What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (3 page)

We were born in revolt: revolt against oppression, revolt against taxation without representation, revolt against those who ruled by royal decree, revolt against tyranny.

The odds were stacked hugely against us. On one side there was the British army: well trained, well equipped, a professional fighting force in their crisp red coats. On the other side, a bunch of farmers with pitchforks, preachers with muskets, country lawyers with bayonets, rich and poor, fathers and sons, a ragtag bunch of men and boys. Their very unexceptional nature is what made their achievement so exceptional. In that motley collection of early patriots, we see the first American ingenuity, the first American feistiness, that uniquely American combativeness and competitive spirit.

Most important, the early Americans knew that their demands were not radical. To King George, they constituted treason. But to the patriots, and later for the whole of humanity, they were basic rights that came not from government but from God. They believed, they
felt
, that they were on the right side of history. Even then, they knew they were part of a grand political and spiritual experiment. They didn’t know how it would end, but they also knew they didn’t have a choice but to fight.

Several years after the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “The important ends of civil government are the personal securities of life and liberty. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.”

If Franklin were to get a gander at the unlimited power seized by our current arbitrary government, his blood pressure would be off the charts.

Franklin went on to say: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. But America is too enlightened to be enslaved.”

Are we still too enlightened to be enslaved? Are we still virtuous?

Obama and the Democrats have answered those questions with a resounding no, which is why they are forcibly imposing their own version of “virtuous” redistribution, like a bunch of demented Robin Hoods. The majority of Americans are answering those questions with thundering yeses, which is why they’re opposing the Democrats’ madness. It is as basic a conflict as was the one between the British king and the early Americans: Should the United States be a land of individual freedom, truly representative government, and free market prosperity, or should it be a land of an omnipotent state, central economic planning, and, in the words of Obama, “collective salvation”?

Obama and much of the Democratic Party have answered that pointed question with an emphatic push toward statism. That very anti-American approach has cracked every foundation upon which America has rested, and has led, in turn, to a growing sense of American defeatism, economic crisis and collapse, failed leadership, U.S. impotence abroad, and national malaise. We are watching the sequel to Jimmy Carter unfold, but this time the destruction is much more dangerous and consequential.

The United States has experienced some extraordinary seminal events: the decision to take up arms against England; the adoption of the Constitution; the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the Great Depression; World Wars I and II; the cold war; the civil rights movement; September 11, 2001. Each event was profoundly jarring to the status quo. The nation was turned inside out, forced to deal with challenges it had never before imagined. And yet, in each case, America managed to find its bearings and ultimately emerge from the test with different national strengths and skills.

The current seminal moment is one of those unprecedented events. The economic meltdown, which began in late 2007—accelerated in the autumn of 2008 and continuing through today—gave rise to two levels of anxiety. The first level is immediate and urgent economic fear: Will I lose my job? Will I ever find another job? Will the bank foreclose on my home? Will I soon be homeless, living in Kenya like Barack’s half brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama?

The second percolates under the first and is far more profound and transformative.
It is the feeder notion of an America in decline
. It’s the fear that the very nature of America is changing—or perhaps has already been irrevocably changed. It’s the fear that the America of our Founders and of days past—of limited government, individual freedom, free markets, of innocent youth and prosperous adulthood—is disappearing. It’s the fear that what made America great—liberty that led to creativity, innovation, risk and reward, and natural optimism—is slipping away. Who can be optimistic when the government micro-manages us all down to the lowest common denominator, from breast exams to bottled water, from sodium intake to central air? It’s the fear that the once-fearless Frontier Nation is becoming regressively European in its policies and sensibilities.

It is the fear that America the Exceptional is becoming America the Ordinary. Or worse, that it’s becoming America the Weak and Passé, the twenty-first-century Sick Man of the World.

The tangible effects of this era can eventually pass if we change leaders and policies. But the
intangible
effects will be more insidiously persistent because they stem from a kind of faltering faith. And that is much harder to restore than a healthy job market.

There has been a weird vibe in America for a few years. It has left, in the words of the Grateful Dead, a “smoking crater” in our individual and collective psyches. But just as we have during every other seminal moment, we will turn a crisis of confidence and fear into an opportunity for fight and renewal. And we will succeed because we are not about to be the first generation to drop the “exceptional” ball.

Fortunately, the United States is still a nation of, by, and for the people. Despite the most strenuous exertions of Obama and his dour band of leftists, the country is NOT of, by, and for the federal government. At least it isn’t yet. No matter how many times Dennis Kucinich attempts to lure you into his spaceship, remember that you do not work for him. We still have time to reverse their grand statist experiment, but only if we make the right decisions going forward. No nation is guaranteed primacy. It’s up to the people, who are generally far more rational and grounded than their leaders, to do the hard work of keeping us number one. To stay number one, we’re going to need a president who does more than just wake up at noon and play Xbox 360 in between destroying our exceptionalism.

The United States is not yet ready for the toe tag. America is like those people who are declared dead, wheeled into the morgue, and three days later, sit bolt upright and scream, “I’m alive! What the hell? And how did Jar Jar Binks get into the White House?”

