There may be no other group in American life whose collective self-image is as distorted as the media’s. Over the years, the press has worked hard to sustain the notion of themselves as grizzled, cynical enemies of entrenched power. If that were true (and consistently applied), we’d live in a much different world – one where The New York Times’ bestseller list was filled with books about libertarian bias in the media. But it’s not.
If you want to understand the true temperament of our journalistic elite, then you need to understand teenagers. That’s basically what most reporters are. They are indeed jaded, but selectively so. Like adolescents, their condescension is facile and often more socially than intellectually motivated. But the other trait they share with their high school counterparts is a capacity for unquestioning romanticism. When members of the media do fall for something, they fall hard.
Perhaps that explains why their current coverage of Democratically-controlled Washington makes it sound as if the French Revolution is breaking out in the streets of our nation’s capital. NBC reporter Dawna Friesen characterized the reaction to President Obama’s inauguration as “America’s euphoria” and “the beginning of a new era”. CBS’s Mark Phillips declared him the world’s new leader. And ABC’s George Stephanopoulos touted his first 100 days as “shock and awe on the domestic front.”
At the same time, the media have spent the four months that Obama has been in office holding a jazz funeral for the right. A Los Angeles Times column, cribbing from Abraham Lincoln, accuses Republicans of being “locked in the dogmas of their quiet past, unable to think and therefore act anew.” A recent Time Magazine cover story accuses the GOP of a “Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression”, a criticism equal parts historically illiterate and incoherent (debt is not prosperity). And Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank opines that “even when conservatism is made pure, it won’t be able to govern.”
A generous judgment of this coverage would quote the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “nonsense on stilts.” The country is not being reborn. Times may be tough, but sensible Americans seem to realize that this is not the American Revolution, the Civil War or the Great Depression. And short of existential crises of that stripe, Americans tend to be satisfied with the broad status quo that has served us so well over the past 233 years.
The greatest proof that we are not in a revolutionary moment, however, may come from Obama himself. For while the president’s plans are certainly ambitious, they are not even remotely original. And to misunderstand this is to misunderstand the entire essence of Obama’s success. Barack Obama isn’t offering the American people anything new. He’s offering them something old in a new (and deceptive) way.
What Obama has wisely jettisoned is the millstone that has hung around liberalism’s neck since the McGovern years: honesty. Hard experience has taught the left that on a litany of issues – raising taxes, exploding spending, forcing a government takeover of health care, going after guns – they cannot win the support of the electorate. So the president has cleverly framed his most liberal positions as anything but.
Thus, Obama is able to quadruple the deficit by redistributing the taxes that makes government spending so unpopular. As he shifts the burden to an increasingly small portion of the population, he will concentrate the economic squeeze almost exclusively on the productive classes. This is a Machiavellian move that guarantees that a majority of the federal government’s revenues will come from a minority of its voters, ensuring they will never have the requisite political power to fight back. It translates to real pain for America’s entrepreneurs, inventors and creators. But it translates to a free lunch for everyone else.
On health care, he has figured out that there is a method that can bring the single-payer model to America – but it is by inches. That is why one of the centerpieces of Obama’s proposal has been a public plan that “competes” with private sector health care providers – a proposal that has co-opted the right’s insistence on consumer choice. But imagine what it’s like when one of your competitors writes all the laws and has an endless supply of money. With Washington stacking the deck, an increasing number of health care providers will either go out of business or be forced to essentially adopt the public sector’s standards.
On the environment, Obama touts cap-and-trade as a “market-based solution” despite the fact that its insistence on artificial scarcity is the exact opposite of a free market. On energy, he touts the merits of creating “millions of green jobs” while keeping quiet about the fact that – like all such meddling in the production of private goods – this will simply redistribute wealth rather than creating it. And on guns, he insists on a pious reverence for the Second Amendment while his Department of Defense attempts to disrupt the supplies of ammunition to the private market (a cunning bit of strategy that ultimately failed because of a backlash from ammo merchants).
Those who wish to fight back against Obama’s statist agenda would be well-advised to expose these deceptions for what they are. If they don’t, the public will only learn the truth once many of these initiatives have already been implemented. And conservatives weary of defeat would do well to mimic Obama’s strategy of putting old wine in new bottles (albeit in a more earnest fashion).
Conservative principles aren’t dead – indeed, most of us who believe in them hold that they’re tethered to the nature of reality. But they are in need of better articulation. Thoughtful conservatives ought to be able to make the case that free markets are the ultimate form of populism – because they empower individuals rather than bowing to either privileged corporations or venal unions. They ought to be able to make the case that a strong foreign policy is less an assertion of American imperialism than a recognition of universal human rights (how is diplomacy coming on liberating the people of Sudan or Burma?). And they ought to be able to make the case that government can’t grow without individual rights shrinking.
Obama has shown that the right sales job can do wonders for even the most discredited ideas. Now the conservative movement needs to marshal that strategy in service of our own principles. If we do, we’ll have an opportunity to show the left what a real revolution looks like.