Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.–George Washington

In 1930s Germany, a unitary leader plead for sufficient power to make his homeland safe from the threats faced by his nation.

The German people and their parliament, in the name of security, allowed him to assume virtually unlimited power to make them safe.

The draconian measures implemented to prevent terrorism were soon turned upon the citizens of Germany and they, along with millions of others, lost their freedom.

Who could have imagined how terribly wrong it would go?

In our day, Americans are being asked to trust the head of the Executive Branch to exercise unprecedented power for the purpose of securing the homeland against the threat of terrorism.

Draconian powers including indefinite detention and extra-judicial executions are being authorized against foreigners and Americans alike in a worldwide war against terror that we’re told will last for generations.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the increasing parallels between the former Weimar Republic and modern America are becoming difficult to ignore.

Disturbing as that realization may be, it’s not half as unsettling as the raucous cheers and applause of those who actually celebrate the emerging authoritarian state inflicting harm on others without recognizing the corresponding damage being done to their own liberties.

Like the Germans of the 1930s, Americans appear to be afflicted with a nationalistic short-sightedness that seeks to excuse virtually any abuse of government powers, so long as those powers are directed at others for the stated purpose of making us safe.

As a nation, we stand at a crossroads with the choice of restoring limited government that keeps us free by safeguarding our inalienable rights, or creating an unlimited police state that will promise us security even as it fits us for our restraints.

How our experience with unchecked government power will end is anybody’s guess.

The passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with its provisions for indefinite military detention at home and abroad represents an unmistakable departure from the concept of limited government in America.

With the open assertion of executive power to detain anyone anywhere without evidence, trial or due process the bill heralds the approach of a presidential dictatorship legally authorized to use the U.S. military to impose its will domestically.

The 2012 NDAA follows hot on the heels of the extra-judicial assassination in September of an American-born radical Muslim cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

The cleric’s death by Predator drone missile was ordered by the president after a secret panel within the Executive branch labeled al-Awlaki an “enemy combatant.”

No indictment was issued.

No evidence presented.

No proof required.

The president simply ordered the snuffing out of an individual (as well as a few innocent bystanders) based on his word alone.

This wasn’t the first time such extra-judicial killings have been authorized by the Executive branch, but it’s the first time that the power to do so was openly and brazenly acknowledged.

How could such a naked abuse of government power stand virtually unchallenged?

Attorney Glen Greenwald explains:

“What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.”

In our haste to embrace absolute security at the cost of proper government and our essential liberties, we’re making the same mistake many Germans made in the 1930s of mistaking patriotism for its belligerent counterfeit: nationalism.

Orwell addressed this phenomenon beautifully in his Notes on Nationalism written in 1945.  He makes a clear distinction between patriotism and nationalism as follows:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

The desire to dominate others has been an observable part of human nature throughout the history of mankind.

Writer Christopher Manion notes that St. Augustine, in his work City of God, identified libido dominandi or the lust for power in the very first page.

Manion goes on to point out that, “these lusts are more powerful than simple physical appetites. And they tempt us all.”

A perfect example of this mindset can be found in the ongoing Republican presidential debates.

Of the seven candidates still in the running, six of them are seeking to solidify their voter base by promising to expand government powers to secure America.  Most say they would engage in more aggressive, unconstitutional wars abroad.

They have affirmed their support of torture, indefinite detentions, and continued expansion of the global War on Terror.

They are united in their belief that American exceptionalism justifies the projection of military power around the globe out of the fear that “If we don’t dominate the world–someone else will.”

Concern about the proper role of government has no place in their dialogue; only the desire to see American military might continue as the dominant force globally.

Warmongering, exploiting fear and creating enemies to vanquish is a key to maintaining their power.  It’s no coincidence that the more we send our military abroad to police the world, the less free we become here at home.

One solitary candidate has proven the exception by advocating fidelity to the principles of limited government and strict adherence to the Constitution.

This approach would mean less intrusive government and greater freedom at home and less meddling and interventionism abroad.

Too often, this candidate’s message is met with anger and derision by those whose lust for power over others would be checked by such reforms.

For freedom to be maintained, three things are required.

We must be an educated, independent-minded, clear-thinking people.

This can only occur when we have inoculated ourselves intellectually against the daily onslaught of propaganda that beats against us on all sides.

Mass media in America today does not serve to inform and enlighten the public so much as it exists to sell us the agenda of those in power.

To counter this manipulation of public opinion, there is simply no substitute for the power of a good old fashioned liberal arts education.

A classical education enables us to more clearly see the world as it is.  It also leaves us better equipped to speak with clarity and power while persuading others across a broad spectrum of beliefs and viewpoints.

We must be capable of practicing public and private virtue.

Public virtue means that we are willing to step up and do things that will benefit others generally without thought of recognition or personal reward for ourselves.  Public service used to actually include a degree of public virtue.

It can take forms other than public office, but it requires a willingness to serve others to the best of our abilities.

Private virtue means that we rectify our own hearts and minds, as Confucius suggested, before we set out to correct others. It’s not enough to insist that others be good, we must be willing to govern ourselves first.

By setting our selves and our homes in order, our communities and states will follow.

We must be willing to love liberty more than we hate our enemies.

We must have correct forms in our government and our personal lives. 

A form is what gives wet concrete its structure, limits and purpose.

Without a proper form, the concrete would flow uncontrollably and become useless.

In a similar sense, correct forms in government are what define its proper role and upper limits.

They are what allow the powers of the state to be used wisely and humanely for securing our natural rights rather than for simple domination or mischief.

In our personal lives, correct forms include strong marriages and families and sound personal financial practices as well as greater self-sufficiency.

When these elements are widespread throughout a society, self government and freedom flourish.  When they are generally lacking, even well-schooled, highly technologically advanced societies can be led into the abyss.

Military might and domination alone cannot make us or keep us a great nation.

Abiding by correct principles and doing the right things for the right reasons–regardless of circumstances–can.

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Bryan Hyde is a radio host, husband, father, graduate student at George Wythe University, and seeker of truth. He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice.

Bryan blogs at The White Rose Society and writes firearm reviews for The Truth About Guns. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

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With another renewal of the PATRIOT Act recently, it’s clear that the debate still centers over whether the act goes too far or doesn’t go far enough to protect against terrorism.

A better question would be: Is the proper role of government to keep us safe or to keep us free?

At stake is whether national security–namely those measures undertaken to protect the government and its agents–should necessarily trump the personal freedoms of the populace.

Justification for expanding government powers is found in tales of implacable foes at home and abroad preparing to slaughter innocent Americans unless we collectively give government more power to scrutinize our lives in order to “protect” us.

When the issue is framed in these terms, many Americans will lend their support to continued government-sponsored waterboarding, domestic surveillance, extraordinary rendition and aggressive warfare against nations that may someday pose an actual threat.

While we’re hyper-focused on official enemies abroad who supposedly “hate us for our freedom”, we fail to recognize the opportunists here at home who are successfully depriving us of our freedoms in the name of security.

As evil as true terrorists may be, they still lack the necessary infrastructure, manpower, and popular support to control even the third world countries they infest, much less the power to invade, enslave or conquer America.

Despite being portrayed as nearly superhuman, Al Qaeda and other terror groups must use attention-grabbing threats and isolated episodes of brutal violence to try to force their way into our consciousness. Subtlety really isn’t one of their strong points.

The tiny handful of radical Islamists which engaged in terrorism have shown a preference for coming at us head-on in easily recognizable attacks like 9/11, the U.S.S Cole and the African embassy attacks in 1998. Attacks which, in the short term, tend to unify and rouse the populace much like the “sleeping giant” that Admiral Yamamoto acknowledged after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in WWII.

A more likely, though less obvious, threat is found in the actions of policy makers who, under the color of law are slowly but surely erecting the framework of a police state here at home. This goal is being accomplished through steady, incremental expansion of the state’s power at the expense of essential individual liberties.

This is done by focusing the security state’s attention inward on American citizens through the measures like the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act and Keep America Safe Act.

These acts expand the federal government’s police powers to fight terrorism by allowing it to scrutinize virtually every American citizen as a potential terrorist. They provide cover for the state to engage in warrantless eavesdropping, denial of due process, etc., in order to keep tabs on us.

What these policies are intended to accomplish, in reality, is to increase the security of the state and its agents, not the security of the average American.

