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Caesarism Comes to the Republican Party
Among a very long list of harms inflicted upon the United States by Barack Obama and his party, perhaps the worst was Caesarism. Obama relished the worship of millions in 2008. From his star turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was treated not as a political candidate, but as a savior. Progressives fell into a swoon, typified by Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’ 2008 comment, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world; he’s sort of God.”
Now, a similar kind of unreasoning adulation is greeting (improbably enough) Donald Trump. Fred Barnes reports that a focus group of Trump supporters is swept up in a kind of worship, too: “He’s not just their favorite candidate. Their tie to him is almost mystical. He’s a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think.”
If Obama had accepted the reverence of the crowd but governed as a normal president, his sin would have been merely aesthetic. But he did not. Contempt for law and tradition has been the hallmark of his presidency. His lawlessness makes Richard Nixon’s look penny ante.
In addition to his blatantly illegal grant of legal status to 4 million illegal immigrants — a move Obama himself declared he lacked the authority to make — Obama has acted as an autocrat in dozens of other instances. Without any legal basis, he imposed a fine on BP after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and unilaterally suspended offshore drilling. He bypassed the plain language of Obamacare multiple times, whenever enforcing the unpopular or unworkable aspects of the law would be politically inconvenient. (The employer mandate, for example, was supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2014.) He attempted to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate was not in recess. He waived the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform law. Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration “set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.” His administration has ignored repeated congressional subpoenas, while his attorney general was found in contempt of Congress.
Obama perhaps calculated that he could get away with this lawlessness because of his uniqueness. The Constitution provides a remedy for lawless executives — but while Obama has arguably committed acts that merit impeachment, he knows that his status as the first black president gives him immunity. Impeachment would tear the country apart.
The courts have thwarted some of Obama’s power grabs. The Supreme Court has rebuked him several times. The NLRB appointments were reversed, and the immigration waiver has been judicially stayed for now. But much damage remains.
Obama’s legacy is a profound weakening of respect for law and tradition in this country. That Democrats are fine with this isn’t a huge surprise. They’ve long demonstrated that they are ends-justify-the-means types. Since the era of Woodrow Wilson, they’ve decided that if they cannot get their preferred policies through legislatures, they’re happy to see them imposed by courts — and if not by courts, then by executive fiat. They conveniently uphold a “living” Constitution — which is pretty much no Constitution at all but just the raw exercise of power by those in robes.
Conservatives and Republicans, by contrast, have traditionally stood for the rule of law — with all of its frustrations and inefficiencies. Respect for the rule of law is more precious than any given policy outcome. If we are not, as John Adams said, a “government of laws and not of men,” we will soon drift into the kind of despotism that characterizes nations without a strong legal tradition. Putinism is destroying what is best in Russia. Peronism devastated Argentina. Franco crushed liberty in Spain for half a century. The Castro brothers have imposed their tyranny on Cuba for longer than that. The list of countries that succumbed to Caesarism is very, very long.
The appeal of Trump falls into this category. Though one might suppose that his borderline pathological narcissism, his arrested emotional development and his nearly incoherent ramblings would exclude him from consideration for county clerk, he sits atop the GOP field. The message from a segment of the Republican Party is: “Okay, we’re an autocracy now. So let’s have this guy govern by fiat.”
Unless the rest of the Republican Party makes a different case — namely that the answer to Obamaism is a return to law — it may be game over for self-government in the world’s oldest democracy.
Published in General
Yeah, I didn’t want to derail the thread, but here in page 4…
When I visited Spain and spoke with the descendents of the Nationalists, all of them said variants of the same thing: “Franco or Stalin.”
And thus, for them, ended the matter.
ET,
Everyone thinks Obama says everything is bush’s fault, blaming Obama is not smarter.
Orwell concludes roughly the same in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell went to Spain to fight Franco–then discovered his own side was rotten.
My favorite of all of Orwell’s writings.
There are a lot of morals to be drawn from the story of Gaius Julius Caesar, but one, surely, is the importance of good police. People can only take so much violence and disorder–and, when they reach their limit, the man on horseback looks acceptable. It’s an odd thought that the cop in the street is all that stands between us and dictatorship, but I’ve grown convinced that it’s true.
Jack Dunphy, are you listening? We all owe you a shoeshine.
