It is part of the responsible exercise of intelligence to recognize the difference between ideas that work and produce desirable outcomes and those which merely produce a form of moral intoxication. The modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
As a society, Mr. Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are “crumbling.” There are “lines in the emergency rooms” of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is “rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.” He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life’s difficulties (“high gas bills, insufficient health insurance and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable”), have become bitter and unhappy. He promises us “Change.”
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“Change we can believe in.” Like the Nicene Creed, Obama’s doctrine begins in belief. Credo. Once we believe in the possibility of a transformative politics, “the perfection begins.” The selfish politics of the present yields to the selfless politics of the future.” So believing, we can replace a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism with a politics that fosters unity and peace. In Mr. Obama’s “project of national renewal,” government can become an expression of “our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity.”
Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system’s wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make sense of our condition.
“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” - David Hume.
George E. Cort
Montrose
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