It has been remarked that every once in a while the President goes off prompter and tells us what he really thinks. Political opponents, of course, use these moments to make the point that he does not share the same values as most Americans. Just fine, but that doesn’t always get to the heart of the matter. Proving that the President has socialist leanings tendencies blood doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know.
However, now the President has made a statement that is perhaps most revealing of his fundamental misunderstanding of the greatness of the American experiment. This isn’t a gaffe, like some other statements, and will likely go unremarked. But in it lies the conceit that is at the heart of the problem with the President.
And that is the belief that in America, change is always possible. That our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible.”
“That we can strive over time, through effort and sweat and blood and tears until it is the place we imagine. It may come in fits and starts, at a pace that can be slow and frustrating, but if we are willing to push through all the doubt and the cynicism and the weariness, then yes, we can form that more perfect union,” Obama said.
It is this conceit that is at the heart of Mr. Obama’s fundamental misunderstanding, both of the possibility of perfectibility and the role of government.
No society of men, even one thoroughly governed by every rule and regulation set forth by the best and the brightest with none but the best of intentions, is perfectible.
In fact, every effort of man to seek that perfection has resulted in tyranny. The utopian ideal has a body count unrivaled by any religion.
What our founders understood and what Mr. Obama misses is that the best possible society is one in which each individual seeks God through that liberty granted him by that same God. True liberty is the freedom to seek after holiness. In that liberty people are free and morally compelled with compliance of the will to help one another, to love as God loves.
Unfettered government is the enemy of liberty and thus the enemy of the most just society possible. Every effort of government to seek such power as to perfect society corrupts it. This is why our founders sought to limit government and to leave men alone in their effort to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect.
It is only when we seek heaven, that society is truly just. Those who seek a just society for its own sake forsake the means to achieve it and empower the great usurper of that liberty necessary to the end.
