I Want a President Who Loves America. Again

It was just a year ago that I floated my dearest political wish upon the waters: “I Want a President Who Loves America.” It really wasn’t asking much. Since then, I’ve written again and again about what I want in a president. Of course, my subtext was that the current incumbent, Barack Obama, rather obviously did not love America. As a man of the left, he loves the “struggle,” culminating in what lefties Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their Empire trilogy, call a “a strong event, a radical insurrectionary demand,” which they understand as the transformative moment born of “extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals.” In other words, Revolution. Obama modestly calls it fundamental transformation.

If you are a regular middle-class guy, you find yourself nonplussed by all these angry lefties. You find yourself muttering that it can’t be that bad. Maybe you bought the liberal meme from your incarceration in government elementary school that things have been getting better and better in every way thanks to the great and beneficent Oz of labor laws, social legislation, and the civil rights era. Perhaps you are a total conservative badass; you have bought instead the meme that the modern society of free markets and limited government is the best thing ever, so why wouldn’t things be pretty good? Either way, 3,000 percent increase in per-capita income in two hundred years ain’t beanbag. But what is it that makes President Obama and Black Lives Matter and the special snowflakes at college so angry? It is because they still, like angry young bloods down the ages, have the dawn raid in their blood. They know that they must take out the neighboring village before the neighboring village does its dawn raid on them. That is what the revolution obsession of the Marxist left, and the fundamental transformation of Obama & Co. is all about. As aggressive young men have always done, they long for the moment when the “extraordinary accumulations” of insults from the neighboring village can only be resolved by a “strong event,” the moment of “Kairòs,” the radical dawn raid on the unsuspecting “others” on the other side of the mountain. Only today the neighboring village is capitalism Ordinary liberals don’t hate America; they just think they are too good for America. Their education is better than other Americans’ practical wisdom. Their activism is better than ordinary people making things and selling services. Their non-profits are better than ordinary corporations. Their grants are better than ordinary work for wages. In other words, liberals cannot love America; they cannot love America because they are better than America. One fine day, we will socialize this anti-social element -- these community organizers, these social justice warriors, these well-born youths that yearn for a career in activism -- into socially useful channels, as we have socialized the rest of our young bloods, without even noticing it, into sports and careers and battling for market share, but that day is not yet. Meanwhile, we must work to elect a president that loves America. Think about it. Let’s leave President Obama out of it. How about Hillary Clinton? She loves Chelsea and Charlotte, but America? It just does not compute. The GOP candidates are different, they have to love America or we Republicans and conservatives will know the reason why. Ted Cruz? A rather fierce love, I suspect. Marco Rubio? A lucid and charming love. Donald Trump? A rather inconstant, three-divorce love. Dr. Ben Carson? An up-from-nothing love. Jeb Bush? An old and rusty love. And so on. But love America they must. When you think about it, loving America is the only sensible policy. If you can’t write a better Declaration of Independence than Thomas Jefferson, or a Constitution better than James Madison, or a refunding of the debt better than Alexander Hamilton, maybe you aren’t really better than America as you thought. Maybe you should get off your high horse and just surrender to the idea and the reality of America and learn to love it. But how do we deal with the revolutionaries and the fundamental transformers? That’s why we need a president who loves America, so that his love can outshine their hate. But life is not easy for America lovers, and all you lovers know why. It is hard to keep the flames of love burning bright when it is so much easier to burn up with hate. In fact, for most of us, we have to be threatened with the loss of those we love in order to remember how important our loves and our loved ones are to us. That’s the great contribution that President Obama has made to America. He has reminded us how much we love our country and how important it is for America lovers to elect and have once again a President that loves America. Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.