Think back a couple of years to when a tiny Cessna aircraft wandered off course and flew over the nation’s capitol. Remember the official response? News footage showed virtual citywide panic on the part of government as select leaders were whisked to “secure locations” while the mere “people” who worked in D.C. were herded about like frightened cattle by officers in battle gear.

It was an ideal demonstration of just who the State is willing to protect and who is likely to be on their own. From the TSA shakedown at the airport to rifle-toting officers patrolling public transportation, many of the obvious shows of force are simple window dressing for the sake of demonstrating that the state is “really in charge.”

That’s good for the state, but not so good for the prospect of perpetuating liberty for future generations.

Unlike the shadowy terror groups abroad, the security state actually has at its disposal the power to regulate virtually every aspect of our lives by piling on increasingly inflexible rules designed to solidify its control. And it’s cheered on by fearful individuals who are enabling the very entity that is quietly fitting them for their restraints.

The fearful don’t care what becomes of liberty so long as it’s the state promises to protect them from the unknown.

In truth, most of us are only touched or affected by terror to the degree that we allow fear of it to direct our lives or our thinking. Fearful people are generally more easily controlled and more easily persuaded to exchange their freedoms for promises of security. This is especially true when those promises come from an entity that knows precisely where they live, how much they make, what they buy, what they read, etc.

Terrorists can’t seize our assets; deny us the ability to travel, or prevent us from obtaining gainful employment. But government has the power to do all this and more at its pleasure.

A decade later, people still fixate on the loss of those 3,000 souls who perished on 9/11, but fail to comprehend that we lose that many Americans each and every month to the predations of homegrown criminals.

The statistical probability of being a terrorist victim is smaller than the prospect of dying of a spider bite or being struck by lightning. The odds are greater that a person will win the lottery than they will be a terror victim, yet millions of Americans still live their lives in fear and willingly surrender essential liberties.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever lose our freedoms to al Qaeda or any other radicalized sect of Islam because they simply lack the capability to physically invade, overcome and conquer America. But there exists a very real hazard in our own government’s response to security by which it justifies expanding and consolidating its power and control over the American people at the price of their freedoms.

The proper role of our government is to keep us free, not to keep us safe. It’s not a choice of having one or the other.

It is in the nature of government–any government–to expand beyond its upper limits. This is why the founders crafted a limited federal government with vertical and horizontal separation of powers as well as checks and balances and a Bill of Rights. Those limits on government power were not only intended for when the sun was shining, but for dark and foreboding days when men would be tempted to set them aside for expediency.

Anytime we’re told that it’s a “necessity” for government power to be expanded or “terrorists will kill us all”, it simply demonstrates that the faces and names may have changed, but the tactics of the tyrant never do.

Endlessly pointing to the events of 9/11 as justification for expanding government power doesn’t change the fact that capability is what really counts when determining a threat. And the capability of terrorists to destroy liberty can never approach that of a government that refuses to abide by its limits.

So who, in the long run, is more likely to succeed in separating us from our freedoms?

The one who openly comes out against you or the one who surreptitiously takes your freedoms while claiming to be your protector?

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Bryan Hyde is a radio host, husband, father, graduate student at George Wythe University, and seeker of truth. He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice.

Bryan blogs at Hydeologue.com. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

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For decades, many elite liberals in America have wanted the United States to become more like Europe.

During the Cold War the NATO agreement naturally kept Europe and the U.S. in a cooperative relationship.

But after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an Atlantic divide appeared as U.S. and European Union interests frequently took different paths.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain and even Britain at times found themselves at odds with American policy around the world. Even Canada often sided with the Europeans against the U.S. on numerous attitudes from health care and international human rights to views on global institutions and world events.

While some conservative and liberal leaders openly believe in and promote American exceptionalism and the idea that the U.S. should retain its own brand of free society, a number of elite liberals, most notably the Clinton and Obama Administrations, seem to want the United States to fit more naturally into the Europeanized community of nations.

Europeanized America?

What would a more European-style America look like? Of course, nobody can really know for sure what such a change would entail. But we can use our imagination to consider a few possibilities simply by identifying major ways in which American life is the exception and doesn’t fit into typical European society. Here are few:

• More apartments and fewer houses. In most European nations, only the very wealthy afford houses instead of living in apartments. This impacts the size of families and also how many cars can be parked in urban settings. A narrative is growing that most Americans can’t really afford houses anymore (see the housing bubble which is still a problem) and a different style of housing is ahead.
• More public transit and fewer personal vehicles.
• Smaller families.
• Mandatory military service. Not every Western nation requires mandatory military service for all young citizens, but the U.S. has long been an exception to the norm with its all-volunteer military services.
• More people working for the government and a smaller percentage in the private sector. This would certainly end American exceptionalism, and in this arena the U.S. has—unfortunately—greatly progressed toward the European model in the past twenty years. Indeed, in 2010 U.S. public employees became more highly compensated, on average, than private business employees.
• International law and precedent above the Supreme Court. Many argue that we have been moving in this direction for a very long time. Add to this the changes effected in our legal structure by various treaties over the years and the trend is clear. A number of analysts consider this a genuine and ongoing reduction of national sovereignty.
• Government control of a guaranteed health care system, highly regulated banks and other financial institutions, and high levels of government intervention in nearly every sector of the economy. This has almost become a near-European-style reality in the current United States.
• Public education emphasis on career training from a very early age. Again, this has recently become the European-style actuality in the U.S.
• A sense of celebrity and superiority among some government officials, and a corresponding view among citizens that they are “below” many government officers.
• A deep reliance on, and unfounded faith in, experts. Coupled with the growing “celebrity and sense of superiority” of some government officers, this creates a new de facto class system–the major European legacy which the American founders rejected.
  There could be a number of other changes in American lifestyle to make it more similar to Europe, but these are enough to see the overwhelming potential impact of trying to make the U.S. more like many of our allies across the North Atlantic.

But is this Actually Liberal?

Ironically, only a few of these are actually in line with traditional liberal values. Indeed, conservatives have historically been supporters of class divides, which liberals have considered deplorable. And liberals have long argued against job-training as the center of education, frequently preferring the liberal-arts education to make us better people.

Both liberals and conservatives have recruited celebrities to their cause, but neither have been friendly to politicians as celebs. Liberals have always been very skeptical of anyone using celebrity, charisma or fame in positions of power. Likewise, liberals have customarily been opponents of any reduction of judicial power and independence.

It makes sense that liberals, as believers in the progressive role of government, would support European levels of regulation over health care, financial institutions and business, and also reliance on credentials and expertise as the highest available levels of human ability and trust.

But even this doesn’t logically explain the popularity of American Europeanization among some liberal thinkers. For example, how many liberals actually support mandatory military service? This is an arena where many liberals may dislike the Europeanizing of America, and where many conservatives might support a change.

If liberals who want America to become more like Europe are simply promoting much higher levels of government involvement in the U.S. economy, that makes sense. As an independent, I don’t agree with this goal, but I can understand why those who believe in big government would want it.

Or, if those who support American Europeanization want to pick and choose from the European model—applying good ideas and rejecting bad ideas—this fits into the original American founding viewpoint.  I have a hard time finding much on the list above that I think we should adopt, however. But I can understand the value of improving whatever we can—and learning from Europe.

For example, I think we should make real changes in response to Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of America for believing in legalism over morality, materialism over spirituality, and military might over the power of principles. Indeed, both Eastern and Western Europe, and other places, have much to teach us.

I believe the lessons learned by the people from so much war and devastation in the last century should be closely considered by us all.

No American should skip studying the works of Picasso, Anne Frank, C.S. Lewis, Frankel, Lusseyran and so many others. And Churchill’s counsel on how to analyze current events and prepare for the future is still sage advice.

More, I personally loved the tradition of siesta when I lived in Spain, and I think many Americans would benefit from a more relaxed attitude about life. We are, in general, far too driven most of the time. I am a fan of many things European, and many European ideals and traditions deserve consideration by Americans.

The Power of Fashion

I don’t think this is actually what is going on in the current longing to make America more like Europe, however. Instead, I think this view is simply fashionable in some circles. Wanting to be like Europe is hip. People see real and deep problems with American power, leaders and institutions, and they see them exhibited in both major political parties and by almost everyone in office.

