President Obama’s inauguration speech was a giant dollop of
collectivist nonsense.
Apparently determined to seize the Constitution from
conservatives, the president spent much of his address making
pointed references to the Founding Fathers and our history.
America’s success, he declared, sprang not from our individual
freedoms, but from a peculiar kind of collectivism:
“[W]e have always understood that when times change, so must we;
that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to
new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately
requires collective action. For the American people can no
more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than
American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism
with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the
math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the
future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will
bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than
ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one
people.”
It goes without saying that Americans have been successful
because they’ve worked together. No person is a bubble. We can’t
live contently by ourselves, let alone build a house or a space
shuttle.
But by “do these things together,” the president doesn’t mean a
family raising a child or a business creating a product. He means
empowering government. He’s justifying the welfare state by citing
our history of common purpose. Americans cooperated to build
commercial steam engines, so let’s throw more money at the
Department of Transportation.
It’s a bizarre argument, and a relatively new one for the left.
Progressives used to justify government action by calling the
Constitution outdated. Left-wing intellectuals like Herbert Croly
said we needed to unmoor ourselves from our historical values and
usher in a grand age of statist intervention. Today’s liberals
embrace our history and then claim it contains a blueprint for
collectivism.
They’re wrong. Our history is filled not with huge government
interventions (although those are there), but with voluntary
associations. Americans have come together not because of some
national will, but because they wanted to create, think, talk, and
build, and they needed each other to do it. For all of James
Madison’s fretting about factions, independent organizations, often
in disagreement with each other, have been the stars in our
country’s constellation.
Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this when he came to the United
States in 1831. America, he observed in his seminal work
Democracy in America, was a land of associations.
“They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in
which all take part,” he wrote, “but associations of a thousand
other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or
restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations
to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to
construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the
antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and
schools.”
In this way, America was an entirely different nation than its
European cousins: “Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you
see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the
United States you will be sure to find an association.”
And unlike the French, Tocqueville drew a line between voluntary
associations and the federal government. Addressing the concern
that citizens become disempowered in a democracy, he wrote of his
fellow Frenchmen:
“I am aware that many of my countrymen are not in the least
embarrassed by this difficulty. They contend that the more
enfeebled and incompetent the citizens become, the more able and
active the government ought to be rendered in order that society at
large may execute what individuals can no longer
accomplish. They believe this answers the whole
difficulty, but I think they are mistaken.” (Emphasis added.)
That dangerous contention is shared by our president. If
Tocqueville were to travel through a wormhole and hear Obama’s
inauguration speech, it would send him staggering to the history
books to research how France successfully invaded America.
Instead he would find a gradual expansion of government that’s
blurred his line between associations and the state, culminating in
a president who thinks government overreach is a form of national
cooperation. For Obama, the associations that “build inns,” to use
one of Tocqueville’s examples, mesh with the federal government
that demands innkeepers obtain permits to serve alcohol. The state
is no longer a restrained protector of our freedoms. It’s just
another association, a harmless expression of the people. To
believe that is to abandon skepticism of domestic government power.
Which, of course, is exactly what the left wants.
What happens when power is shifted from voluntary associations
to big government? Tocqueville issued this dystopian warning:
It is easy to foresee that the time is drawing near when man
will be less and less able to produce, by himself alone, the
commonest necessaries of life. The task of the governing power will
therefore perpetually increase, and its very efforts will extend it
every day. The more it stands in the place of associations, the
more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together,
require its assistance: these are causes and effects that
unceasingly create each other. Will the administration of the
country ultimately assume the management of all the manufactures
which no single citizen is able to carry on? And if a time at
length arrives when, in consequence of the extreme subdivision of
landed property, the soil is split into an infinite number of
parcels, so that it can be cultivated only by companies of tillers
will it be necessary that the head of the government should leave
the helm of state to follow the plow? The morals and the
intelligence of a democratic people would be as much endangered as
its business and manufactures if the government ever wholly usurped
the place of private companies. Feelings and opinions are
recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed
only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another.
The president can rationalize big government all he wants. But
he can’t pretend it’s the same as the cooperation that made us
great. His ideal America, in which the benevolent federal
government solves all our problems, is what Tocqueville feared
most.
And besides, it’s just so…French.
