What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (4 page)

Although conceived by an Englishman, the concept of the Happy Warrior became a perfect symbol of American exceptionalism as the United States emerged as a great power. It married American optimism with American virtue. The Happy Warrior was formidable. The
American
Happy Warrior was unbeatable.

It wasn’t long before politicians saw the political benefit of casting themselves as Happy Warriors. President Grover Cleveland loved the poem so much that he would often recite it unsolicited and requested that it be read at his funeral. Franklin Roosevelt nominated a far-left wealth redistributionist, Alfred E. Smith, at the 1924 Democratic National Convention by cloaking him in non-threatening “reformer” garb and calling him “a happy warrior on the political battlefield.”

Roosevelt himself channeled the concept of the Happy Warrior in his jaunty carriage and frank but rallying messages to the nation during the depths of the Great Depression and World War II. Roosevelt understood the image’s power, both conceptually and symbolically, and he used it to great effect as he sought to move government from a limited enterprise to an activist one.

Flashes of the Happy Warrior concept could be seen in John F. Kennedy, who, during his 1961 inaugural address, said: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” As president, Kennedy was also staunchly pro-growth, cutting marginal tax rates and reining in government spending.

Several years later, the mythology returned, when the 1968 Democratic nominee for president, Hubert Humphrey, explicitly called himself a “happy warrior” as he fought against communism and for social and economic “justice.” He even called his campaign plane “The Happy Warrior.”

Ronald Reagan luxuriated in the concept of the Happy Warrior as he aggressively sought to defend the United States and defeat our enemies. Those policies, paired with his natural “morning in America” demeanor, conveyed the Happy Warrior far more than any campaign plane ever could. Reagan did not need to invoke the Happy Warrior because everybody already knew him to be one.

Bill Clinton—our forty-second president and national treasure—initially presented himself as something of a Happy Warrior running against the tired, older president George H. W. Bush as a devil-may-care rascal infused with a joyful confidence. It was only later that we saw that the Happy Warrior was not happy at all, but a selfish baby boomer possessed by a malignant narcissism.

Clinton’s nomination and election as president, however, revealed a fault line that began with Alfred Smith (who actually
opposed
the New Deal and campaigned against Tammany’s corruption) and ran through the Democratic Party throughout the twentieth century, but has now completely ruptured.

In 1968, there were three major groups on the political scene: (a) the Great Silent Majority, led by Richard Nixon; (b) the “happy warrior” Democrats, led by Humphrey; and (c) the far-left kooks.

The kooks were made up of aging New Dealers, antiwar radicals, zonked-out hippies, free-love yippies, angry feminists, and coercive racial activists, whose common agenda was to transform America into a socialist utopia. Many of them poured into Chicago in 1968 for the Democratic National Convention, sparking riots that led to chaos and violence. Who knew that utopia involved water cannons and the Black Panthers? The spectacle of a Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, having to use police force against a violent collection of leftists, crystallized the moment: the counterculture, led by the anti-American radicals, had taken over the Democratic Party. The year 1968 would mark the last pro-American Democratic presidential ticket in Humphrey/Muskie.

In the years after 1968, the kooks used their leverage within the party to nominate fellow kooks: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. The pro-American “happy warrior” Democrats were sidelined by the most radical, anti-American elements of the leftist movement. Some weren’t even part of the Democratic Party at all but were avowed socialists and communists. And yet they managed the wholesale takeover of one of the nation’s two major political parties and commandeered it to one electoral disaster after another.

Those political losses occurred in large part because the centrist Democrats fled what was now the party of the kooks. The old-school Democrats in the tradition of Humphrey and Kennedy and Smith—who opposed massive expansion of government power, believed in a strong foreign policy, and truly loved America—were grandfathered into the Great Silent Majority. Former left-leaning intellectuals, such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, led the exodus. No longer welcome in the new-left Democratic Party, they were also increasingly horrified by its rabid anti-Americanism. Many of them had been supporters of Democrats Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and Humphrey. Now, however, they saw their party being eaten alive by a new virus of radicalism.

They were staunch anticommunists who believed, as did Truman, Kennedy, and Humphrey, in “bearing any burden and paying any price” to defeat that lethal ideology. Their final break with their former party took place over the Vietnam War, which the Left opposed as immoral but which they saw as a necessary exercise of U.S. power. It was an ideological divide that could not be bridged. And they—along with tens of millions of others—turned to the Republican Party, giving Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan major victories in 1972, 1980, and 1984. Their landslides were a direct result of the abandonment of mainstream Democrats by the new lords of the Far Left.

The only blip on the leftist radar was Bill Clinton, who was a product of two developments: (a) the perceived end of the cold war and global communism, which generated a peace dividend and domestic confidence in handing over the national security controls to a Democrat; and (b) the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, which cultivated “third way” candidates between the Republicans and the Far Left. For more than a quarter of a century, the DLC promoted centrism and championed moderate, pro–free market Democrats. Its goal was to get Democrats back to the mass-market center in which they had thrived before the kook takeover. During its zenith, the DLC boasted members such as Senators Sam Nunn, Joseph Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Charles Robb, as well as congressmen such as Harold Ford Jr. and Democratic National Committee chairman and governor Ed Rendell.

