An ancient sage has said, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and so it is with American politics. I have stopped keeping count of the number of “most important election in my lifetime” elections I have been through. So is Romney-Obama “the most important election in my lifetime”? It is and it isn’t.
If Obama wins, the conservative, free-market ideal of America as a people with a limited government will be toast. Permanently. If Romney wins, the ideal gains a four-year reprieve, though its advocates still have, oh, a five percent chance of long-term success.
If Obama wins, the United States will stop being a people with a government, and become a government with a people. It will increasingly be transformed into a social democracy along the lines of Germany, the United Kingdom, or France, with all that entails: A highly politicized economy, a permanent state of sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, and political debates that do not focus on not whether, but how government will grow. Increasingly, critics of government will be seen as kooks on the fringe. If Romney wins, the U.S. may go down this road anyway.
Why the pessimism? The most important election in my lifetime has already occurred, in 1964. That’s when LBJ crushed Barry Goldwater.
While FDR launched the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society set the country on the course of permanent dependency on government. Exhibit A: Republicans are attacking Obamacare on the grounds that it takes money way from Medicare, a government program that at its creation they attacked as “socialized medicine.” Furthermore, LBJ created a vast army of “experts” in government, universities, and the non-profit world. It’s still with us. This army sells, rationalizes, and then administers laws and government programs that make fathers unnecessary, attack consumer sovereignty (bans on light bulbs, “large gulp” soft drinks, etc.) “for our own good,” and even seek to control something as basic to life as the exhalation of carbon dioxide.
In other words, the most important decisions facing the present have largely been made in the past.
First published by the Michigan View