Isn’t it revealing, this horror expressed by some leftists that anyone would use the world “socialist” to describe President Obama even if many of them used to worry endlessly that George W. Bush was imposing a theocracy on the nation?
Obama himself recently told a gathering of chief executive officers that he was not a socialist, that he is really just a free-enterprise kind of guy, even though he spent a campaign demagoging their salaries and lambasting oil, drug and other corporations for the practice of making profits beyond his own sense of what’s OK.
He might occasionally have patted a small business on the head, but he was forever growling at the big ones while also proposing wealth redistribution.
All of that was merely a harbinger of the real thing once he was elected — the takeover of a big hunk of the auto industry, a stimulus bill costing more than the war in Iraq, outsized regulatory enthusiasms and a health care plan under which the federal government would dictate endless instructions to businesses while establishing a new entitlement on top of the ones that already threaten fiscal calamity.
The government growth as a percentage of gross domestic product has economists throughout the land concerned.
I myself do not much care whether one uses the word “socialist” to describe all of this or not. But if the Obama agenda is far from socialist in some grotesquely authoritarian, North Korean sense, it is easily socialist in the freedom-eroding, bureaucratically burdened, welfare-state, big government, Western European sense. To argue otherwise is to skip lightly over how the word has been used for decades.
Turn now to the proposition that Bush was imposing a theocracy on the nation. Those making the charge included rival politicians, scads of columnists and editorial writers and academics who really should have known better.
Turn now to the proposition that Bush was imposing a theocracy on the nation. Those making the charge included rival politicians, scads of columnists and editorial writers and academics who really should have known better.
And yet the idea — buttressed by little more than Bush’s rule against federal funding for certain kinds of stem cell research — is as paranoid as thinking he was in on the planning of the 9/11 attacks or that Obama was born in Africa even though Honolulu newspapers reported otherwise right after his birth.
The Bush rule did little if anything to inhibit stem cell research, since private funding took up the challenge, and was supported by secularists as well as by some of the religious. But even if the only people to agree with Bush had been true-believing churchgoers, it’s an absurdity to suppose that the moral understandings of religious people must ipso facto have less standing in our democracy than the moral understandings of the non-religious. That we have a theocracy on our hands if religious citizens do occasionally win their way on an issue.
A theocracy is rule by an established faith making reference to its theology on all important questions, and a quick look at America today — its rapidly changing mores, the near decadence of much of its popular entertainment, declining church attendance and the influence of religion generally, the government’s rejection of virtually every fundamentalist quest, the war against Christmas displays — informs us that nothing of the sort has remotely occurred or ever had a chance of occurring.
I am not really sure that more than a tiny minority of religious people would want a theocracy, even if they would like to see a few laws changed in ways consonant with their faith-based attitudes. On the other hand, the Gallup polling organization recently reported that 53 percent of Democrats have a positive image of socialism.
Now what does that tell you?
