47%? Mitt Was Being Optimistic

Sometime after 2004, America crossed a tipping point, and the Sandra Flukes and Occupiers and Obama-phone ladies and all the others who live, or want to live, supported by the bankrupt welfare state, became a majority. These modern Democrats are not the party of JFK, who challenged his generation to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

The American experiment was built around the assumption that we have been granted rights by God, and that our republic is sustained by the sweat and hard work of millions of citizens who labor to pursue success in order to benefit themselves, their families, and accidentally, this nation. The Entitlement Party headed by President Obama sees government as the source of all rights, and the only proper beneficiary of all of the fruits of the labor of its citizens, who ultimately exist to support the State and all those who suckle at its teats.

This is not the America the founders created. What lies ahead for Obama's America is more statism, more crushing debt, more class warfare, more demonization of the haves by the have-nots, less and less individual liberty, more and more centralized control over the details of our individual lives. And, incidentally, in Obama's America the right to abort your children will remain absolute, because the national religion of the Democratic party is narcissism.

Conservatism has the superior moral argument to state-centered progressivism, and I remain hopeful that conservatives can make their argument convincing to enough Americans that we can reverse course in 2014. We need to try, because even as we careen towards fiscal and social ruin, the America as conceived by our founders is a great treasure worth preserving.