Liberty & Union

More than a year has passed since the great tragedy of President Obama's re-election. The great deception of '08 was understandable, what with eight years of President Bush, fear stalking the land amidst the financial meltdown, & Mr. Obama serving as the national cipher, an empty vessel into which voters poured their own hopes & dreams without any real understanding of who the man was or for what policy prescriptions he stood. But that the wool could be pulled over the eyes of the American electorate a second time, that amidst an economic recovery hardly worth the name & a world descending ever-further into chaos as American leadership & derring-do were conspicuously absent, that the majority of the voting citizens in this country would continue to keep their eyes fixed on the Great & Powerful Oz & spare nary a glance for the man behind the curtain, that was truly disheartening.

Not long after the election, one of my kith, a fellow of left-wing politics & a friendly disposition, insultingly beseeched me not to lose faith in democracy; he insisted that the political pendulum swings to & fro, & would eventually swing back in a direction more to my liking. He meant this kindly, but that he could think so little of me convinced me that we must not be friends after all, that I must be a stranger to him. I have now as much faith in democracy as I have ever had, which is to say as I have now as little faith in democracy as I have ever had. As long as I have been an adult thinker (I refuse to be held accountable for the rashness of thought I possessed a youth, for the very nature of youth is that as not-yet-fully-formed individuals youths cannot be held strictly to account for their rashness), I have been guided by Winston Churchill's famously acerbic appraisals of democracy: "Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..." & "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." I held to this when then-Governor Bush defeated my preferred candidate, Senator McCain, for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 & when the Supreme Court stood up for law over politicking in deciding Bush v. Gore later that same year. I held to this when President Bush defeated then-Senator Kerry in '04, a man whom even his supporters (& Bush's harshest detractors) disdained as a "douchebag." I held to this when then-Senator Obama defeated Senator McCain in '08. I have always held democracy in little regard, & yet embraced it as a the only morally defensible form of government. The dichotomy is the result of serious thought & cannot be shaken as the result of an unfavorable electoral result. (My faith in democracy, such as it is, is not built on sand, sir!)

But, yes, the '12 election was discouraging. A quotation from the self-made billionaire Harold Hamm, from a recent profile in the magazine National Review, reflects well my opinion:

He admires Romney and says, "He was a better candidate than we deserved"—"we" meaning the country. "It's a shame he couldn't get there," he continues. "Some things just go against you."

We as a body politic made a dreadful error, an error we continue to pay for in blood, treasure, & honor. Belatedly, thanks to the deceptions at the heart of "Obamacare," the electorate is awakening to its error & the magnitude of injustice it has inflicted on itself. Too late to fix the errors made in the last election cycle, but not too late to apply their lessons to the midterm elections & beyond.