By Claudia Rosett
http://www.forbes.com/
11.06.08, 12:00 AM ET
With more than 63 million votes, President-elect Barack Obama--eloquent, young and bankrolled to the gunwales--has won the White House. That still leaves more than 55 million Americans who voted for the aging, outspent warrior, John McCain.What were those McCain supporters voting for? Rather than reverting to the zillion polls of recent months, which centered on the platforms put forward by the candidates, I'll hazard a guess--based on what was missing from this campaign, and seems to have all but vanished from the main stage of American politics.
That would be the straightforward love and defense of individual liberty, with its attendant freedom to take risks, and responsibility for the results. And here I stress individual. Not the chant of the crowd, but that basic American passion for individual life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Joe the Plumber, icon that he became, was not ultimately all about marginal tax brackets worked out to the umpteenth decimal point. He was a symbol of the broad principle that America thrives when its citizens are free to chart their own lives under a government more focused on defending their liberty and private property than encroaching on it in the name of redistributive state-administered "justice."
I doubt most McCain supporters cast their votes based chiefly on comparative health care plans or fine points of climate policy. I think they were voting for the closest thing they could get to a politician who believes that collective efforts are best confined to the common defense of the nation, not to confiscatory wealth transfers among interest groups.
But McCain's message was more muddled than Joe's. McCain spent more time promising to "fight" than he did explaining and championing the freedoms for which he himself once literally fought. Toward the end, it was a race in which both candidates were mainly hawking "change." On those vague and utopian terms, Obama had a hands-down lead.
Time was when America's creed could be summed up pretty well by the words of the 18th-century revolutionary Patrick Henry, whose reply in 1775 to the oppressive ways of British colonial rule was: "Give me liberty, or give me death."
In the American system built around that creed, the monstrous original failing and contradiction was the institution of slavery. America paid for that with a civil war, followed by another century in which, finally--about the time of Obama's childhood--segregation and discrimination began to give way to the equality and opportunities that Obama has now surfed to the presidency. Liberty prevailed.
The irony is that Obama arrives at the threshold of the White House steeped in ideas that subordinate individual freedom to the collective. In his campaign and his victory speech, Obama declares that America's "timeless creed" is now, "yes, we can." This is not a defense of liberty. It is a declaration so malleable and generic that it could have applied to anything from Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution to the Little Engine that Could.
Obama has called repeatedly upon America's people to sacrifice. What's not yet clear is whether this will entail sacrifice in the common defense of liberty, or whether it is liberty itself that will step by step be sacrificed in the name of the common good. If the latter, the implications are indeed world-changing. For the past century, America has stood as the world's great bulwark of freedom. That can no longer be taken as a given. Americans will be hard pressed to support freedom elsewhere if they do not protect it at home.
In his victory speech, Obama spoke not only to his supporters, but to "those Americans whose support I have yet to earn." He said he is willing to listen, "I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too."
How will Republicans respond? Right now, the temptation will be great to turn on each other and then look for ways to climb back onto the gravy train that Washington has become.
What this country needs now is something much bigger than that. The field is wide open for a new generation on the right to start all over again--in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, free men and free markets--speaking to the voters who might still prize a vision of America that was not clearly offered in this campaign.
How to do that is a tough question with the left now dominant in Washington, academia and the media. But if America is to remain a great nation, what must somehow be restored as the centerpiece of the nation's goals is not collective "change," but individual liberty.
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.com.
1 comment:
Yes We Can--the most abominably vague and misleading words uttered in the past two years. Americans wanted to hear "yes" we can fix every problem you have and we can do it in a span of six months. I think that's why it worked so well. This phrase/promise allowed everyone to read into it their specific needs, desires and biases. The liberal illuminati knows how to tell people what they want to hear, or at least convince them it's what they want to hear.
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