For almost my entire lifetime, the friends of liberty have been in retreat. They have accepted the welfare system, and they have temporized with the administrative state. With regard to domestic affairs, they have been in competition with the progressives – but only in one particular. The battle has been over who can better manage the system. In effect, what we have witnessed is a struggle between two species of progressives – managerial progressives who for the most part come out of the business world and intellectual progressives drawn from the academy. Only rarely in the last century have we had a genuine conservative as President – a man guided by an understanding of what the Founders had in mind when they adopted the Declaration of Independence and framed the Constitution. Only rarely has the Republican Party presented itself as a party of principle. The prospect terrifies many of those who consider themselves conservatives. They cannot imagine our departing from the New Deal order. All that they really want to do is to slow down the liberal juggernaut.

It is not always wrong to temporize. That is precisely what one should do with evils likely to disappear if one leaves them alone. That is what one should do with evils beyond one’s capacity to change.

But occasions do present themselves in which institutions and practices that once seemed entrenched and impregnable can be disposed of, and on such occasions temporizing is disastrous. We spent much of the Cold War attempting to accommodate the Soviet Union – and rightly so. In the beginning, they had the best artillery in the world and a great many divisions; later, they had nuclear weapons.

But a time came when shrewd observers recognized that the revolutionary generation had passed from the stage, that the Soviets had lost their élan, and that their economy was imploding. These men persuaded Ronald Reagan that what had always been deemed impossible was well within our grasp – that it had become possible to roll back communism without a nuclear war. And he, in turn, had the courage and the resolve necessary if an American leader was to seize the occasion and subject the Soviets to pressure that they could not bear. The proponents of Realpolitik recoiled in horror, but Reagan pressed on.

We now live in the worst of times. We are subject to a President and a party intent on fixing elections; on denying to workers faced with unionization the secret ballot; on shutting down conservative talk radio; on marginalizing Fox News; on demonizing Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, and John Boehner; and on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” This is the meaning of the massive expansion of federal expenditure and regulation under Obama; it is the likely consequence of Obamacare; and it will come to pass if we do not reverse course, repeal Obamacare, radically cut back federal expenditure, pare regulation, and balance the budget without imposing – except perhaps for a short time – additional taxes.

We also live in the best of times. At no time in the last sixty-four years has American public been as fed up and aroused as they are now. At no time have they been as well-informed. At no time have they been as open to genuine change. The onslaught of Barack Obama is the last gasp of the welfare state. The Social Security Administration is now paying out more than it takes in. Medicare and Medicaid are dependent on general revenues. If we do not cut back, we will have to pony up – and if we choose to pony up, we will soon discover that marginal tax rates affect conduct – that you can raise taxes and collect considerably less, rather than more, in revenues. This is a time for decision, and the American people know the score.

If we could roll back communism, we can roll back the welfare state. We can eliminate the administrative state, restore the separation of powers, re-establish constitutional government, provide for legislative accountability. We can do this, or – out of timidity or a disgraceful taste for running other people’s lives – we can acquiesce. It is not a time for half-measures. Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have unwittingly opened the way for a return to first principles and a political realignment. If we do not seize this occasion now, we may never have another opportunity to change the direction in which this country has been tending for almost a century now.

In the order imagined by Woodrow Wilson and the progressives, set in motion by Wilson’s great admirer Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and extended by Lyndon Baines Johnson, we were destined to drift in the direction of what Alexis de Tocqueville called soft despotism. But Barack Obama has awakened us from our slumber, and we have an opportunity to become again what we once were – free women and men governing ourselves within a republican order characterized by federalism and the separation of powers. At this point, the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself. The only obstacles are the ambition of the would-be managers in our own camp and the timidity of those who mistake temporizing for prudence.