The Obama Presidency Increasingly Resembles a Modern-Day Ancien Régime: Extravagant and Out of Touch with the American People

From The Telegraph
By Nile Gardiner

President Barack Obama (Photo: REUTERS)

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions.

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

It is epitomised above all by the President’s relentless drive towards big government against the will of the American people, and the dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing, which threaten to leave the US hugely in debt for generations. It is also showcased by Barack Obama’s drive towards a socialised health care system, which, as I’ve noted before, is “a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government.”

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

Did de Tocqueville Predict Today's Crisis?

From Faster, Please!
By Michael Ledeen

Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago. What a pity! No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville.

The economics of the current expansion of state power in America are, as I said, “fascist,” but the politics are not. We are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.” Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First World War. Fascism hailed the men who fought and prevailed on the battlefield, and wrapped itself in the well-established rhetoric of European nationalism, which does not exist in America and never has. Our liberties are indeed threatened, but by a tyranny of a very different sort.

Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it.

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Conservatives Have Important Political Value

From Aberdeen News
By Jon D. Schaff

The election drubbing recently taken by Republicans has given rise to much soul searching on the part of conservatives. What is the future of conservatism?

The conservative serves an important role in any regime. This is perhaps best illustrated by the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the slave who would ride behind a victorious Roman general during the triumphant return to Rome whispering in his ear “All glory is fleeting.”

The conservative's task is similar. It is for him to whisper in our ears “there are limits.” Human reason is not sufficient to solve all problems. Sin cannot be eradicated from the human soul. Society is sufficiently complex that it makes central planning difficult, if not impossible.

In the 19th century, Alexis De Tocqueville noted democracy's dangerous tendency to trust in the “indefinite perfectibility of man.”

But the conservative teaches that perfection is impossible. I recently asked a group of students what “utopia” means. They responded “a perfect society.” True enough, as this is how we often use the word. But “utopia” literally is from the Greek for “nowhere.” In other words, the perfect society is impossible.

Our love of even good things, conservatives teach us, must be a moderate love. To turn any particular thing into the sin qua non of justice is actually to do injustice.

The conservative reminds us that progress always comes with a cost. Perhaps one error of contemporary conservatives is to believe that the market is the sole of justice, perhaps promoting an immoderate love of the “progress” of economic change.

Conservatism suggests there is something worth conserving. As Abraham Lincoln famously put it, if conservative means favoring “the old and tried against the new and untried,” then he was a conservative. Lincoln gets at a central conservative truth: there is wisdom stored up across the ages that one discards at great peril.

Human order is a fragile thing. C.S. Lewis reminds that even war is not outside the norm of the human condition; war only “aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it,” and “human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.”

It took roughly 4,000 years to build a civilization that was not brutal and vulgar. We are to be reminded that the now seemingly barbaric “eye for an eye” was actually a major advance in human decency. If you kill one of mine I will only kill one, as opposed to all, of yours. Yet civilization is fragile, on a precipice as Lewis puts it. Conservatives do their job best when they remind us of the value of the past and to innovate only with great trepidation.

This is why conservatives question the redefining of marriage, the diminution of the sacredness of human life in the name of “choice” and the rejection, indeed outright mockery, of traditional religion. If Western civilization was built on the solid foundation of the Christian church and the morality it promoted (if not always practiced), then only a certain kind of ideological arrogance suggests that we can casually dispense with that foundation and retain the fruits of that civilization.

Conservatives will prove the faithful opposition if they successfully remind that majority that even audacious hope needs its limits.


Jon D. Schaff is associate professor of political science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, North Dakota. The views presented here are the author's own and do not represent those of Northern State University.