Now that Obama has been elected President, we’re told that the country is unified. Yet, when Bush was President, we were repeatedly told that the country had become dark, evil and divided. I talk to people every day who are furious and angry about the election of Obama; they can’t believe the country has sunk so low as to endorse a leader opposed to freedom in so many areas. It’s kind of like the days and weeks right after 9/11, for the half of the population who didn’t drink the Obama Kool Aid.
So how united are we? It’s not really an issue of united or divided. It’s an issue of the Establishment approving of this new President — because he’s decisively collectivist and socialist — and the Establishment disapproving of the last President, who was perceived as capitalist and anti-terrorist (when, in fact, he stood for almost nothing). The Establishment consists of academia; most of the government; all television news except for Fox News; the bulk of Internet blogs; and essentially all other media, newspapers and publications, with the dissenting (and soon to be outlawed) conservative talk radio as an unusual exception. The Establishment has its President, its Congress and (soon) its Supreme Court.
Almost half of the country didn’t vote for Obama, and instead voted for one of the weaker candidates the Republican Party opposition has ever served up. A lot of people who opposed Obama stayed home in protest, disguising the weakness of his victory even more. There are probably even a few Democrats who quietly wonder if Obama has what it takes to avoid being another Jimmy Carter. There is less than enthusiastic support, even in Congress, for what the Establishment media hails as the “New New Deal,” which so far consists of bailing out the American auto industry and turning it into a government-subsidized environmentalist “business.” Will a bankrupt, government supported former car industry be Obama’s great legacy, and will Americans rally behind it like nothing ever seen before? Are battery operated cars that don’t work to be the essence of “change” we can believe in? Then there’s the hundreds of billions in proposed government spending. Spending for its own sake didn’t stop the Great Depression, which continued through all of FDR’s terms in office. Can we expect any better when Obama does the same?
No, I don’t think America is all that united. The most stalwart opponents of liberty have won — for now — because there are no proponents of liberty, freedom and individual rights on the political scene. That’s not “united.” That’s just plain sad.