The Freedom Fighter's Journal: SEDITION!

While the left seeks to overturn whatever is left of the American system of government, they accuse the right of advocating the violent overthrow of the government—which is the left's way of working up the nerve to suspend the freedom of political speech.

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Commentary by Robert Tracinski

1. The Obama Banana Republic

President Obama's handling of the Gulf oil spill reflects the statist's dilemma: he believes that government ought to be in charge of everything and empowered to solve every problem—but government is not actually capable of running the economy or solving complex technological and engineering problems, so every time he actually tries to make good on the promise of omnipotent government, he is doomed to disappoint.

Obama's response to the oil spill has been an instruction manual in the incompetence of lifelong politicians to deal with practical problems. A press release being sent around by the Republican Party hits home: it shows how Obama has been our second-hander-in-chief, acting not in response to the objective needs of the crisis, but in response to the coverage of the spill in the media.

Meanwhile, we're learning that oil skimmers offered by the Dutch to help clean up the oil slick were held up for 50 days because of bureaucratic paperwork and EPA regulations—all of which was in the power of the president to waive. (For more on the administration's flat-footed inaction, see here.)

The administration's only response has been a ham-fisted moratorium on new drilling licenses in the Gulf, which is already causing oil rigs to shut down and leave for countries that want them (such as Brazil), with at least one oil exploration firm cancelling its contracts with Gulf firms.

But this is not just incompetence. It reflects the administration's moral priorities. In their view, this is about punished big business—and especially the oil industry—for its evil, while exploiting the crisis to expand the power of government. For that goal, Obama's response is perfectly tailored.

The whole Obama presidency has been an experiment in rule by executive decree. Take, for example, President Obama's demand that BP set up a $20 billion "escrow fund" for paying damages for the spill, which is to be administered by an "independent" official who just happens to be chosen by the president. BP has knuckled under to this demand, and also to Obama's demand that it suspend dividend payments to its shareholders. (So much for the British pensioners who rely on those payments.)

What is important about this fund is that there are existing legal processes for assessing the damages caused by the spill, litigating them, and settling claims. That process did not break down in this case, and I've seen no evidence that it is failing to work. But by setting up this fund, Obama has specifically bypassed that legal process and created an extralegal one, one based on nothing but his own unlimited authority to impose his will.

Even the New York Times is beginning to notice this trend (before making excuses for it).

First there was General Motors, whose chief executive was summarily dismissed by the White House shortly before the government became the company's majority shareholder. Chrysler was forced into a merger. At the banks that received government bailouts, executive pay was curbed; at insurance companies seeking to jack up premiums, scathing criticism led to rollbacks.
But President Obama's successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating—just a down payment, the president insisted—may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do "what individuals couldn't do and corporations wouldn't do."
With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach.

The extent to which the president "twisted arms," by the way, is greatly exaggerated. BP has spent the past decade attempting to turn itself into a pampered lapdog of the government, greenwashing itself as an environmentally correct oil company whose initials stand for "Beyond Petroleum"—a claim that is beyond belief. So they naturally have acceded to whatever the government demands of them.

But this is not about BP. It's about us. It's about the preservation of the rule of law and of some legal and constitutional limits on the power of the president.

A commenter over at NRO sums up succinctly what is the matter with the BP shakedown:

Doesn't this perfectly sum up the Left's view of government? Its role is not to produce the oil (the moratorium) or clean up the oil (the Obama administration's well-documented failures post-explosion), but to distribute someone else's money to third parties.
I don't want to let BP off the hook here. They should pay legitimate claims. But it should be done through their claims process and, if necessary, the courts. Instead, this escrow deal is just another way to create a political constituency by redistributing someone else's wealth. Modern, interest-group liberalism at its core.

Far more hard-hitting is the Ben Stein column below, which captures the Third World, banana republic flavor of the Obama presidency.

Jack Wakeland sent me this link with the following comment:

"Ben Stein writes: '"Under what authority," I asked. "None needed," was the final answer.'

"To large corporations who are at a political disadvantage—like GM and BP—the president of the United States bluntly issues orders as if he were an absolute and hereditary dictator.

