The Death of Statism? Pat Buchanan on good news for libertarians.

[Ronin Truth]

Will Obamacare Be the Death of Liberalism?

lewrockwell.com/2013/11/patrick-j-buchanan/the-death-of-statism/

Patrick J. Buchanan

By 1968, Walter Lippmann, the dean of liberal columnists, had concluded that liberalism had reached the end of its tether.

In that liberal epoch, the 1960s, the Democratic Party had marched us into an endless war that was tearing America apart.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had produced four “long, hot summers” of racial riots and a national crime rate that had doubled in a decade. The young were alienated, the campuses aflame.

Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon.

For forty years, no unabashed liberal would be elected president.

Jimmy Carter won one term by presenting himself as a born-again Christian from Georgia, a peanut farmer, Naval Academy graduate and nuclear engineer. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist.

So toxic had the term “liberal” become that liberals dropped it and had themselves rebaptized as “progressives.”

Barack Obama, however, ran unapologetically as a man of the left. An opponent of the Iraq war, he had compiled a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.

And Obama proudly placed his signature achievement, Obamacare, right alongside, and in the tradition of, liberal giants FDR and LBJ.

This is the new progressivism of the 21st century, Obama was saying, and I the transformational figure who will usher in the post-Reagan era. Where Clinton failed, I will succeed.

But now that Obamacare is coming to be perceived as a political catastrophe, not only does it threaten Obama’s place in history, it could invalidate, indeed, eviscerate the defining idea of the Democratic Party itself.

For Democrats are the Party of Government. They believe that government is more nobly motivated than a private sector that runs on self-interest and the profit motive, and that government can achieve goals private enterprise could never accomplish.

To liberals, government is us, the personification of the nation.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicare and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are monuments to this belief. So, too, are the world wars fought and won under liberal presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

It was 1968, the Tet Offensive, the assassinations, the urban riots, the campus anarchy, the smash-up of the Democratic Party in the streets of Chicago that caused the national recoil from liberalism that lasted for forty years.

Now consider what the rollout of Obamacare is doing, not only to this president and his administration, but also to the idea that government has the solution to America’s problems.

Though they had as long as World War II to get it done, Obama’s crowd could not even produce a working website. Now we learn the White House was alerted to the website problems in March but plunged ahead.

Obama’s reputation for competence has been shredded, and, so, too, has his reputation for truthfulness.

With millions losing their health insurance because of Obamacare mandates, we learn that Obama and his team knew this was inevitable, even as they reassured us, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period.”

The brutal truth: Our president got his legacy program passed by deceiving the American people in a giant swindle.

Not only have millions lost their health care plans, tens of millions more may lose theirs at year’s end when they learn that their employer’s health care plans also do not meet Obamacare mandates.

Hillarycare cost the Democrats the House in 1994. Obamacare, the love child of Hillarycare, could cost Democrats the Senate in 2014.

But what makes this a disaster not just for a party but a philosophy is that Obamacare is liberalism incarnate. It is premised on the idea that progressives, starting from scratch, can redesign a health care system, 16 percent of the economy, and make it more fair, more just and more efficient for us all.

Obamacare was an act of hubris by an administration of talking heads most of whom never ran anything in their lives. And what we are witnessing is the antithesis of what we were promised.

So confident were they in the wonks that wrote the bill that Nancy Pelosi could say, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.”

Seven weeks in, the website is not fixed. Millions have lost their health care plans. Quality hospitals are being cut out of the program as too costly. Individuals are being offered plans inferior to what they had in terms of benefits, but with far more costly premiums.

The crisis for Obama, his party, and his philosophy is that this is not only a nightly national story; it is a daily story in every state. And the anecdotes of debacles have been piling up, one upon another, for seven weeks. They do not cease, and there is no end in sight.

Nothing, it appears, will interrupt the litany of personal woes before Democrats, in panic, cut themselves loose of Obamacare and try to swim away from the Lusitania.

It will likely be a long time before another Democratic president dares again another such Great Leap Forward.

One can only hope. <sigh>

 

[seapilot]

Democrats are cooked. Obama care unlike all the other scandals and lies is personally affecting a majority in the USA negatively. People need someone to blame and no one better than the simple name attached to it. There is only 30 % of the country that are devout democrat and even some of those are having first time doubts because it is personally hitting them in the pocket book. My guess is democrats lose the Senate, become a small minority in the house and if this is not repealed likely the presidency.

This is why the Establishment republicans are nervous, there is soon to be a vacuum that they would easily fill, but they have their own problems of people mistrusting them, hence the rise of real conservatives.

 

[Acala]

I think this is hogwash. The differences between the Republicans and Democrats are merely cosmetic. The idea that the liberal Democrats favor big government and socialism and the Republicans oppose it is supported only by rhetoric and not the facts. With a stroke of a pen Dubya increased the size of Medicare - the single most socialist and bankrupt program in the Federal government - by something like 30%. Were the Republicans up in arms over it? Ha. Did the Republicans holler when Dubya introduced the first two trillion dollar budget? How about when he introduced the first three trillion dollar budget? No, because they like big government just as much as the Democrats.

There is only the crony-capitalist party and it has two branches that stage puppet shows for the entertainment of the masses.

Now MAYBE the people will be so disgusted with Obamacare that they will grumble about any major expansion of government for a bit. But frankly, it is too damn late. The hull is breached and the people are too ignorant and selfish and cowardly to even begin to do what needs to be done to patch it.

 

[Ronin Truth]

So I guess the voters are to blame. Just as I expected.

 

[Peace&Freedom]

The Democrats are cooked in '14 and '16 (as per seapilot), as they voted in this Obamanation (party line vote), but Acala is also right---ROMNEYcare was the true love child of Hillarycare, with Obamacare being a knockoff of the Republican/Heritage Foundation plan. Buchanan is cleaning it up to make it look entirely like a left-right battle, instead of the crony-hack pol vs liberty issue it really is.

Democrats own the disaster immediately because their version was the one that got voted in when they completely controlled the government, and because they utterly forgot about planning a way to cover themselves once it went sideways. Republicans are now positioned better because (kicking and screaming, due to the efforts of Tea Party and Liberty members) they conspicuously appear to have fought it to the end.

 

[James Madison]

Never gonna happen. There are huge chunks of the population that will never vote for freedom, and they are paid to breed. Liberty is achieved by sharp, radical changes, not incrementalism.

 

[nobody's_hero]

There are some striking parallels mentioned between LBJ and Obama. We're merely seeing history repeat itself. This could be the start of another 40 years in exile for the D's. Of course, that didn't stop government from growing, but it will be nice to see some of the liberal "Government knows what's best for you"-arrogance to be tempered for a while.

 

[euphemia]

I think we are in for more of the same. Liberals have taken over government. They have taken over both major political parties. They have taken over the educational system all the way from preschool to university. They have taken over the media. I don't see this changing.

 

[Acala]

I think we are in for more of the same. Liberals have taken over government. They have taken over both major political parties. They have taken over the educational system all the way from preschool to university. They have taken over the media. I don't see this changing.

And by liberal you mean politicians who screw the people so they can give massive handouts to banks, oil companies, drug companies, arms makers, agribusiness, auto makers, etc. etc. etc. Right? Because that's who has taken over. Nobody is taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, if that is what you mean.