A New Birth of Freedom

The heat of adversity yields steely resolve, so says Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs Adjunct Scholar Paul Rahe in his landmark piece imploring conservatives to have heart, for this “could be our finest hour.”  Rahe highlights his thoughts in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift that Americans are “made of sterner stuff,” thus we have not fallen prey to the tide of Western European-style welfare statism like our Anglospheric brethren across the pond.

And it’s this “sterner stuff” that imbues the Tea Party with its on-going fervor.  It has already borne from the adversity presented by the unapologetic progressive statism of Barack Obama and company a new generation of citizen-activists committed to a change in the system and a change in the guard.  After all, Obama’s true “change” has been merely in the speed with which America careens toward the precipice of national disaster.

One among that new generation leading the charge is Oklahoma’s favorite son (in-law) Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) whose seminal speech to the 800 in attendance at OCPA’s annual banquet last week could be regarded as on par with Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” address.

Leaving no doubt, he rightly framed the terms of our present struggle by opening his address:

“Last week, on March 21st, Congress enacted a new Intolerable Act. Congress passed the Health Care bill – or I should say, one political party passed it – over a swelling revolt by the American people. The reform is an atrocity. It mandates that every American must buy health insurance, under IRS scrutiny. It sets up an army of federal bureaucrats who ultimately decide for you how you should receive Health Care, what kind, and how much…or whether you don’t qualify at all. Never has our government claimed the power to decide when each of us has lived well enough or long enough to be refused life-saving medical assistance.  This presumptuous reform has put this nation … once dedicated to the life and freedom of every person … on a long decline toward the same mediocrity that the social welfare states of Europe have become.”

Ryan has drawn the line in the sand and declared to our progressive foes, “No more.”  To wit, the two conservative candidates for Oklahoma Attorney General have already pledged to join thirteen other states’ Attorneys General in the suit to challenge the constitutionality of ObamaCare.  Not surprisingly, the progressive candidate juked and jived: “I agree with Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson that litigation should not be rushed into but the issue should be analyzed before a decision is made to join, or not join, or to take some alternative action.”  Translation: I’m really caught between a rock and hard place here in that my party expects me to support my president despite that Oklahoma’s voters are overwhelmingly in favor of repealing ObamaCare.

The battle that lies ahead — progressive statism versus liberty — could not be more stark.

Paul Rahe echoes Congressman Ryan in his prescription for our present progressive malady, summing their sentiments: “Barack Obama has made manifest; and to all with eyes to see, the danger that we have temporized with for nearly a century is now perfectly visible. As Obama himself has insisted in speech after speech, the moment in which we now live is a ‘defining moment.’ What is required in what he calls ‘this defining moment’ is what Abraham Lincoln once called ‘a new birth of freedom.’”