Since Barack Obama has now won the nomination, prepare for a potential series of posts--especially if I feel like it--about the man against whom I will be campaigning vociferously. I promise, I won't talk about how his supporters regard him as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. Well, no, the other thing...the opposite. Right, I WILL be talking about that.
Sort of.
Hope is a good thing, depending on whom you talk to. It motivates us to accomplish goals. (On the other hand, it can disappoint us bitterly if it was unfounded in the first place.) Hope speaks to all of us, because all of us have ambitions and dreams. Barack Obama knows that hope is important to Americans in particular; we are a hopeful people. Obama was attacked for invoking Ronald Reagan during the campaign, but one can understand why: Reagan, too, effectively based his presidency on hope for America's future at a time when that future looked anything but bright. Moreover, people vote for the person, not the issues, and what better person to illustrate hope than a black man raised by a single white mother? (Beyond that, who better to appeal to liberals than a private-school-educated Harvard and Columbia grad who was a community organizer for the radical group ACORN and attended a radical black separatist church for twenty years? But I digress.) Republican opponent John McCain, on the other hand, is an old white man from a long line of high-ranking military officers, and a Vietnam War veteran to boot. Ho-hum.
But hope alone isn't all that great; it has to be in something. Something worthwhile--hopefully. (Ha! Erm.) Ronald Reagan's was a hope in people--ordinary people, helping other people in their neighborhoods and beyond. His was a dream of the potential of individual Americans participating in their communities, in their families, exercising their freedom to help their fellow man. He rightly recognized that state involvement in this process curbs that community involvement when he said that the most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." History bears this out. Most people know about the Lion's Club; perhaps fewer people remember the Oddfellows, the Elks Lodge, and others. Lion's Club does excellent work helping the blind, but it--and the others--used to be more than that: they were voluntary associations to bring people in the community together and help its members when they were in need. With welfare and other redistribution programs, these organizations no longer had a serious purpose. That's just one example in a larger story.
Barack Obama's hope is that of a world improved, reshaped by the state. Before you tell me that "reshaped" is an exaggeration of his words, read this column by Jonah Goldberg, containing this Obama gem: "This was the moment--this was the time--when we came together to remake this great nation..." (Does he think it's a great nation, or does he want to remake it? Or does he want to remake a nation that's already great? These questions answer themselves one way or another.) He insists that he dreams of America coming together, of Americans helping each other. But if you think he means that he trusts Americans to give voluntarily of their time and money, think again. Instead, he means to take the sphere of morality out of Main Street, USA, and move it to the office buildings of Washington, D.C. That is the fundamental mistake of modern liberalism: it means to make morality an issue of governance, rather than of private will.
This is its appeal to many Christians, and its downfall when compared to actual Biblical teaching. Christians rightly believe that their duty is to help the sick, the poor, the needy: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27, NIV). But just as Christianity emphasizes loving those around us, so too it emphasizes a separation between the Church and the state: "Then he said to them, 'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's'" (Matthew 22:21b, NIV). At question here was the payment of taxes, but it also gives us an important principle for understanding the relationship between Christianity and the state. If charity is in Caesar's sphere, then by all means empower him to conduct charity. But if it belongs rather to God, then Caesar must not get hold of it. The state is not, nor can it be, an instrument of grace. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, politics cannot be redemptive. Anyone who tells you otherwise is truly a totalitarian; for this reason, hope in the state's ability to change the world was central to Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and Roosevelt's New Deal.
The idea does not make us feel good, and therefore does not often get much traction, but politics must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, whether the candidate in question is a war hero, a powerful speaker, a Baptist minister, or an actor. Government cannot be a realm of hope for us; indeed, such an idea could not be more terrifying. It is the ultimate primrose path, taken with the highest intentions, to a totalitarian hell. In the Aeneid, the prophet Laocoon, who warned the Trojans not to bring the horse into their city--it was here, in fact, that Vergil coined the phrase, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"--was an unsavory character, but he was right. Likewise, beware politicians proclaiming hope. Hope is not theirs to proclaim.
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