"Firing the chairman of the board of GM with one telephone call, taking tens of billions of dollars in cash from BP with another: one has to wonder if these will be, in Mr. Obama's memory, the cherished moments in his life. In his mind, will these be the high points that made all the years of hard work; all of the tactical double crosses; all of the social maneuvering; all of the earnestly delivered half-truths; all of the years in obscurity spent to establish the reputation upon which to mount his rapid climb to the top—are these the moments that will have made it all worthwhile?

"We Americans will probably never answer that question with any certainty. To answer that question one would have to ask it of someone who understands life in a different kind of country. We Americans will probably always reserve a charitable confusion about Mr. Obama's ultimate motives. To borrow a phrase from Dorothy Rabinowitz, he will always seem like 'the alien in the White House.' He's a man from a different country, a country with which we're unfamiliar, a land where the inhabitants aren't in the habit of assuming that liberty is their birthright."

"Our Caudillo President," Ben Stein, American Spectator, June 15

As I write this on Monday night, there are rumors around that BP will agree to President Barack Obama's demand that the oil giant "voluntarily" put about $30 billion [it ended up being $20 billion] into a fund to be administered by the government to compensate victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
[T]he action of the president in demanding this immense transfer of the stockholders' wealth without any legislation or court decision is extremely worrisome.
We live in a constitutional republic. The president's job under the Constitution is to enforce the laws made by the elected Congress. His job is not to create new laws and enforce them all by himself. His job is as magistrate under the Constitution, not as Caudillo. He is not the law. He is supposed to enforce what Congress decides.
The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr. Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked. "None needed," was the final answer….
These are not the acts of a teacher on Constitutional law. These are the acts of a big city boss or a third world dictator.

2. Sedition

While the left seeks to overturn whatever is left of the American system of government, they accuse the right of sedition, the crime of advocating the violent overthrow of the government. It is hard to tell whether this is a conscious tactic of misdirection, or simply psychological projection.

The latest is a smear-job by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, which apparently uses fringe 9/11 "truthers" and the proto-fascist 1930s leftist Father Coughlin as example of the dangerous ideas of the right.

All of this serves a distinct and dangerous purpose. The left is vilifying the right as violent and seditious, because they are working up the nerve to suspend the freedom of political speech and forcibly suppress political opposition.

I don't think they'll manage to work up enough nerve to go all the way, not yet, but they're already pushing through an intermediate step: the DISCLOSE Act, a chaotic jumble of new regulations on political speech, the purpose of which seems to be to impose onerous restrictions on right-leaning advocacy groups, while granting special exemptions for supporters of the left.

In an open letter to members of Congress, the National Right to Life Committee, a group with a long history of support for the First Amendment rights of political organizations, explains that the bill is not, as its sponsors contend, merely an exercise in making sure groups make information about themselves and their donors available which, in Congress' judgment, the public needs to know. It is actually about discouraging "as much as possible, disfavored groups (such as the NRLC) from communicating about officeholders by exposing citizens who support such efforts to harassment and intimidation, and by smothering organizations in layer on layer of record keeping and reporting requirements, all backed by the threat of civil and criminal sanctions."
What the Disclose Act proposes to do, therefore, is constitutionally dubious but politically advantageous to the Democrats. As written, it includes numerous "carve outs," for groups like labor unions which are part of the party's electoral and political constituency, that exempt them from the wide-reaching dictates of this new law.

This piece of stealth legislation finally made it into the news when the National Rifle Association, which had opposed it, sold out the freedom of political speech in exchange for a special carve-out of its own.

Like I've been saying, we have one election left in which the slap down this administration and this Congress and begin the long process of restoring constitutionally limited government to the United States.

"DISCLOSing Contempt for Liberty and the Constitution," Hans A. von Spakovsky, Heritage Foundation, June 17

