Why the “conservatives” have just realized now that Obama wants to turn the U.S. into Europe

In his speech to the annual AEI dinner on March 11 Charles Murray said:

The topic I wanted to talk about was one that has been at the center of my own concerns for more than twenty years, but I was afraid it would seem remote from these urgent immediate issues. How times change. As of the morning of February 24, this is the text I had written to introduce the topic: “It isn’t usually put this way, but the advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?” And then on the evening of the twenty-fourth, President Obama unveiled his domestic agenda to Congress, and now everybody is putting it that way. As Charles Krauthammer observed a few days later, “We’ve been trying to figure out who Barack Obama is, where he’s really from. From Hawaii? Indonesia? The Ivy League? Chicago? Now we know: he’s a Swede.”

According to Murray, it was only after February 24 that establishment “conservatives” realized that Obama wants to make America into a version of Europe.

But hasn’t it been a truism all along that what Democrats want is to turn America into Europe? Haven’t Democrats constantly compared the U.S. unfavorably to Europe, and argued that Europe’s controlled, subsidized societies were more advanced and humane than America’s backward society? Haven’t they constantly said that it’s a disgrace that America, unlike European countries and Canada, does not have state-controlled and financed universal medical care?

And this has been not just a generic observation about Democrats. Leading Democratic figures have clearly favored the European way for America. For example, in December 2005, when it was assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the 2008 Democratic nominee, I wrote about the need to block “Hillary’s lifelong project of turning America into a European-style socialist country.”

In February 2007, before Obama emerged as a leading candidate, Paul Belien wrote in the Washington Times (and I discussed Belien’s article here):

Those who think that Europe is America’s past, think again. Europe matters to America. It matters more than ever before. Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the liberal special-interest groups that currently dominate Congress want to reshape America in Europe’s image: socialist, secularist and multicultural.

In February 2008 I wrote:

Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin tonight consisted of a long list of limitless promises that government will provide people with every conceivable human material need. His vision is socialism from start to finish. But then he says, I’m not unrealistic, I’m not pie in the sky, I know this won’t be easy, I know you have to work hard and struggle for things. But what he means by working hard and struggling is not the work and struggle of people to advance their lives, to build things, to produce wealth—it’s the work and struggle of people to pass government programs to take care of their needs.

Referring to a commenter in that same thread who is a recent immigrant to the U.S. from Europe, I continued:

He has seen close up how the Omnicompetent Provider State subjects people to an unaccountable bureaucracy, removes their initiative and spirit, takes away their freedom, strips away their identity, and empties them of life. They turn into passive things.

The closest the U.S. came to that was the Clinton proposal in 1993-94 to place the entire U.S. medical industry under state controls. At the time of that battle, I experienced more fear about a political event, fear in my gut, than about any other issue in my lifetime. I felt that once this bill was passed, we would have lost our freedom and there would be no way to get it back.

On January 28, 2009, in an analysis of Obama’s inaugural address, I quoted Obama:

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today.

About which I said:

Yes. We must struggle and sacrifice and work until our hands are raw in order to turn America into a European-style, statist, unfree country with a population totally dependent on, and under the thumb of, the government.

Now all these comments indicating that the ambition of the Democrats, of Hillary Clinton, and now of Obama is to turn the U.S. into a Europe-style, taxed-to-death, bureaucratic state, were made for years before the establishment conservatives’ realization, in February 2009, that Obama wants to make us into Europe. So why did the establicons only recognize this about Obama in the last month?

The reason is that up until then, the establicons supported George W. Bush and John McCain, whose entire thinking was pro-EU and pro the creation of EU-type transnational entities.

Thus I wrote about McCain in March 2008:

If you go paragraph by paragraph through John McCain’s foreign policy speech, as I have done, you will see that virtually everything in it is about building transnational and global order. None of it—except for a passing mention of guarding our borders from terrorists—is about enhancing the well-being of the United States, as the United States. The United States does not really exist in McCain’s speech, except as an instrument for promoting and leading the way to a post-national and—though he speaks endlessly of freedom—unfree world. For example, he supports a common market and a common “security and prosperity” sphere for all of North and South America, and he also supports the establishment of a common market with the EU. But how did the present, increasingly totalitarian EU get started? As a common market. He talks endlessly about partnerships with fellow “democracies,” and he says that the threat of “radical Islamic extremism” is the greatest danger facing the world. He doesn’t notice that Europe is living under an unaccountable bureaucratic regime which through anti-hate speech laws prohibits its citizens from discussing the threat of … radical Islamic extremism. He portrays Europe as a key component of the expanding democratic world order. He doesn’t notice that when the peoples of Europe in popular referenda rejected the EU constitution which would turn Europe into a single superstate, the European governments simply bypassed the voters and now are poised to achieve the same result through a treaty that does not require popular approval. Yet he calls this transnational European monstrosity “democratic,” and he wants us to merge ourselves with it, in the name of democracy. He says he wants an ever freer world. But without the self-governing nation-state, which McCain’s agenda is plainly aimed at eliminating, there can be no freedom.

This is why, as ruinous as an Obama or Hillary presidency would be, it would be better than a McCain presidency. A Democrat in the White House would break the hold over us of this “conservatism” which is really a monstrous globalism. Globalism in a more honest, leftist form would be opposed by conservatives, instead of followed by them, as will happen under McCain.

What I predicted in March 2008 is exactly what is happening. Establishment conservatives who supported McCain’s EU-style policies, oppose Obama’s EU-style policies.

Also remember that President Bush, like McCain, completely supported the EU system, never criticized EU-type statism, constantly praised the un-free and increasingly totalitarian EU as “democratic,” supported every proposed expansion of the EU including the admission of Turkey, and supported the construction of a common market in North and South America which was obviously aimed at a North-and-South American Union along the lines of the European Union. Remember that the establicons never criticized Bush over his support for the EU and his promotion of EU-type policies for America.

The lesson is that the only way to get American “conservatives” to oppose a U.S. president who is pushing European-type statism is to install a Democrat in the White House. If a Republican is in the White House and pushing European-type statism, the “conservatives” will support him.

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Tim W. writes:

California is the prototype for what they want the entire West to become. Once a conservative-leaning state that attracted American dreamers and launched the political career of Ronald Reagan, it’s now a bankrupt, regimented one-party state (except for a left-wing GOP governor) with a non-white majority and many of its most productive citizens fleeing for elsewhere. Rather than seeing the collapse of the Golden State as a warning, our elite political class see it as a blueprint. They just want to make sure the leftist dystopia they produce is so encompassing that we have no place to flee.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2009 09:00 AM | Send