Amen to what Peter and Sabrdance have said. My mother lived in Francisco Franco’s Spain during the 1960s when she attended graduate school at the University of Madrid. She and her Spanish friends have nothing but positive things to say about life under Franco. At their house, my parents have a portrait of Franco hanging alongside one of King Juan Carlos I.
(Commenting on both your and Stephens)
The City of Rome was controlled by Magnus Pompey when Caesar took over, there was already control of the streets. Gaius Julius Caesar executed hundreds of political opponents just as his uncle Gaius Marius had when he took over Rome and when his opponent Sulla had (Sulla started out as a lieutnenant of Marius). Remember that it was under Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus that Cicero was executed (even though according record Cicero was loved by the populace). The issue was more than mere political opposition. The Roman Republic had become somewhat habituated to solving political issues with violence and the will of one ruling.
The sheer fact that the populace wouldn’t attempt to rebel against such political genocide shows how cowed into submission they were. Anyone that trades freedom for security deserves neither and will recieve neither. We are better individuals than to resort to populist demagogeury and Ad Hominem attacks. I would rather keep logic and win than resort to what the left does.
Spot on again Mona. Besides the crass language, besides the bad policy proposals, besides the blowhard announcements, besides the mean spirited attacks to all who criticize him, I cannot understand how his supporters live with his narcissism. The man’s ego is twice as big as Obama’s, and Obama had the biggest ego I had ever seen to date.
I’ve said this before, I can vote for any of the other Republican candidates, and I disagree with some of them in major ways, but there is no way I will ever pull the lever for Trump. It’s not just policy; it’s his ego and the low brow nature of the way he struts it.
The first step of the left is to create an unbalanced budget generally. They do this by proposing their incompetent and ineffective welfare state programs and if fortunate for them enact them with limited if any funding for that program thus creating a deficit. Then with a deficit in place they are able to argue for more taxes in order to “keep the government going”. They can do this through at least two ways. They can enact taxes and regulations that hamper growth and help to pay for it or they can enact further welfare programs that actually work like a tax (an example is social security, which when created had the minimum age as 65 when the average life span was 63) with alleged social benefits. The first step then in defeating them and their policies in legal terms is to balance the budget and begin to decrease the size of government.
The Republican Congress of the mid-late 1990s till Iraq were doing that (200 Billion Dollar surplus in 2000) until Osama Bin Laden hit the towers. There was progress, literal progress, and it unfortunately was ignored by both political parties (or at least the media) and most citizens completely forgot that. This isn’t even mentioning the draw back of progressivism on the state level with less gun control and more restrictions on abortion.
So the answer is that you need to widen your scope of vision. Republicans have been fighting.
It is a profound desire of my heart never to disagree with Peter! Franco did “shut down” politics. He didn’t permit labor unions. He controlled the press. He was a dictator.
He wasn’t nearly as bad as Mao or Pol Pot or Castro, but I still think it’s fair to call him a despot. Not a totalitarian, but a “strong man.” I’m comfortable tossing him into the basket that also includes Peron and Putin. You?
On point one, my fairest and oldest of friends, we agree: I said myself that Franco shot down politics.
No, I wouldn’t lump him with Peron, one of whose characteristics was at least a strong tendency toward state control, if not outright ownership, of large swathes of the economy, whereas Franco left the markets more or less alone. Nor with Putin, who keeps threatening his neighbors and has already annexed Crimea and seized control of much of Ukraine, whereas Franco’s concerns lay almost entirely with Spain itself. (He messed around in northern Africa, but he was only attempting to administer regions Spain already controlled, and he never really took much interest in it.) Far from proving expansionist, Franco was a thoroughgoing isolationist: He wanted Spain to drop out of the modern world, and to end its civil wars, which in one form or another had been going on for much of a century, to permit a couple of generations of Spaniards to grow up in peace.
Also–and I’m a little surprised this doesn’t seem to have registered on Mona’s usually exquisitely sensitive historical scale–when it came to choosing sides during the Cold War, Franco chose right; which is to say, of course, that he sided with us. Surely that weighs in his favor? (Again, Jeanne Kirkpatrick thought so.) A strongman? Yes. But–as even George Orwell all but admitted–Spain could have had either Franco or Stalin. Nothing else was on offer.
And now I find myself so upset at disagreeing with Mona that I have to go lie down.
So a dictator with conservative instincts gets a pass?
Arise Peter Robinson. I completely submit to your interpretation.
To prevent the Soviet Union from expanding into Western Europe? To prevent the creation of Soviet Client States in the Western Hemisphere? To preserve some semblance of Chinese Democracy from the Politburo?
