A "Baton" or a Bludgeon?

"Healthcare reform "baton" passes to states" is how The Washington Post headlined today's article about the ObamaCare mandates Washington is expecting states to implement -- which makes it sound as if we're all one big happy team, sprinting toward an agreed-upon finish line. But that "baton" looks more like a bludgeon to many states, judging from the resistance they're showing.

This isn't a foot race; it's a forced march, in a direction most Americans just don't want to go. Uncle Sam isn't the pace-setter; he's the cruel mule-driver, with a lash at the ready for any who dig in their hooves. But leave it to The Washington Post to spin the situation as a relay race in which a few of the runners are reluctantly falling behind.

That's the view today from WashingtonWorld. We now return you to more reality-based content.

The Village Idiot

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page keeps columnist Thomas Frank on board to serve as a sort of court jester: he's the liberal whose arguments are so stupid they make conservative arguments look brilliant. He's there as the village idiot, who makes every one else on the page look good in comparison.

Yesterday he delivered on both counts.

His piece bemoans the fact that the left has meekly surrendered the mantle of the freedom fighter to the right, even though, according to Frank, liberals, statists and collectivists are the true freedom fighters in this society. The founding fathers were wrong, he says; it's just not true that expansive government is a threat to freedom. For support, he cites no less an authority than the painter Norman Rockwell. His other authority is of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose "Four Freedoms" established the predicate for the nanny state we live under today.

You'll want to read the whole piece, for the same reason you gawk at car wrecks. But here are the key passages:

"Any increase in the size or duties of government, the right tells us, necessarily subtracts from our freedom. Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health-care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.

"What we're going to end up with is higher taxes, bigger government and less freedom for the American people," House Republican Leader John Boehner said on Fox News in July. "We're going to have a real fight for how much freedom we're going to have left in America." . . .

. . . That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: "Freedom from Want," an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms." Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to "secure to every nation," as Roosevelt put it, "a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights" . . .

. . . Conservatives of the 1930s, led by an upper-crust outfit called the American Liberty League, certainly felt that way. "That Roosevelt was a dictator there was no doubt; but Liberty Leaguers were not quite sure what kind," wrote the historian George Wolfskill in "The Revolt of the Conservatives," a 1962 study of that organization. "Some thought he was a fascist, others believed him a socialist or Communist, while others, to be absolutely sure, said he was both."

Today, of course, we know that the right's tyranny-fears were nonsense. Most of Roosevelt's innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.

Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada remain free societies, generally speaking, despite having gone skipping blithely down the universal-health-care road to serfdom decades ago. For the sort of people who gathered on the Mall last weekend, however, I doubt that such observations would matter in the least. Their conception of freedom soars on by a force all its own, carried aloft on the wings of pure abstract reasoning: Government intervention equals tyranny. Liberalism is forever a form of despotism-in-waiting."

Most American "ancestors" who predate the 1930s did in fact define freedom, in part, as the "absence of the state," which is why American government was designed to be strictly limited in power. And I could fill this post with quotes, citations and evidence to back that up. But for leftists, like Frank, American history begins not at the founding, but in the Roosevelt era. That's as far back in American history as they dare delve, in search of rationales for the superstate.

I happen to believe Americans have become less free since the New Deal, if one defines freedom not just as having the right to march on Washington to protest ObamaCare (Frank's emasculated definition of "freedom"), but the freedom from dependency on government programs and largess, which tends over time to make one an indentured servant (if not a slave) of the state. It's our independence -- meaning independence from state interference and state coercion and co-option -- that's been eroded as the size, power, appetite and mission of the mega-state grows. There's no denying it's grown significantly since the 1930.

Construction of the mega-state has gone on under both Democrat and Republican regimes. What Obama is doing is the logical extension of the trajectory the country had been traveling for decades. But the changes until now were too incremental to stir more than minor rebellion. The accelerated pace of Barack Obama's Great Leap Forward -- his fevered rush to finish the edifice Roosevelt laid the foundations for -- has jarred many American awake to the trap into which they've sleepily wandered. And that, not racism or embittered partisanship, is at the root of the ObamaCare backlash and tea party movement.

Hall Monitor Hypocrisy

I haven’t been pleased by some of the shout-downs and shoving we’ve seen at Congressional town hall meetings this August (well, maybe just a little pleased). But there’s a heavy dose of hypocrisy when the calls for civility and reasoned debate come from folks on the political left.

We rarely hear such complaints when the “angry mob” is advancing a “progressive” cause: when certain politically-incorrect speakers are shouted down on campus; when the anti-war protests of the 1960s got raucous; when anti-free trade groups disrupt international economic conferences; when environmentalists loudly protest logging projects or other alleged attacks on the planet.

More annoying than the double standard, though, are condescending White House lectures on how the rest of us ought to behave in the presence of His Eminence, Barack Obama, when he blesses fly-over country with an audience later this week.

Here are a few paragraphs from Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel:

"At the same White House press briefing in which it was announced the President will be coming to Grand Junction to possibly host a town hall meeting here, the tensions at similar style meetings across the country was touched upon.

“I will tell you this,” Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary told media on Friday, according to a White House transcript, “The President believes, and has always believed, that town hall meetings are a very useful place for the discussion of issues to talk about the decisions that are facing him and the American people. They ought to be able to be conducted without shouting and shoving and pushing and people getting hurt.

I think we can have honest policy disagreements without being either disagreeable, or certainly without being violent.“And I think anybody that has a strong opinion should come to a town hall meeting, but also respect that others may want to also take part in the town hall meeting, or you know, may just want to listen to the debate. And if somebody is yelling, or if somebody particularly is being violent, I’m not entirely sure that helps the entire process for anybody involved.”

Coloradans don’t need lectures in civility from the White House spokesman. I understand that Democrats like treating most people like children, by promising cradle-to-grave paternalism. But it's still insulting to hear them talking to the rest of us as if we were unruly kids who need a time out.

The shouting and finger-pointing may not follow the debating rules of the Oxford Union, but it does deliver a message, loud and clear, that not everyone is embracing ObamaCare. Whether this is a minority opinion won’t be determined until next election season. But that’s beside the point, since the art of protest is the art of making even a minority view seem politically potent.

It’s an art that the political left mastered long ago. Anti-war protesters of the 1960s didn’t represent the majority view (if I recall the polling data correctly), but they changed national policy by grabbing headlines. Environmental extremism isn’t the majority view in America, yet greens are driving the regulatory agenda through agitation, litigation and indoctrination. Loud and angry protest has been one important way the left exerts influence. But red flags go up when the protest comes from the right.

It’s equally odd to see those who elected a former community organizer president trying to discredit the ObamaCare backlash as the work of “conservative organizers.” Many recent news stories seem to go out of their way to make such connections. Yet I rarely see such labeling when liberal groups are involved.

America’s long and proud history of dissent wouldn’t have been possible without behind-the-scenes organizers. This never before delegitimized these events as bellwethers of public opinion. The anti-war protests of the 1960’s weren’t just spontaneous eruptions. Freedom marches in the South were planned and organized (thanks to “ringleaders” and “agitators” like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.). The American Revolution got a helping hand from organizer Sam Adams. Abolitionists and prohibitionists also had organizers.

Today, it seems, protests are only legitimate expressions of public sentiment when they’re organized by the left. Protesters become an angry “mob” when they oppose left-wing policy prescriptions. It’s a sign of how far the former “counterculture” has come, in terms of becoming the new “establishment,” that it can’t recognize the weird irony in this line of attack.