BY DR. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
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The media herd is stunned to discover that
Barack Obama is a man of the Left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches,
the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural
address, that is.
Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama
chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for ““malice toward none”“
ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.
But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his
transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four years ago
(February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social-democratic
manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”
Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care,
which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus
that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington
now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20
percent.
Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost
him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced
in Monday’s inaugural address.
It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1)
defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it
unrelentingly for the 21st.
The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly
obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — is the very
definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created when life
expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical technology was in
its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and technology have
rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that,
unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.
As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already begun that in his
first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another
grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created
green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory
apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas
tomorrow).
The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Václav Klaus
once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as
justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it
acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.
Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists of any Obama
interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was spectacularly
devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the post-industrial
democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an increasingly
insolvent entitlement state.
On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His
speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not
the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable,
artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American
system.
For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within
which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put
another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the
Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the
state.
In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to
Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government
is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And
then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed
15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the era of big
government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish
welfare.
Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old
ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order
where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of
government.
Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way
that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political
zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite
norm.
Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan
liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically
unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as
the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have
earned the title.
— Charles Krauthammer is
a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 the Washington Post Writers
Group.
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