The Fourth Revolution

Roger Kimball on the fourth revolution in American politics.

Excerpt:

[I]n trying to emulate FDR and his other predecessors, who were operating under far different circumstances, President Obama made all of our current problems worse. His stimulus and budget packages added to the national debt without doing anything to stimulate economic growth. He spent his first two years passing an expensive health-care bill instead of focusing on steps to promote recovery and growth. By ramming all of these measures through on narrowly partisan votes, he destroyed the comity between the parties. On the health-care bill, he broke the longstanding agreement between the parties that important pieces of social legislation should be passed on a bipartisan basis. He has thus managed to divide the public without doing much to solve the problems he was elected to address. 

Many analysts expect President Obama to be reelected this November. Perhaps the odds favor him. After all, it is difficult to unseat an incumbent. Yet, the economy is still weak, his policies have not succeeded in turning it around, and he is not widely popular. No matter how it turns out, this year’s presidential election is likely to sharpen, rather than to resolve, political divisions in the United States. Despite all this, President Obama is unshaken in his presumption that he is a herald of a new era, a revolutionary on the models of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. But is it possible that he will instead turn out to be something much different, a modern day Adams, Buchanan, or Hoover—that is, the last representative of a disintegrating order? Such a denouement is not only possible but, in view of our situation, more and more likely.

I do sense that there are radical political winds blowing. The left is nasty and criminal as always, and there is a rage and defiance on the right-- most of it justified-- that I have not seen in my lifetime. The left-- the elites in our society-- have controlled government and media and academia for generations, certainly since FDR.

The internet has changed the game for the right. We can now circumvent elites and get our message out directly.

It's a game-changer. With the greed and criminality of leftist statism becoming painfully clear in socialist utopias in Europe, people are increasingly realizing that we are heading into the abyss and that there are ways to avoid it.

Hence the Tea Party. If there is to be a right-wing fourth revolution, the Tea Party movement will be at its heart. Think of it: constitutionally limited government that pays its bills.

Kind of like the first American Revolution.