George Rebane

Two intellectuals and students of the human condition – Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield and Yale’s Charles Hill – lend their considerable weight to the notion that we are beyond the tipping point to the promised “fundamental transformation” of America.  By all accounts we have now failed the Grand Experiment envisioned by the Founders to answer the question of the ages – Can man govern himself?  While the answer to that question is never final because the experiment is ever ongoing, they did provide us a magnificent tool to keep bringing back a ‘YES’ answer.  It’s called the Constitution.  Professor Mansfield tells us (‘The Crisis of American Self-Government’) that “the founders wanted people to live under the Constitution.  But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people.”

Along this line Professor Hill talks about the American decline (‘World Order in the Age of Obama’) and says –

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be “fundamentally transformed” through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s “diplomacy” is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.  Only America’s return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. “Sequestration” will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem.

RR readers know that one of the more successful Rebane Rules, long argued here, is ‘The most reliable predictor of progressives’ policies is the their common aim of weakening America’s influence on the world stage by removing all vestiges of the country’s exceptionalism.’  The reliability of this rule is doubled when used to predict which turns Team Obama will take in navigating the ship of state (see also ‘Obamunism’ in Glossary).

The uses of America’s energy abundance.  In the same vein, there is a growing corpus of belief that America’s newly found gas and shale oil energy reserves will not be used to launch a new era of growth and prosperity for the country.  Instead the wealth from those resources will be commandeered by the federal government under new powers that it will discover and relegate to itself.  The entire scenario starts with President Obama having emerged from a second term victory to steer the country into a (hard to imagine) deeper fiscal thicket, whether by a rapid tumble over the approaching fiscal cliff, an extended version thereof, or a more torturous way.

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