Onward to 2016

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.