Christopher Chantrill:
Want to get a new angle on Obama’s Hope and Change mantra? Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote the book about it before Obama was even born: The Ordeal of Change.
[E]very radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem… It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
“Action,” wrote Hoffer, “is the most obvious way by which to gain confidence and prove our worth… [but] there must be an abundance of opportunities, and there must be a tradition of self-reliance” for a program of action to work. And back in the 19th century when the first great wave of immigration hit the shores of the U.S., there was.
But Obama offered the U.S. change without ordeal, gain without pain: don’t worry, be hopey, he told us. It worked for a while, until people woke up to the fact that the reality of Obamaworld was no hope and no change.
Obama’s change could never work anyway, because he forgot to provide Hopper’s secret ingredient for successful change: “abundance of opportunities… and self-reliance.” Obama doesn’t believe in opportunity and self-reliance: you didn’t build that.
What happens to a time of drastic change without abundant opportunities? It’s not good. People grab for substitutes, like the Germans did in the 1930s.
When a population undergoing drastic change is without abundant opportunities for individual action and self-advancement, it develops a hunger for faith, pride, and unity… it creates a proclivity for fanatical attitudes, united action, and spectacular manifestations of flouting and defiance; it creates an atmosphere of revolution.
Hello liberals in 2014! All the noise, the faith in climate change, the pride in “marriage equality” and the unity over the “war on women:” These are cheap substitutes that your leaders are cynically feeding you.
But we are conservatives; we accept no substitutes for abundant opportunity.
We see that Eric Hoffer points past the liberal dead end to the truth of the post-Obama age. When Obama finally goes on permanent golfing vacation we Americans know we’ll have to endure a period of wrenching change to get the economy moving again and the society back together again, and the world thugs back to their lairs.
And we know that we must clear the decks to open up abundant opportunity for our young people.
On Hoffer’s analysis you can see why the Reagan years worked. Sure, it was a period of wrenching change in the economy after the follies of the 1970s, but try as they might with their media amen chorus chanting Trickle-down and Me Decade, liberals couldn’t get the American people to sing anything but Morning in America, because the 1980s were years of abundant opportunity for millions of individual Americans and Reagan personified self-confidence and self-reliance.
Now it’s time to do it again. Indeed we must do it again, for the children. We’ve got to get the Millennials into full-time work, get them out from under their unjust student debt burden so they can start to believe in lives of opportunity and then have time for wedding rings and things, all over the world, just like the old WWII song said.
The wonderful thing is that we know how to do it. Cut government spending. Replace ObamaCare. Cut regulations. Cut tax rates and close crony loopholes. Curb crony capitalists. Drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack. Stop crony green energy and “carbon pollution” madness; stop bike paths and bullet trains. Stop just about every liberal self-indulgence you can think of.
