Obama invokes Founders, inaugurates new era of collectivism

If, like me, you woke up to the sound of Obama inaugurating himself into the pantheon of great American presidents by invoking the words of the Founding Fathers to bolster his own arguments for collectivism, then you too might have wondered how he thought he could pull off what, even in that early hour when the brain is still slightly foggy, sounded like a massive logical leap. Maybe it sounded that way too to the folk in the audience, since the applause for his phony rhetoric seemed pretty spartan.

Jon Sanders notes that this is a common trope of Obama’s major speeches, especially this one in which he sought to use the Founders to make the case for collectivism.

first referencing the ideals of the Founders, then after having imitated the soaring rhetoric of past American luminaries, changing the focus to make it sound as if the next step for American liberty is to become a socialized nanny state. (Emphasis added.)

Nice, if you can (or want to) pull off the fraud. Because the man who started his address by extolling the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being not only self-evident but unalienable—to the individual freedom those Founders were so desperate to protect—finished up by calling for collective action on class warfare, government healthcare, social-welfare programs, climate change, social spending in other countries, gay marriage, women’s pay gap, immigration reform, and gun control.

As Sanders concludes, what we heard today was not at all a ringing exhortation to bring back the America the Founders built,

but a promise of four more years of false rhetoric and real economic pain driven by ideological fervor and demonstrable diffidence.