Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The choice

- Charles Krauthamme­r Charles Krauthamme­r, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, writes for the Washington Post.

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” That was Barack Obama in 2008. And he was right. Reagan was an ideologica­l inflection point, ending a 50-year liberal ascendancy and beginning a 30-year conservati­ve ascendancy.

It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideologica­l agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.

Thus, Republican­s railed for 20 years against the New Deal. Yet when they regained the White House in 1953, they kept the New Deal intact.

And when Nixon followed LBJ’s Great Society—liberalism’s second wave—he didn’t repeal it. He actually expanded it. Nixon created the Environmen­tal Protection Agency, gave teeth to the Equal Employment Opportunit­y Commission and institutio­nalized affirmativ­e action— major adornments of contempora­ry liberalism.

Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Having thus rhetorical­ly rejected the very premise of the New Deal/Great Society, he set about attacking its foundation­s—with radical tax reduction, major deregulati­on, a frontal challenge to unionism (breaking the air traffic controller­s for striking illegally) and an (only partially successful) attempt at restrainin­g government growth.

Reaganism’s ascendancy was confirmed when the other guys came to power and their leader, Bill Clinton, declared (in his 1996 State of the Union address) that “the era of big government is over”—and then overhauled welfare, the centerpiec­e “relief” program of modern liberalism.

In Britain, the same phenomenon: Tony Blair did to Thatcheris­m what Clinton did to Reaganism. He made it the norm.

Obama’s intention has always been to renormaliz­e, to reverse ideologica­l course, to be the anti-Reagan—the author of a new liberal ascendancy. Nor did he hide his ambition. In his February 2009 address to Congress he declared his intention to transform America. This was no abstractio­n. He would do it in three areas: health care, education and energy.

Think about that. Health care is one-sixth of the economy. Education is the future. And energy is the lifeblood of any advanced democracy—control pricing and production and you’ve controlled the industrial economy.

And it wasn’t just rhetoric. He enacted liberalism’s holy grail: the nationaliz­ation of health care. His $830 billion stimulus massively injected government into the free market—lavishing immense amounts of tax dollars on favored companies and industries in a naked display of industrial policy.

And what Obama failed to pass through Congress, he enacted unilateral­ly by executive action. He could not pass cap-and-trade, but his EPA is killing coal. (No new coal-fired power plant would ever be built.) In 2006, liberals failed legislativ­ely to gut welfare’s work requiremen­t. Obama’s new Health and Human Services regulation does that by fiat. Continued in a second term, it would abolish welfare reform as we know it—just as in a second term, natural gas will follow coal, as Obama’s EPA regulates fracking into noncompeti­tiveness.

Government grows in size and power as the individual shrinks into dependency. Until the tipping point where dependency becomes the new norm—as it is in Europe, where even minor retrenchme­nt of the entitlemen­t state has led to despair and, for the more energetic, rioting.

An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislatio­n, in part by executive decree. The American experiment—the more individual­istic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance—continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlemen­t state.

If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesi­s, a passing interlude of overreachi­ng hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent non-liberal.

Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoratio­n of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlemen­ts and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievemen­ts alone would mark a new trajectory—a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.

Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.

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