For example, President Bush was seen by much of the younger generation as “King George” for his hardline stance in the world, and while President Obama came into office promising to take a very different approach, the reality has been an increase in the secretive apparatus of government.

Americans see this, then they visit other free nations and note many positive things. Or, in many cases, people who long to visit such places find it trendy to praise them.

Together these two groups watch the leaders of other nations being less extreme in international politics, seemingly more tolerant and diplomatic, and they wish their leaders would do the same.  Of course, the reality is much more challenging. But few see all the warts without a long-term involvement in the other nation. As even most fair-minded American expatriates will admit, their new country has its full complement of problems too.

Still, I do want the United States to change—a lot. And I think it has things to learn from European and other nations. But more than anything, it needs to learn (both good and bad) from its own history.

The Needed Americanization of America

Sure, at times some people over-glamorize the greatness of the American founding. To hear some tell it, the founding was perfect, ideal and even idyllic. They seem to have forgotten about brutal slavery, violence in the big cities and on the frontier, religious and racial persecutions replete with murder and rape and pillage, gender abuse, mob attacks and crosses burning on lawns, and so much more.

Some of my own ancestors supported and participated in the Revolutionary War, and later they were driven out of their homes and forced to carry their children in the biting Midwestern snow for hundreds of miles seeking safety—all for their religious beliefs. When they appealed to Washington D.C., the conservatives turned them away in disdain.

Some liberals at least showed concern and care for their plight, but ultimately almost nobody in power helped and their ordeal of pain and suffering was repeated less than a decade later. Their religious leader was attacked and brutally beaten repeatedly. He was eventually murdered. This is my history.

Ask an African-American, a Native-American or a Japanese-American about his story, and tragedy and drama will likewise be retold.

In short, our nation has problems. It always has. This is not what sets us apart from other nations. What does set us apart is that the American founding accomplished one thing that has few parallels in all of history: They established a free government and a free-enterprise system without many class restraints and brimming with opportunity.

Under this system, my ancestors, and all Americans, were able to start over and flourish within a very short time period.

Not every wrong was made right, but freedom gave them opportunity and they used it. Their successes came mostly through their enterprise, but without freedom it would not have been possible. And as a result of those successes, over time our nation has had the luxury seldom seen in history to try to right its wrongs.

Such opportunity is hardly the legacy of Europe. It is more American than almost anything else, and we need to remember and resurrect such levels of opportunity. Fortunately, there has been much progress under this free system in race, religious, gender and class relations.

The U.S. Constitution set the pace for all such changes, and they naturally—albeit not easily—occurred under its structure. In our day, we need less of an example from Europe and more of a return to the principles of freedom which made America great.

Those who dislike some things about America—and, honestly, who doesn’t?—should remember that few nations in all of world history or today have made as many positive advances for freedom and prosperity—and for most of the people. I love Europe, and certainly Europe and other nations have a lot to teach us.

But nothing in human history is more likely to help us make the needed changes effectively and lastingly than life under the U.S. Constitution and applying the principles of freedom as championed by the American founders and great leaders since.

Conclusion

The stakes may be poised to rise on this, since world events seem likely to drive U.S. gasoline prices well above $5 a gallon. When I lived in Spain, I was always shocked that the gas prices were always three to five times higher than in the United States. Americans have since seen prices go up to around $3-$4, depending on the specific time or place, but we may see this double, or more, in the years ahead.

Prices of $6, $7, or even $9 a gallon would not be surprising.  And make no mistake, cheap energy prices have greatly benefited America’s economic success.

America can alter this direction, or find ways to innovatively overcome it, if it is allowed to work in a free system with a free enterprise economy. But if it is forced to fight this battle without the benefit of true free enterprise, it will most likely move more and more toward European lifestyles.

Nothing in accepted history has accomplished more for widespread freedom and prosperity than the American constitutional model of free government and free enterprise. So, definitely, let’s learn all we can from the successes of Europe, Asia, conservatives, liberals, history and everyone else.  We must make sure our children and grandchildren have the opportunity to apply the best lessons of the world in a society as free and prosperous as the ideal American system—which we have yet to create.

Let’s improve our nation, change old traditions that don’t work, and re-emphasize the principles of freedom that have proven true (even if we have forgotten to apply them in recent decades). America needs to be a lot more like the ideal America—and soon.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

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“Raise their heads on gilded poles! Roast the fatted calf! We need a rousing song–summon Toby Keith!” – from The Onion on the killing of Usay & Quday Hussein by U.S forces in 2003.

The past couple of weeks have revealed a great deal about the character of the average American. It’s not exactly good news either.

When the news broke that 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, it took mere minutes for an orgy of celebration to break out across the nation.

Even the news media, which used to at least try to be circumspect in its coverage, couldn’t help but allow a bit of gloating to surface in the headlines including these gems:

• “Bin Laden Demise: America Rejoices After a Decade”
• “Rot In Hell!”
• “We Got the Bastard!”
• “Got Him! Vengeance at Last: U.S. Nails the Bastard!”
• “Justice Has Been Done”

Look, according to the Law of the Harvest, Bin Laden reaped exactly what he sowed as a murderous religious fanatic. No sympathy here. I can even understand the relief and emotional closure that many feel at this time.

But what about those who celebrate Bin Laden’s death with cheers, chants, chest bumps and high fives? Does his killing at the hands of our military really prove once and for all the that greatness of this nation resides in its ability to terminate despicable individuals with extreme prejudice?

Consider how John Quincy Adams summed up America’s greatness in 1821:

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. [emphasis mine]

At the risk of being extremely unpopular, I suggest we take a step back and see what the joyful celebration of any bloodshed actually says about us as a people.

Muslims are often characterized in our media as blood-thirsty, vengeful people who dance in the streets when their foes are killed or maimed. Thank goodness we’re not so crass, right?

Remember how outrage in America hit a fever pitch when a video was shown purporting to show Arab people celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks?

The footage was later revealed to be video of a wedding celebration. Yet few Americans ever knew they’d been played like a fiddle at a barn dance. The current reaction of many U.S. citizens to a man’s death halfway around the world shows that we’re not immune to the effects of official propaganda.

This type of misinformation inflames emotions and whips the crowd into the type of frenzy where facts simply don’t matter. What really counts in the minds of too many Americans is that Bin Laden’s death supposedly validates our nation’s inherent greatness.

The official line is that “justice has been served.” But that may not strictly be the case.

Vengeance has certainly been served. But justice usually involves a modicum of due process; a cornerstone of our legal system that serves to limit government and protect individual liberties.

Though the official version of events has changed several times since the story broke, it’s clear that whatever justice Bin Laden will receive will be administered in the hereafter.

Bob Higgs has zeroed in on the inconsistency of what separates us from the kind of mindless blood lust that characterized Bin Laden and his minions:

No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.

Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.

Joseph Sobran long ago observed that there is a degree of tragedy involved even when someone is crushed by the enormity of his own evil actions. Is it unreasonable to think that even the Creator grieves at the loss of one of his children?

Salon Magazine’s Glenn Greenwald dares to pose the vital questions that need to be addressed:

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

And then there’s the notion that America has once again proved its greatness and preeminence by killing bin Laden. Americans are marching in the street celebrating with a sense of national pride.

Our situation hasn’t changed because one man was waxed by our military. We are still less free as a people, more entangled as a nation, and far deeper in debt than we were a decade ago.  Are those facts worth celebrating as well?

We aren’t less free today because Bin Laden succeeded in personally wresting our freedoms away from us. We are less free because we’ve allowed our own government to take them from us, incrementally, in return for the promise of protection from our official enemies.

Our greatness as a nation depends more upon the quality of our individual character as citizens and less upon which official enemy we’ve just annihilated.

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Bryan Hyde is a radio host, husband, father, graduate student at George Wythe University, and seeker of truth. He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice.

Bryan blogs at Hydeologue.com. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

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“According to the Pew Research Centre, some 87% of Chinese, 50% of Brazilians and 45% of Indians, think their country is going in the right direction, whereas 31% of Britons, 30% of Americans and 26% of the French do….For most of its history America has kept its promise to give its citizens a good chance of living better than their parents. But these days, less than half of Americans think their children’s living standard will be better than theirs. Experience has made them gloomy: the income of the median worker has been more or less stagnant since the mid-1970s, and, thanks to a combination of failing schools and disappearing mid-level jobs, social mobility in America is now among the lowest in the rich world….In the emerging world, meanwhile, they are not arguing about pensions, but building colleges. China’s university population has quadrupled in the past two decades.”
—The Economist, December 18^th, 2010

California. Florida. Texas. These names are known to the educated class in China. Indeed, so are Nevada, Colorado, Arizona and Kansas. But for the middle and educated classes in the United States, the same level of knowledge about state-level entities does not hold.