Let me think about it.
yes.
I think Jamie is saying that we shouldn’t defend the concept of dictatorship in comparison to republicanism. I would agree that preventing the spread of Communism was a very important goal (and I suspect that Lockett does too) but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean we can’t say that we dislike him or oppose him or his style of governance. We just oppose Communism more than him. There is a chain of priorities on what to deal with.
As such, even if the left supports dictator like power wielding (which they have always supported from Napolean to Napolean III to Vladimir Lenin to Benito Mussolini to Adolf Hitler to Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh) it doesn’t mean we should resort to the same. An example would be with the Green Lantern when Sinestro decides that the lanterns should use the power of fear to defeat fear but Hal Jordan believes that will power alone can defeat it. Our values are superior to the left’s, the issue is that we rarely communicate it and explain it vs the left to the populace. We have no need for Ad Hominem.
But, to defend Jamie on foreign policy a moment, would that apply now? To the extent that there are dictators with conservative instincts in power today, ought we to strongly urge them to democratize, or should we give them a pass?
Mine, too, partly for Orwell’s moral non-perfection; I find it meaningful that one of the century’s great sages was as keen to shoot policemen as Orwell was (policemen who were fighting on his own side of a civil war). There are no humans so great as not to have occasional mind bogglingly awful moral moments. Or, as Hume would prefer I suggested, there are many who might appear so and then are not. As such, when Peter and Mona come out in favor of wage and price controls, turn out to chain and starve their respective children in tyrannical displays of dominance, or prefer Gillette to Harry’s Shave, I ought not to find this as incongruous as my mind, shaped by a literature that loves heroes and villains, would find it to be.
Republicans used to fight. They have not been fighting for the past 15 years that I can see. See my list in the previous post.
It boils down to this as a conservative:
When we lose elections, we lose.
When we win elections, we lose.
Even Reagan did not shrink government.
I can list exactly two things moving in the conservative direction:
Everything else is moving to the left at an alarming rate.
Don’t tell me that the Contract with America was a great thing. You might as well tell me the GOP is pro-freedom because it fought the Civil War. It is all ancient history. What has the GOP done for me lately?
Bryan
1 and 2 are not really isssues
I don’t understand what you mean by that. Can you clarify?
Again at the state level the Republican Party has also expanded school vouchers, thus creating more choice and free market education solutions (while also weakening teacher unions) and in some cases out right smashed public sector labor unions like with what Scott Walker did. In other areas like Florida and Texas (Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and the respective congresses of those states) income taxes (and others) have been completely eliminated (while also shrinking the budget, therefore size of government. and enabling the market to flourish; thus resulting in hundreds of thousands of new jobs). That is several other accoplishments.
I assume you either have never had an addiction or noticed having one. Our nation was on an addiction of Big Government for roughly 80 years. The sheer fact that we have even gotten Republicans to majorities in Congress (remember it had been nearly 70 years since Republicans held it for more than 2 terms; Democrats were that popular) that have managed to create a surplus and begin to strangle government growth and then begin to shave off fat is a beginning. The Republican Party has begun the process. It will take a long time though, people don’t just get off an addiction in one day or even in a couple of years.
As a glimmer of hope, think about the individuals that grow up under limited state governments and see the benefits of it. They apply that same thinking to the federal government in time.
Shhh don’t talk about Jeb Bush’s actual conservative governing record. Facts just get in the way of the Jeb hate.
Jeb isn’t even in my top 3 candidates but you don’t just hate a man because of his last name. You have to weigh all the merits and vices, then you have to weigh those against his competitors’. Overall Jeb Bush did well in most areas and failed in some, but to the answer of what to do against such reckless Jeb hate?
School Choice? Jeb! and many in the GOP have embraced Common Core. I am not sure we can call School Choice a victory of any sort.
I don’t want a “glimmer of hope”. I want a victory. The GOP has not begun any process at all. Nothing has happened at a national level since the Contract with America. The GOP abandoned Newt, while the Dems stuck with Clinton. Our side always loses.
He is for Amnesty and Common core. I am against those things.
Jeb! is not for what I am for. I am going with what he says he will do.
It is odd to think you would think to support him because he must not be telling the truth.
