President Theodore Roosevelt famously admonished America to “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Yet, today, a progressive president incubated in the anti-war movement is successfully doubling down on the former and all but eviscerating the latter. And soft power is not the only weak aspect of Obama’s transformed America.
The trends are difficult to ignore:
Identity politics is now taught to young people in a way that our most liberal friends would have rejected not so long ago.
However antithetical to American individualism it may be to believe that one’s sex, race, or ethnicity must be determinative in one’s politics, it has nevertheless garnered the endorsement of the progressive movement. For context, note the relentless hostility directed toward conservative African Americans from leaders of the civil rights industry — at no cost to the purveyors. A more ludicrous example is Madeline Albright’s feminist indictment that “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other”, i.e. provide condition-less support for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Yes, you read that correctly: One’s reproductive organs must dictate one’s political identity — at least according to our former secretary of state.
Nowhere is the soft label more appropriate than on our college and university campuses.
Today, speech codes complete with safe zones, trigger warnings, and micro-aggressions are as much a part of the collegiate experience as history, math and literature.
Indeed, what were unthinkable limitations on academic free speech a mere ten years ago are now widely accepted notions at many of our leading institutions of higher learning.
Think about how devalued speech has become: The great-grandchildren of the “greatest generation” are now told they have a right to an offense-less life and to run (not walk) to the nearest safe zone should unpleasant language or events (presumably from the College Republicans or Fox News) impinge on them in a negative way. The widespread acceptance of such practices can also be attributed to poor parenting; how else to explain why such coddled young adults could be so easily influenced?
All of which begs the question of how long it will take for some enterprising union rep to negotiate the imposition(s) of safe zones into the private sector workplace?
The anti-war candidate won (twice) and (sorta) exited American might stage left.
Unfortunately, military withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq were accomplished with little regard for the smoldering vacuums left behind. Today, such smoldering embers have morphed into a full-scale fire. President Obama also led a world apology tour wherein the “mea culpas” were freely offered for Uncle Sam’s imperialism and intemperate behavior regarding the Muslim world. But history intervened. You see, miscreants migrate toward vacuums. Bad guys smell “safe.” Autocratic bullies are always happy to exploit the weak. And the Obama administration has served up huge helpings of both.
No pundit could seriously feign surprise when the former community organizer adopted an unserious approach to the Islamic State, aka “the J.V. squad,” or that he happily supplied the enemy with the precise timetable for U.S. withdrawal on the few occasions he agreed to deploy troops. But leave it to a former anti-war senator to define soft in the context of modern warfare; who could forget John Kerry’s pitiful announcement that a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria promised to be a “very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort … [an] unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.” Bashar Assad no doubt shook in his boots upon reading that missile from a U.S. administration always uncomfortable with the projection of U.S. military assets around the world.
Yet, such rhetoric goes hand in hand with insufficiently narrow rules of engagement that have contributed to the increasingly strong suspicion among our Sunni allies that the U.S. is not in the terror war to win — too soft, so to speak.
The administration’s approach is nowhere better exemplified than by the decision to send 70’s anti-war crooner James Taylor to Paris (rather than travel to massive unity rallies attended by other world leaders) in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack. Now, “You’ve Got a Friend” is one of my favorite tunes, but don’t you think the message would have been a wee bit stronger had the leader of the free world bothered to show up to deliver it?
Back home, the war against football plays here too, as Obama has stated that if he had sons they would not be encouraged to play America’s most popular sport.
But here, at least, the soft card may be unsuccessful. Football appeals to the American sense of competitiveness — you know — that personality trait that makes you want to keep score. Some commentators even believe this uniquely American game plays a part in our “exceptionalism. Oops, forgot — Obama’s definition of American exceptionalism has proven to be far different than what so many of us (still) believe makes Uncle Sam so unique: individualism, assimilation, laissez-faire capitalism, work ethic, upward mobility.
If you believe cultural “softness” is metastasizing throughout our culture, consider voting for Donald Trump. He does not have all the answers, but I’ll take “great” over “soft” every time.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich is a Washington Examiner columnist, partner at King & Spalding and author of three books, including the recently released Turning Point. He was governor of Maryland from 2003 – 2007.
