A Nation Like No Other

by Newt Gingrich

  Finally, there is no better example of Obama’s willful determination to downsize America’s global influence than his actions in Libya. Having undertaken a humanitarian mission to prevent the massacre of Libyan rebels by their dictator, Muammar Kaddafi, the president stipulated from the beginning that after conducting some initial airstrikes, the United States would play a “supporting” role in the operation. And Obama has kept his word, turning most responsibility for the campaign over to NATO, particularly Britain and France.

  This represents a fundamental reorientation of power relations both within NATO and in the world at large. America has always exercised firm leadership of NATO, but that era is apparently over—at America’s own behest. Elevating the tool of multilateralism into an end in itself, the Obama administration categorically rejects the very idea of American dominance. The administration’s urge to shirk responsibility and accountability for the Libyan operation is clear; in fact, one U.S. official was quite explicit about it in his comments on Libya to the New York Times: “‘We didn’t want to get sucked into an operation with uncertainty at the end,’ the senior administration official said. ‘In some ways, how it turns out is not on our shoulders.’”16

  The predictable result of the abdication of American leadership has been confusion, tension with our allies, and thus far, failure in the Libyan campaign. NATO members—as well as Obama’s own officials—have not even been able to agree on what would constitute victory. The New York Times reported on the alliance’s disarray:The United States has all but called for Colonel Qaddafi’s overthrow from within—with American commanders on Thursday openly calling on the Libyan military to stop following orders—even as administration officials insist that is not the explicit objective of the bombing, and that their immediate goal is more narrowly defined.

  France has gone further, recognizing the Libyan rebels as the country’s legitimate representatives, but other allies, even those opposed to Colonel Qaddafi’s erratic and authoritarian rule, have balked. That has complicated the planning and execution of the military campaign and left its objective ill defined for now.17

  The French foreign minister claimed the Libyan campaign would last days or weeks but not months.18 However, lacking a well-defined strategy or even clear objectives, the operation, at the time of this writing, is well into its second month—with no end in sight. It is astonishing to think that after protecting Western Europe from Communism for forty years, and acting as the linchpin of most of the continent’s security for another ten years, NATO’s credibility is being severely damaged by an African dictator who no longer fully controls his own country.

  As previously stated, we pay a price for America’s leadership in the world—but there is also a price to pay for withdrawing from it. The entire world is watching as a void develops that American power used to fill. Our enemies are adept at exploiting weakness, and they are already maneuvering to take advantage of America’s new reluctance to “meddle” in world affairs.

  America is confronted by growing threats from radical Islamism. As we remain engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, as conditions in Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan become more precarious by the day, and as Iran races to develop nuclear weapons, one might be tempted to conclude President Obama lacks any comprehensive strategy for addressing radical Islamism and other threats facing the United States. However, it has recently come to light that the president does, in fact, take a principled approach to leadership.

  In the New Yorker, an Obama advisor characterized the principle behind the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” The magazine explained, based on interviews with a wide range of current and former Obama administration officials, that this is “a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”19

  This “definition of leadership”—the closest thing we have to an Obama Doctrine—not only violates American Exceptionalism, it is the precise antithesis of American Exceptionalism. This notion—that America should acknowledge its “decline” and abdicate its global leadership at the behest of those who supposedly “revile” us—is a self-fulfilling prescription for our future as a weaker, less respected, and ultimately less safe country.

  The world today would be a far different place if not for America’s constant, confident push for freedom over the last century. In evaluating the usefulness of American leadership, President Obama should ask the opinion of a survivor of East European Communism, or a survivor of Imperial Japan’s depredations throughout Asia, or a survivor of Nazi Germany’s horrific atrocities. He should ask Taiwanese or Korean citizens who depend on America to protect their nations from revanchist Communists, or Indonesian or Japanese citizens who benefited from American aid in recovering from a tsunami. Ask them if America is a force for good—and whether the world would be better off if the United States were a nation like any other.

  PART III

  AMERICA RISING

  The great privilege of the Americans is not only to be more enlightened than others, but also to have the ability to make mistakes that can be corrected.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville

  CHAPTER NINE

  RESTORING AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

  The American economy today is in dire straits. The real unemployment rate—which includes those who have stopped looking for work—is around 15 percent. Food, gasoline, and healthcare prices are rising fast. Americans are working longer hours, yet have less disposable income. We remain reliant on unstable, sometimes hostile foreign countries for much of our energy. For the first time since World War II, we face real economic competitors, in China and India. And most threatening to our future, the federal government budget deficit is over $1 trillion a year, pushing our national debt to an astonishing $14 trillion.