@ Bryan Stephens – When I say school choice I mean voucher systems (from Texas to Florida to Louisiana so that parents are not stuck with only a public school). I may not exactly like Common Core but his argument for it was the whole bare minimum for education needs to be higher kind. He was essentially saying that education in the USA had become so non competitive due to stagnation. I can attest to this because public school’s don’t generally offer as many choices as they once did; at least by comparison in my town between me and my parents.
This doesn’t absolve the issues of Jeb though; what it means is that he sees Common Core as a means of raising standards (assume that instead of getting Cs to pass, you need Bs now) and extrapolates this claim from what reforms he did in Florida. Assuming his philosophy this means that he supports vouchers (competition between all schools) and increasing standards instead of lowering standards (NCLB). During the first debate he outlined the standards as being merely goals set nationally while state governments could decide how to achieve those themselves.
I personally have reservations against it but his logic isn’t completely unfounded and he has at least put some effort into the issue unlike the doom and gloom Trump. On the issues of wanting victories though I assume you haven’t read much history, at least about conflicts generally. Unless one side completely dwarf’s the other then the fight can take a while. This war we wage with the progressive left has been going on for over a century.
Both sides have won battles (victories); the elimination of state income taxes and other regulations, the victories on the right against public sector unions and right to work states, the victories on school vouchers, the victories on gun control, and the victories on abortion and defunding PP at the state level are all battles won in the war. You have witnessed victory, but you wish for a more simple world.
Even today with McConnell and Boehner who are attacked from both left and right as being wrong have managed to decrease the deficit starting in 2010 when the Republicans took over the House of Reps; look at the decrease in the deficit before (since 2007 when the Dems took over) and after and you will see some significant change. As I said before, the first step is to take over at the state level first. Those raised in limited state governments that witness the beauty and success of it will apply that same paradigm to places they move to later and when they run for political office. The Republicans hold over 2/3rds the state governors and legislatures, given time with the application of conservative principles and we will gain even more ground. As I said before, patience is key, wars are not won in a single battle but unfortunately after a slew of them.
CBA:
The Obama Admin is destroying Federalism. It does not matter how many States the GOP controls, if the Federal government rules by imperial fiat.
You tell me to be patient and then say, look at the crumbs. We are not winning on Education. Jeb! and his Brother are for top down control of schools, which is not a power Washington should have, but they are for doing it by the back door. Common Core could be the best thing in history, but it is wrong on the face of it.
We are not winning battles in this war, we are losing them. You site that spending has decreased under the GOP. It has to stop. Departments needs to be eliminated. The Regulatory state needs to be rolled back. No one in the GOP even talk about what needs to be done.
A GOP President could, with a stroke of a pen, shut down the Regulatory state. It is beyond imagination that one would.
If a GOP President did for us what Obama is doing for them, then I will think our side is fighting.
Please stop telling me to be patient. I have lived with that since Clinton was elected.
The GOP are a party of losers, who do nothing buy lose. Conservatisim is not advanced by the GOP at all.
Again, stop pointing to wins in the margins. The only two are the pro-life drift of the nation and gun rights. Those are wins. Mark my words, Common Core will be used to attack school choice.
IF the GOP wants to be for true School Choice, they should advocate total vouchers and no public school system. They won’t do that because it is too radical.
The other side has all the radical ideas, that they then get, and move on to their more radical ideas. One long march, one long game, one long war to more and more socialism.
What is your plan to unwind that other than to point to some vouchers in some states, and agree that we should have Federal Education standards (and please show me where our founding documents give the national government that power).
Bryan, I don’t think you understand how Anerican governance works. The liberal experiment was only successful politically because they implemented iticrementaly over 100 years. Our counter revolution will take just as long. Sorry if this disappoints you but it is just the way America works. These “wins on the margins” you deride are more important than you imagine.
Since 1937, the move has been only in one direction, it has just been a question of speed.
If you could point to how our small victories point to a greater win down the road, you might have me. What the left has is a steady stream of victories, one after the other.
And it is not a “liberal experiment” it is the most illiberial thing possible: the State as replacement for God.
The true experiment, the founding of this Republic did not happen in steps over 100 years, it happened in a civil war. The Constitution was forged in a matter of weeks. Real change can be fast.
If winning at the margins is so vital, please map out for me how wins at the margins have advanced our cause and reveres the effects of the last 100 years of growing socialism in this nation. Already, the GOP is unwilling to end Obamacare, much less address Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
No, sir, I am no longer going to listen to the people who say “wait”. 25 years is long enough to have waited.