It was 24 years ago, on February 1996, when President Bill Clinton stood before a joint session of Congress and, in the course of delivering his State of the Union address, declared that “the era of big government is over.” For a Democratic president to say this is on the order of Hugh Hefner declaring the sexual revolution a failure. In any case, it seemed to cement in history the Reagan revolution and, coming not yet five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ultimate victory of capitalism and limited government.
Much has happened since then to suggest that Clinton’s pronouncement might have been somewhat premature: Sept. 11, 2001, and the Obama administration, for instance, not to mention the current far-left revival within the Democratic Party fueled mainly by young people who know little of the Berlin Wall. But those are nothing quite as portentous as what we are witnessing now.
