May 15, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
Barack Obama's America
Fast forward to 2012.
By Michael Novak
One of the wisest American former officials I know asked me a few nights
ago: "Michael, put on your thinking cap, and tell me where the United
States
will be four years from now, if Barack Obama is president."
I had been trying to avoid that question in my own mind. I have tried to
tell myself the old proverb (told me by my father), "God takes care of
children, drunks, and the United States of America." I have tried to
imagine
that Obama will not be president.
But I should try to do the responsible thing: follow the trail from
Obama's
announced principles and policies to their probable effects, based on how
we
have learned that the world actually works.
The number one issue, orders of magnitude greater than others, is what
will
happen in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other sources of worldwide terrorism -
suicide bombers, haters of Israel, and would-be destroyers of the United
States and her allies. What will happen in Iraq? What will happen in Iran?
What will happen in Pakistan?
Our Democratic party ever since George McGovern's candidacy in 1972 has
wished and wished, like an undisciplined child, for a benevolent world of
peace, in which we could "talk to" and "reason with" those leaders whom
earlier administrations had learned they could neither trust nor deal with
as rational, benevolent partners. Earlier administrations had also hoped
that other leaders of nations respected us, and meant us well. Events like
the bombing of the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, and
September 11, 2001, plus the subsequent fury and irrational cruelty of
jihadists around the world, disillusioned them. But not, apparently,
Obama;
nor many members of the left-wing generation he represents.
The partisans of the welfare state demand peace, in order to pay for its
insatiable need to keep handing out more and more benefits. That is why
left-wing statists take peace as their natural inheritance. They cannot go
on without it. They do not intend to pay any price for it; there are no
funds left for that.
Given the historical record of the last 200 years (and more), what can we
expect from this nursery-room fantasy? An untypical, even unprecedented
era
of peace? Or, on the contrary, the salivating determination of enemies to
celebrate our visible moral weakness, and to slay their hated enemy while
we
bow our heads, standing there as weak and frightened supplicants? When a
head is lowered from weakness, they strike it off.
In my experience, unwillingness to fight earns one contempt, further
furies
of terror, and truly bitter war. But perhaps other observers trust human
nature more than I.
If the United States shows signs of weakness, surrender, and a one-sided
departure from Iraq, the rejoicing of those who predicted that they would
in
the end defeat us will profoundly strengthen their resolve for the next
battle. Further, without an offensive thrust in Iraq, any military forts
or
airfields of ours would be sheltered in a defensive enclave - announcing
to
those who hate us that they should keep killing two or more Americans
every
day, drip, drip, drip, until the American people cannot stand it any more.
Weakness once shown invites fiercer aggression.
Iran will thus have its nuclear weapon by 2012, secure in the knowledge
that
Americans have no heart to do battle to prevent it.
In Pakistan, forces of economic and political development will know that
they can no longer count on the Americans as a last resort. They would
soon - to save their families - begin to yield more and more space to
jihadists, terrorists, and promoters of sharia law. Free nations by 2016
will be far weaker than now, with far less space in which to alter the
direction of terrorism.
Domestic Policy
Meanwhile, if Obama keeps his pledge to raise taxes on the top 10 percent
of
income earners (or even on the top 2 percent), he will give them enormous
incentives to alter their behavior, so as to show lower income. Since the
top 1 percent of earners pay over 35 percent of all income taxes paid by
all
Americans, any decline in their income means a steep decline in tax
revenues. Obama seems to have no comprehension that raising tax rates at
the
top dramatically lowers revenue coming in. He will learn the hard way.
His policies on quasi-universal health care will change all the incentives
in our current health system - and for the worse. Studies show that a high
proportion of demands for health care are the result of personal behaviors
-
eating or drinking too much, not exercising enough, leading a dissipated
life, not taking advantage of preventive care, spending health dollars
heedlessly (because they are paid by the State, not the responsible
individual).
Many older doctors will leave medical practice rather than become
employees
of the State, constantly regulated, badgered, and demeaned. The idea of
medicine as a proud, independent, inventive profession will be profoundly
wounded. In hospitals, paying benefits for patients (even if they practice
irresponsible behaviors) will demand ever more dollars, which must
necessarily be pulled out of research and invention. Long bureaucratic
lists
of those needing particular operations will force even the neediest
patients
to wait long months before they can get care.
Neither Obama nor his party seems to understand how incentives motivate
human behavior - not force, not coercion, not mockery, not nursery-school
regulation, but real possibilities of good fruits up ahead for free and
responsible actions. They do not understand the wellsprings of a virtuous,
free, and prosperous society. They are still entangled in the fantasies of
the European Left of 150 years ago.
Thus, Obama is now the creature and the prisoner of the American far Left,
which has learned nothing from the failures of socialist and statist and
anti-capitalist ideas during the past hundred years. Many leftists learn
nothing, know nothing, and propel themselves not with practical wisdom,
but
with outrage and contempt and a desire to punish those who do not agree
with
them.
My friend himself thought, he finally revealed, that the West has come to
an
epochal axial point in history. From now on, economic and political
progress
would grow far less quickly than ever before, and a long-lasting,
precipitous decline is about to begin. Overseas, and also at home.
Morally, too, virtue and character and responsibility for oneself would be
mocked and discouraged. The State would take over more and more of life.
Although licentiousness would be glorified on big screen and small screen
(the Democrats favor the Hollywood view of the world, and vice versa),
neither self-directed liberty nor self-mastery nor responsibility for the
consequences of one's own behavior would be encouraged. These would be
treated as retrograde ideas. All virtue would be attributed to the
motherly
caring State - and to its political managers. Woe to the "right-wing"
dissenters!
Well, maybe I am wrong. But that is how I see things, admittedly through a
cloudy glass.
My only two suppositions are (1) that Obama will do exactly what he now
says
he will do; and (2) that we may dimly discern the consequences likely to
flow from his words and actions, based upon what we have seen happen in
other decades and other generations.
My most hopeful moments derive from imagining that Obama, as president,
will
be dissuaded from acting as he now says that he will. In that way, God
will
once again take care of those who are drunk on statist illusions, and He
will once again take care of the United States, despite itself. It is when
I
take Obama at his word that pessimism floods over my heart.
- Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in
religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy,
and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own
website
is www.michaelnovak.net.
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National Review Online -
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