Posted on January 31, 2013

The Old Republic and Obama’s America

Pat Buchanan, Buchanan, January 25, 2013

“Second Term Begins With a Sweeping Agenda for Equality,” ran the eight-column banner in which The Washington Post captured the essence of Obama’s second inaugural. There he declared:

“What binds this nation together … what makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago.”

Obama then quoted our Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Our “union,” Obama went on, was “founded on the principles of liberty and equality.”

Nice prose — and transparent nonsense.

How could the American Union have been founded on the principle of equality, when “equality” is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or the Federalist papers? How could equality be a founding principle of a nation, six of whose 13 original states had legalized slavery, and five of whose first seven presidents owned slaves all their lives?

What Obama preached in his inaugural was not historical truth but progressive propaganda, an Orwellian rewrite of American history.

Undeniably, the post-Civil War 13th, 14th and 15th amendments established an equality of constitutional rights. And from the Brown decision of 1954 through the civil rights acts of the 1960s, there was established an equality of civil rights. Black Americans were assured equal access to schools, public accommodations, the voting booth and housing. And Congress and the people overwhelmingly supported those laws.

But if the nation did not establish equality of constitutional rights until the 1860s and equality of civil rights until the 1960s, how can Obama claim that “equality” has been the feature that “makes us American” and “binds this nation together.”

How can he say that our commitment to equality is what makes us “exceptional” — when every Western country believes in equal rights for all of its citizens, and it was the French Revolution, not ours, that elevated “egalite” to a founding principle.

And when he says equality “is the star that guides us still,” exactly what kind of equality is Obama talking about?

Answer: The equality of which Obama speaks is not an equality of rights but an equality of results, an idea that dates not to the Founding Fathers, who would have been appalled by the idea, but to the 1960s.

{snip}

What Obama was attempting at the Capitol, with his repeated lifts from Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, was to portray his own and his party’s egalitarianism as a continuation of the great cause that triumphed at Yorktown and Appomattox.

He is hijacking the American Revolution, claiming an ancestral lineage for his ideology that is utterly fraudulent and bogus.

Feminism, the gay rights movement and the post-1965 civil rights movement, with their demand for equality not simply of rights but of rewards, cannot be achieved without trampling on the freedoms for which the patriot fathers fought. And they cannot triumph without creating a permanent, mammoth and redistributionist state more powerful, intrusive and dictatorial than anything George III ever dreamed of.

{snip}

As Obama’s America rises, the old republic falls.