Barack Obama has made a big deal out of the fact that he wants to change the United States.  (Pardon me if I’m being too picky, but I don’t like the current tendency to avoid saying that name.  There’s nothing wrong, per se, with the word “America,” but when it becomes a mere meaningless sound for people to toss casually off their tongues, I become unhappy.  I primarily, therefore, speak of this country as the United States.)  And the changes he wants to make are away from what this country was at its beginning.

Of course the country’s been changing for a long time now.  It was, in many ways, Woodrow Wilson who embarked us on our present course.  Wilson, of course, was president from 1913 to 1921; in just four more years it’ll have been a century since his inauguration.  Liberalism didn’t really take off, however, until Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Depression as an excuse to grab power; his alphabet soup agencies didn’t end the Depression (it was World War II which solved that problem), but they did centralize power in DC as nothing else in history.

But el Vampiro wants to do more than every liberal president in history put together.  He wants to, in the four years of his term, go from what is still essentially a free, capitalistic nation to what will be, in its essentials, a communist state.  He wants to take power from the people, from cites and counties, and from the states, and centralize it in the District of Columbia.  Indeed, though the liberal Congress seems not to realize it yet, he wants to demote the national legislature to a Soviet-style rubber stamp body, while he rules by decree.  He’s already done some of that – his early flurry of executive orders was a clear short circuiting of the legislative process in order to get what he wanted.  And Congress has shown little inclination to deny him anything he’s asked them for – his “stimulus” bill, which will harm rather than hurt the economy (indeed, we’re seeing the effects of it already, as layoffs continue) sailed through as though Congress’ job was to approve it, rather than to debate it on the merits and, if necessary, stop it dead.

That is not the sort of country that emerged from the Constitutional Convention.  At the conclusion of that body’s work, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin, “Pray, Doctor, what have you given us?”  And he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

A republic – not a “people’s republic,” which is about as much a republic, and answers about as much to the people, as the Holy Roman Empire lived up to its name – but a republic.  The Constitutional Convention didn’t give us a pure democracy, for it was impossible in the 18^th century for three million people to vote on every proposed piece of legislation.  (Indeed, it would be impractical at best, even with modern technology.  Can you imagine a legislature of even 500,000 passing urgent legislation – a declaration of war, for instance – in less than a couple of years?)  Instead we got a republic, a nation where elected representatives would govern as the people’s agents, and would answer to the people who chose them.

And for much of the nation’s history, that was exactly what happened.  Someone – a doctor, a merchant, a soldier, a farmer – would win election to Congress, would serve a term or three, and then return home.  And having passed laws, he would then live under those laws – and knowing that he would have to live under them, among the people who’d elected him, he was careful to ensure that he neither proposed, nor supported, nor voted for any bill which would be detrimental to the welfare of the citizens.  Even presidents followed this pattern – unlike today, when an ex-president does nothing in particular, former presidents of the past went on to legal careers, or service in “lower” public office.  William Howard Taft, for instance, became a justice of the Supreme Court, serving “under” his successors in the White House.

Further, the republic which the Constitutional Convention gave us had as its purpose the protection of individual liberties against encroachment by the state.  The Constitution’s primary purpose is to create a limited government – not merely to create a government, but to create a limited government.  If you read the Constitution (you have done so, right?), you’ll find that it very specifically states what powers the federal government has – and by doing so, it clearly indicates that any powers that it doesn’t give to the government, the government doesn’t have.  And beyond that there’s the Bill of Rights, which first names certain rights that the government may never encroach upon, and second – in the last two amendments – explicitly says that any power that the Constitution doesn’t plainly give to the government, remains in the hands of the states and the people.

We thus, from the beginning, had a limited government, with the lawmakers and executives coming from the people, and returning to the people when their service in DC was done.  We had a nation where the liberties of the citizens were the primary concern, where the rights of the people were more important than the powers of the government.  And Senators, Representatives, and presidents respected that.  Even Abraham Lincoln, who during the Civil War exercised power that no president before him had dared wield, did so only reluctantly, and with the aim of preserving the Constitution (whether Lincoln’s determination to keep the Union intact, by means of brute force if necessary, was valid is of course another question).

Thus, Barack Obama’s goal is not only very different from what the founding fathers gave us, but it is antithetical thereto.  Ayn Rand was fond of saying that A is not non-A.  By this she meant that a thing isn’t its opposite – good is not evil, black is not white, slavery is not liberty, a strong central government is not a limited government.  And under this principle, we can see that what Barack Obama wants is not what the founding fathers gave us.  It is both different, and opposite.

Where they gave us individual liberty, el Vampiro wants us to have mass dependency on government.  Where they limited federal authority, he wants to make it all-encompassing.  Where they feared the power of highly centralized government, he loves it.  Where they viewed the citizens as the highest authority in the nation, he views them as the lowest – indeed, not as an authority at all, but as mere subjects, whom he may order about as he pleases.  Where they conceived of the individual as having the best ability, and the most right, to make decisions about his life, Obama believes that only government has the wisdom or the right to determine what our retirement, our health care, our lives may be.

Obama wants to change the country, all right.  In a very real sense, he resents and disapproves of the American Revolution.  His vision of the United States is far more like that of the British government in 1776 than it is like that of the Continental Congress.  He would rather that we had stayed under the English yoke, than that we had created our own Constitution.  Indeed, what he wants to do is far more dictatorial than anything the 13 colonies endured, for he wants not merely to have the legislature pass repressive laws – he wants to issue them himself, without the necessity of trying to get congressional approval.

Barack Obama wants, in short, to undo what the colonies fought for.  He wants to nullify the work of Jefferson and Adams and Hancock, he wants to make the sufferings of the Continental Army irrelevant, he wants to reverse the surrender at Yorktown, he wants to return us to the servitude we threw off 233 years ago.  While he might never do so physically, spiritually he wants to tear down the Minuteman statue that guards the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, for the men who fought the British that day opposed tyranny, and a tyrant is what el Vampiro desires to be.

If Barack Obama is right, our founding fathers were wrong.  If his vision for the United States is the best one, then theirs was not.  If what he wants is what’s good for our country, then what they wanted, and got, was bad for the nation.  Barack Obama is saying to us, and to the whole world, that Washington, Knox, Franklin, Revere, Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan, Ethan Allan, and all the others who stood up on their hind legs and told the British where to get off at, were wrong.  All of them together, and all of them individually, were wrong if he’s right.

I would like to have the opportunity to ask him to his face just how he can have the chutzpah to believe that he’s so much smarter and wiser than they were.