Four years and one night ago I shouted in jubilation to my best
friend through the phone, “WE DID IT!”
Last night was different as I allowed myself to shed a few
tears before choking back the rest of my sorrow.
What a difference four years makes.
Mitt Romney’s loss was heartbreaking for me. Not that he was an
ideal candidate—far from it—but he was the better option. Romney does not have
the disdain for freedom that our current “Leader of the Free World” outspokenly does (see Obama
Declares Liberty A ‘Bumper-Sticker Theory That Doesn’t Work’). This is
important because, as Ayn Rand put it, “[I]deas matter.” She further explained that “To take ideas seriously, means that
you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true.” If President
Obama takes his ideas seriously (and we have every reason to believe he does
based on his policy decisions), we’re in for a tough road ahead.
Is Obama’s reelection the end of the
world? No. I do not believe in such a thing as historical determinism. Our
future is not set in stone. We can reverse course. But the immediate future,
however, does look dim.
With several Supreme Court Justices
near retirement, this could give President Obama the opportunity to stack the
court with “progressive” judges sympathetic to his vision of transformation.
With a Court in agreement with the President’s agenda, the checks and balances
from the court go out the window. One branch down, two to go.
That brings us to the Congress which
remains gridlocked and divided with a Republican controlled House of
Representatives and a Democrat controlled Senate. It’s highly likely (if the last
four years were any indication) that he’ll use the gridlocked Congress as an
excuse to continue his policy of issuing Executive Orders. In fact, he’s on
record as saying
“Where Republicans refuse to cooperate on things that I know are good for the
American people, I will continue to look for ways to do it administratively and
work around Congress.” With a Senate
sympathetic to the President’s agenda, do not expect a Congressional challenge
to that “work around.” Two branches down.
One Executive branch is what we are
left with, with practically no checks on the President’s power. What we are
left with is, essentially, a quasi-dictatorship.
Now, as I said before, our future is
not set in stone. It’s very likely that doesn’t happen, but it is a possibility,
based entirely on the words and sentiments of the President himself. It’s
something we ought to be wary of. America suffers from this notion that “it can’t
happen here,” but it can. As I said, nothing
is set in stone.
With that said, I think our best
hope now to ensure this is prevented from happening or reigned in if it does
happen, is to look towards the mid-term elections in 2014. If Republicans can
sweep the House and Senate, Congress won’t hold back in challenging the President’s
use of Executive Orders.
The silver lining in this (if one could be found) is that America is known for making course corrections. After the “Progressive Era”
that brought us statists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, we
eventually got Coolidge along with his laissez-faire style approach, which
brought with it almost a decade of prosperity. After the stagflation of Jimmy
Carter’s administration, we chose Ronald Reagan who put us on a better path. We are free to make a change every few years, and since
I think it’s almost assured, assuming current trends continue, that the economy
does not get better, with our best hope for stagnation rather than depression,
I’m hopeful a real leader will emerge the next time around to challenge the misconceptions
that statism works. A free-market thinker can turn this around.
But for now, we have to deal with the
fact that instead of seeking freedom from men, Americans today are seeking
freedom from the laws of nature, i.e. freedom from reality (through an ever-growing
and more empowered welfare state). They will find there is no such thing as;
hopefully sooner rather than later.
Four years is a long time to educate
(and that will continue to be my mission), so I say onward to 2016—America's
next chance at a renaissance.
