Obama and America's end

First, let's get one thing out of the way. My prediction that Mitt Romney would win the election was absolutely incorrect. I assumed from the beginning of the Republican primary campaign that Romney would win both the nomination and the election, but I failed to keep three things in mind.

The state polls, with their seemingly absurd +11 and +7 Democrat weightings, were nevertheless correct.
The Hispanic vote continues to grow at the rate of one percent of the electorate every four years and is increasingly inclined toward the Democratic Party.
The libertarian element that once voted Republican and now rightly refuses to support moderate Republicans of the Dole/Bush/McCain/Romney variety has grown considerably.

Eight years ago, I wrote a column about "the continued stink of an extinct republic as it decomposes into dictatorial empire" titled, "You can't fix a corpse." It was readily apparent, even then, that the constitutional nation, founded upon the revolutionary tradition of the rights of Englishmen, was already dead. So why does it feel as if something important has changed as a result of the recent presidential election? Why is there a sense of significant and lasting change for the worse in the political wind due to the re-election of Barack Obama?

The reason is that the re-election of Obama – combined with the manner in which it occurred – has finally extinguished the last embers of hope in the hearts of millions of true Americans. Even many of those who refused to vote for Romney on principle because of his proven liberal track record nevertheless saw him as operating within the limits of traditional American political ideology. They might have seen him as a potentially disastrous president, and been skeptical that he would even begin to address the cataclysmic problems facing the nation, but they saw him as someone who was genuinely concerned about the fate of the United States and the American population within it.

Americans don't despair now because the president is a Democrat or because blacks disproportionately supported him. That was equally true when Clinton ran for office. The reason they are reeling with shock and horror is that they have finally come to understand that the melting pot is a myth, that the grand story of immigration they swallowed as children is a monstrous falsehood, and that there are now two very different nations living within the boundaries of what they had previously believed was a single country.

The uncomfortable fact of the matter is that post-1965 immigrants are not, and never will be, Americans in the constitutional or revolutionary sense. It doesn't matter if they are Catholic mestizos, Christian Asians or Muslim Arabs. It is not a matter of religion or race, but rather of centuries-old cultural traditions in which a dominant central government is considered a basic fact of life and a potential resource to be exploited, not a dangerous servant best viewed with suspicion and kept under constant restraint. This can be seen in the 2012 exit polls: Asians voted 73 percent for Obama's big government message, Hispanics 71 percent, Muslims 85 percent and blacks 96 percent.

But it doesn't matter if we look at the recent exit polls or at the historical governments in Mexico, Japan and the Middle East. The conclusion remains the same. The overwhelming majority of people from those cultures and traditions neither understand nor desire limited government. Over the last half-century, the federal government has elected itself a new people, and just as the Indians were supplanted by the European colonists, the descendants of those European colonists are now being replaced and deprived of self-governance by colonists from the Third World. And while it is certainly the democratic right of those colonists to demand increasingly big and intrusive government, it is arguably worth noting that the limited government they reject is exactly what the ancestors of traditional America fought a bloody revolution to establish.

I have no doubt that many will be outraged by this historical perspective and decry it with angry howls of "raciss!" That's fine; it is the childish level of discourse on which such people operate. I expect nothing less. But to the sincere immigration proponent capable of rational thought, who sincerely believes that post-1965 immigration has somehow been beneficial to American society, I would merely ask this question: Why do you believe a simple geographic change is sufficient to completely change an individual's cultural traditions and political ideologies?

Being an American emigrant, I am more aware than most of how little a change in location affects one's cultural traditions and political values. I have been a European three times longer than the average green-card holder needs to become a U.S. citizen and acquire the right to vote in U.S. elections. And yet, are not my views and perspectives still recognizably American? If you would still consider me to be fundamentally American, then how can you possibly consider immigrants from Mexico, Malaysia or Somalia, even immigrants possessing U.S. citizenship and the right to vote, anything but Mexicans, Malaysians and Somalis?

More importantly, why would you expect them to place any value on things foreign to them such as the U.S. Constitution or the ideological values of America's Founding Fathers? Are they learning it in the public schools? Are they learning it from the mainstream media? Are they even encountering it anywhere?

The 2012 presidential election was not significant because it signaled the end of America. That was already readily apparent eight years ago. But it was significant because it made it clear to everyone how, when and why constitutional America met its end.