Our president is caught up in the eternal tension between the two, according to Shelby Steele:
(Health care reform) was a chance for Mr. Obama not just to be a part of history but to make history. Here he could have an achievement commensurate with his own historical significance. To have left off health care and taken up jobs would have left him a caretaker rather than a history-maker. So he hung in with health care and today it can be said: Barack Obama has signed the most significant piece of social legislation in 45 years—achieving something that has eluded every president since FDR.
A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency. In Iowa, a day after signing health care into law, he put himself into competition with history. If history shapes men, “We still have the power to shape history.” But this adds up to one thing: He is likely to be the most liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to grandiosity and to historical significance.
Of the two great societal goals—freedom and “the good”—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom. And ideas of “the good” are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.
Steele’s larger point is that the president lacks a defining vision of what he wants to do as much as a desire to do big things, that vector is less important than scale.
That it’s really, at the end of the day, all about him.
All politicians have a certain amount of narcissism, but Obama’s is simply off the charts. Everything on this planet is all about him as long as he is in office.
Ken … Even if he’s a one term president [please God please} everything on this planet will always be about him even after we get him out of office. He's a dedicated narcissist of the most intense kind. After all, he's already written two [count 'em, *two*] autobiographies before he reached the age of fifty. And that was, as his wife Michelle says, before he *actually did anything*. This does not bode well for the reading public.
Marianne
“This does not bode well for the reading public.”
Boy, an understatement if there ever was one, Marianne! Are you sure you’re not British?
Pobably has a very lerge bit of Brit blood.
virgil dear … There’s all varieties of Brit in my “mutt mix” — Welsh, Scots, Irish and of course Anglo Saxon, a little bit of French in there somewhere, and probably some Druid if we look hard enough. Oh, and don’t forget the odd Roman legionnaire seducing the country girl under the hedgerows … one of my family names is Titus. I hope he was charming … must have been if she was willing.
Marianne
Titus, eh? If not charming then at least convincing.
fwiw M, you almost perfectly described my ancestry with a Welsh last name to boot.
My wife might tell ya, Welsh men may not be convincing but are cunningly charming.
There are a few ways one can be a historical character I believe Mr. Obama has chosen one that may not, in the future, be considered a role model. And one that is not on the scale between “Freedom” and “the Good”.
But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom.
What today’s liberals define as “the good,” the classical liberals — the 18th Century humanists — defined as “servitude.”
In the interest of full disclosure: English, Scotch, Irish, French, Spanish, Romany (by way of Bohemia), ‘Murican Indian, and GOKWE*.
*GOKWE: n., pron. gock‘-wee, abbr., “Gawd Only Knows What Else.”
In other words, standard Amuricun mutt!
Yeah — weird thing is, people keep telling me I look *German*.
Must be the dueling scars…
Dang, Bill, I feel genetically deprived. I’m almost pure North British. I coulda used some Gypsy genes when dealing with the ex-brother and my lawyer. I just can’t say “Hey, look over there!” and have it work.
If my momma (rest her soul) had it right, I’m mostly English/Welsh with some Dutch thrown in.
Time to haul out some of my favorite quotes, I guess:
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” –James Madison
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may
at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good
will torment us without end for they do so with the approval
of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis
Thomas Jefferson – I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
Ah, yes. I was thinking C.S. Lewis when I first started reading Lex’s post. Thomas Sowell, former Marine pistol instructor, has written much along the same line. He is one of my personal heroes.
here is another good read: http://www.theadvocates.org/library/christian-crockett.html
Here is a short bit of it:
“Thank you for that, but you find fault with only one vote. You know the story of Henry Clay, the old huntsman and the rifle; you wouldn’t break your gun for one snap.”
“No, nor for a dozen. As the story goes, that tack served Mr. Clay’s purpose admirably, though it really had nothing to do with the case. I would not break the gun, nor would I discard an honest representative for a mistake in judgment as a mere matter of policy. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.”
“I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.”
“No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true!”
“Certainly it is, and I thought that was the last vote for which anybody in the world would have found fault with.”
“Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity!”
“Here was another sockdologer; for, when I began to think about it, I could not remember a thing in the Constitution that authorized it. I found I must take another tack, so I said:
“Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.”
Mr. Sowell does have an impressive history. Would that BHO were such an American.
Give me Freedom and I’ll find my own Good.
Tyranny begins with others thinking they have the corner on what is best for others.Like the Narcissist in Chief.