  Unsurprisingly, Americans feel anxious about our future. A March 2011 Rasmussen poll showed that by a margin of 48 to 34, Americans believe our country’s best days are behind us, and just 22 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. This pessimism was evident at a town hall event with President Obama in September 2010, when a woman who voted for Obama told him, “My husband and I … thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but … that might be where we’re headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?”1

  Video of the confrontation went viral on the Internet, because it captured Americans’ current fear and frustration. America’s traditional can-do optimism, in which every generation is expected to have a better life than the last, has been replaced by a growing concern that our current problems are not, in fact, a temporary bump in the road, but instead, a preview of the tough decades ahead.

  THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE OF THE BIG-GOVERNMENT WELFARE STATE

  The deteriorating economy is, in many ways, a symptom of the collapse of the big-government welfare state. Our current governing model is simply proving too slow, too expensive, and too destructive of the core habits of success that have made America exceptional for the past 400 years.

  The election of a young, charismatic, liberal president to tackle our economic crisis was seen by our elites as heralding the rebirth of big-government liberalism in America, and as the death-knell of small-government conservatism. “We are all socialists now” blared one typical headline from Newsweek. “Whether we like it or not,” wrote the authors, “the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction.”2

  Instead, Obama’s spasm of big-government intervention—including the extravagant and counter-productive stimulus, the unpopular passage of ObamaCare, and the acceleration of the government debt crisis—vividly demonstrated to the country not a renaissance of Big Government, but its limitations. America is now reassessing what government can and cannot do against the Left’s false assurances that g
overnment is always the solution.

  To understand just how fundamentally the big-government welfare state has failed, it is worthwhile to review how it emerged and why. During the Progressive era of 1890 to 1916, in reaction to the rapid industrialization of the Gilded Age, the belief spread that America needed the federal government to substantially regulate the private economy. The government approved anti-trust laws and formed agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration to protect consumers from corporate dishonesty and abuse. The Progressives also tried to professionalize the government workforce, both to combat corruption and to introduce scientific planning and new efficiencies to government.

  Initially, the welfare state was deemed necessary in order to adapt to new economic realities. Capitalism in the industrial age could produce enormous wealth, Progressives argued, but it also left people at risk of poverty and exploitation. The promise of the big-government welfare state was that government would curb the worst excesses of capitalism through strict regulation of the private sector while providing a system of social insurance to meet everyone’s basic needs.

  This welfare state, they promised, would be run impartially and scientifically by a professional and competent bureaucracy. Furthermore, the common contribution to the social safety net would provide a sense of community and shared moral purpose among the American people to care for the health and well-being of their neighbors.

  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the government assumed responsibility for providing a basic level of economic security for the American people. The Social Security Administration was created to solve the problem of senior poverty, and unemployment insurance was introduced as part of the new safety net. The Great Society programs of the 1960s saw the government further expand its role in reducing poverty with the advent of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and many other programs. As the number of these welfare and social insurance programs grew, the government needed an ever expanding bureaucracy to administer them, and more and more regulations to guide them. The whole system grew into the big-government welfare state we have today.

  This model is both inadequate and inappropriate for the modern world and has generated unforeseen and devastating consequences. Its collapse is driven by simple economic reality. Massive, publicly funded social insurance and benefit systems have proved unsustainable, driven toward bankruptcy by the demographic realities of lower birth rates and aging populations, and by the damage to economic growth caused by the high taxes that fund these entitlements.

  The American entitlement system is, essentially, a federally mandated wealth transfer system from one group of people to another. Social Security, for instance, was designed in an age where there were forty-two workers for every retiree and poverty amongst senior citizens was rampant. Today, however, there are three workers for every retiree, with that ratio projected to fall to 2–1 in the coming decades. Furthermore, young people entering the workforce today are more likely to be poor than seniors are. Coupled with Americans’ increasing lifespans, a wealth transfer system from, in this case, the young to the old will not serve the economic needs or meet the economic realities facing future generations.

  For the first time since its creation, Social Security is now operating in the red. The Congressional Budget Office says it will continue to operate at a loss until its structure is reformed.3 Medicare is in even worse shape due to demographic realities as well as exploding health costs that are destroying its solvency. The trustees of Social Security and Medicare estimate that the two programs have $46 trillion combined in unfunded liabilities—that’s $15,333 per person. Medicaid, which covers the healthcare of the poor, costs an additional half trillion dollars a year. Those costs under the current structure are only going to increase because there are no market-driven pressures to lower costs or to improve benefits.