Who can describe, or claim to have heard of, Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang, Sichuan or Yunnan? Shanghai, Guangdong and Macau are a bit more known, but hardly. Of all the state-level entities in China, only Tibet and Hong Kong are universally known by most Americans.

But point to Tibet on a map. How many educated Americans can get it right on the first try?

I have three points to make about this, and I believe all three will have a great impact on America’s future.

1-Friends?

First, how can we consider China an enemy if we don’t even know them? Time reported that Americans are 25 times more likely to be concerned about China than Afghanistan (where we’re still engaged in America’s longest war), and that the big worries of middle-class Americans are jobs, government overspending and China.

Most Americans see China as an economic threat right now and believe it will be a political/military threat in the coming decades—if not sooner. Many believe that China is poised to replace the U.S. as the world’s dominant power.

During our Great Recession, China experienced major economic growth. A majority of Americans right now seem to feel that good news for China is bad news for the U.S. and good news for America is bad for China. Johns Hopkins dean David M. Lampton argues that economics (unlike war) is a win-win game and that Chinese success is good for America’s economy and future.

Indeed, having a larger market of consumers to buy products should help American businesses. Long-time Asia expert James Fallows says that China and the U.S. have a lot in common and could benefit from increased cooperation.

Few Americans seem to agree. As Harvard’s Ross Terrill put it in The Wilson Quarterly, “It may be good for the West that China continues its economic progress, but not if it remains authoritarian.” This basically sums up the view of many Americans.

So does Terrill’s comment that, “By being a shrinking violet, the United States would simply hand the future to China.”

Growing U.S. middle-class concerns about China are legendary. But all of this deals with Beijing and national China. The reality is that Xinjiang may be one of the world’s most likely sites of 21^st Century freedom.

It is entrepreneurial, religiously and culturally diverse (boasting significant populations from four of the world’s major religions), resource rich, and geographically strategic. It borders Tibet, India, Russia, Mongolia and two other up-and-coming possible global freedom centers in Gansu and Qinghai.

It has a skilled and rising middle class. It has the totalitarian Beijing government going against it, and pretty much everything else going for it.

Along with the unsettled American west (from Flagstaff up to Edmonton, Spokane to Fargo, and Santa Fe to Lincoln), the Iguazu plain in South America, WWT (waiting for water technology) Australia, various places in Africa, and Siberia, Xinjiang is part of the world’s remaining frontier for population growth, wealth and freedom.

China is investing in nearly all of these places, and knowledge of these areas should be part of America’s middle-class awareness.

China is certainly a potential future threat, but the fact that Americans are almost entirely ignorant of the potential opportunities for common projects and interaction is the greater challenge.

2-Enemies?

Second, if China does turn out to be our enemy, how can we effectively deal with it without, as Sun Tzu put it, “knowing our enemy?” The largest militarized border in the world runs between China and the former Soviet Union. And with China overtaking the U.S. and Europe as the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, the Siberian oil fields will become tempting at some point.

Most of Siberia is part of what was traditionally the Greater Chinese region, after all. Indeed, even in Tolstoy the upper classes are European and the lower classes are Asian. Fortunately in the modern West we reject such racist class systems, but the strongly Asian populace in most of Siberia isn’t missed by the Chinese rulers.

What such a conflict by two major nuclear world powers would bring remains to be seen—or, hopefully, not seen.

As for Americans, how many of us are studying Chinese? In contrast, the high number of Chinese nationals learning English is well known. U.S. economic policy too often repels investment and sends corporations and jobs abroad (even U.S. banks are now looking beyond the U.S. to grow).

The Chinese are simultaneously encouraging investment through business-friendly policy and investing far and wide in resources—especially in the Southern Pacific and Africa but also in Latin America, Europe, North American and the Middle East.

If China does become our enemy, historians will look back at U.S. policy between 1992 and 2011 and marvel at how precisely and consistently we did exactly the wrong things to prepare for such an enemy—and how China did so much right in order to prevail in a conflict with the U.S.

3-Enemies Within?

Third, the fact that we know China as a nation—as it is presented by Beijing and the party rulers—instead of by province and people, shows a change of mindset in the way educated Americans think about the  world, other nations, and ourselves.

Have we become a nation that sees the world through “imperialist-” rather than “federalist-” tinted glasses? This is perhaps the most dangerous of my three points in this article. Sun Tzu said that to “know thyself” is even more important than to “know thy enemy.”

It may be most accurate to look at China as a monolithic power run by a few leaders at the top, but unfortunately we seem to have made the same mental switch concerning the United States. As a citizenry, we have anointed Washington as our leader at levels far beyond the Constitution.

Have modern Americans so fully lost the American founding view of federalism with states in charge of almost everything except a few national powers (20, to be exact, according to the U.S. Constitution) held by Washington? If so, we’ve got much bigger problems than anything China may or may not do.

No outside force will ever conquer America unless we first weaken ourselves. If we’ve truly rejected (on purpose or through neglect) the basic principles of freedom which made America great and prosperous, then we are destined to lose the 21^st Century to someone—be it China, Europe or some other powerful civilization.

Separation of powers into three independent branches of government, checks and balances, and true federalism with most of the power residing in the states rather the federal government—these are vital to our freedom. Without them, we will decline and eventually lose our power in the world.

Unless our regular citizens take action soon, we will continue on the path to decline regardless of what China or any other powerful nation does.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.
He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.
Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

This is Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part One here.

Away from Arrogance

With a Republican House, we now get to see if President Obama is only ideological (as some people claim) or if he has the ability to be a pragmatist.

It is possible that President Obama is a pragmatist, but that he simply believes his own press. His inner-circle supporters have said he is so intelligent that “he’s never been intellectually challenged.”

The President may not adopt such a smug view, but the Administration’s talking point that Democrats only lost the election because the White House didn’t communicate well (doublespeak for “the voters just don’t get it”) is reinforcing this view of the Obama Administration’s arrogance.

The Administration is saying that the American people like Obama’s policies, such as health care, but that they are simply upset with the pace of economic recovery and weary of partisan battles (double speak for “they don’t have the stomach for the political process”).

“Our policies were right on,” this argument goes, “but we did a poor job explaining our agenda.” This mantra is repeated by many Administration officials, including the President.

Democrats of course tend to accept this view, and on the opposite extreme Republicans would like the President to come out vocally against health care—which will never happen.

But the most poignant political reality is that this White House mantra sounds to independents a lot like the following:

“We did the right thing for the American people, but they just aren’t smart enough to realize it. We’ll just have to be patient with these uninformed American voters while we lead them along slowly toward what they really need.

“Our polices may need a few tweaks, like all major policies do, but they were right on. America should be praising our leadership in bringing them universal health care!”

“It was an embarrassment in front of truly informed people (like Europeans and Ivy Leaguers) that the U.S. didn’t have mandatory health care, and we fixed that! The midterm votes were not against our policies, just frustration with a slow economy among hard-working but unsophisticated voters.”

The White House isn’t saying these things, exactly, but it seems like they are.

If, as the White House seems to believe, so erudite and articulate a man as our sitting President lost the House because he didn’t couch his message in a way the people could understand, isn’t this just another way of saying that the masses aren’t smart enough to get it?

Independents, who determine modern elections, believe the election of 2010 was a call for:

• No tax hikes;
• A cut back of the big-spending portions of health care;
• Lowered government debt and the end of deficits;
• Reduced regulations on small businesses;
• Reduced government spending.

Above all, it was a call for reduced government spending.

When the average government employee in America makes $120,000 a year while the private sector average is $60,000, with 9.6 percent unemployment at a time that government is hiring more employees, government spending is clearly out of control.

Small businesses are laying off and shutting down in large part because of the rising regulatory cost of doing business, and they are watching those with government jobs getting increased budgets.

(And the irony is even more poignant when we consider that the job description of many of those with expanding government-funded budgets was to define and enforce regulations on private sector employers and employees.) That’s what the vote was about.