The House of Representatives is expected to vote in the next day or two on the DISCLOSE Act, a law purportedly intended to blunt the effects of the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision. That case restored the First Amendment right of political speech by throwing out a federal ban on independent political advocacy by unions and corporations, including both for-profit and non-profit associations.
The real effects of the DISCLOSE Act will be to deter political speech (including criticism of incumbents, such as its chief sponsors, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.)) and political advocacy by corporations and associations that Democrats don't want participating in the American political process. It includes both absolute bans on independent political advocacy and new, burdensome disclosure requirements. Schumer admitted when he introduced the bill that "the deterrent effect should not be underestimated." During a House Administration Committee hearing, Rep. Michael Capuano (D., Mass.) made no bones about the fact that he hoped this Act "chills out all.... I have no problem whatsoever keeping everybody out [of elections]. If I could keep all outside entities out, I would."…
The DISCLOSE Act is the modern-day version of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were passed by the Federalists in 1798 to quell political opposition from the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson. These acts were one of the worst (and most noxious) violations of the First Amendment ever passed by Congress. Under their terms, Federalist judges jailed or fined 25 people, mostly Republicans newspaper editors, and many of their newspapers were forced to shut down….
As always, there are those willing to sacrifice liberty in order to gain a personal or political advantage for themselves. The National Rifle Association, which previously called the Citizens United decision a "defeat for arrogant elitists who wanted to carve out free speech as a privilege for themselves and deny it to the rest of us," has apparently agreed to withdraw its opposition to the DISCLOSE Act in exchange for a narrowly drawn exemption….
Public opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts was so great that it was major factor in the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800…. If the unconstitutional, partisan, and pernicious DISCLOSE Act is passed and signed into law by President Obama, it will be interesting to see if the American public has the same reaction to this noxious bill in 2010 and 2012 that the public had in 1800.

3. Apocalypse Now

The oil spill is sticking, so to speak, as an indictment of the administration because it demonstrates that Obama doesn't care so much about solving crises as he does about exploiting them to increase his political power.

Thus, a new crisis is emerging that has gone virtually unnoticed. Michael Barone draws our attention to a report indicating that Social Security cash flows are becoming negative—the system is paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes—five years earlier than expected.

For decades, the positive cash flow from Social Security has gone into the fraudulent "Social Security Trust Fund," which meant that Congress spent the money and wrote itself an IOU. Now that the cash flow has gone the other way—now that the IOUs are coming due—we've finally reached the point when Social Security starts to yawn open and swallow the entire federal budget. This is the beginning of America's fiscal apocalypse.

"Social Security at Mid-Year," Bruce Krasting, Bruce Krasting (blog), June 10

There is enough published information from the SSTF [Social Security Trust Fund] to make some observations for the first six months of 2010….
[What follows are charts showing that Social Security tax receipts for the first half of this year will total $346.9 billion while benefits paid out will total $347.3 billion.]
The numbers are going in the wrong direction. Receipts are down across the board while expenses keep rising….
These lines were not expected to cross for at least another five years….
Some, including the CBO, see this as a temporary phenomenon. I disagree. For there to be a return to a positive result of (payroll tax revenue [minus] benefits) the economy would have to grow on a sustained basis at 5% and inflation would have to remain near zero. Those conditions are unlikely to be met….
All heavily indebted borrowers, whether they be individuals, corporations, or sovereigns are highly dependent on cash flow to service debt. When cash flow goes negative individuals and corporations go bankrupt. Most sovereigns do, too.

4. Radicalized

I keep saying that we have one election left, but the good news is that it looks like we can accomplish a lot with that election

The numbers keep piling up to show that November could be a blood-bath for the Democrats. A new poll shows that more people view the Democrats as too "liberal" than those who believe that Republicans are too conservative. But what I found really interesting was this number:

Among self-identified Democrats the percentage identifying their party as too liberal has not changed significantly since 2008, but the percentage identifying Democrats as too conservative has risen slightly, from 6% to 14%. That suggests that a certain number of left-leaning Democrats may not be motivated to vote in 2010.

Michael Barone also describes how budget-cutting governors are gaining in popularity in state elections.

But what we're really interested in is not the contest between Republicans and Democrats but the contest within the Republican Party, where many candidates have been radicalized by the Tea Party movement. How far has it gone? Some people are even talking about repealing the 17th Amendment, so that senators would once again by chosen by state legislatures, which would supposedly have the effect of reigning in federal overreach. I doubt it would have that big an effect, but this is an example of the establishment being besieged by "peasants with pocket Constitutions."

Meanwhile, a few readers sent in updates on the performance of Tea Party candidates in the Republican primaries. Heike Larson writes:

"Another primary that went the Tea Party Way is John Dennis, who won the Republican primary and will run against Nancy Pelosi this fall.

