The State Despotic

by Mark Steyn - June 1st, 2009 - The New Criterion

To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending. The can-do spirit means Ty’Sheoma Bethea can do with some government money: A high-school student in Dillon, South Carolina, Miss Bethea wrote to the President to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress.

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Today, very little stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why schoolgirls in Dillon, South Carolina think it entirely normal to beseech Good King Barack the Hopeychanger to do something about classroom maintenance.

The problem in America today is that so many of our citizens wait for government to take care of them. They think working actively to have government do it for you constitutes a can-do spirit. "Please Mr. President, will you paint my classroom?" They have never heard of Tocqueville and, much much worse, they do not recognize the America that he loved and lauded. Nothing in their experience prepares them for the idea that can-do means get off your lazy butt and fix it yourself. Get involved.

Even if they do "get involved" it is only to curse out others who don't agree with them on every single issue. That is America today, and the Republican Party today. My way. My way. Me, me, me.

The freedom being thrown away in this orgy of self indulgence will never be recovered. Our founders feared mobocracy and mobocracy is what we have attained. The Republic is dead.