If the Obama Administration doesn’t get this message, it doesn’t understand independents. Independents voted against Democrats in 2010 because they want the economy fixed, and they see health care as the major obstacle to significant economic recovery.

They realize that President Obama can’t turn on his own health care law, which is exactly why they turned to Republicans. Where they turn in the 2012 election will depend on whether the Obama Administration goes on a massive government cost-cutting and regulation-cutting push in the next two years.

Whatever direction President Obama takes, one option is to end certain foreign interventions and bring the troops home. Ironically, Obama will probably have more support for this now with more right-wing and even Tea Party members in Congress.

If we had spent the 3 trillion dollars used up in Afghanistan and Iraq on incentivizing and seeding American entrepreneurial ventures, where would unemployment and our economy be right now?

Or what if we had never taxed or borrowed the trillion dollars in the first place—just left it in the economy instead?

The combined 2009-2010 deficits were $2.9 trillion, less than the cost of our Middle East interventions. Certainly we should afford operations which truly protect our national security, but did it really take $3 trillion to do this?

Of course, we’ll never know the exact answers. But clearly the economy would be at a better place.

As for national security, more people are now asking which makes us stronger against terrorism—thousands of troops and $3 trillion spent in the Middle East or a booming U.S. economy?

More and more it seems that the interventions, for all their anecdotal successes, were animated by the need to save face—from start to finish. When those towers came down we had to respond; of course we did.

But the perilous and labyrinthine issue of America’s War on Terrorism seems to be a never-ending vicious cycle of losing and saving face.

Military options should deal with direct threats, and we should put our nation-building efforts and capital to work at home.

Washington spends more on national security than China, Russia, Japan, India and Europe combined ( Foreign Affairs, November/December 2010, p. 30)—even as our soldiers and vets lack some of the basics needs and care.

And the quagmire that is our Middle East war theater is a one-step-forward-four-steps-back debacle; meanwhile, our own citizens are being subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures for simple domestic travel.

This is the epitome of imperial overreach and a broken policy of national security. Certainly some of these massive and ineffective expenditures can be cut while still maintaining the strongest national defense in the world. Hopefully we can apply these lessons in the next two years and beyond.

The President can also recommend an immediate 5 percent cut to everything in the federal budget, and a 10 percent cut to all government salaries above the private-sector average of $60,000 per year.

Republicans would be called reckless for such an act, but the President would be called an aggressive leader who really cares about the economy. He has already suggested an end to the small business-killing 1099 requirements in the health care law, which is a good move.

He can do more if he stops advancing the line that he just didn’t sell his message better and instead vocally listing out other positive “tweaks” to health care and other regulations—all in the name of helping small business.

A powerful White House talking point could be, for example:

“America needed Health Care reform and we are glad we did it, but it needs some changes to really work. I propose that we cut…”

President Obama could list 10 things that need to be changed in the law and energetically get to work altering them. And he could identify specific cuts to government spending in big ways, and sell the reduced cost as he promotes the changes.

Now that’s leadership. In effect he would be saying, “I hear the American people. I still believe in health care, but I know we can make it even better through wise cuts; as a servant of the people I’m going to lead out in this reform that the voters have demanded. Come on, Republicans, let’s make these changes right away!”

Here is what independents would hear: “I may have seemed like an ideologue before, but with Democratic leadership of the White House and both houses in Congress I wanted to push for as much as I could.”

“That’s just smart politics. But now the people have spoken, and I’m humbled and listening. They want less government spending, and as their leader I’m not going to sit around and wait for the other party to set the agenda.”

“I’ve heard what the voters have to say, and it’s time to get to work. Let’s start by changing certain big-spending items in health care, and then let’s get to work on deregulating small business and rebooting the economy.”

“I hear you, voters. And I believe in you. This is a democracy, and I’m going to lead the people in the direction they really care about. Let’s get to work.”

Incentives Matter Most

In the election passion of 2012, will jobs, China and Health Care still be the issues that elicit voter anxiety, fear and fervor? Two years is an eternity in electronic-age politics.

Iran, Israel, India, North Korea, Europe and other themes could rise to the top. A third party could arise and sway the entire political landscape like the rise of the Federalists, Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans did at earlier decision-points in history.

Unless a serious re-incentivizing of small business does occur, the issues may well be major financial challenges like increasing fears of a depression.

People are hurting in this economy a lot more than Washington admits. Consumers are loathe to spend, and most families have far less discretionary money than before 2008.

When Democrats continue to ask if America really wants to go back to the failed policies of the Bush years, a lot more Americans are comparing their life now to 2001-2008 and answering, “Yes, please.”

They don’t mean it in a technical way, perhaps, but they do want their prosperity back. If they thought the Republicans could really offer it, the 2010 election would have been an even bigger swing to the right.

Americans are feeling less and less faith in the policies of the Democrats that got us where we are now. The White House can greatly impact this by re-incentivizing growth and global investment in U.S. business. If it doesn’t, Barack Obama rather than George Bush will be blamed for the second Great Depression.

Unemployment. China. Health Care.

Barring some major change in the world (like a legitimate third party, a great depression, another 9/11-like event, or a detonated weapon of mass destruction, etc.), this will be the 2012 campaign slogan of Republicans and independents.

And this could make the Republican gains of 2010 seem small in comparison. But even conservatives don’t really want this path—they’d prefer to see Obama really help reboot the economy long before 2012.

The Obama Administration has the chance to truly lead by re-booting the private sector and therefore the economy. If it does, President Obama will probably go down in history as one of the greatest American presidents.

He is not popular now, but the policies of the next two years (not the last two) will determine his legacy.

The challenge, of course, is that Barack Obama isn’t a private small-business owner. He can only significantly boost such owners with drastically decreased levels of regulation and government spending—the real test of whether he’s mainly a politician-ideologue or a pragmatic and visionary leader.

As President Obama considers his strategy for what’s ahead, he should seriously contemplate this: As small business goes in the next two years, so goes his presidency, his leadership, and the nation.

For more on the big themes and issues in the coming years, see Oliver’s latest book, FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

The Big Three

Americans feel deeply and strongly about three things right now. All three have support on the right, the center and the left.

These may well dominate the news and politics until the election of 2012, just as stimulus, health care and the midterm election overshadowed the discussions of 2009-2010.

Moreover, all three are long-term issues and unlikely to be solved any time soon. The American discussion for the next two years will probably center on:

1. Jobs
2. China
3. Healthcare

This reality holds an inherent disadvantage for Democrats:

1. Americans overwhelmingly discount government jobs and see private-sector jobs as the only real solution.
2. Democratic presidents are seen as soft on foreign aggressors.
3. It was an entirely Democratic vote which passed health care. Republican gains in the 2010 election were mostly votes against Democrats and not votes for the Republican agenda. The one exception is the idea of repealing the health care law.

If Republicans can combine these three points into one coherent message, their stock will rise. If they can position the health care law as the great enemy of both jobs and America’s ability to compete with China, they will most likely gain momentum toward the 2012 election.

This likely will not be a hard sell since much of the underlying concern about China is that it is becoming a world leader in innovation.

Arguably, the foundation of leadership and power is innovation; and the rise of Chinese entrepreneurialism is the greatest world challenge to America (except for Washington D.C.’s anti-small business regulations). Deep down many Americans are feeling the anxiety of this shift.

Mainstream Americans want to feel good again; they want to feel like we’re on a course to achieve a meaningful end. Having an enemy like health care to unite them, with the promise of increasing both jobs and our competitive advantage over China by dismantling the new health care law, will appeal to many.

Only a few on the left still experience the health care afterglow, so there is little staunch support for it even in the liberal base. Beyond that, the majority of Americans in the election of 2008 were optimists, but now the majority feels pessimistic. In times of malaise like this, one-term presidents are the norm (e.g. Ford, Carter, Bush I).

The New Blame Game

Americans put the blame for their feelings of worry over jobs and China squarely on the White House: both Bush and Obama. In the case of health care, however, only President Obama is to blame.

Phrases like “Obamacare” and “Obamanomics” are now household additions to the language. And these are patently not positive or even neutral terms.

A common and even pervasive narrative now is that the United States is seeing its status decline and may lose its leadership role in the world because of the way Obamanomics and especially Obamacare made us unable to compete with China.

