Instapundit » Blog Archive » JONAH GOLDBERG: The fact that the presidential vote matters so much is a sign not of national healt…: "JONAH GOLDBERG: The fact that the presidential vote matters so much is a sign not of national health but of dysfunction.
This echoes Jerry Pournelle, who wrote: “We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.”
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:37 pm"
Of course it's a
RTWT. So much so in fact, I can't resist trying to make sure you read the whole grand finale:
President George W. Bush adopted a number of policies liberals once decried as dangerous expansions of the imperial presidency. With a few exceptions, few complain about those powers now that Obama is the president. The rule seems to be runaway executive power is good, so long as my guy is in power.
That's a dangerous principle. "Those who tried to warn us back at the beginning of the New Deal of the dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were taking toward strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong," then-California Sen. Alan Cranston conceded at the height of the Watergate hearings in 1973.
In his brilliant new book, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, Charles Kesler argues that it was Woodrow Wilson who introduced the idea that American presidents must have a "vision" for where they should take the country.
In other words, everyone's life and lifestyle somehow needed to conform to the priorities of a politician in Washington. The 19th century notion that presidents should be "statesmen" who guarded the Constitution gave way to the 20th century fetish for "leaders" who mold the public to their vision.
Unfortunately, since Wilson, this has become something of a bipartisan idea. Republicans are just as likely to talk about the "vision thing" as Democrats. As a conservative, I certainly prefer the Republican vision to the Democratic. Republicans, for instance, rarely vow to "fundamentally transform America."
But the libertarian in me aches for a time when the president's vision was irrelevant and national elections just didn't matter that much.
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