminishment that seemed to him evident in both the astonishing possibility that a failed president would be re-elected and the equally surprising inability of that president’s opponents to make a compelling case for change.

And here, too, is something for Republican strategists to ponder while sifting through the wreckage. Mitt Romney made himself a better candidate throughout 2012, and for one brief, electric moment at the first debate, he seemed like a leader with vision, passion, and wit. But a recovery of American greatness – cultural, political, economic, diplomatic and military greatness – was not the driving theme of the Romney campaign. Not knowing Mitt Romney personally, I can’t say whether this obviously decent and successful man simply lacked the understanding necessary to make the case for true American renewal, as distinct from thefaux hope-and-change mantra that had seduced so many in 2008.

But whatever Romney’s personal inclinations, many Republican campaign managers and consultants always seemed afraid of scaring the horses. Obama would be beaten, they insisted, on grounds of competence, not by a campaign that called the country to recognize that it need not settle for mediocrity, a campaign that summoned America to new heights of achievement. The themes for such a campaign were not difficult to imagine; they could have been built around a recasting of FDR’s four freedoms:

• Freedom of religion: No government bureaucrat in Washington is going to tell your religious community how to conduct its affairs.
• Freedom from fear: A Romney administration will not tolerate the burning of American embassies and the torture and murder of our diplomats by the thugs of al-Qa’eda and their jihadist allies.
• Freedom for excellence and accomplishment: Unshackling American ingenuity from the restraints of government interference will unleash new wealth-creating and wealth-distributing energies, even as that liberation empowers the poor to lead lives of self-responsibility through honest and dignified work.
• Freedom from unpayable debt: Your children and grandchildren must not be buried beneath a sludge pile of extravagance sluicing out of a national capital (and an administration) addicted to throwing oceans of money at problems.

Would it have worked? Who knows? But the issues would have been sharpened; the fake issues (“war on women,” “tax breaks for the rich” and so on) might have been marginalized; and a lot more energy – real political energy, not just energies bent on denying Obama a second term – might have been unleashed.

The counter-case, it must be admitted, has something to be said for it. Not the counter-case of the culture-wars-averse campaign consultants, but a counter-case that would run something like this (and that illustrates another great change, not initiated on election day but confirmed by the results): Whatever the clumsiness of Mitt Romney’s now infamous “47%” remark, the hard fact of the matter is that a critical mass of Americans are now so dependent on government (either directly or through public-sector unions) that any appeal to a larger national vision, much less a vision of personal responsibility, is impossible. So try to make the case that a Romney alternative to Obama will fix things without fundamentally altering the relationship between individual citizens (and families) and the post-New Deal, post-Great Society American welfare state.

There is, in hard truth, something here. That half the country was prepared to re-elect a manifestly failed president whose personal incapacities, like the incapacities of the bloated governmental bureaucracies over which he presided, were on full display in the weeks before the election, and in venues ranging from North Africa to Staten Island, is a very disturbing “indicator,” as the pollsters like to say. That a goodly proportion of that half of America seemed susceptible to the Obama campaign’s class warfare is also disturbing.

But perhaps most disturbing of all is the exit-poll data showing that a healthy majority of the electorate believed Obama more capable than Romney of handling foreign crises: and this, after the lethal fiasco of Benghazi, itself the embodiment of an ideologically driven pusillanimity in foreign policy that has been on display since the president’s apologize-for-America tour at the beginning of his first term. “Missing greatness,” it turns out, is not just a function of who’s in charge. It’s a result of democratic citizens’ not paying attention. Or worse, it’s the result of citizens’ suffering such severe ideological glaucoma that they cannot see what is in front of them.

What has obviously changed, in other words, is American political culture: and it is hard to make a case that that change has been for the better. Shortly after Ohio sealed the deal on election night, a friend (who earlier in the evening had said that she was having a hard time recognizing the country she grew up in) sent me an email with a salient Tocqueville quote:

“In the United States, the majority rules in the name of the people. This majority is chiefly composed of peaceful citizens who by taste or interest sincerely desire the good of the country … If republican principles are to perish in America, they will succumb only after a long social travail, frequently interrupted, often resumed; they will seem to be reborn several times, and they will disappear without return only when an entirely new people has taken the place of the one that exists in our day.”

