President Obama’s commencement address at Ohio State University has prompted Jonah Goldberg to raise concerns about apparent confusion involving the proper roles of the federal government and civil society.
Self-government is not captured simply by working through the federal bureaucracy in Washington. It starts, to borrow a line from “America the Beautiful,” with the need to confirm thy soul with self-control. It builds from there, through local communities, businesses, congregations, associations etc.
But Obama constantly collapses all levels of civil society and all appeals to community in order to equate them with support for federal initiatives in Washington. Either you’re with the administrative state or you’re on your own. As he said in his push for gun control “government is us.”
He’s not alone in this. Hillary Clinton defined civil society in It Takes a Village as just a “term social scientists use to describe the way we all work together for common purposes.” At the democratic convention last summer her husband took a similar tack.“The most important question is, ‘What kind of country do you want to live in?’ If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society, you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility – a we’re-all-in-this-together society – you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”
I write about this at some length in the new afterword to Tyranny of Clichés. And speaking of that, there’s the second problem with Obama’s commencement address: His contempt for the inbred American fear of tyranny. I like America’s instinctual fear of tyranny. It is single best bulwark against, you know, tyranny. It’s a bipartisan tendency by the way.
