From the pen of George Weigel:
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 reelected 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 the faux 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-Qaeda 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. And 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,” etc.) 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.
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Whatever the clumsiness of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” 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.
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There is, in hard truth, something here. That half the country was prepared to reelect 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.
I found myself struggling yesterday morning to explain my deep sorrow to my wife upon discovering that Obama had won. She thought I was attaching too much importance to one man. Isn’t our hope found elsewhere? Well, yes, certainly, but I had to explain that it was more like watching a life-long friend succumb to a drug addiction than losing hope personally. My sorrow was not so much over what Obama has or hasn’t done, but what his re-election says about our electorate, our country.
The simple fact of the matter is that if you are offering financial responsibility, personal liberty (and the responsibilities that go along with it), religious freedom, and the inspiration to greatness, both personally and as a country, no one is buying what you are selling. You might as well be trying to sell horse carriages in competition with Lexus. At twice the price. At least you would probably not be demonized for selling horse carriages (Although with PETA around, you never know).
Conservatives are wondering what they could have done better to appeal to the American voter or how they could have better run the campaign. It’s actually quite simple. Stop being conservative. Enable people’s dysfunctional desire to be victimized by telling them it’s not their fault and awarding them (non-existant) money from the government for their perceived umbrage. Demonize the wealth-producers and non-antitheists. Glorify our enemies. Murder babies. Pay to have babies murdered, for that matter. And above all, promise people that they will be able to achieve orgasm in whatever twisted manner suits them and condone their every unnatural sexual act.
Personal irresponsibility sells. Class warfare sells. Religious hatred sells. Sex sells. Conservatism doesn’t.
One potential hope for our country is lies ironically in natural selection: Christians are the only people I personally know right now who are reproducing and passing their beliefs on to their children. Most people I know in the Church that are my age are occupied with two, three, four children. Most that I know outside the Church are not married, and are certainly not looking to raise a child. My homosexual friends are certainly not reproducing. I cannot imagine how a culture obsessed with non-reproductive sexual activity and infanticide intends to be influential for more than one generation. By definition they are against the next ever coming into being…
There is no short comment I can make in response to this, so let me quote a long one.
She is most certainly worth fighting for. However, I don’t know if many of us understand what that will cost us. We seem to think that the fight will be intellectual or physical and we tell ourselves that we are ready for that. In reality, I think it will be much more akin to helping an addict recover.
Anyone who has ever befriended an alcoholic or drug addict, or even worked with them, will have some idea of the kind of sacrifice, resources, and willingness to be hurt that is needed by a multitude of people to win that one addict back, and even then, despite the best efforts and unavenged and forgiven wounds of an entire community, that person may still decide to self-destruct. We must love the unlovable, bless them when they curse us, repay evil with kindness, forgive, and above all pray. Our Savior has shown us the way, and we too must find the strength to say “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” It may cost us what it cost Him, but there truly is no other way. Our country is more or less thoroughly addicted to those oh-so-salable cultural drugs I listed previously. It has already chosen to ignore its own well-being for just one more hit.
I pray to God that He endows me with His strength and love for those that have knowingly or unknowingly taken our country down this path, because I know that my pitiable imitations of strength and love is certainly not up to the task. I would rather rage, argue, show them why they are wrong, beat them, write them off, ignore them as being beyond the pale, anything but love them. And even with His help, America and her people may still choose to turn to destruction.
I cannot help but mourn.
Very well said. You speak with the tongue of angels. My heaven strengthen me to stay away from the temptations you list, to argue, to rage, to ignore, all of which (alas!) I am all too prone to do!
Alas I find my own temptation towards despair and callousness. (This is why I believe God must be infinite love, because there’s no way He could be any less and still bother with us – I know I wouldn’t.)
Alas it seems that foolishness and misery is our natural state and “the West” was but an aberration, a brief heaven on earth, we were granted for a time that must pass away. Maybe I can do my part as a storyteller and preserve the legends of this golden time to give hope to the generations after me, but history tells me it wouldn’t matter, we’re always in such a hurry to throw out Eden.
Still, I must thank you guys for giving me some strength to suffer fools another day.
Read Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. At the end of the Great War (World War One) he could see the writing on the wall, that the kingdom of men, and good life, was passing away, and that before the period modern children even consider the good life to have started!