So let’s spare ourselves the Bertolt Brecht bromide about a displeased government getting itself a new people, which is precisely the opposite of the point here, and ponder the serious question raised by Tocqueville, and put in more contemporary terms by another of my day-after-the-election email correspondents, a former senior White House official:

“Is it time 1) to conclude that what began in 1992 has provided 26 years of confirmatory evidence that the American experiment in ordered liberty has given way, decisively and irrevocably, to a crass and stupid commercial (and sexualized) culture, under a technical-administrative state, guided by the view that man is the measure of all things, and 2) to consider a refocusing of political efforts to the local level, which has its own problems of corruption, stupidity, and loss of tradition and virtue, but in some cases may permit of a politics in some measure noble and worthy?”

Unwilling to go quite that far into the Slough of Despond, I nonetheless recognize (and commend) the seriousness of the questions posed by these two friends. For while the surface manifestations of national politics (the presidency, control of the houses of Congress) may look “the same” to the less lucid elements of the punditocracy, the question of whether we have become, if not “an entirely new people” (pace Tocqueville’s warning), then a deeply divided people, one large part of which is now wedded to government in ways that gravely erode civic virtue, surely must be part of the post-2012 conversation.

And even if our cultural slide into a cheerful Gomorrah is not, as my second correspondent suggested, “irrevocable,” the effects of the culture of the imperial autonomous (and government-subsidized) Self on our politics must be reckoned with, as Republicans, conservatives and all those who felt a real emptiness settling upon them at 11pm on Tuesday night think through the economic reconstruction, the restoration of fiscal sanity, and the exercise of global responsibility that must be part of a post-Obama America, now unhappily deferred until at least January 2017.

It takes a certain kind of people, living certain indispensable virtues, to make the market and democracy work so that justice, prosperity and human flourishing are the net results of freedom. That elementary truth – recognized by the Founders, ignored by the newly re-elected administration, and avoided by libertarians and Republican campaign consultants – has to be at the centre of the conversation about the American future, and about playing good defence during the next four challenging years.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. This article originally appeared in the National Review Online.

Comments (20)

• The good news is that whenever anyone complains of Left-wing bias on the ABC again, we can just copy paste a link to this article.

  This article proves Poe’s Law – (paraphrased) it is impossible to tell the difference between genuine expressions of fundamentalist thought and satire.

• What a rant from someone who has an academic position. So thoughtful, so balanced, so accurate? – not.

  What did we do to deserve this on our ABC?

  Could do nothing but shake my head in befuddled bewilderment as I read this, ahem, ‘article’ by a, ahem, ‘Distinguished Senior Fellow’ of an, ahem, ‘Ethics’ and Public Policy Centre.’

• Two year olds could pick up some tips on tantrum-throwing from this.

   

• ” A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”

  W. Durant

   

• Rote chants of the embittered Right. they might have had more traction if it were not the same plainsong of the Republicans going back to FDR.
  There is no question that American Government is groaning under the inefficiency of an almost two and a half century old constitution and its elective eighteenth century monarchy. But that is not going to change any time soon.
  Republicans lost because they are the ,in ever sharper relief, the party of Angry White Anglo Males with nothing to offer the emerging America. If a Catholic Fellow cant seriously ask why the almost exclusively fundamentalist Catholic demographic of Latinos feels his party has nothing to offer them it seems blinkered. If a person afeared of a Middle Eastern War doesnt wonder why Jews voted in overwhelming majority for Obama, it seems careless.
  If those 99% ers who feel the poverty from forty years of declining real income and 1%er indulgence dont feel confidence in the Republican elitists. If the new evangelicals feel the need to reach beyond Ayn Rand and Capitalist Jesus coalition dont feel like the Republicans are the party of God then something is wrong.
  The Republicans should have won by all the indicators but they lost. They lost because they are, like the dinosaurs, Angry White Males now no longer rule the Universe.

   

• “Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is now set in legislative concrete”

  The Affordable Care Act does not legislate a government takeover of healthcare. It imposes regulations on the health care industry. These regulations will increase costs for health care providers. In order to pay for these increased costs, the Affordable Care Act mandates– through a tax penalty on individuals– that citizens be insured. The federal government does not and will not have full or partial ownership of any previously private insurance companies. There is no government takeover. The Affordable Care Act is a free-market solution. You can agree or disagree with the bill based on its own merits, but mischaracterizing it only serves to mislead people and to distract us from the important discussion we should be having.

