What Obama Wants
For him, a "more perfect union" is a more European one, writes European parliament member Daniel Hannan in the WSJ:
On a U.S. talk-radio show recently, I was asked what I thought about the notion that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. "Pah!" I replied. "Your president was plainly born in Brussels."American conservatives have struggled to press the president's policies into a meaningful narrative. Is he a socialist? No, at least not in the sense of wanting the state to own key industries. Is he a straightforward New Deal big spender, in the model of FDR and LBJ? Not exactly.
My guess is that, if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions.
He is not pursuing a set of random initiatives but a program of comprehensive Europeanization: European health care, European welfare, European carbon taxes, European day care, European college education, even a European foreign policy, based on engagement with supranational technocracies, nuclear disarmament and a reluctance to deploy forces overseas.
...All right, growth would be slower, but the quality of life might improve. All right, taxes would be higher, but workers need no longer fear sickness or unemployment. All right, the U.S. would no longer be the world's superpower, but perhaps that would make it more popular. Is a European future truly so terrible?
Yes. I have been an elected member of the European Parliament for 11 years. I have seen firsthand what the European political model means.
Read the whole piece for why it's dangerous for us to become more like Europe.
And thanks, Ben David, for the tip on the videos -- Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge, interviewing Hannan. Here's the first:
The rest are here.
I was hoping you'd link to this.
There is a great set of video interviews with Hannan in the Uncommon Knowledge archive at National Review.
I am having frustrating conversations with Israelis raised on socialism, trying to get them to connect the dots between local labor unions and the disasters in Greece and Ireland.
Ben David at March 13, 2011 2:20 AM
Thank you for posting that. I watched all five.
The problem is the progressives won't get his explanation.
Jim P. at March 13, 2011 3:14 PM
It's ironic considering that Europe itself is starting to try to move away from that direction.
Cousin Dave at March 13, 2011 4:19 PM
I find this to be unpersuasive. There are lots of legitimate reasons to oppose Obama's policies, but Hannan's vague assertions about him being too "Eurpoean" are unpersuasive.
While there are differences between Obama and his predecessor, the similarities are quite strong, especially with respect to foreign policy. Obama has: signed off an extension of Bush-era tax rates, kept Bush's Defense Secretary, continued Gates' plans for orderly withdrawal from Iraq, escalated U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and continued the policy of indefinite detentions of terror suspects.
With the exception of Obama's toned down rhetoric, and the health care bill, I see much more continuity between his policies and those that preceded him. Seems to me that Hannan's more reactive to a shift in tone that in a change in actual policies.
We have no carbon tax bill in the works. I have no idea what "European college education" means, given that there is no such thing, with the various nations in Europe having very different educational traditions. And I can't imagine anyone thinking that becoming less prone to deploying our military in short-sighted interventions is a bad thing.
One thing I found striking: It's easy for Hannan to encourage the U.S. to be more aggressive with its military. In any any new war of the sort he would like, his country will neither bear meaningful loss of life among its young people nor substantial cost to its treasury.
Christopher at March 13, 2011 10:53 PM
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