The difference between Keynes and Hayek is that Keynes’s theories were primarily concerned with providing politicians cover for expanding government control of the economy, whereas Hayek’s were concerned with explaining how things work.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: the election of Scott Brown was a straight-up referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency.  Obama made it so by heading to Massachusetts to campaign for the bumbling Martha Coakley, and didn’t even attempt to deny when stumping for her. But Scott Brown also made it so by running on an explicitly anti-Obama platform.  It’s not like Brown was trying to hide his conservative stripes from the electorate. In fact, what makes his victory so astonishing is that he actually ran as a tax-cutting national security hawk who promised to be the forty-first vote against Obama’s health care monstrosity.  A full 72% of the electorate believed that Brown was at least somewhat conservative, compared to only 22% that saw him as a moderate.  And he won! In liberal Massachusetts, a state that hadn’t elected a Republican Senator since 1972, he won a seat that hadn’t been held by a Republican since Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952. Add that to the fact that fully 56% of voters said that health care was the issue that most influenced their vote; that 50% of voters said it would be better to pass no bill at all than the bill before Congress; and that 51% percent of voters flat-out oppose the current health bill (with 41% percent strongly opposing it), and it becomes difficult to see the election as anything other than a slap in the President’s face. (All figures from Rasmussen Reports.)

And you know, that’s not a shock either. What President hasn’t faced some sort of rebuke from the public? It happens. In fact, it’s meant to happen. Our particular form of democratic republicanism is structured to enable the electorate to let their government know when it’s going to far. The Founding Fathers were fearful of rapid change spurred by momentary eruptions of public outrage, and when they wrote the Constitution, they installed mechanisms to prevent it.  There’s no question about that.  Insofar as the results of the election reflected the will of the people of Massachusetts – and by extrapolation the will of the American people, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be strongly against the President’s current health care proposal – the system worked.

But the liberal literati seem to think that far from being a perfect example of the electorate exercising its power over the government through the system, Brown’s election demonstrates that American democracy is in fact broken.  Yes, their interpretation of the results is that because the public consciously chose to derail the Obama agenda, the system has in fact failed.  How do they arrive at that conclusion? Well, I can’t claim to know what lurks in the mind of every liberal, but my instinct tells me that the reaction comes from a paradox, which is a necessary condition of the liberal philosophy as it exists in modern America.

The fact is that the progressive agenda that drives liberals cannot be fully enacted by the will of the American people. This is because it is in many ways fundamentally at odds with the traditional American ideas of individualism and self-reliance, and consequently is relegated to minority status among American philosophies. (Witness this Gallup poll, which found that only 21% of Americans identified themselves as liberals by the end of 2009.) However, the general thinking among progressives is that despite their agenda’s unpopularity – and they recognize it as unpopular, or else they wouldn’t feel the need to disguise it every election cycle – it must be enacted in the name of social justice.  And there is the dilemma. Liberals recognize that their policies are not widely supported by the American people, yet they believe that those policies must be implemented in the name of righting societal wrongs.

When the electorate votes them into office, liberals naturally celebrate. They seem to think that the people have finally come around to them; that they have accepted the progressive agenda and recognized the genius of their enlightened leaders. In short, the agenda has won people over. But when they are voted out of office, liberals refuse to believe that their agenda lost people. Instead they panic, because suddenly the system no longer serves their goals. They realize that under a system in which people can turn against the enlightened agenda so quickly, no true “progress” can be made. Consequently, this system – the system of American democracy – has failed them. It is at this point that they claim to have lost faith in democracy.

I’m not going to pretend that conservatives always handle electoral defeats with grace and dignity.  But I will say that I’ve never heard a conservative rail against the system itself simply because the people have dealt them a defeat. Most conservatives simply try to figure out how to win next time, how to win the people’s favor once more.  Liberals, though, seem to want to cut the people out of the process entirely, because to them, anything that stands in the way of enacting the progressive agenda now must be eliminated.

But that’s nothing new. It’s just the logical extension of a philosophy that holds at its core the belief that not only does an enlightened elite knows what’s better for a country than the citizenry as a whole, but that it is the right of that elite to see its agenda implemented, regardless of public opposition.