  “The administration’s abdication of responsibility in Benghazi will have likely convinced a critical mass of the Israeli leadership that they have no choice but to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in self-defense.”

  When did the administration abdicate responsibility for the attack? I recall the secretary of state taking responsibility. I recall the president also taking responsibility, in the middle of a debate, no less, when he was most prone to political attack for it. What more do you want them to do? What exactly would entail taking responsibility? Stepping down from office? Every administration oversees tragedy. It’s their responsibility and the responsibility of the public to react in a mature fashion. From what I’ve seen, the administration is doing a better job than you are in that area.

  And you’re going to need more than a paragraph to justify how a United States diplomat murdered in Libya is going to convince Israel to attack Iran. In fact, you need a separate article to support that claim because as it stands, it makes no sense. Those are two separate issues involving completely different nations.

  The Benghazi incident was a tragedy. This is true. It’s also true that a nuclear Iran would be a volatile situation for Israel and for the world at large. What do these two situations have to do with each other besides taking place in the same general region? How is what happened to an AMERICAN in LYBIA going to convince ISRAEL to attack IRAN?

  Are you trying to say the weakness projected by the attack is going to convince Israel to take their self-defense into their own hands? I suppose that’s a possible scenario, but it’s hardly “likely.” You’re going to need more than three sentences to support such a bold claim. As it stands, it’s outlandish. It’s childish conjecture with the unfortunate stamp of legitimacy afforded by a published piece of “journalism.”

  There’s this much fuzzy reasoning and outright deception in your first three paragraphs alone. You then move on to social issues, and it o

   

• The Paul Hetherington poem “Uncle Bible” would not be out of place in accompanying this article.

  I don’t often agree with James Picone but he has a few salient points in his comment.

   

• What utter rubbish. Note to George Weigel, who obviously hasn’t grasped the significance of Barack Obama’s re-election yet: This sort of nonsense was unambiguously rejected by the majority of American voters. Time to leave the right-wing, religious-extremist, ideological bubble and return to the reality of 21st century Western democracy.

   

• “Obamacare, the governmental takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy, is now set in legislative concrete, and the progressive campaign to turn ever-larger numbers of citizens into wards of the state”

  Come to Australia. Our ‘socialised’ health care system delivers better health outcomes than your privatised one, at one half of the cost.

  “The children and grandchildren of 7 November’s voters have been condemned to bear the burden of what is certainly an unpayable mountain of debt”

  You do realise of course that most of that debt was racked up by Bush and Reagan in times of economic growth. The cut taxes without cutting programs. Obama’s contribution is what helped saved your country going back to 25% unemployment like it did in 1929, along with the scial upheaval and economic ruin that caused.

   

• Sometimes I’m amazed at what Scott puts on this website. This is just Weigel ranting about the fact that the American electorate is more attached to reality than he is. It’s about as informative as that old coot of an uncle we all have – the one who lives on a farm and will, with only the slightest provocation, explain why the world’s going downhill ever since those darned blackfellas got the vote.

  Honestly, Scott, how can you take him seriously when he seems to think that universal healthcare is a bad thing, somehow un-Christian? When he seems to think that the American national debt is a function of how long it’s been since a republican was in power? Who thinks that the founding fathers of America were Christian? Who thinks that the Republicans war on women is a ‘fake issue’ (this just in, George – women are slightly more than half the American electorate, and they tend to care about little things like rape apologetics)?

  The only positive about this article is how obvious George makes his bigotry. “booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy”? Seriously? Why don’t you just say “I hate women and homosexuals!”?

  If you don’t know what the Sandra Fluke comment was about, I strongly suggest looking it up. Apparently a woman expressing a political opinion backed with data isn’t allowed in Weigel’s universe.

  • Perhaps, instead of ranting about losing, Weigel and the GOP could spend a bit of time with an introspective look at why they failed.

    Treating the electorate (all of the electorate – not just the monied male ‘people of faith’) with a modicum of respect might be a good starting point.

     

• George, Jesus was full of grace and truth. Your article was neither.

  This article is do full of right-wing anti-factual assertion and bile it is was exceedingly hard to read all the way to the end.

