Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Monday, January 16, 2012 4:04:37 PM
The Mechanisms of Control Already Exist for an Autocratic Agenda of Enhanced Executive Authority, Setting up a Potential Constitutional Crisis in an Obama Second Term.
President Obama is stretching executive-branch powers and pushing them beyond constitutional limits according to Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel in “The New Authoritarianism”. America is on notice say the authors of the potential for a constitutional crisis in a second Obama term. They point to the President’s extra-constitutional recess appointments this month when Congress was not in recess and to statements made by the President.
And to further support their argument they point to comments by supporters around Mr. Obama and other progressives who believe they are an “ideological vanguard” and members of a special clerisy—similar say the authors to clerics of the middle ages—whose goal is government control over everything. These “New Authoritarians”—some reflecting positively on the Chinese model, others urging the President to take even more authority—are not, say Siegel and Kotkin, your traditional liberals: “Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class.” They are a committed group with a religious fervor, a group ignoring the record setting results of the 2010 election, a group pushing forward with their policies despite the political reality because “the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth.”
Today’s progressives call for “positive progress” and for “good government” over self government. They believe Americans are too stupid (“a nation of dodos”) to be left to govern themselves. Expressing the view years ago of our current clerisy, Herbert Croly said: “The average American is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
“A victorious Obama administration” says Kotkin and Siegel “could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model.” The mechanisms of control already exist. Mr. Obama with his czars, expanded regulatory agencies, and executive power, is poised in a second term to lead America where a majority does not want to go. If the President is re-elected watch out for an “autocratic agenda of enhanced executive authority” because we are all but poised to leap into an uncharted world, a world with a large but ignored majority, a world where that majority is considered incapable of taking care of itself, a world where Progressives will plan our lives for us and exercise total control. Such leadership would potentially set up a constitutional crises—a situation that could lead to “a road full of dangers, weakness…to the boundaries of the world, and the Cimmerian land of darkness and whirlwinds.”