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1/26/13, "Democracy is on the brink of a sea change," Janey Daley, UK Telegraph, "Obama looked to the discredited past; Cameron to an impossible future."
Obama's second inaugural speech "came across here (in the UK) as recycled New Labour-speak: “But we have always
understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding
principles requires new responses to new challenges: that preserving our
individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” (Note the New
Labour trick of claiming that something can only be safeguarded by embracing
its opposite: individual freedom requires submitting to the collective will.)
There were some quite surreal moments when Mr Obama seemed to be channelling
Gordon Brown at his most self-congratulatory....
The core message was pounded home relentlessly: American government is now in
the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary
to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers’ conception of a
nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over
the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the
government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of
social virtue.
The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the
state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government
that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm
and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one – but the
concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it?
Then we got Mr Cameron’s offering, which, by comparison with the Obama
message, seemed to be coming from a future world: from those who had learnt
the lesson of overly powerful centralised political institutions that have
spent money like there was no tomorrow on programmes that were steeped in
benign rhetoric about “social fairness”. Mr Cameron had a dream of the
European Union as an open, flexible, freely diverse fellowship of nation
states, each of them democratically accountable to its own electorate, and
all of them able to cooperate in whatever ways suited their individual needs
at any given time. The speech was everything everybody said it was:
eloquently argued, irresistibly persuasive to British ears, and logically
faultless.
But does he not appreciate that this is the very antithesis of the founding
principle of the EU? That its deliberate object was to curtail the power of
its separate member states and the dangerous impulses of their volatile
electorates, whose inclinations had a tendency to end in mass murder?
It is
not a travesty of the European project to say that it was a conspiracy of
the European elites against their own peoples: it is the literal truth. Of
course, the EU, with its unelected centralised governing bodies, overrides
the democratic wishes of the nation states. That’s the whole point. This was
a post-war French and German idea, devised to prevent any possibility of the
hideous conflicts that devastated the continent during the last century. Its
imperatives – the irreversible political integration of member states, a
guarantee that national governments could never again go rogue, and the
disempowering of electorates – arose directly from the 20th-century
experience of criminal national leaders.
The nation state, driven by the
will of its own people, had been the demonic enemy of peace and the EU would
put an end to it, once and for all.
So was Mr Cameron making the EU an offer he knew it could not accept? Or was
he trying to appeal to the restive, disempowered peoples of Europe over the
heads of their leaders? Mr Obama was speaking from what is, for us, a
discredited past in which the will of government is always seen as just and
merciful. And Mr Cameron seemed to be offering an impossibly perfect future,
in which the power of distant governing institutions
is once more made to
answer to the people.
Between them, they drew the outlines of a discussion
that will certainly dominate our politics for a generation. What does it
mean to be a democratic country? Does economic equality, or international
stability, trump everything? Maybe this debate suggests that Western
democracy is entering a new, more mature phase. Then again, perhaps it means
that it is finished." via Lucianne
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