Unfortunately, like many of the moderate Democrats it supported, the DLC met a grisly political end. After Clinton, the leftists regained control of the party and began living large again. When the kooks achieved their ultimate victory in 2008, the moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats were whipped into submission by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, who made sure they voted their way on their highly unpopular, big-government programs, such as ObamaCare and “stimulus” spending. In November 2010, those moderate Democrats were routed. Almost half of the Blue Dog coalition lost reelection, and the DLC found that it no longer had a vibrant Democratic middle to serve. It shuttered in February 2011. Democratic centrism had been rendered irrelevant once and for all. The DLC went extinct because it had no place in Obama’s America.

The time is now ripe for a new brand of Happy Warrior. The new model will turn on its head the concept the Democrats used for decades. The new Happy Warrior will retain the pro-Americanism but discard the impulse toward social and economic “justice.” Instead, the new Happy Warrior will cheerfully fight for constitutionally based first principles and will steer us away from a kook-driven decline that will produce what former ambassador John Bolton has called “a post-American world.” In this “post-American world,” we’ll all speak Arabic, spend Chinese currency, and get abortions at the 7-Eleven. There is no nationalism in the post-American world, only worldism. When the American
people
become Happy Warriors, the country thrives; when they hibernate, the kooks run wild, putting radicals on the Supreme Court, whacking Granny with universal health care, and importing al-Qaeda terrorists from Gitmo to participate in a poetry slam with Attorney General Eric Holder.

So we must reinvent the Great Silent Majority as Happy Warriors once again. Make no mistake: we are in a war for the nation’s future. Barry and the kooks (not to be confused with Bennie and the Jets) are preoccupied with the destruction of the existing order of economic and personal freedom and redistributing our power and wealth globally in order to punctuate the end of America.

Their efforts have already led to one kind of profound change: events that were once unthinkable are now everyday occurrences. It was once unthinkable that the United States would ever have a national debt careening toward $17 trillion, that our debt would ever be downgraded, that socialized medicine would ever become law, that 8 percent–plus unemployment would be the “new normal,” that terrorist regimes would proceed unimpeded toward nuclear weapons, that tin-pot tyrants would thumb their noses at the United States, that we would spurn our closest allies, that people in one nation fighting against violent oppression would be assisted by Washington while others were abandoned.

The kooks have made American impotence acceptable, and that in turn has made it acceptable to dis, confront, challenge, and downgrade America in ways that would have been inconceivable before the kook takeover. They have converted the United States from the king of the global jungle into a paper tiger, whom very few respect or fear any longer. Everyone from credit ratings agencies to third-rate tyrants now feels free to take a swipe at the American piñata. (And with this piñata, you don’t want to be around when it bursts, because when it does, you’ll be covered in millions of illegal aliens.) The kooks have taught others how to treat us and, indeed, their anti-American behavior has changed others’ behavior toward us.

This is, perhaps, the most dangerous development to emerge from the kooks’ global redistributionism. Whenever America has been perceived as weak, history’s darkest chapters of chaos and destruction occurred. When everyone from big-time foreign enemies to smalltime domestic thugs believe they can hit the United States with impunity, America shrivels up, much like George Costanza’s unfortunate “shrinkage” incident after leaving the pool on a classic episode of
Seinfeld
.

The leftists, however, did not bank on the rise of the Happy Warrior. The Happy Warrior is the antithesis of the kook. The Happy Warrior takes pride in the very essence of America and seeks to protect it and advance it, as the kooks assault it as immoral, counterproductive, and evil. Two and a half years before they orchestrated Occupy Wall Street, the kooks Occupied the White House. They may have been running the show, but now they have met their match.

Happy Warriordom is about a new positive national attitude, new leadership, and new policy environment that will make the American rebound possible. The United States is, by its very nature, a forward-looking, frontier-driving, dynamic nation. We are instinctively a nation of Happy Warriors. We just have to tap into it again. As Thomas Paine told his fellow Americans when General George Washington’s men were freezing in the snow at Valley Forge: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The conventional wisdom is that the Founding Fathers gave us three branches of government. Not true. They gave us four: the executive, the legislative, the judiciary … and the American people. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.” The Founders vested us with the power to change our government and the direction of the nation because they feared that one day the three other branches would be in the crapper. That day has arrived: the presidency is held by a radical redistributionist, the Congress cannot stop itself from spending us into oblivion, and the courts are legislating left-wing insanity from the bench. All three branches are engaged in social engineering in every part of American life. It is now up to the Founders’ stealth fourth branch to stop it.

A few years ago, I got to know the brilliant former
Saturday Night Live
player Darrell Hammond, whose masterful impression of Bill Clinton remains one of my all-time favorite comedy bits. One day, our conversation turned to the Islamic terror attacks of September 11, 2001. I spoke glowingly of President Bush’s handling of the chaos of that day. Darrell nodded a few times, and then, after a long moment, he looked straight at me and said, “He got out of the chair.”

I blinked at him, puzzled.

He asked me to imagine that I was the president of the United States. One minute, he said, you are sitting in a classroom in Florida, surrounded by a sea of small, innocent faces. You are reading them a story and speaking about education policy. One minute, it’s a normal day. The very next minute, you are told that a shadowy terrorist group has attacked civilian sites such as New York’s World Trade Center using commercial aircraft. All you know is that two planes have hit their targets. You do not know how many more are still in the air. You do not know how many more Americans will die before the day is over. You just know that you are responsible for the safety of three hundred million of them. You also know that no other president has ever experienced anything like this, so there is no one to whom to truly turn. The nation’s security rests with you and, in your heavy responsibility, you are completely alone.