Given Enough Rope These Democrats Just Might Hang Liberalism

For a while now I have maintained the belief that there is a silver lining to having Barack Obama in the White House.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that America is now in decline and it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out why. In fact it can be summed up in one word. Liberalism. From the inane belief that we as a nation can and should do something about the supposed phenomenon of man-caused global warming to the failed view that more and more government involvement is the best way to promote our collective well being, the increasing influence of liberalism is crippling America.

Who needs an external threat when a significant portion of your nation’s citizenry blindly accepts the notion that destroying capital (perfectly good cars) is good public policy; or when your leading legislative institution feels it doesn’t need to read 1000 page bills that spend hundreds of billions of dollars; or when your chief executive believes he can charm committed enemies out of their pursuit of nuclear weapons. As Abraham Lincoln said, “America will not be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

No it’s clear that we have a problem and the problem here is not the American people, where the ultimate power in our society lies. The problem is liberalism and its ridiculously undeserved position of prominence in the minds of many Americans. Sure one could argue that decent fair-minded Americans are no longer the majority in this country or at least not a strong enough one to turn back this big government tide, but I don’t subscribe to this belief quite yet.

So how did we get here? How did a philosophy that is made up of theories that are at best entirely untested and at worst completely ineffective or downright disastrous, gain such traction in our society?

Thomas Jefferson said, “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Power corrupts as they say. It seeks more power. But a people won’t willingly cede authority unless they believe they will get something of real value in return. This something might be a welfare check or simply the “promise” that these welfare checks are in the best interests of the society as a whole. Whatever they are specifically, in the big picture they are one giant utopian mirage.

Liberalism (or statism as Mark Levin more accurately terms it) is thus a grand scheme used to amass power. With it there is always a promise of something in return. A promise that the money deducted from your paycheck will be successfully used to improve the position of the collective. A promise that the higher prices you will encounter will save the earth. But as with the hope in hope and change, these promises are more often than not empty.

As I’ve mentioned liberalism has been on the rise in this country and its increasing influence amongst journalists, educators, government officials, and those in the legal profession has been the main reason that it now holds such sway with so many Americans. As it stands now liberalism is the dominant ideology amongst the influential in this country and the resulting barrage of liberal nonsense to which Americans are exposed has stripped a significant number of them of any intimate connection to the principles that have made this nation great.

The beating that traditional American principles have taken at the hands of liberal elites has been achieved to a great extent through the application of two practices: crediting liberalism for the successes of conservative policies because Democrats were said to be responsible and blaming conservatism for the failures of liberal policies because Republicans were said to be responsible. The assignment of responsibility by party hasn’t always been incorrect, but the beating that conservatives have taken as a result has most often been completely undeserved.

Now you can argue that these journalists, educators, etc. who are promoting liberalism are actually perfectly well intentioned individuals. Any avarice they possess, if they do possess any, is simply a desire to promote the public good. Well I’m sure most of these folks are in fact “decent Americans”. Decent Americans that are, to put it mildly, rather ignorant -- ignorant enough to spend much of their time working on behalf of and/or pushing a worthless ideology. An ideology that if left unchecked will lead to tyranny and a complete obliteration of the public good, as it has done throughout history. But whether true malice is involved or it simply is as John Adams said, “power always thinks that it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws”, doesn’t really matter. Either way this cloaked socialist philosophy is killing our country.

The founding fathers were all too aware of this tendency towards the accumulation of power; and in designing a system based on checks and balances, the spreading of power, the reliance on natural law, etc. they tried to minimize its effects. That being said, there was only so much they could do. They knew that ultimately it would be up to us to keep the Republic they had created.

So how do we keep the Republic and avoid a collapse into tyranny? As it stands now with Barack Obama in the White House the liberal establishment is in an all out race to remake this country. From the government purchase of GM to a possible nationalization of the health care industry and from the czars to the apology tours the dominance of liberalism in America today is staggering. But as liberalism tears at the traditional fabric of America with a fury to date not seen Americans are showing clear signs that they are beginning to wake up.

This growing backlash comes as no surprise to me or to many others. America has not drifted so far left that you can give people like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid a monopoly on federal policy-making authority and not expect that people will protest. This discomfort with liberal/Democratic control of the federal government as evidenced by the tea parties, the town halls, and the March on DC is nothing new.

