Michael Barone, Washington Examiner: Obama offers security at the expense of liberty
The always thoughtful David Brooks complains in his New York Times column that Republicans learned the wrong lessons from John Ford’s classic Western movies. They should not be “the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice,” but rather “once again the party of community and civic order.” They should not celebrate the lonely hero that saves the town, but the everyday people who build the voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the chief strength of America back in the 1830s.
But Brooks errs when he suggests that in opposing administration policies Republicans are betraying community and civic order. For the policies of the Obama administration are not designed to shelter and nourish what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons.” They are designed to subject them to what Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” which he identified as the natural tendency and potentially fatal weakness of American democracy.
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