The Government We Deserve

President Barack Hussein Obama.

It's time to become accustomed to saying this.  There will be other presidents, of course, but no matter what happens over the next eight years, President Barack Hussein Obama has earned his place in history as the first black American president - really, let's be honest here: the most powerful black man of all time.

In a more just world, this achievement wouldn't be noteworthy; but, alas, humankind has always been prone to racism, so it's a milestone of significance.

After the confetti has been swept up and the inaugural dishes returned to the china cupboards, though, the color of our president will be of little consequence.  The daily lives of Americans are not affected by our leaders' hue, nor should they be.  We are all, though, profoundly affected by the policies that our representatives enact on our behalf; and this is where the hurricane warnings are flying at full mast.

Throughout American history, whenever one party has held untrammeled power over both the Executive and Legislative branches, bad things happen.  The record is bipartisan in this regard - what great and worthy feats of conservative legislation did Bush accomplish while Republicans held Congress?

No, instead of, say, the end of the Department of Education or expanding domestic oil drilling, we were handed No Child Left Behind and the Department of Homeland Security.  We can expect far worse from a party that actually believes government knows best in almost every aspect of human life.

The true concern is not bad policies, though.  Bad policies usually reveal themselves and can be fixed later.

Today's Democrats are after bigger game.  They don't just want to put their policies in place; they want to change the structure of the system to ensure their changes stay in place and that they themselves stay in power indefinitely.

Money

Obama famously set fundraising records, outspending McCain and the Republicans on the order of three to one.  Historically, Democrats have not had this advantage; now they are accustomed to it, and they won't want to give it up.

The Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act is just the first structural change to ensure a steady tsunami of dollars into liberal coffers: since labor unions are almost exclusively Democratic, any act which will help unions force themselves on workers and companies and thence to extract union dues by more force, is no less than a massive infusion of stolen cash for the left.  Moreover, thanks to the ill-advised policies of Pres. Bush and Hank Paulson, the Democrats now have their hand around the necks of America's banks.  Any doubts as to whom the banks will be donating?

Then there's the other use of money in politics: lavishing the public purse on your own voters.  Obama famously wants to lower taxes on the poorest 95% of Americans, but when half of those already don't pay any income taxes, his "tax cut" is really a welfare payment.

The time is fast approaching when a clear majority of the American people will welcome taxes because they don't pay them - they only receive.  Yes, people do vote against their own pocketbook occasionally, but it's a tough job to convince them it's necessary.  Republicans had better start working, hard, on the art of persuasion.

Votes

Which brings us to the second structural change planned by the Democrats.  Again, Obama is no Trojan horse; he has proudly proclaimed the need to give illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

With citizenship, of course, comes voting rights; since illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly poor, and poor citizens will be receiving Democratic "tax cuts" in the form of a refund check, need we wonder for whom they will vote?  The Democrats have clearly learned that if you don't like the voters you've got, get a different batch, and bribe them accordingly.

Making the illegal legal may be sufficient, but we'll never know; liberals have long opposed any measures of control at the polling booth.  We have to show our IDs to step onto an airplane, but by the next election, count on a ban of ID checks at polls.

Who is voting?  Should they be?  Are they who they claim to be?  Who can say?  There will, of course, be no convictions for fraud; there wouldn't be any evidence or any way to prove it.  How convenient... yet how corrosive.

Voters themselves, of course, are not the only votes that count; the votes of the Supreme Court are in some ways even more important, since they control who can vote and how they must do it.  Chief Justice John Roberts is a conservative, indeed, but we can expect him to feel very lonely going forward.  It's expected that Obama will appoint two young, rabidly leftist judges to the high bench.

But that's assuming he's content with just nine of them; there's no reason he has to be.  Nowhere does the Constitution specify a number for the Supreme Court; Congress is granted the power to change the rules at any time, and no doubt there are legislators who would not mind a seat on the Court themselves.

Would the Democrats prefer eleven justices?  Fifteen?  Twenty-one?  As many as needed to ensure that no conservative ruling is ever again rendered.

Ideas

And that leads to the third major structural change, which may very well be the first one to come to pass as it's by far the most important.  Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic leadership are far from stupid; they are well aware that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.  In order to make sure that their ideas hold sway, even though they are the wrong ones, there's a very simple solution: make certain that nobody else's ideas ever see the light of day.

No one who has been paying any attention will be the least bit surprised when the Fairness Doctrine is put back into place; with the stroke of a pen, this will destroy conservative talk radio.  Obama himself has been saying it's essential for broadcasters to be responsible to the interests of the "community"; three guesses what that will mean.

The radio waves will soon contain two choices: music, or PBS; in order to be "fair", anyone with a political idea to discuss will have to arrange for the opposite idea to have equal time, at their own expense.  Who will bother?  Will Rush Limbaugh pay to have Noam Chomsky on the air for three hours a day?  The question answers itself.

What's not nearly as expected, but of vastly farther-reaching consequences, is the regulation of the Internet.  Contrary to popular belief, it is perfectly possible to control what's commonly available on the Internet. The Red Chinese have been doing it for years with a great deal of success.

It's not just totalitarian Communists who want to do this anymore, though; the free Western nation of Australia recently mandated national internet filtering.  Naturally, it will be advertised as for our own good, to intercept illegal and reprehensible content such as child pornography, but polls show a large minority of Americans want political Internet content regulated too.

Think the First Amendment will protect us?  The Constitution is only as powerful as it is permitted to be by the judges who interpret it, and Obama has already made his feelings on those quite clear.

Now, could any government actually succeed in totally and effectively banning a category of political thought on the Internet?  Of course not; not even the Chinese have accomplished that.  But they don't need to.

Dedicated nerds will always be able to punch through any firewall, but once they've done so, they'll find on the other side... only other dedicated nerds.  It's all very well to chat with people who already feel the same way as you do, but it's hard to get an effective political force that way.

To gather votes, you need to get your message out to people who don't already agree with you, and who aren't going to go to any special effort to seek out what you have to say.  We are already perilously close to a situation in which this is almost impossible, thanks to the liberal monopoly of mainstream media and the education system; the Fairness Doctrine on the airwaves and online will finish the job.

Hope and Change

There is one more advantage that Democrats need not put into place, because they've already obtained it: the advantage of legitimacy.  For all that the Right may complain about the outlandish media bias of this election, the fact remains that the truth has been out there for all to see.  Anyone who wanted to know about Obama's true record need only listen to Sean Hannity or spend a few hours surfing the web.

No, the American voters have made their decision; Barack Obama and the extreme leftists have won, not by fraud or even extensive deceit, but pretty much fair and square.  They do, in fact, hold a mandate to rule; they do, in fact, have every right to put their policies in place; they can rightly point to the poll results and proclaim their actions as the justified Will of the People.

Which brings us back to the great failure of conservatism.  It's not a failure to win elective office; we did that for years, to little effect.  It's surely not a failure to mobilize, or to raise money, or to find good speakers, or to write intelligent articles (thank you very much.)  Conservatism has failed in a far more basic way - in fact, the exact same way in which we were failing in Iraq prior to the Surge:

We have failed to win the hearts and minds of the voters.

And we will never succeed until we learn how to do this.

Let's take the opportunity of the next few years to address this historic weakness.  After all, there won't be a whole lot else for us to be doing.

The Democrats have argued for unlimited power, and now they have it, granted to them by the American people.  Let them bear the authority... and every last bit of the responsibility for the devastation they will cause.

Then, perhaps, when America is ready to listen to a voice of true hope and true change, we will have something persuasive to offer.  Until we can do this, conservatism does not deserve to lead.