And so you see, the latest electoral setback that liberals have endured – the victory of Scott Brown – may have inspired headlines like the one above. However, for liberals, faith in American democracy did not just evaporate because of Scott Brown. It vanished a long time ago, when they chose to embrace a philosophy that holds as its highest virtue the service of “social justice,” rather than the service of the will of the people.

Scott Brown’s electoral victory is nothing less than the single most cataclysmic electoral event of my lifetime, and yes, I’m including Obama’s election in 2008.  The pendulum of national politics swings back and forth between Republicans and Democrats with some regularity, and despite the fervor that surrounded Obama during his campaign, he was still ultimately another Democrat who won a small but decisive majority in a national election.  Scott Brown, on the other hand, ran a quixotic campaign in the bluest of all blue states, and literally came out of nowhere two weeks before the election to claim victory.  No one was prepared for this, especially not Martha Coakley, who seemed content to twiddle her thumbs until her preordained coronation.  The implications of Brown’s victory are far-reaching, and will doubtlessly have a tremendous impact on the national debate between Right and Left, the legislative process, and the Obama presidency.  It will be seen, justly, as a referendum on the direction the country has taken under President Obama, and moderate Democrats who were already leery of being associated with the party’s Left wing will begin to hedge their bets (as Evan Bayh has begun to do).

In short, a tremendous night, and one with huge implications.

UPDATE: It begins!

No one except Barack Obama.

When you’re in a state of panic, you go with what you know, and what President Obama knows is television.  Your economic plan is failing miserably? Go on TV! “Your” health care package has stalled in Congress? Go on TV!  You’ve proved negligent to the war that you promised to wage with honor during the campaign? Go on TV! And when all else fails, when your credibility is shot and people are getting sick of seeing you on TV, that’s when you do something guaranteed to get you on as many TVs as possible: go overseas for an elaborate shindig featuring Oprah!

I don’t begrudge the President for wanting to see the Olympics in his home city of Chicago.  As a former resident of the Chicago suburbs, I myself would have been thrilled to have the Games come to the Windy City.  However, I am stunned that the President made securing the Olympics one of his top foreign relations priorities.  As we reach a critical turning point in the War in Afghanistan, Obama agreed to speak with General Stanley McChrystal, head of the operation, for only the fourth time (third in the last week) at the last minute before returning to the States from his meeting with the International Olympic Committee.  That’s right: the American General in charge of successfully completing our mission in Afghanistan is merely an afterthought to this President, to be addressed only after the crucial “Get Obama On As Many Screens As Possible” mission has been completed.

The danger is that in this particular instance is that not only is Obama self-indulgently engaging a body that he has no business in front of for a reason entirely disconnected from the responsibilities of his office, but also that he’s doing it in such a way as to disrespect and demean his military commanders and neglect his real duties as president.  There is a very real possibility that by showering his attention upon the Olympic Committee instead of addressing his commanders’ urgent needs, the President is compromising our nation’s security. He is so wrapped up in his own celebrity that he is neglecting the duties he must fulfill to keep his people safe.  And he is showing no signs of stopping.

Crises are piling up, but the President is adamant in his refusal to address them in any substantial way.  Instead of going behind closed doors and hammering out policy, he’s trying to move the country through the power of rhetoric alone.  The problem is that great rhetoric repeated ad nauseam without any substance behind it eventually mutates into empty rhetoric, at which point the listeners tune out and the speaker is left looking like a blathering fool.  And if the speaker has gotten to that point, he’s not likely to realize the need to change what he’s doing until it’s far too late.

The presidency is not merely a role to be played.  It is a responsibility, and one too great to be borne by preoccupied with their own celebrity.  Obama would do well to realize this, or he’ll quickly find himself in a new role – that of ex-president.

Oops.

When President Obama promised to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within the first year of presidency, it was because he believed that a combination of unprecedented compassion and his own irresistible personal magnetism would cause other countries to embrace the newly-freed alleged terrorists who had survived his predecessor’s “Gulag.”

Oops.