The vast majority of Americans are now sitting bolt upright. It took a while for the country to become hip to what Team Obama was up to, because nobody wanted to believe that any president, administration, or political party was capable of such deliberate destruction. What is this, a Metallica concert? The great awakening began in the summer of 2009, when polling began to show a creeping sense among the American people that the new administration’s policies were veering dramatically off the usual American course. We began to notice that something just might be awry when skateboarding champion Tony Hawk was given permission to skateboard through the White House. Yes, that actually happened. Many were still willing to give Obama and his agenda the benefit of the doubt, but as he doubled down on his redistributive agenda even as it not only failed to produce results but began to make things worse, the dissatisfaction became more widespread.

Conservatives who insisted that Barack Obama is a socialist and anti-American radical have often been dismissed as cranks and conspiracists due to a lack of explicit statements on his part to this effect. Of course, Obama and his allies are smart enough not to openly declare their agenda. They don’t run around wearing Carrie Bradshaw–esque nameplate necklaces that say “Redistributionist.” They don’t broadcast an intent to downgrade America at home and abroad by weakening her economically, militarily, and philosophically. In fact they would vociferously deny this if asked. But if you take a hard look at their actions, the choices they’ve made, the people Obama surrounds himself with, you can’t help but conclude, as I have done, that their true objectives are not what they claim. Their words may be moderate, but everything I’ve seen and heard points to their truly radical intentions. Moreover, this is a conclusion that millions of other Americans have also drawn. They have awakened to the threat. And they are increasingly alarmed and indignant.

That alarm expressed itself in the Tea Party movement, the 2009 election of Republican governors in the deep blue state of New Jersey and the purple one of Virginia, the January 2010 election of a Republican to succeed leftist demigod senator Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, and the near rout of congressional Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It expressed itself in the outrage over ObamaCare in town halls across the nation. It expressed itself in the election of additional Republican governors and state legislatures who, despite the rancorous pushback from government unions and their allies, effected fiscal reforms to stave off their own states’ declines. It expressed itself in plummeting job approval numbers for Obama and Congress, as well as sustained opposition to his signature legislation, from the “stimulus” to ObamaCare to the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill. It expressed itself in a growing backlash against his administration’s war on business. And most important, it has expressed itself in a national soul-searching over what America has been, what it is, and what it should be.

Most Americans reject wholesale the notion that our best days are past, set in amber like an ancient dinosaur fibula. Weakness, uncertainty, and retrenchment are for other, lesser nations—follower nations. We do not follow. We lead, and not “from behind,” either. That’s why most Americans rage against the idea of U.S. decline and will do everything in their power to reverse it.

That impulse is not simply a matter of national pride. It reflects a fundamental understanding of America’s unique role in the world, and that if America goes down, the wheels come off. And we certainly don’t want the country to morph into a gigantic version of Charlie Sheen in his “tiger blood” days. We have a duty
not
to pack it in, retreat, give up. We are not a nation of quitters. And we are not about to quit now just because we have had a mustache-twirling radical in the White House who has tied the nation to the railroad tracks.

Anger, however, can only take a cause so far. It’s largely a destructive force, which is why most leftists are always so angry. Disingenuous leftist “entertainers” such as Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and Janeane Garofalo have built a cottage industry on being pissed off. Leftists seek to destroy the existing order, which they think is a tool of oppression of whites/the “rich”/heterosexuals/The Man. They revel in chronic outrage over made-up “injustices” in the hope of provoking chaos: once chaos sets in, the established order becomes vulnerable. And that’s when the Left moves in for the kill, fangs bared, going right for the jugular of economic freedom and limited government. It’s the same way Michael Moore behaves at lunchtime. Anger is what drives the Left. It is its indispensable emotion.

It’s also what ultimately limits the Left’s freedom of action. The two main reasons most Americans routinely reject leftist ideology are that (a) its redistributionist “justice” agenda is thoroughly anti-American, which you do not have to be the smart Kardashian sister to see, and (b) it’s driven by negativity, which is as anti-American as is wealth redistribution. The United States has always been a positive, can-do, fearless, upbeat nation, even in our earliest, most uncertain, and darkest times. Optimism is as much a part of our national fabric as are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both of which reflect that vibe: “the pursuit of happiness,” “in order to form a more perfect Union.” The message has always been positive. The Left has always been on the anger wavelength, while the rest of America is on the sunny-side-up one. The Left is much more than the Grinch who wants to steal Christmas. It’s the Grinch who wants to steal EVERYTHING.

The Left also failed to realize that while anger can provoke action, it has a tougher time building anew. For that, you need something to believe in, not simply something against which to rage. If the Left seeks the destruction of core American values in order to replace them with social “justice” ones, the rest of us seek their rebuilding and reinforcement: rugged individualism, personal freedom, hard work, constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and a muscular foreign policy.

The desire to reclaim America for those values may have grown out of a seething anger over their deconstruction at the hands of leftists such as Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and other zanies. But if that anger were to continue to drive the push for an American renaissance, it would never be successful. We do not play on the Left’s sick battlefields. Instead, we play on ours, the American plain of optimism.

Accept American decline? Hell, no. First we got angry at the Left’s sacrilege, and now we will buck up and begin to repair the damage.

We must, and will, return to our roots as a nation of Happy Warriors.

The term “Happy Warrior,” which is now firmly associated with Ronald Reagan, originated in a poem written in 1806 by the English poet William Wordsworth called “Character of the Happy Warrior.” Written following the death of Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, it is an ode to the warrior who, despite battlefield defeats and painful injury, continues the fight cheerfully because he believes in the righteousness of the cause and the draw of the warm home that awaits him. The poem begins: