Last month’s posts today!
Where else can you get timely topical commentary one month late?
Where else but here? No where. It’s because we care.
Anyway, there were a couple of things from Obama’s acceptance speech that I wanted to touch on.
First, let us compare and contrast the Constitution and something from TheOne:
First from the Constitution (sing along, you know the words):
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
And now Obama:
We can perfect this Union.
Obama’s statement makes a nice sound bite and calls to mind the Constitution’s phrasing, which it was obviously intended to do. But the meaning is almost entirely opposed to what the Framers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.
The Framers chose the phrase “more perfect Union” advisedly. They understood that human things are necessarily imperfect. There are conflicting goods in every human life and every human society, there is no such thing as perfect justice. Tragedy is inevitable and inherent in the human condition.
Obama’s phrasing ignores this reality, dumbs down the content of the Constitution and in doing so perverts it’s meaning. Either he doesn’t understand that, or he doesn’t care because he doesn’t agree with the Framers and the Constitution on this point.
The Framer’s understanding, the one shared by most conservatives, helps to engender humility in government. If you understand that no matter what you do, the end result will just be better, maybe good, but certainly not “perfect”, you are less willing to pile up the sacrifices and the bodies to achieve your necessarily limited aims.
But, when perfection is the goal, the all-enduring Utopia the aim, no sacrifice is too great, no pile of corpses too high. Witness France, Russia, China, Cambodia; all places where no atrocity was too horrible, because perfection was on the line.
Obama is either dagerously unaware of this history or too flip with his phrasing. Either way, I don’t like it.
And another thing.
Yes We Can!
Is not an American Creed. It is a socialist worker’s party’s rallying cry. That manipulative piece of verbiage really pissed me off.
Katy:
Did you see the t-shirts on Election Eve — “yes we did!” ? Ummm, no you didn’t.
And I like the way you put what the Founders understood the imperfections of human nature and society to be. Yes, indeed. We may work as best we can against our baser natures, but that effort is most successful when it’s founded on a moral understanding — usually the result of theological and philosophical reflection, not political power. And this, friends, is the difference between modern-day liberals and conservatives. Ironically, if you ACCEPT the imperfectability of human nature, you can actually act more effectively to better the interests of people, even using political tools to do so. But nowadays, in our therapy-driven, self-esteem-needy world, admitting that people cannot be perfect (and here I’m not talking eternally or spiritually) makes people lose all “hope”. And so we get to the place where that hope they want to have is wholly misplaced.
6 December 2008, 1:13 pm