When President Obama promised to hold direct talks with Iran in order to convince the Mullahs to abandon their nuclear program, he assumed that by bringing the rogue nation into the civilized international political community he would be addressing the root causes of its aggression, and would consequently win concessions.

Oops.

And when President Obama proposed the feel-good legislation of the year in health care reform, he expected that lingering goodwill, overwhelming majorities in Congress, and people’s insatiable appetite for his personal brand of change would cause an irreversible leftward shift in this country’s political climate, destroying the wicked profit motive and helping the populace move forward into a new, more enlightened age.

Oops.

Barack Obama’s first eight months in office have been a disappointment, to say the least.  And with the battle over health care raging on even as other crises pile up, it’s hard to imagine it getting better anytime soon.  Some of that is due to the realities of the times – even the most proactive presidents are beholden to circumstances.  But the truth is that most of Obama’s biggest failures are not the result of uncontrollable, irrational forces (Nancy Pelosi excepted), but rather of the President’s own inability to see beyond the elaborate fantasies that decades of academia and activism have constructed in his mind.

President Obama genuinely believes that his words have the power to make the planet cool and the oceans recede, or to bring unruly dictators happily into the global community.  He expects that people will accept his superior judgment on issues ranging from health care to industrial policy to climate change because, after all, they were wise enough to elect him in the first place.  He doesn’t understand why people would see him as an increasingly negative, overexposed presence in their lives.  He doesn’t understand why people seem to have stopped listening.

And when the unexpected occurs; when Iran announces the construction of a second nuclear facility; when Guantanamo can’t be closed; when radicals within the administration are exposed and expelled; when the agenda flounders; when public confidence drops; when legislation fails, it doesn’t make sense to President Obama because in the fantastic theoretical world in which he has spent his entire adult life, things like that just don’t happen.

But they have happened, and the fate of the Obama presidency rests on whether or not he can do something he has never been called on to do in the past – adapt. He needs to shift to the center because it was the center, not the radical left, that elected him president, and it is the center that will vote him out of office. He needs to work with Republicans on legislation instead of shutting them out of the legislative process.  He needs to adjust his expectations so that they reflect reality, not the theoretical world in which his philosophy developed.  He needs to scale back his goals, to stop trying to be a revolutionary presidency and settle for simply being a decent one.  And most of all, he needs to get off TV, to get back into the Oval Office, and to do his job.

Simply put, the thing that needs changing most right now is Barack Obama.  And if he can’t, then America is going to look back at November 4, 2008 with only thought:

Oops.

Wednesday night’s Very Special Episode of the Barack Obama Show has come and gone, and the most memorable thing about it was an interruption by an unruly member of the audience. The President’s Historic Game-Changing Speech is beginning to look like just another in a long line of pointless rhetorical exercises.

And yet the left has predictably responded by showering the President with gratuitous amounts of praise. If Obama has proven himself adept at one thing, it’s energizing his base, often at the expense of others. But rather than use this column to criticize the speech, praise/damn Joe Wilson, or talk about the Republican Party’s alternative health reform plan (The Patients Choice Act, H.R. 2520), I think it’s high time we come to the realization that the cause of this health care battle is not a lack of persuasive rhetoric. It’s that there is a fundamental ideological divide between the left and the right in this country over the role that government should play in citizens’ everyday lives.

This wasn’t always the case. If President Kennedy, for example, had made a strong push for universal health care, he may well have received it, because at that time much of the Republican Party was little more than a coalition of aspiring moderate Democrats. We sometimes refer to them now as the Rockefeller Republicans – progressively minded individuals who, for one reason or another, chose to put an “R” in front of their name instead of a “D.” (We once also called them Specter Republicans, but… well, you know…)

But beginning with Goldwater and then carrying on through Reagan and the two Bushes, differences in ideology have destroyed this country’s once-secure left-on-center base. Whereas we once stood on opposite sides of a creek from our liberal friends, we now are separated by a raging river, nigh impassable. It’s not just that our political positions have changed; rather, conservatives’ and liberals’ core beliefs have undergone radical transformations over the last forty years and are now diametrically opposed.

