There Is Time
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Editor's Note: I wish my readers a happy Thanksgiving: I plan to take tomorrow
off. Further posting may be irregular until the end of next week due to
travel.
Reader Dismuke emails me a link to the below quote, which turned out to have been
mistakenly attributed to a Czech newspaper:
The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president.Steven Hayward of Power Line forthrightly sets the record straight on the source (and admonishes himself for some back-seat blogging), and he is on the right track about the issue the quote raises:
The general point it makes is worth pondering, whatever the source. As I put it in an article coming out in the next print edition of National Review, this election result raises the question of whether we have passed the point of no return, or whether sufficient "republican virtue" remains in the American people. This is the central question of American politics for the next four years.I agree that we have to be concerned about whether America has passed the point of no return, but not on the matter of whether there is "republican virtue" among the Anerican people. There definitely is in some quarters. The question is whether time remains to increase our numbers through education. Contrary to much of what I have seen from the right, history and even some of the results of the past election suggest that there is hope. The philosophical ideas that predominate in a nation strongly influence the culture, character, and political preferences of its citizens. These can be changed over the span of a few decades.
-- CAV
Update
Today: Corrected a typo.
2 comments:
Yo, Gus, from Wendy Milling's column: "The base simply needs to become more intellectual than it is today. People need to read less of the amateur propaganda on the internet and start reading the classics. As a starter, everyone should read Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and be able to discuss and apply the principles therein."
Amen, sister! And then one might profitably turn to the reading list given at the end of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. There's a lot of nonsense in economic history oozing out of the academy that those books would innoculate the reader against--and they'd also help the reader acquire the long-term, broad view of economic causation needed to effectively fight statist economic dogmas. (I should add I read most of them in high school--it was a bit hard to track some of them down, but well worth the effort. It should be much easier now, what with Amazon and all.)
Excellent point regarding Amazon.
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