The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection

The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection
By: David Harsanyi
3/4/2013 05:00 AM

Nationally syndicated columnist and Human Events editor David Harsanyi’s new book Obama’s Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection is out today.

“This is not a book for the faint-hearted. In chilling detail, David Harsanyi exposes the brutal and bloody dangers looming ahead during Obama’s second term. Harsanyi outlines how the Nanny State progressive-in-chief has enabled the four horsemen of debt, dependency, national decline, and the culture of death. Yes, it is apocalyptic. No, it is not irreversible. Conservatives must pray, pick themselves up, and pull together to turn our country back from Obama’s highway to hell. America must heed Harsanyi’s prophetic work!”

—Michelle Malkin, New York Times bestselling author of Culture of Corruption

You can order the book on Amazon. Below is a free chapter.

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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? The Book of Revelation? Fire? Brimstone? Armageddon? The Last Judgment?

Really, David? Yes, really.

As metaphors go, it’s an entirely apt one. To begin with, Conquest, Famine, War, Death—the four horsemen of the Obama Era— are coming, and they are coming in the form of a national debt disaster, an epidemic of government dependence, an erosion of our world standing, and a nihilistic view about the value of human life. If our federal government had been inclined to do anything to avoid these impending catastrophes—and I’m not sure it ever was—that day has now passed. Barack Obama’s reelection ensures we’ll be deal- ing with some level of societal instability and economic calamity in the future. No, these calamities won’t transform us into Bangladesh, and they won’t mean the United States will cease to exist. They will only mean that this particular iteration of the United States will be no more.

Change, of course, doesn’t always imply impending disaster. Americans seldom accept that terrible events can befall them. We have solid reasons not to. Truth is, I have always been somewhat of a utopian regarding our prospects. I operated under the rosy assumption that our free markets, individual liberty, technological superiority, astonishing wealth, and Constitutional protections (however eroded they may have become) would allow us to adapt to or over- come nearly anything—recessions; wars; terror attacks; demographic shifts; environmental disaster; and, the most treacherous of all threats, Washington. Regrettably, I underestimated Washington.

President Barack Obama didn’t invent the impending disasters America faces—not our debt problem, not our welfare state—but he did accelerate nearly every one of them. It’s not only that the president’s progressive politics have battered economic dynamism, ham- strung capitalism, and discredited the importance of meritocracy; it’s that, in the Obama era, the relationship between the average Ameri- can citizen and his government has been transformed forever into something unhealthy.

Using frightening religious symbolism in this political argument also makes sense because Obama has consistently portrayed his political aims as the great moral cause of our time, one that pits the highway to hell forces of decency and empathy against the self-serving profiteers of the old guard. His central case for government’s existence rests on the notion that the state is society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity, and the arbiter of fairness. Obama treats government as a theocrat treats his Church—but he’s got an army and the Internal Revenue Service to ensure your participation.

Anyone who stands in the way of Obama’s vacuous moral constructs is branded an obstructionist, unpatriotic, a hostage taker, “the enemy,” or worse. Those of us who refuse to buy into left-wing orthodoxy remain “uninformed” and, inevitably,“selfish,” a bunch of bigoted clods, intellectual buffoons, and moral cripples who got our deserved comeuppance in the 2012 election. If we continue to insist that partisanship is a healthy, organic reflection of differences in a vibrant society—Republicans, after all, still control the House—we can expect to be demonized as remnants of a brutal and obsolete age. Under Obama and his progressive successors, all must submit to the progressive agenda. You saw a bit of this after the election when liberal commentators kept crowing about how the Republican party is a rump party of elderly white males; either the party changes—by which the liberals mean, becomes more progressive—or they gleefully predict it will die.

Progressives are in power, and Obama has treated the political arena as a massive socialist revival meeting. Obama spent four years preaching his own brand of progressive morality: everyone “must” sacrifice. Obama challenged Americans “to find meaning in some- thing greater than themselves,” and by that “something greater,” he meant government. Every initiative he proposes, every law he signs, is an expansion of the state.

The American political conversation is not what it used to be. We’re no longer debating policy, no longer talking about whether government should be merely huge or whether it should be ginormous. We’re not really wrangling over what levels of debt or spending are acceptable. We are in a clash for the soul of our country.

And we’re losing.

Here are the facts. Obama won reelection convincingly in 2012. There was no theoretical hope-peddling this time around. There was no mystery about what Obama stood for. He had a record of com- prehensive economic failure, of divisiveness, of attacks on freedom of religion. He had a record of relentless class warfare, cronyism, incompetence, and stagnation. There were many broken promises. This time around, Barack Obama wasn’t bashful about plying the most explicitly left-wing agenda in presidential history—more government, more taxes, more dependency, more bailouts, more regulations—and he won easily. He promised government-run health care, more crony “investments” in proven economic losers, more interference in markets, more coercion, and more redistribution—yet he cruised to victory. He promised these things as the economy sputtered and his foreign policy crumbled.

Conservatives lost, and the prospects are grim.

If you’re a conservative, you might be shocked by the statist slogans tossed around at the Democratic National Convention about government being “the only thing that we all belong to.” You might be completely scandalized to hear an American president utter the words “you didn’t build that,” and to argue that private businesses owe their success to a beneficent government. You might think these statist sentiments are outrageous. But your neighbors? Not so much. We talk about liberty, but many Americans are far less worried about preserving individual freedom and far more attracted to politicians who make promises about what government can do for them.

Things can change to some extent. Political variables are always in motion. A retooled and revamped Republican Party might help. Perhaps a new charismatic leader can better articulate the values of mainstream conservatism. But let’s not fool ourselves. There’s been a fundamental shift, especially among young people, in how Americans view government’s role in society that will be difficult to ever turn around. A Pew Research study conducted after the election found that nearly six in ten of the voters under thirty supported a more expansive role for government in solving problems.

Put it this way: in a post-election poll, Gallup found that more than half of Democrats and left-leaning Americans had a positive view of socialism. Democrats—the majority party in the United States—have a more positive image of the federal government than they do of capitalism. And there is every reason to believe that it will get worse, as Obama works at expanding the power of government, at telling us that government knows best and is the highest calling (and a darn good employer), that government has the answers to all our problems and can take care of us. As recent elections bear out, a large portion of the electorate is happy to embrace this vision.

Feeling depressed? Well, hey, nothing is meant to last forever. With all that’s gone on, all the divisive rhetoric, all the political ploys, all the executive abuse, all the hyper-nastiness, one may have forgotten that the Golden Age of Obama dawned with a call to fundamentally remake America. Mission accomplished. If you happen to believe, as I do, that government should be strong, but limited, and that individual freedom is more vital than fairness—guess what? We’re screwed. And how.

Order David Harsanyi’s new book Obama’s Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection
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