“Obama fiddled while America’s jobs burned,” is more and more becoming the accepted view in middle America. President Obama calling himself “America’s first Pacific president” actually reinforces this concern; it feels to many that he is following China’s leadership instead of vice versa.

Many Americans—conservative, moderate, and liberal—simply cannot fathom how the White House put so much emphasis on health care, Cap and Trade and increased government spending while seeming to ignore the issue of jobs.

No matter how the administration tries to argue that it cared about jobs all along, the American people just don’t see it that way. Even the stimulus is seen now more as a clever use of the recession to expand government spending than a sincere effort to combat unemployment.

A Tale of Two Stories

All the incentive now is for President Obama to tack to the center. He originally ran as a centrist, a charismatic representative of a new generation that would care more about leadership and bipartisan cooperation than the old party politics, but his first two years in office were both liberal and partisan.

Indeed, with a Democratic White House, Democratic Senate and Democratic House of Representatives, the incentive for a Democratic president was clearly to push as many liberal policies and programs as possible while the Democrats were in the majority everywhere—and to make vocal war on any place with a conservative voice, from the Chambers of Commerce to Fox News to the Supreme Court.

But all of that changes with a split government after the 2010 election. Consider these story lines:

A newly elected American President comes to office replacing the opposing party, has the support of Congress and pushes his partisan agenda strongly in his first two years in office.

He loses support in the midterm election, but still remains firmly committed to his roots and tries to keep pushing his ideological agenda. This was the story of Jimmy Carter and, to a certain extent, Bush I.

At midterm elections, the President’s monolithic advantage crumbles; he faces split government and a big choice. He tacks to the center, works with the other party and becomes known as a centrist President who emphasized leadership. Reagan and Clinton followed this path.

Presidents typically want to follow a third storyline, which is to keep pushing their partisan agenda and gain more and more popularity. There is no example of this working in the entire post-War era.

The incentive for a Democratic president facing a conservative Supreme Court and Republican House is to tack to the center.

It remains to be seen which storyline President Obama will choose. Some say he is too ideological to tack to the center and govern as a leader rather than a liberal reformer, but the same was said of “conservative ideologue” Reagan in 1982 and Clinton in 1994. Both made the switch.

Ironically, many who criticized Obama for running as a centrist and then governing from the left ditch will likely condemn him if he turns to governing from the center. But the pragmatists will give him credit for taking his shot when he had a Democratic Congress to support things he really believed in.

They will also see the practicality of his tacking to the center when it is likely the only way to win a second term and keep getting some, though not all, of his agenda. Note that it took Clinton eight months to come to the new reality and tack to the center.

Independents will likely be more understanding of this process than either Republicans (many of whom will disparage whatever he does) or Democrats (who see nothing but a hard-left agenda as success).

If President Obama finds ways to please the independents in the next two years, mainly by freeing up small business to bring growth and more jobs, he will be in a good place politically in 2012 and beyond. And independents expect Republicans to work with Obama as well.

Policy Shift

Independents determine elections. As believers in checks and balances, they got the best split possible in the 2012 election: A firmly Republican House against a Democratic White House, a barely Democratic Senate balanced by a barely conservative Supreme Court.

Of course, the White House carries a bit more power than the House, unless it stands firm—but even this is offset by more Republican state governments.

The media will probably use the woeful term “gridlock” a lot in the next two years. But many independents are fine with gridlock on the little things (especially if it tends to reduce government overspending)—as long as the big things are handled.

As for 2012, independents generally like Barack Obama. They don’t like his financial strategy, however. At least not right now. They like the man, not the policies.

And they really dislike the health care law—indeed two-thirds of independents see the health care law as a negative or even a disaster to the U.S. economy. The real problems will kick in when the already cash-poor and struggling states are required to drastically increase their spending to meet health care mandates.

Still, the President has the ability to do something nobody else can. He can take on jobs and worries about China simply by de-regulating and lowering taxes on small business in America.

Congress will follow his lead on this, if he pushes it like he did health care. If he gets serious about incentivizing private-sector jobs, he can reboot the economy in significant and even sweeping ways. He will have to make friends with business to do this, which may be beyond his emotional constitution. But business would love such a shift.

Such reconciliation would have to be genuine and even passionate to undo the damage which has already been done.

But Barack Obama is an effective politician, and if he puts his mind to re-incentivizing the economy he can lead Congress to make it happen. He can’t directly repeal health care, but he can sign “McDonald’s-style” exemptions for all of small business, and get the buy-in of Congress.

He can push for reducing the extra spending caused by the health care law, and he can blame any changes he makes to the health care law on the need to wrangle with difficult insurance companies on behalf of small business.

He can also put the emphasis on economic growth policies, as opposed to tax hikes, to balance budgets. And he can lead the West Wing in a studious agenda to pinpoint and reverse all federal laws and policies which hinder small business growth and de-incentivize global investors from bringing capital to the U.S.

The problem, as The Economist Oct. 30, 2010 issue put it, may be that Obama “has lived all his life among tribal democrats” and “seems curiously unable to perceive, let alone respond to, the grievances of middle America…”

Some say he struggles to understand why middle Americans think like they do, and assumes anger and fear makes them cling to things like limited government, or “guns and religion,” as he famously said. He may, as some critics say, consider himself much more intelligent than American voters.

If this is true, and if Obama cannot make the shift to leadership instead of partisanship, the White House will likely adopt the Bush and Clinton rapprochement strategy of appearing more conciliatory to the opposition in Congress while using executive agency policy to keep pushing the party’s ideology and agenda.

This gives the façade of cooperation and leadership without really changing direction. The question remains whether independents and other citizens in the Internet age will be duped by this. The modern voter may well have become too savvy for this kind of end run. Time will tell.

Many in the new Congress have expressed their intent to keep a watch on agency policy—which is a good sign regardless of which party is in power on Capitol Hill.

But while some on both the right and left might hope for a partisan Obama in the next two years, most moderates and independents want him to make the shift and succeed—especially for the sake of small business and the economy.

Some, including David Brooks and Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, describe Obama as less an ideological and more a pragmatic politician who has yet to live up to his leadership potential.

To be continued…

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

The Age of Dependence

We have recently changed as a people, and as a nation. I’m not sure exactly when the change occurred, but we are living in the new reality it has created.

On the one hand, we have always been a nation dedicated to positive change.

America was founded by breaking from the old world and establishing a new model of society and governance, and the progressive impulse has guided America ever since.

On the other hand, we have usually defined change in the positive sense, and when progress has come it has always been based on a nation of freethinking citizens and courageous leaders.

Today, in contrast, we have become, to a large extent, a nation of followers. For the past three generations, we have been taught to depend upon experts.

This is a stunning break from the founding and pioneering generations who raised their children to depend upon their own wisdom, initiative and grit.

This dependence on experts is as devastating to freedom and as potentially controlling as totalitarian governments, caste and class systems, and the wealthy withholding education from the masses.

It is an applicational flaw in modernism that is persistently leaching freedom from historically open nations around the world.

In addition to unhealthy dependence on experts, we have been conditioned in the West to think like reductionists—only accepting logical, concrete and proven answers.

This invalidates our “gut” feelings about right and wrong and leaves us more dependent on the accepted authority. It puts the “experts” above the citizens in determining America’s future.

But the biggest problem with our reductionism is that we are Dependent Reductionists: we consider something to be logical and proven when the experts say so.

Ironically, this kind of reductionism is actually the opposite of reductionism; it is, in fact, a personal rejection among citizens of our own logic and common sense and instead an ignorant reliance on the leadership of our “betters” in academia, the media, economics and government.

An Age of Epicurus

Add to this a third major characteristic of modern Americans: we are nearly all epicureans, meaning that we want life to feel good.

We expect childhood, youth, education, health, career, finances, romance, family, entertainment and everything else in life to basically go well for us. Always.

And if this ever fails, we angrily blame the government, our employers, our parents or someone else for not doing their job. If everyone did his part, we now believe, pretty much everything would go well for us; and if we’re not content, comfortable and at ease, someone is surely to blame.

So then, most Americans are now Epicurean Dependent Reductionists: We want the experts to make everything good for us, we instinctively believe that they will, and we expect them to use science, logic, research, planning and whatever else is necessary to ensure that all goes well.

After all, they’re the experts. And government officials are expected to do the most, since they are experts with power.

This is the New America.