Conservatives are not opposed to health care because we think it will cost too much. We use that as an argument against it, but what is really at the core of our beliefs is the notion that the government should not be able to have the level of control over our personal lives that a universal health care system will provide it. Nor do we believe that such an invasion of privacy is authorized by the Constitution. We revere the document, and we attempt to shape our country to its principles.

Liberals, on the other hand, support universal health care not because they believe it will solve financial problems, but because they believe that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of its citizens in every way it’s able and to ensure them a comfortable quality of living. To justify this, they probe the Constitution and expand upon its meaning, regardless of the original text. They attempt to shape the Constitution to our country.

And because of this sharp ideological divide, the only way to move controversial legislation forward is compromise. And this is where it’s all falling apart. Because each side is convinced that it is right in principle, a mutually satisfying compromise is that much harder to reach. Moderate and liberal Democrats won’t compromise with each other. Democrats won’t compromise with Republicans. And Republicans – well, we’d just like to be invited to the negotiating table at this point.

This is the reason why President Obama’s campaign promise to heal the nation’s political divide was destined to fail and why his health care reform has run into trouble – because we are being asked to compromise on our principles, not our politics. And so government has slowed to a crawl and legislation pushed forward by eager reforms has stalled. As conservatives, we must ask ourselves what the Founding Fathers would think of this development. We can find solace in the words of Thomas Jefferson: “I own that I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.”

The two major political forces in our country today have sharply differing views on the fundamental nature of the U.S. Constitution. Until those views are reconciled, there will be no real health care reform.

One element of the health care debate that hasn’t received much attention is the underlying economic and philosophical misconception behind the Democrats’ proposals. While we’ve heard countless reports about the “necessity” of providing health care coverage to those who can’t afford it (or don’t want it), there’s been relatively little discussion concerning one of the central tenants not only of health care reform, but also of modern liberalism. The Left’s rush to embrace radical health care legislation and, more broadly, an economic package premised on redistribution, is the result of its unyielding but erroneous belief that capitalism is ultimately a zero-sum game. In liberals’ minds, there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and the acquisition of wealth by one party necessarily comes at the expense of another party.

Let’s think about that for a second. President Obama’s health care package, like nearly every universal health care plan before it, is centrally concerned with moving resources from place to place and person to person. It is about an equitable redistribution of services facilitated by a government entity. A more market-oriented plan would focus its energies on creating new services, so that one individual would not have to give up anything in order for another to gain something. But the people behind the government-run option cannot conceive of creation, only of reordering and redistribution, because in their minds, anything obtained by one person must be taken from another.

Once one has accepted this proposition, it becomes remarkably easy to justify the sort of redistributionist action that has been taken by Democratic politicians over the last century. If one believes that any acquisition of wealth contains within it an inherently immoral element, then how can one argue against letting a wise arbitrator use its powers to tame the market and correct these wrongdoings? And if that is true, then surely anyone who takes issue with the government’s forced redistribution of resources only does so because he or she is profiting from the exploitation of others.

It sounds ridiculous, but the reality is that the Left genuinely believes that it is almost impossible to get ahead without screwing someone else over. (Of course, when their points of reference are Charlie Rangel and John Murtha, it’s almost understandable why that would make sense to them.) And it’s that sort of misguided morality that enables them to take the radical actions that define their agenda.

But the reality is that economics is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the capitalist economy would simply not function if a central feature of every exchange were that one party would inevitably come away worse off than before. Capitalism is a positive-sum game, one in which individuals engage in transactions to reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Furthermore, there is an unspoken trust between the parties involved in a transaction that each will hold up its end of the agreed-upon bargain. If the expectation was that this trust would be broken and that there was a fifty-fifty chance of “losing” an exchange every time, then the rate of commerce in this country would slow to a snail’s pace. People would avoid even the most basic of transactions for fear that they would be economic “losers.”

But note that this does not happen, because in the vast majority of mutually agreed-upon transactions, both parties win. That’s capitalism, and once that is understood, it becomes much more difficult to see the acquisition of wealth as inherently immoral. Consequently, the redistribution of wealth, goods, and services, becomes morally unjustifiable.