One reason, oddly enough, I now think Christianity is true is because it is difficult. I should say, back when I was a Stoic, and something very near to an Objectivist, I also held them to be true because of their difficulty, and to this day I think the difficult parts, being rational, being productive, having self control, are the parts where these virtuous pagans were practicing true virtue. (I think Ayn Rand got it wrong exactly where she went soft, such as her apologetics for divorce and adultery in the name of true love.)
One of the harder words of Christianity to practice is hope, and one of the harder vices to avoid is despair. Every generation has an echo of being flung out of Eden, something that reminds them of that primary and primordial loss. Every generation is tempted to wish for the deluge.
If it is any comfort, we Christian firmly believe that it will get worse, far worse, on Earth before it gets better. We are expecting a false Prophet to arise in the East, and for the beast of all the political powers of the Earth to ally with it, and for their to be turmoil, and bloodshed, and tears unnumbered, like none have ever seen before.
And we believe in a happy ending.
If you think about it, the agnostics and atheists, since they believe entropy will win in the end no matter what, and that death comes under all estates, and time consumes all races, nations, species, worlds and stars, they also believe things will get worse. They just think the story ends there. Nobody lives happily ever after because nobody lives. Despair is not a sin for them because it is their default setting. The self-medicate and benumb the despair with some form of diversion, either a healthy one, like making money (Ayn Rand) or an unhealthy one, like envying those who make money (Marx) or a very unhealthy one, like indulging in as many empty pleasures as you might before you die (Hugh Hefner, the Marquis de Sade, Timothy O’Leary).
The disciplines in Christianity, things like hope and chastity, meekness and charity, which prevent these acts of self medication and self stupefaction are usually regarded as the narrow, judgmental, impractical, harsh and unpleasant rigors which all right thinking people must avoid. In reality, these disciplines increase our joy.
Hopeful people are happier than despairing people, even if the hopeful man is in the poorhouse, or the jail, or the hospital, and the despairing man is in his counting house, or his harem, or his opium den.
It is not easy being hopeful when the world is going to Hell, and the Roman Empire is falling and it seems the world ends. Indeed, it is impossible. But with God, all things are possible.
During election night, I cheered in irony because if I did not laugh I would not know what to do. The greatness in this sarcastic folly struck me only the following day in conversation with a friend, a God-fearing man who means well — and voted for Mr. Obama.
“But what about abortion? How is that not terrible?”
“It’s just one issue … ”
True to form, I cut him off bitterly, and the weight on my shoulders increased with every word: “It is not an issue. It’s everything. How can it be an issue when the scale boggles the mind? What is it, 45 million in the United States alone, since the ’70s?”
Any man who openly advocates for abortion may seem a nice man, a decent man, who loves his daughters and means well. But these otherwise noble qualities do not redeem a man, but condemn him. It is kinder, in a sense, to Mr. Obama if we demonize him. For the other option is that he is a dupe, willing or unwilling.
Clean, nice, kind Mr. Obama, with a long solemn face wracked with what might be genuine torment advocates for the clearest, crispest moral evil our country has ever endured and cannot endure for much longer.
It would almost be best if he really were an America-hating devil, a Socialist fifth columnist, a Balrog clothed in nightmare. But instead he is a man who appears, by every indication, to believe he is doing good by doing the very wrongest thing there is in this world.
Evil prevails when good men do nothing, or so goes the adage. This is centrally the tragedy of Mr. Obama: He is not just a good man doing nothing, but a good man doing everything upside down without seeming to notice it, aiding and abetting one of the greatest natural evils the world could possibly know. It is as if a man with a wide, friendly smile began to clean the kitchen by dipping his mop in pus and bile and the droppings of a diabetic.
Interesting remarks which inspired considerable reflection in me: http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/11/on-the-enormities-of-kindly-men/
Isn’t this exactly what we’d expect in the end stages of a Gramscian revolution? In my lifetime, for example, the way I was taught American history changed radically just from middle school to college, even what was considered worthy of the ‘canon’. A necessary part of this is a near inversion of traditional morality, where victimhood is glorified, considered more authentic and worthy of attention, than strength and self-sufficiency.