Of course, there is more to America than these three characteristics, but the new influence of widespread Dependence, Dependent Reductionism and Epicureanism indicates a different kind of future than most Americans seem to want.

Time magazine chronicled Joe Klein’s visit across America in the fall of 2010. Klein talked to hundreds of regular Americans, asking them questions about America and the world and listening closely to their answers, concerns, thoughts and worries. What he discovered is a good overview of modern America.

He found voters to be more eloquent, unpredictable and candid than the candidates. He wrote: “There was a unanimous sense that Washington was broken beyond repair.”

Americans are also upset with big business, especially big finance.

They feel that Washington is out of touch. For example, the citizens mentioned concerns about China 25 times for each time they mentioned Afghanistan.

Liberals are frustrated with Obama; but surprisingly, conservatives are less angry about Obama and more disappointed.

They wanted him to succeed, to help fix the economy. But they don’t feel he has done much.

The growing nanny state drives them crazy. They hate the stimulus and bailouts, and they are confused about the health care bill.

They wonder why the Obama Administration focused on these things instead of jobs. They just don’t understand why the big things — jobs — are being ignored. This infuriates many Americans, both liberals and conservatives.

Klein called the regular Americans he met, on the whole, “rowdy and proud, ignorant and wise.”

The Lost Cartesian Age

Tocqueville said that Americans in the 1830s were nearly all Cartesians, but noted that most of them didn’t know that the word “Cartesian” means a follower of the philosophy promoted by Descartes.

This philosophy was based on not believing any of the experts, but rather thinking about things independently and reaching your own conclusions.

Indeed, a Cartesian considers himself the only real expert on things that are important to him. She listens closely to the thoughts of others and deeply considers all views, and then arrives at her own conclusions.

And for Americans, as Tocqueville witnessed, individual citizens were the highest “experts” on all things related to government.

In Europe, he wrote, the people loved the great artists. In America few idealized the great artists but nearly all youth and adults participated personally in art — paintings, plays, singing, and so on.

The same applied in politics. Instead of following great political icons or parties, the American electorate was deeply and personally involved in the ongoing issues.

The Americans of the 1830s could easily be called Independent Cartesian Innovators.

They expected life to be full of challenges, and they didn’t want their government or anyone else to solve their problems. They wanted to be adults, to meet their own challenges, to solve their own problems.

They believed that the government had its role, but they wanted the freedoms that could only come by keeping the state limited. Again (and this bears constant repeating in our times), they wanted to live life as adults, facing the challenges of the world and overcoming them on their own or with their families and communities.

If problems arose, they didn’t blame others. They were too busy getting to work on solutions.

When they failed, they suffered. Then they claimed that the lessons they had learned through suffering were worth the failure, even as they intently and optimistically went on to new and better projects.

This attitude led them across the oceans, into the wilderness, to freedom from the Monarchy and the old countries, across the plains, and to the moon itself. Along the way, they began the process of conquering the internal frontiers of slavery, chauvinism, bigotry and racism. They made mistakes, but they refused to give up. They kept trying.

A New Age Ahead?

Today, far too often, we just give up. We wait for the experts to do what needs to be done. And, unfortunately, too frequently the experts and officials want us to do nothing.

They believe in the experts as much as everyone else. They too often see citizens as children to be cared for, not adults to be left alone to deal with their own lives as they see fit.

But when a nation becomes a society of followers instead of leaders and adopts a culture of dependency and complaining instead of citizens who are at least trying, flaws and all, to innovatively make the world truly better, freedom is in danger.

We have reached a point in history when this generation must take a stand. If we want to pass on freedom and prosperity to our children and grandchildren, we need to move toward an attitude of innovation, independent thinking, responsibility, resiliency, and taking personal risk to make the world better.

It is time to stop talking so much about what kind of leaders we want, to give less lip service to what Washington or Wall Street or Hollywood should do, and to act a lot more like citizens who actually deserve freedom.

It is time for all of us in America, once again, to change. And this time the change needs to earn the kind of future we truly want.

The first step is a simple change in attitude from dependent on experts to truly thinking for ourselves and seeing regular citizens (not political or economic professionals) as the real experts on American government, freedom and the future.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series.

Read Part One Here.

Problems with Grand “Tactics”

Generals lose when they fail to learn the lessons of past wars; generals also lose when they attempt to fight new wars with old strategies. This adage applies even more to statesmen.

To put this in context, each time a new grand strategy was needed in American history, many of the leading members of the establishment held on to the past strategy, just as the Clinton and Bush Administrations still pursued the status quo — an international world where the U.S. is top dog and capitalism keeps spreading new markets for U.S. companies.

The bad news is that no nation in history has ever maintained the status quo, even though big powers like Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, France, Spain and Britain all tried.

Nations become top powers by seeking either to change or to obtain something — not by trying to keep things the same.

Big powers only stay big powers when they remake themselves, when they adopt a new grand strategy as needed like Rome and later Britain did.

The U.S. has remade its strategy three times, and all of them came from dealing with the big challenges, not the minor nations.

Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” while there is some truth to its argument, doesn’t take nearly as much courage, grit or will as Reagan’s “evil empire,” FDR’s choice to beat Hitler, Wilson’s “world safe for democracy,” Lincoln’s decision to prove out the founder’s experiment with blood, or the Washington generation’s “lives, fortunes and sacred honor.”

In short, statesmen are needed in the next decade to formulate and implement a grand strategy which requires virtue, wisdom, diplomacy and courage at Churchillesque, Ghandi-like and Jeffersonian proportions.

Idealism

Two other proposals are more strategic, offering a truly new view of America’s future. Whether or not you like either of these strategies (and many people don’t) they are certainly a new take on things rather than the mere tactical changes of the first three proposals.

A fourth proposed new grand strategy came with the re-entry of Gary Hart into the elite dialogue. He suggested that the best way for America to impact the world, and to remain both free and prosperous, is for the United States to focus on its most primary foundation: being good and promoting the great ideals.

This argument has a long history among Democratic politicians, including perhaps most notably Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, but it hasn’t led the conversation for Democratic presidential candidates since Carter. And among recent Republican presidential nominees only Reagan pushed this theme.

In some ways, this idea rekindles a thesis pushed by the American founding era. If we are a great example of freedom, prosperity and success at home, other nations will want to learn from our model — history shows that this is so.

As they do, the paradigms of freedom, justice, checks and balances and other constitutional ideals, and a sense of unity and liberty will spread.

Simultaneously, our own nation will — by focusing on the basics that truly work — increase our levels of freedom, prosperity, opportunity and wise leadership. We benefit, and so does the world.

Hart is adamant, and I agree with him, that without a refocus on the intangibles that make freedom work — the great ideals of true liberty and justice for all — America will not continue to lead the world because it won’t really deserve to lead.

This is a grand strategy indeed: Make the hard and vital changes to America that would make it truly the best it has ever been. The rest will naturally occur.

Of course, this is not a simple process, but neither is any grand strategy. Some will agree and disagree, as I do, with certain specifics in Hart’s ideas, but as a grand strategy this one has real merit.

“Atlanticism”

A fifth, albeit informal, possible grand strategy seems to be gaining momentum in the Obama Administration. Such a strategy might be called the Atlantic strategy, because it entails making the United States more like the nations of the European Union.

Unlike NATO, which was built on the idea of American leadership with the U.S. and its allies guiding the world, the Atlantic strategy assumes that the parliamentary social-democracy system of Western Europe, especially France and Germany, is the model the United States and other allies of the EU should adopt.

In this view, our courts should build a common body of precedent with Europe and Canada, the focus should be on human rights rather than inalienable rights, and our constitution and institutions should evolve to be less rigidly separated, checked and balanced and more and more like the nations of Europe.

On economic matters, the government would abandon a free enterprise posture and become much more involved in regulating, running and owning businesses. Washington would adopt and run a nationwide industrial policy with the government in charge.

This would allow, the argument goes, the nations of Europe and North America to become more alike and increasingly cooperative.

Eventually, many elites hope, supra-national organizations might even take away some of the more “troubling” sovereign powers of individual nations.

Understandably, few politicians have come right out and suggested this direction. It would certainly cause a firestorm of political backlash.

Many Americans (myself included) would be strongly against this. But the policy and direction of the Obama Administration is definitely in line with such a course.

President Obama’s position on many issues — from health care and national security, the bailouts and stimulus, to financial and environmental policy — has toed this European line. At times it has seemed almost purposely designed to impress European sensibilities.

