In my weekly conversation with Hugh Hewitt, we looked at America at home and abroad on the nation's 238th birthday. I suggested to Hugh that, from Obama's point of view, everything was proceeding according to plan:
MARK STEYN: Mr. Medvedev was, if you recall, Vladimir Putin's sock puppet as the nominal leader in Russia. And Obama was overheard saying 'Well, this'll be my last election, and afterwards, I'll have a lot more flexibility.' And we're now actually seeing what that flexibility means. We're seeing it in the retreat of American power not just across the globe, but actually the vanishing, the evaporation of American sovereignty even at the southern border. We're seeing it in classic banana-republic stuff in the IRS... Even the king's tax collector is simply a crooked stooge on his boss' behalf. And I think that is actually the flexibility that he was discussing with Medvedev. That's the flexibility applied on the domestic scene - that he's actually quite open about... The speech he gave yesterday or the day before, saying 'You know, who needs this separation-of-powers business? Just clear it out of the way, I'm going to go ahead and do what I want.'
HUGH HEWITT: I'm going to borrow some of the power that I need.
Overseas, America's allies certainly understand what "flexibility" means:
HH: Now that does bring me, though, to one development that my guests have been split on... Our friends in Japan have reinterpreted their constitution vis-à-vis the amount of military power that they can deploy, use in support of other allies, et cetera, abroad, away from Japan. Mike O'Hanlon said this is common sense. Victor Davis Hanson said this reflects the evaporation of American power in the world, and it's not going to be just Japan. It's going to be everybody running to get their own guns. What do you think, Mark Steyn?
MS: Yes, I tend to agree with that, and Victor is a believer in the American umbrella, which is the situation that's prevailed since the Second World War... If you learn anything from the last six years, it's that we are entering the post-American world. And whether you're an enemy of the United States or an ally of the United States, you've got to adjust to that. And I entirely understand why the Japanese would conclude, as the Polish foreign minister concluded a couple of weeks ago, that when it comes to it, the Americans are not going to be there for them. The Royal Australian Navy a couple of years ago held exercises with the Chinese, joint exercises. And I said to a naval officer down there that I know, I said well, didn't you guys all find that a bit odd? And he said 'Well, this is the reality. When America withdraws from the Pacific, Japan and Indonesia and Australia and China are all still going to be there, and we're going to have to deal with the new reality as best we can.' Japan is dealing with the post-American world. Poland is. Australia is. Singapore is. That is simply a reality of five years of Obama foreign policy.
Japan in that sense is making a modest declaration of independence all of its own. And what of the home front?
HH: I don't know if the great turn is upon us. We'll know in five months, Mark Steyn. What do you think?
MS: I think that's the great question. You know, when you go back and look at some of the things Mitt Romney was saying, for example, about the economy in 2012, it made a lot of sense: The economy's a disaster, the economy's a bust, Obama hasn't been able to jump start the economy. And I think the response of a big sliver of the American people was that that's all the more reason to vote for more permanent multigenerational government dependency, which is a very sad thought for the eve of Independence Day. But a lot of Americans, particularly the ones who supplied his margin of victory, voted for a kind of Big Government nanny, because Obama has so flatlined the economy that they don't want to take their risks out there in the new normal, and they'll cling to nanny's apron strings in the service of government dependence, a very sad thought.
One could certainly interpret the 2012 election result as a declaration of dependence. Three Fourths of July ago, I put it this way:
Dozens of countries have "Independence Days." November 25th, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname's case. They had the first military coup seven years later.
But in America "Independence" seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded "independence" not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. "Independence" is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.
Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he's history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What's left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History?
As Hugh says, that's the great question for this November: There's nothing the Founders would recognize in the Hobby Lobby case or at the southern border. Meanwhile, as he promised, Obama steams full-speed ahead on the SS Flexibility.
You can read the full transcript here, and Jeff Poor at Breitbart has some audio here.
~Meanwhile, this post by John Hinderaker set me wondering where the Obama Democrats' promised "transformation" of America is likely to end:
The population of Mogadishu is moving to Minneapolis, through the miracle of chain immigration. I don't know whether there is any limiting principle to this or whether all of Mogadishu will one day reside along the Mississippi, but in any event, the Somali influx is already impacting Minnesota politics.
By which John means that, in a close race between Phyllis Kahn and Mohamud Noor (incidentally, I'm a connoisseur of Mohammed spelling variations, and that one's beaut), a Somali-born Minneapolis elections judge has announced that a fellow Somali's vote was cast not for the "old Jewish lady" but for "our Muslim brother".
This is a Democrat primary: Ms Kahn is a doctrinaire leftie incumbent and Mr Noor is an assertive Muslim challenger. No Republicans need be involved in this civil war: it's the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition. But on America's national holiday hearing impartial election clerks sounding like corrupt tribal officials in the Horn of Africa is a stirring testament to diversity.