  You made a big mistake posting this on an Australian website, because we live outside the right-wing bubble of untruths repeated so often as to take on the impression of truth to those captives within the bubble.

  Australia has a medicare system that is far more “socialist” than Obamacare. It works very well, and is far more efficient and just than the US medical system. Australians do not feel like “wards of the state”, simply grateful that we can receive high quality medical care when we need it without going into horrendous, life-crippling debt.

  Your concerns about secularism are derisory. Newsflash, the Holy Roman Empire is long dead. Thank God. The freedom to not be a Christian, or to not have to conform to Christian control of one’s personal life, is in no way a threat to Christians or any body else. It is only a threat to the abuse of power. When you read the Bible, you may choose to actually pay attention to the fact that Jesus condemned those who “strained out the gnat (imposing petty self-righteousness on others) and swallowed the camel (gross acts of economic and social injustice).

  As a Catholic, you utterly fail to observe a “preferential option for the poor”, preferring instead to treat the poor as deluded and unworthy of the vote (and I suspect, lazy and blameworthy).

  Your appeal to international support for your narrow-minded views is laughable. The overwhelming public opinion across the world (with the exception of Pakistan and Israel, 2 magnificent examples of theocratic political regimes worth not emulating) celebrated or at least was thankful for the Obama victory. He’s not the Messiah, nor a naughty boy, but he was and is so obviously better than the Republican option.

  Your slight against Obama regarding Benghazi is deeply offensive as well as factually wrong. I’m sure your view of Iran is equally aggressive, imperialistic and wrong. Israel’s (and the USA’s) hypocrisy regarding Iran is clearly displayed by their behaviour towards their complicity and breach of international law and agreements to enable or allow nuclear weapons for Israel itself, apartheid South Africa, and Pakistan. US governmet intelligence since when George W. Bush and through Obama’s term have stated that Iran is not close to obtaining nuclear weapons, and is not a ‘clear and present threat’.

  Finally, your deep lack of honesty was most manifest in your slating all responsibility for the debt onto Obama’s government. First, all honest commentators say that both Republican and Democrat governments (Congress & President) are responsible for failing to reign in the debt. Second, George W Bush was responsible for greater expansion of debt,

   

• I read with mounting cynicism this piece, knowing that hwen I checked the writer’s credentials, the gig would be up. And so it is: The William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Which makes this line all the more hilarious: “sacramentalized sodomy “.
  Surely that description is more suited to the Catholic clergy than the Democrats?
  The author needs to realise he and others of his mindset got a severe whipping from an electorate sick of fat establishment mysogynist males telling them what’s good for them.

   

  • A very inconvenient truth you have mentioned, T. Williams.

    There is nothing wrong with homosexuality. The Democrats are right and should be applauded for recognising this.

    There is everything wrong with child abuse and pedophilia. The Catholic Church actively covers up, enables and by logical extension supports the continued abuse of innocent children by its clergy.

    I know which of the two is morally repugnant, but the sleight of hand by Mr Weigel in attempting to draw parallels between homosexuality and immorality/”dictatorships of relativism” (a slippery slope argument if ever I’ve heard one) compared to the track record of his Church is nothing short of disgusting.

     

• From the article:

  “Religious freedom and civil society are now in greater jeopardy than ever, as what was already the most secularist and statist administration in history will, unfettered by re-election concerns, accelerate its efforts to bring free voluntary associations to heel as de facto extensions of the state.”

  What rot.

  Secularism means not favouring any religion – which means religious freedom is more secure than under a de-facto monoculture where only one religion is favoured.

  Also from the article:
  “A war in the Middle East is now almost certain, and sooner rather than later”

  Did the author miss the recent developments of rampant inflation in Iran, which brought them back to the negotiating table?

  I would dearly appreciate if ABC could encourage some semblance of logic within the opinion pieces it publishes. I’m all for varied opinion, but it should at least be coherent and backed up with facts, not fear-mongering and apologia.

   

  • Weigel’s quasi-Ciceronian diatribe against the decadence of Obama’s latter-day Imperial order and his call for a return to the pre-1992 ‘virtuous’ republic reveal much about the conservative mythical imagination in America but little, it seems, about contemporary historical realities. No doubt the conservative yearnings for this ideal, virtuous Republican past will only intensify as such realities become increasingly inescapable for them.

    http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/11/09/3629430.htm