From 1937 (as far back as I can find presidential job approval data) to January of this year when Barack Obama was sworn in there have been eight periods where one party has controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. Only one Republican during this time has governed alongside a Republican controlled House and Senate (George W. Bush). Using Gallup data and treating Kennedy’s Presidency and Johnson’s Presidency as two separate periods, five of these periods have seen a Democratic president’s job approval rating end below 50%. This has been true whether you look at the last Gallup poll taken during these periods or you take an average of the last three polls. The seven periods featuring Democratic control have seen an average final presidential approval rating of 46%. If you look at the five Democratic periods that ended below 50%, which seems to be particularly relevant given that only nine months into his Presidency Obama is already at 51% (October 20th – www.gallup.com) , the average final approval rating falls to 38%. Neither of these final approval numbers look any better when you look at the three poll averages, as only Clinton’s numbers improve (ending at 42% rather than 40%) while Kennedy’s, Johnson’s (45% vs. 49%), Roosevelt’s, and Truman 1’s all decline.

To me the most striking thing about these numbers is that of the two Democratic presidents to keep their heads above water, one of them (Kennedy) would hardly be considered a Democrat at all by today’s standards. I don’t think you’re going to hear Obama saying that “it’s a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

So we are left with six distinct periods of complete Democratic control over the legislative and executive branches of the federal government; and only one of those periods ends with a president receiving the final approval of the American people. Looking at the 3-poll averages, Truman 1 begins with 81% approval and ends with 34% approval (with the start of the Republican controlled 80th Congress); Truman 2 begins with 57% approval (with the start of the Democrat controlled 81st Congress) and ends with 32% approval; Johnson begins with 76% approval and ends with 45% approval; Carter begins with 69% approval and ends with 34% approval; and Clinton begins with 54% approval and ends with 42% approval (with the start of the Republican controlled 104th Congress).

In my opinion the Carter years are the most helpful in trying to predict what is likely to happen from this point forward. Not only did Carter first enter the White House through election he also most closely approximates the unbelievably flawed liberal nature and naiveté of our current President.

In the three Gallup polls taken between September 12, 1977 and October 17, 1977 Carter’s approval ratings averaged 56%. So when it comes to failure; Obama, Pelosi, Reid and gang are actually outpacing Carter, O’Neill and friends.

This then brings me back to the opening premise of this article; the silver lining to this dark liberal cloud.

Liberalism’s ascendance to its current position of dominance amongst the distributors of information in this country has disconnected a vast number of Americans from the principles that this country was founded upon; and given the frail state that our nation is in people are going to need to begin to recognize this.

For America to remain the (or even a) land of opportunity the founding principles are going to need to experience a mighty renaissance, and this renaissance will only be made possible through the renunciation of liberalism. Without any collective help from the information elites, this ideology is finally going to have to be seen (in the eyes of a significant majority of Americans) for the failure that it is. A tall task to be sure. But Obama and this group of Democrats might just be up to it.

As we now know, electing a moderate Republican like George Bush was not the way to “out” liberalism. And succeeding him with John McCain would have simply made matters worse. Had John McCain been elected, the endless “last eight years” chants would have simply been postponed four years, with the common refrain now featuring a twelve instead of an eight.

Believe me four years of John McCain would have been no picnic. The combination of a Democratic controlled Congress, and well, John McCain being John McCain would have made passage of cap and trade and amnesty almost inevitable. Even with the obvious outrage present in this country (which would have been very unlikely under McCain) these scoundrels in Congress are still likely going to pass a calamitous health care reform bill. The difference is that were McCain in office the Republicans (and by extension conservatives) would have received all the blame when these liberal reforms went all wrong. As it stands now, blaming us limited government types won’t be so easy.

In the last 76 plus years the Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress 71% of the time. During this time the Republicans have had control of both houses of Congress for only 14 years, and 10 of these years have come after Jimmy Carter left office. In the 76 years before Obama took office the Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress and the White House 42% of the time, but only two of these years came after Carter left office in 1981. In the 44 years before Carter took office the Republicans held the White House and/or both houses of Congress 41% of the time. By stark contrast they have only failed to accomplish this feat once between Carter’s leaving office and Obama’s entering this year. Thus I think it’s safe to say that relative to the success they enjoyed before he took office in 1977, the Democrats have suffered greatly as a result of Carter’s badly failed attempt at leading the free world.

So what will happen to Obama? Will he fail? Well it’s almost impossible to imagine a scenario where he doesn’t; and if he gets just a few of his “rebuild America” ideas enacted he will fail miserably. The real question is whether the land of the free and the home of the brave will be mortally wounded in the process or will the decisive blow in fact be dealt to liberalism?