Capt. Obama and Titanic 2.0

The 1,500 passengers who boarded the Titanic in April of 1912 did not willingly sail into an iceberg, but the voters who buy tickets to Obama's Titanic 2.0 do not have the excuse of ignorance. The warnings of fiscal catastrophe are unmistakable, yet all we have heard speaker after speaker in Charlotte this past week is – party on!

About 125 million Americans will go to the polls in about 60 days, or about 65 percent of registered voters. Polls tell us that if the election were held today, 47 percent of them plan to vote for Obama, 47 percent would vote for Romney, and the others are undecided. Why do otherwise intelligent citizens cheerfully follow a pied piper of certain bankruptcy?

Many presidents have raised taxes, but not one has made a tax increase the centerpiece of his campaign in the middle of the worst economic downturn in 60 years. Even the centrist Congressional Budget Office has said that the proposed Obama tax increases will kill the already-anemic recovery and make a second recession unavoidable in 2013.

And that fate is not only accepted but cheered? Welcome to the wonderland of socialist-era politics. If Obama wins a second term, that will be our permanent reward for jumping down his rabbit hole.

Henceforth, material misfortune will no longer be seen as the product of economic laws of supply and demand, with their economic incentives and penalties. In the new politics of Obamaland, when things go wrong, when we face painful budget choices, it is because "the rich are not paying their fair share." If that is the problem, then the solution is not in doubt: raise taxes on the rich.

Since "fair share" is never defined in Obama's lexicon, the target can never be reached. In the socialist vision, we can never achieve a "fair share economy" until all Americans share equally in the good things of life. Thus, it's a convenient and versatile snake oil for whatever ails the nation at any given moment. More and bigger government is the solution no matter what the problem.

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That socialist vision, the proposition that in a just society equal opportunity must yield equal outcomes, has been with us since Marx published his Communist Manifesto in 1848. Where that proposition and that formula have been tried, they have not only failed but failed at horrendous costs in human life and suffering. Yet our schools do not teach that lesson of history. How many college graduates know that both Stalin and Mao Zedong killed more of their own people than Hitler killed in his death camps?

Yet, a substantial segment of American society is enthralled by the promise of "social justice" and disregard its high cost in lost freedoms. They evidently are unaware or do not care that to get there, to achieve this utopia where everyone shares equally in the fruits of everyone's labor, we must discard the Constitution and the liberties that made America great.

The message that came from the Democrat National Convention in Charlotte is: "All aboard Titanic 2.0!" "Yes we can!" Icebergs, smash bergs: Capt. Obama knows how to avoid icebergs, and besides, the threat of icebergs is a Republican myth, a clever lie designed to keep us from our destiny! $16 trillion in debt? Not to worry: We are a rich country.

Well, we shall see. Are the laws of economics "a Republican myth"? We shall see.

Unfortunately, the socialist ideology has built-in immunities to facts, history and experience. If we enter a new recession in 2013, in the Obamaworld of class warfare politics, it will not be because of bad policy choices he has made but because government did not do enough soon enough. And why was that? The Obama answer will be trumpeted by a captive media: because of Republican obstructionism, of course.

Yes, we are in for a long, hard winter if Obama is given a second term.

But if we turn from predicting the future and ask, how can it be that we have only a 50-50 chance of avoiding that fate, the truth is just as disturbing, perhaps more so.

How did we arrive at a situation, less than one full generation after the "Reagan Revolution," where 50 percent of the adult population – and probably 65 percent of recent college graduates – are willing to throw out the United States Constitution in order to punish the rich for their success?

Even if the nation narrowly survives Obama on Nov. 6, we have not yet survived Obamanomics or his "post-racial politics." In truth, Obama's agenda is part of the progressive movement that began a century ago, and we will not be rid of it by defeating Obama.

To really turn the corner, we must understand why so many intelligent people want to board Titanic 2.0. That means attending to a more fundamental task: the revitalization and recapture of our culture.