"John is an amazingly principled free-market advocate. I have supported his campaign as a volunteer, and I encourage you to look at his web site, www.johndennis2010.com. Read his stand on the issues, and I think you'll be impressed. When I talked with John, he mentioned that he discovered Ayn Rand in 1984 ('How appropriate—Orwell's year!') and that he was deeply influenced by her ('I think most people admire Ayn Rand only for her politics—what really impresses me is how she takes everything back to metaphysics and epistemology.') That, from someone who will run against Nancy Pelosi!

"I think John has a real chance to make a run out of the Pelosi race, and in the process draw attention to the stark extreme ideological opposites: a socialist liberal—as against a principled free-market capitalist."

Meanwhile, a Tea Party backed candidate won a party caucus for a special election to replace a disgraced congressman, and declared that the big issue today is the "size and scope" of government.

TIA Daily reader and New Jersey Tea Party organizer Mark Kalinowski forwarded to me a note from Ralph Franzese of the Morristown TEA Party:

"The lead in the Morris County edition of the Star Ledger Wednesday stated that Tuesday's primary turnout was light. Watching the results come in the night before in my district (11) that didn't seem to be the case. My first thought was that in Morris county the fact that we had eleven candidates for three Freeholder positions was the cause of our better than average turnout. With 20 minutes of research I was able to come up with the chart below [which I won't include, but it shows increases in Republican turnout ranging from 8% to 100%]. I say we should congratulate ourselves for the great work that we did across the state. In a non-presidential election year the New Jersey Republican primary vote totals were up over 44% over 2008."

But the big news out of New Jersey is Little—Anna Little, a congressional candidate who relied on the enthusiasm of Tea Party volunteers to win the Republican nomination against an establishment-backed millionaire who outspent her by about 20-to-one.

Little—her campaign slogan is "Little Government Is Good Government"—was one of the candidates at the Tea Party forum in New Jersey that I moderate last month, and her win does not surprise me: she is extremely energetic and charismatic, a real firecracker. See an overview of her winning campaign here.

The effect on New Jersey politics is described in the article below, including some interesting observations about how the current environment has been causing Governor Chris Christie—whose previous record is that of a squishy "moderate"—to move to the right.

"Little's Win Portends Big Change for the Republicans," Paul Mulshine, New Jersey Star-Ledger, June 15

The conservative mayor of the small Monmouth County town of Highlands had no party support and just a tiny amount of money in her race against Rumson gazillionaire Diane Gooch. But as she was standing in the Statehouse halls yesterday waiting to testify at a Senate hearing, Little got a call informing her that the latest results have her leading Gooch by an 84-vote margin in the election held a week ago….
"Everybody is calling it Obamacare, but we're calling it Pallonecare," said Little, who said she intends to campaign on the issue this fall.
That would be US Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat who was a primary sponsor of the national health care bill recently signed into law by the president.
Pallone is unlikely to object. He boasts of his role in crafting the plan. All indications are that he expects to ride it to re-election to what has been a safe Democratic seat for years.
This year isn't like the others, though…. New Jersey Republicans turned out to be much further right than the mainstream party leaders had expected.
In Little's case, the tea partiers and other activists provided her with volunteer labor to do the door-to-door work that neutralized Gooch's big funding advantage….
Christie seems to have discovered what Little already knew: All the energy is on the right these days.
"This is the first time I've seen such an involved constituency and it has given me great enthusiasm," said Little. "The people are awake and I don't think they are going back to sleep."
Who knows? Maybe even the party leaders will wake up.

5. Rockefeller, Morgan, Beethoven, and Shakespeare

One of Ayn Rand's most profound observations never made it into print—at least until recently. In her notes for The Fountainhead, she observed that while the Left couches its agenda in terms of economics, its real motive is a hostility toward individual achievement in any field, including art and ideas. She says of her leftist villain, Ellsworth Toohey, "He says that he is fighting Rockefeller and Morgan; he is fighting Beethoven and Shakespeare."

And Toohey is alive and well in today's world. One of his real-life counterparts just wrote a sneering overview of the Tea Party movement for the New York Times. The one part of the article I agree with is this: "Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins."

What follows is a statement of pure metaphysical collectivism—the idea that the independent individual is an illusion, that the individual is a "construction" of society and not the other way around. Read this article and remember it, because this is what we are up against. The lesson of 20th-century totalitarianism is that before the individual can be eradicated physically—in mass purges and prison camps—he must be eradicated intellectually.