Central to President Obama’s philosophy is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of wealth, capitalism, and economics. He is laboring under the misconception that there can be no winners without losers, and that one man’s success can only come at the expense of another’s failure. An embrace of his agenda amounts to an endorsement of this fundamentally flawed philosophy, and it is for this reason that we cannot allow his health care plan to move forward.

It is Obama’s plan – not the capitalist economy – that is a zero-sum proposition.

President Obama's Approval Rating (Source: Rassmussen Reports)

Now before we get into it, let’s take a moment to acknowledge why Republicans’ spirits seem to be rising lately.  It’s hard not to get excited, I’ll admit, when we see Barack Obama’s support collapsing under the weight of his own colossal sense of self-importance.  With elections coming up in just a couple of months, Republican candidates Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell seem poised to take back the New Jersey and Virginia governorships, respectively, which could have the same energizing effect on the GOP as Jon Corzine’s and Tim Kaine’s elections did on Democrats in 2005. And as of yesterday, Republicans now lead Democrats on the generic Congressional ballot by seven points, according to the latest poll release by Rassmussen Reports. After a brief period in the wilderness, Republicans are now being presented with the opportunity to assert themselves once more.  Many analysts are now predicting double-digit gains for the GOP in the 2010 Congressional elections, and some optimistic conservatives are even fantasizing about a return to the majority in the House.

Bottom line: it’s easy to get excited right now.  Things seem to be going well and momentum seems to be on our side. But brace yourself, because here comes the cold water.

Momentum in politics is unpredictable, and popularity lost can almost always be regained if the individual in question knows what he’s doing.  How many times have we seen a politician defeated, discounted, and discarded, only to triumphantly rise from the ashes and leave us in disbelief?  History is rife with examples, including Harry Truman’s electoral victory in 1948 and Richard Nixon’s stunning comeback in 1968 after six years of irrelevance.  Given Americans’ fondness for second chances in politics, it would be naive to assume that President Obama’s recent decline in popularity reflects a permanent shift in the way people view he and his policies.  Furthermore, we would be wise to remember that other first-term presidents have overcome similar trials and tribulations.

President Clinton's Approval Rating (Source: Wikipedia)

Let’s not forget that Bill Clinton spent much of his first three years as President with an approval rating below 50%.  And while his early troubles did result in the Republican takeover of Congress, the GOP did have a number of factors working in its favor that year beyond Clinton’s unpopularity, not the least of which was the rise of a new generation of Reagan-inspired politicians and the emergence of Newt Gingrich as arguably conservatism’s most powerful post-Reagan leader.  Clinton’s decline, coupled with the Republican’s readiness to lead as exemplified in the Contract With America plan, resulted in an unprecedented transfer of power from one party to the other during a midterm election.

President Reagan's Approval Rating (Source: Wikipedia)

Additionally, we must remember that following the spike in public support after his shooting, President Reagan’s approval ratings declined for nearly a year and a half, bottoming out in early 1983 just before the economic turnaround kicked into high gear. Reagan’s unpopularity allowed the Democrats to increase their majority in the House of Representatives, although the Senate remained firmly in Republican hands.  Until the end of 1983, many considered Reagan a vulnerable President with little remaining political capital, and it was considered likely that a strong Democratic candidate would throw him out of office in 1984.

Both men were, of course, reelected.

The point is that Barack Obama’s current unpopularity is by no means a permanent condition.  It is still entirely possible that he will right his ship and sail to victory in 2012.  Republicans cannot take for granted that they will have an easy road to Congressional majorities and the White House.  They must instead fight with passion and vigor if they intend to truly return to power, and they must do it wisely.

But the Republican Party, as I have argued before, seems to be bereft of the Gingrich-style leader that we need to wage a successful campaign.  Furthermore, we have yet to forcefully articulate an alternative view of what path the country should be taking over the next several years.  We are running the risk of defining ourselves by opposition, and while it helps to argue against your opponents, it is equally important to be able to argue for yourself.  It is imperative that the Republican Party demonstrate to the American voters a clear alternative to Obama’s left-wing plan, or else it will be passing up an opportunity to truly knock the young President off-balance and (potentially) out of office.  Until the GOP makes the case for itself, any triumphs will be insubstantial and fleeting.