The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Teaneck, New Jersey USA
Posted
on November 7, 2012 | 101 Comments
The most charitable way of explaining the election results of
2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent
President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock,
partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of
responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes
counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and
more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew
the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the
chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane
Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor
campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better
candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the
economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons.
Romney lost because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues
– of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to
moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate.
The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently
retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s
America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is
impossible to compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is
why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool.
Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the
47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so
they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two
full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both
disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the
books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too
those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government to pay their
mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff
is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers
fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet,
all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the
attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in
business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for
the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first
restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the
provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation
(by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney
acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people”
start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free
stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the
game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs,
nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from
their children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes
their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little
margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning
against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In
essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for
a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the
inescapable conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best
argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average
voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by emotion and raw
populism. Said another way, too many people vote with their hearts and not
their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or
even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a
rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just
snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting
taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the
rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those
different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” –
without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the
poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging
that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency
only papered over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants
to squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to
Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”
Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer
words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks
that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women
that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to
Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even
if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not
enforce the current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the
incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians
ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the
politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more
money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone.
How could he do and say all these things ? See Churchill, above.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter
could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama
agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits.
“Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required and does not
solve any discernible problem – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent
answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that
whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a minority in
California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third
World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants
in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world,
and a different America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and
knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works,
invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged
in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his “negative
ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment,
lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of
leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not
embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as
the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years
campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored
interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of
American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan –
people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and
platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class
warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and
cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative
ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to
traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama
could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which
free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the future.
The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy – those
very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a
center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar
voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show
that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in
Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not truly
representative of the country. That people would vote for a Republican
Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce
point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile
Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be
denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply
that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the
Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012,
President Obama insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had
stated all along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was
“terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat
on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and
rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the
canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not
revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated
evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in
order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s
disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the Obama
re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its
limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states
were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The
Democrat begins any race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states –
like the bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large
concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus,
like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost
insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it
literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel
expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed generally, and
it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed
in a traffic accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a
difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most states are
uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking,
or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how
it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will never
be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats,
the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted
for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile
to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at
Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A
dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that
the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart
any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born
Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will
preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first
Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with
this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s
nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will
occur than that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election
prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic –
fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud
defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more probable now than
yesterday. That would not be the worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never
distinguished himself by having a strong political or moral backbone, and would
be the first to cave to the American pressure to surrender more territory to
the enemy and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian
state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he of the
Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of markedly
poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming Israeli
elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make more concessions
and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is
no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the
exile. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and
the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily
foreseen, and yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the
deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only
hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and
materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The
takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come.
Across the world, America under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama,
America is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four
years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The
“Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress
rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing
discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of
the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I
arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is
our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with G-d
matters more than our relationship with any politician, R or D. And,
notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time for Jews to go home, to
Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and
without stress. Thinking that it will always be because it always was has been a
repetitive and deadly Jewish mistake. America was always the land from which
“positive” aliya came – Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a
dire situation. But that can also change. The increased aliya in the
last few years is partly attributable to young people fleeing the high
cost of Jewish living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming
years. We should draw the appropriate conclusions.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America
is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.
This is indeed a sobering reality. I am saddened by the demise of America as we knew her. Empires thrughout history have reigned only an average of 200 to 300 years. I prayed that Anerica would be the exception, not the rule. Alas, my beautiful, liberating country lays injured, but not yet dead. Is there anything to be done to save her? As our generation begins to pass on, so does our America.
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