  Entitlement spending eats up a majority—and growing—share of the federal budget. Unless we adopt a different model, our national debt will be nearly twice the size of the economy by 2030. It will become three times the size of the economy by 2050. This is a debt that will be carried by our children, their children, and their children again. The interest payments on the federal debt will rapidly grow beyond the cost of national security and will crush the next generation with a tax burden just to pay interest on the debt they inherited.

  The creaking bureaucratic administrative state that operates our regulatory agencies and social insurance programs is also running into the harsh realities of the twenty-first century. The administrative state was fashioned in a time of industrialization, mass production, and top-down hierarchal management. The sprawling federal and state bureaucracies were designed along those same lines, both in their command structure and in the way they view how they serve the American people. Government is not Burger King; you can’t have it your way. In fact, it is determined for you to have it the government’s way, that is, the bureaucratic way.

  Today’s economy, however, is marked by customization and personalization. It is increasingly globalized, individualized, and dependent on high-tech information systems. Aside from certain aspects of our military, the bureaucratic structure of government has not adjusted to the new world. That’s because, unlike private companies, the government doesn’t have to stay competitive. Instead of encouraging economic growth, the big-government welfare state suppresses it by redistributing tax income in a way that discourages work, savings, and investment. The result is an atrophied, exhausted administrative state that is completely unsuited to the demands of the twenty-first century economy. Compare your typical experience shopping at Amazon.com with what you go through at the DMV to understand the difference.

  THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF THE BIG-GOVERNMENT WELFARE STATE

  In addition to these harsh economic realities, there is a deeper flaw within the premise of the big-government welfare state that has led to its demise: ultimately, it is incompatible with human nature because it does not view American citizens as individuals with inherent dignity and rights.

  We have discussed throughout this book how America’s extraordinary success can ultimately be attributed to habits of liberty stemming from our founding principles. The Progressives began by “progressing” away from these principles and accepting a European socialist critique of America. According to this view, American wealth inequality proved that the aspects of civil society that the Founders championed—family, religion, charities, and civic groups—were inadequate. They believed that to guarantee the people’s well-being, America should transform into a collective state led by an intellectual elite—namely, them. So they developed government programs to meet the people’s material needs, in effect creating government substitutes for charities, churches, and other philanthropic civic groups.

  The Progressives morally justified the big-government liberal welfare state as a way for the American people to fulfill a shared responsibility for our neighbors’ well-being. Their vision was collectivism, the system rejected in the early settlements of Plymouth and Jamestown as a failure. But by having government take the lead role in addressing social problems, the big-government welfare state eroded Americans’ historic responsibility to participate in civil society. Whereas the traditional American attitude was to ask “What can I do to help?” the collectivist mindset is, “Why isn’t government doing something to help—and who can we tax more to pay for it?”

  Furthermore, as the welfare state grew to encompass not only the poor but even much of the middle class, its beneficiaries were relieved of not only responsibility for their neighbors, but for themselves. The result is that too many Americans now approach their government as desperate dependents instead of as autonomous, dignified, and self-sufficient citizens.

  Now that so many Americans are dependent on government, we find the big-government welfare state is incapable of meeting the needs of the people. That is because human beings need more than simply material sustenance—they require spiritual and moral fulfillment, and the self-respect that
comes from working hard to provide for one’s own needs.

  Because the welfare state defines the American people solely by their material needs, its administrators are incapable of understanding or predicting the way people will react to their programs. The American people, simply put, have never taken kindly to being bossed around by bureaucrats. Bill Mauldin’s grubby, grumbling World War II heroes “Willie & Joe” exemplified our “Greatest Generation” of men who would answer to government authority only until the given task was finished, and even while doing so, behaved in an anti-authoritarian manner that was quintessentially American.

  Thus, the scientific efficiency that was supposed to infuse the Progressives’ administrative state never materialized; as the big-government welfare state has grown, so too has its incompetence and wastefulness.

  As this failure became increasingly clear over time, the Left has invested even more power in the government to try and force people to behave the way they want them to in order to achieve their ideal, efficient society. Friedrich Hayek, George Orwell, Milton Friedman, and many others warned about this willingness among the Left to resort to coercion. As Hayek noted, “The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”