These are the most foreboding times in my 59 years. The reelection of Barack Obama has released a surge of rare honesty among the Left about its intentions, coupled with a sense of triumphalism that the country is now on board for still greater redistributionist change.This is from Victor Davis Hanson's sobering piece: 2013: Welcome to Very, Very Scary Times (via Instapundit). Please read it all.
There is no historical appreciation among the new progressive technocracy that central state planning, whether the toxic communist brand or supposedly benevolent socialism, has only left millions of corpses in its wake, or abject poverty and misery. Add up the Soviet Union and Mao’s China and the sum is 80 million murdered or starved to death. Add up North Korea, Cuba, and the former Eastern Europe, and the tally is egalitarian poverty and hopelessness. The EU sacrificed democratic institutions for coerced utopianism and still failed, leaving its Mediterranean shore bankrupt and despondent.
Nor is there much philosophical worry that giving people massive subsidies destroys individualism, the work ethic, and the personal sense of accomplishment. There is rarely worry expressed that a profligate nation that borrows from others abroad and those not born has no moral compass. There is scant political appreciation that the materialist Marxist argument — that justice is found only through making sure that everyone has the same slice of stuff from the zero-sum pie — was supposed to end up on the ash heap of history.
We are not the first profoundly arrogant yet hopelessly misguided generation lulled into believing that we are somehow immune from the brutish realities of collectivism, that we are somehow detached from history and human nature. We believe we will spared the death and destruction of statism because -- why exactly? -- because we're smarter or more enlightened or more virtuous than those who murdered and starved tens of millions? Of course, that's what each of those generations thought as well.
America without the American idea -- limited government, rule of law instead of rule of men and individual liberty and responsibility -- is not America, no matter what name you put on a map.
This is why we fight.
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