"The Very Angry Tea Party," J.M . Bernstein, New York Times, June 13

Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics begins: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.
The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief….
In a bracing and astringent essay in The New York Review of Books, pointedly titled "The Tea Party Jacobins," Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. It is not for the sake of acquiring political power that Tea Party activists demonstrate, rally and organize; rather, Lilla argues, the appeal is to "individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power."…
My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans' collective self-understanding.
The implicit bargain that many Americans struck with the state institutions supporting modern life is that they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible, and that for all intents and purposes each citizen could continue to believe that she was sovereign over her life; she would, of course, pay taxes, use the roads and schools, receive Medicare and Social Security, but only so long as these could be perceived not as radical dependencies, but simply as the conditions for leading an autonomous and self-sufficient life. Recent events have left that bargain in tatters.
But even this way of expressing the issue of dependence is too weak, too merely political…. [W]hat has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one's very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them….
The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation?...
The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.
In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party "Jacobins"; I would urge that they are nihilists…. With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins' fantasy of total freedom, "a fury of destruction"? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

6. No Consent from the Governed

A few days ago, I linked to a somewhat pessimistic overview of the first anniversary of the popular uprising against the stolen election in Iran. Here is a more balanced look at the story from someone whose deep knowledge of Iran I trust: Reuel Marc Gerecht, who used to serve as a CIA officer in Tehran. He points out how Iran has opened up a fissure within Islam and radicalized a previous little-heard-from liberal and secular opposition to Islamism.

But there is one point on which every observer agrees: that the Obama administration has utterly failed to do anything to help this opposition.

As Gerecht observes, the most effective form of aid would be to provide satellite Internet access that would be impossible for the regime to block and very difficult for it to monitor, allowing the Iranian dissidents unfettered communication, both with each other and with the outside world. And "The Green Movement's technology experts have done back-of-the-envelope calculations: just $50 million per year could open the entire country to the Internet." But while Obama extorts tens of billions from oil producers, he can't be bothered with such a relatively tiny expenditure.

"Iran's Revolution: Year 2," Reuel Marc Gerecht, New York Times, June 14

In the 1980s, when Iran's youth were enthralled by the charismatic Khomeini, it would have been difficult to imagine that in two decades the same Muslim society would engage in the most damning critique of dictatorship ever seen in the Middle East….
The Green Movement, which is an upwelling of Iran's enormous cultural and political transformation, is what America has long wanted to see in the Middle East, especially after 9/11: a more-or-less liberal democratic movement, increasingly secular in philosophy and political objectives, rooted in Iran's large middle class and even larger pool of college-educated youth (a college education in Iran, where the revolution zealously opened universities to the poor, doesn't connote any social status).
The movement is similar in its aspirations and methods to what transpired behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. It aims to incorporate the spiritually dispossessed, the free thinkers, the poorly paid, the young (more than 60 percent of Iran's population is now under 30), the dissident clergy and, perhaps most important, the first-generation revolutionaries of the 1970s who have been purged by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's charisma-free, paranoid successor as supreme leader. The movement is also the most recent manifestation (the first being Mr. Khatami's presidential victory in 1997) of widespread anger by women over their second-class citizenship in the Islamic Republic.
The movement is unique in Islamic history: an intellectual revolution that aims to solve peacefully and democratically the great Muslim torment over religious authenticity and cultural collaboration. How does a proud people adopt the best (and the worst) from the West and remain true to its much-loved historical identity?
The millions who voted in 1997 and 2001 for Mr. Khatami, a clerical apostle of cultural integration, were telling us that for them, this is really no longer a big problem. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled from 1941 until the revolution, failed in his dream of turning Iranians into Germans. Yet 30 years of theocracy have done an astonishing job of Westernizing Iran's culture and political preferences.
While the riots of last June did not topple the mullahs, the Islamic Republic is now permanently unstable. Every national holiday has the potential of turning into a day of protest, and the regime must send out hundreds of thousands of security forces, as it did in the days leading up to the anniversary on Saturday….
While many in the West casually dismiss the movement because it's been unable to maintain huge street demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei has an acute grasp of how numerous his enemies are and how volatile the country remains.