And, in terms of popularity, it has worked in Europe and much of the world. Indeed, this move toward Europeanism has been the inclination and open objective of many American elites for quite some time.

Unfortunately, in an economy desperately in need of innovation, initiative, leadership among the citizenry, and a burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit (since these are the things which promote real and lasting freedom and prosperity), this “Atlantic” grand strategy seems destined, if adopted, to cause a significant American decline.

Finally, the great international-legal thinker Philip Bobbitt has suggested that the future of nations will likely de-emphasize national governments and put more focus on smaller, and possibly even virtual, economically-oriented governments that replace the traditional nation state.

If this does occur, it will not likely be a grand strategy for a long time. Bobbitt sees it growing in influence toward the 2050s, and indeed this may compete to be a future grand strategy shift in a later generation.

Conclusion

More immediately, in the years just ahead the United States will adopt a new Grand Strategy.

The old model of Internationalism, with the U.S. fighting to become and then acting as the world’s sole superpower, supported by its group of allies, is past.

Europe has moved on, and the U.S. and Europe have in many ways moved apart. Simultaneously, a number of places have become growing competitors to U.S. economic dominance, including China, the EU, Canada, Brazil, India, Japan, and others. (We should be carefully studying and considering the grand strategy of these places — perhaps especially China.)

To top off the challenges to Internationalism, the American economy is struggling and the individual states and many businesses are barely hanging on.

If the U.S. is to maintain its prosperity, it must adopt a powerful new grand strategy and then pursue it effectively and courageously. And if it is to maintain and even regain its freedoms, it must simultaneously adopt a good grand strategy and the right one.

I am not at all convinced that any of these five options, or anything else I’ve read on the topic, are the entire answer. I do believe that Hart’s strategy must be part of it.

In any case, it is time for statesmen (including the regular citizen-statesmen of our society) to begin to discover, present and promote the pros and cons of proposed and other possible grand strategies for the 21st Century.

If the patterns of history hold, we have less than 20 years to get the right ideas into the debate and influence the huge choice ahead.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

The United States is currently experiencing a Grand Strategy Crisis — and the most powerful nation in the world since the Roman Empire better get it right.

Such a crisis typically comes along once a generation, when the nation drops its old grand strategy and selects a new one.

Unfortunately, this significant change, which has happened three times in U.S. history and will likely occur again in the next two decades, is hardly noticed by the large majority of the people.

It affects them in many ways, but most people don’t know about it until it’s too late to change.

For those who lead a nation, the grand strategy is more than a set of guidelines or even a list of goals or objectives.

The grand strategy is a vision of where a nation wants to go, of what it seeks to accomplish in the world — a vision shared by its decision-making elite.

A grand strategy is the guiding principle for foreign policy and nearly all international relations for a nation.

“How” to achieve the grand strategy is a subject of ongoing debate among the elites in any free nation, but “what” the strategy should be is only considered on those rare occasions when a nation decides to drastically shift gears.

In such times, big changes occur. In the United States we have shifted grand strategies three times:

1. between 1776 and 1796, from the Revolutionary War through the ratification of the Constitution;
2. between 1856 and 1876, from the rise of Lincoln through the Civil War and into Reconstruction;
3. and again from 1929 to 1949 during the Great Depression and World War II.

Past Grand Strategies

In each case, once a grand strategy was adopted, national leaders pursued it until world events required significant changes.

The American Founding generation rejected the Royalist grand strategy of increasing the power, wealth and empire of the Crown, and instead adopted a grand strategy of Constitutionalism, also known as Republicanism or Manifest Destiny.

This grand strategy held two major themes: First, the founders expected the United States to expand naturally and spread the new American system of free, limited, representative government from the Atlantic states all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Secondly, through example, they wanted the nations of the world to see the success of this free model and embrace it.

This grand strategy was not always implemented perfectly, but it guided American policy.

After the Civil War, U.S. leaders adopted a strategy of Nationalism: the focus shifted to increasing American national strength and status in the world.

Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were among those who helped pursue this strategic vision.

“America must take its place as a leader of nations,” became the sometimes spoken but always central focus of the U.S. policy elite.

At the end of two devastating world wars and a bleak depression, U.S. decision makers again adopted a new grand strategy — Internationalism.

The focus of this grand strategy was simple: use international organizations, treaties, international diplomacy, conferences and cooperative arrangements to make the world safe for democracy and capitalism.

The idea was to contain communism, keep it from spreading, and simultaneously support the spread of democracy and capitalism as far and wide as possible.

Hopefully, if the strategy worked, communism would not only stop growing but its support around the world would begin to diminish, to be replaced by democratic-capitalism.

In short, the foreign policy history of the United States might be summed up as Constitutionalism, then Nationalism, and finally Internationalism.

Internationalism became woefully outdated in the early 1990s — and the world found out just how outdated on September 11, 2001.

Proposed Grand Strategies

Amazingly, however, few have engaged the current vital discussion about America’s new 21st Century grand strategy.

This is partly because the grand strategy is considered and chosen by the intelligentsia — the average American doesn’t even know what the phrase means.

Another reason the grand strategy is little discussed now is that the electronic media has made any controversial policy a point of major political, partisan and societal conflict.

Few politicians today want to engage the firestorm of announcing a new grand American direction. Still, more of us need to be involved in the conversations that are occurring.

At least five proposals, some explicit and others more informal, have been made which purport to be new grand strategy proposals, but three of them are more tactical than strategic.

First, though it was informally introduced as a strategy, George Bush may have been outlining a grand strategy change in his “Axis of Evil” speech.

Certainly the full eradication of terror is a change in tactics, but to what end? What is the goal of the ongoing war on terror?

If it is to make the world safe for democracy and the spread of capitalism, it is a new tactic for the old strategy of Internationalism.

Besides, to truly end terrorism would require using U.S. might to restructure and redirect the leading terrorist-funding and supporting states in the world, including possibly Saudi Arabia and nuclear powers China and Russia.

Nothing in the “Axis of Evil” speech or since seems to advocate such a strategy. Just beating up on the smallest terrorist states, as much as they may deserve it, leaves terrorism healthy and growing.

Unless the Axis of Evil includes China, Saudi Arabia, former states of the USSR Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and over 20 other nations, a few attacks on weak opponents hardly amounts to a moving, visionary national grand strategy.

And in any case, the Obama Administration has shown little inclination to continue this overarching policy.

A second proposal was outlined by Ambassador Mark Palmer in his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil (affiliate link). Ambassador Palmer goes well beyond the Bush Administration and suggests that America adopt as its national purpose the ousting of all dictators in the world by 2025.

He argues that dictatorship is the true evil in the world, and that democratic nations led by the United States and its President should strategize and implement a plan to get rid of all dictators everywhere.

He even lists the dictators by name, and gives a suggested tactical approach to ousting each — some peacefully, others by sanction and pressure, still others by force.

This proposal is not really a new strategy, but simply the tactical application of Cold-War Internationalism to a different enemy — dictators instead of communists.

A third strategy was suggested by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. He called it a “Strategy of Partnerships” and argued that the world should be kept basically the same as it is — the U.S. at the head with its allies, intervening “decisively to prevent regional conflicts,” and embracing Russia, China, and other powers in a world that increasingly adopts American values.

This would be accomplished by partnerships which put “us at odds with terrorists, tyrants, and others who wish us ill” and to whom “we will give no quarter.” At the same time, we will be “partners with all those who cherish freedom, human dignity, and peace.”

Powell’s “Foreign Affairs” article, published in January of 2004, leaves some glaring questions. The whole point of Internationalism was to encourage partnerships with those seeking freedom and peace.

But Powell said nothing about what the partnership would do, what their goals would be, except the same old Internationalism that we’ve been pursuing since 1945.

Powell’s argument, while claiming to explain the Bush strategy, was actually less of a change than Bush’s “Axis of Evil” or Palmer’s proposal to rid the world of dictators.

All three proposals have pros and cons. But none of them really proposed a new grand strategy for the United States—something at the level of change from Royalism to Constitutionalism, Constitutionalism to Nationalism, or Nationalism to Internationalism.

These first three proposals just redirect, rekindle and rehash (respectively) the grand strategy we’ve followed for 50 years — Internationalism.

To be continued…

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver: