Liars (27 page)

That was starting to sound awfully relativist, awfully progressive. And just in case there was any doubt, Obama later circled right around to the word itself: “Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path
to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.”

In his view, stale “debates about the role of government” (debates that help keep our republic vibrant and alive) were simply stumbling blocks to all-important progress. Who had time for debates when we had to “act in our time”? Who cared about what the Constitution actually said when action was more important? In fact, in Obama's logic, being “true to our founding documents” meant we should set aside our differences and just “act” in the name of progress.

In his second inaugural address—beginning a term in office when he would be free from the bother of having to persuade the American people to elect him ever again—Obama expressed a more flexible attitude toward our founding principles and their applicability to modern times. It would follow, then, that this same attitude was extended to the document in which these principles are enshrined: the U.S. Constitution.

Isn't that a bit of a leap?
some of you may be asking. Fair question, but let's look back at a few comments Obama made long before his presidency for a glimpse into his real thinking on the usefulness of the Constitution.

In 2001, while serving in the Illinois State Senate and teaching constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago Law School, Obama gave several interviews to Chicago public radio station WBEZ. These first came to light and made some waves during the 2008 campaign, but they seem to have largely faded from public view since then. Though still early in his career, Obama had clearly formed
sophisticated views on the Constitution by this point, no doubt one reason he was invited on the program in the first place.

In one interview, which got some attention because Obama decried our country's inability to achieve “major redistributive change through the courts,” he also spoke about the Constitution in general, blaming it for blocking major judicial activism. He stated that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, one of the most liberal phases in modern Supreme Court history, “didn't break free from the essential restraints that were
placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” In the context of the interview, it's clear that Obama wished Warren had. He continued: “[G]enerally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties that says what the states can't do to you, what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the state governments or the federal government
must do on your behalf.” Obama clearly believes it is inconvenient that the Founders set up the Constitution with a limited government in order to protect citizens from federal overreach, instead of laying out what government “must do” on behalf the people.

Another radio appearance that same year saw the future president participate in a panel discussion on the Constitution and slavery. Obama and the panelists discussed the debates and compromises over slavery in the Constitution's history, as well as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments added after the Civil War, which outlawed slavery and further expanded individual freedoms. After a fellow panelist, a history professor, noted the importance of judging the Founders' preservation of slavery in the Constitution in the context of their time, Obama offered his take, calling the Constitution “a remarkable document” but also “an imperfect document . . . that reflects some deep flaws in American culture,
the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”

Obama went on to talk about the Founders' lack of concern for
African-Americans, but it soon became clear that he was not confining his criticism to simply the historical, pre–Civil War Constitution:

I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don't think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental
flaw of this country that continues to this day.

What is this “fundamental flaw”? Obama never clearly explained, but what
is
clear is that he thinks there are still problems with the Constitution today. For most of us, the amendments added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War represent a great triumph of how our constitutional system is supposed to work. The country rejected once and for all the brutality of slavery and enshrined that rejection forever in our founding document.

Yet Obama still sees the Constitution as fundamentally flawed more than 150 years later. Does that make it easier for him to subvert or ignore its constraints in the name of progress? Perhaps. Did his view of the “fundamental flaw of this country,” reflected in its Constitution, lead him to run for president on a promise to “fundamentally transform” that flawed country? Perhaps. But in any case, the idea that the Constitution has outlived its usefulness is not new. If Obama does in fact believe that, then he is merely continuing in a long tradition of progressive scholarship.

Herbert Croly, an intellectual godfather of the progressive movement in the early twentieth century and founder of the
New Republic
, one of progressivism's main journals of record, was a friend and inspiration to progressive politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, reading Croly's 1909 progressive tract
The Promise of American Life
was a direct factor in Roosevelt's decision
to run as an independent “progressive Republican” candidate in the 1912 election. And Croly had some interesting views on the Constitution.

In
The Promise of American Life,
he argued that the Federalists who drafted the Constitution represented “chiefly the people of wealth and education,” and as such they “demanded a government adequate to protect existing propertied rights.” This resulted in a Constitution that, according to Croly, “did succeed in giving some effect to their
distrust of the democratic principle.” To Croly, the Founders were rich men looking out for their fortunes who were “distrustful” of democracy.

If Croly planted the seeds of the constitutional suspicion in 1909, he doubled down on them in 1914 in
Progressive Democracy
. In the introduction to that work, he complained: “Ever since the Constitution was established, a systematic and insidious attempt has been made to possess American public opinion with a
feeling of its peculiarly sacred character.”

Croly also approvingly cited the work of Charles Beard, another progressive scholar, who once wrote that the Constitution was created by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors,” because they were losing money under the
earlier Articles of Confederation government. Croly found that “Professor Beard's investigations do indicate that the Constitution was . . . 'put over' by a small minority of able, vigorous and unscrupulous property owners” and concludes himself that “the American
democracy rallied to an undemocratic Constitution.”

This almost Marxist interpretation of the Constitution as a tool to advance the economic fortunes of the Framers would certainly render it a flawed document in the progressive calculus. But even before Croly and Beard, one of their progressive compatriots anticipated these ideas. Writing in
Congressional Government
in 1885, the
book that was developed from his doctoral thesis, Woodrow Wilson criticized “blind worship” of the Constitution. He excitedly proclaimed that his generation was “the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to
serve the purposes for which it was intended.”

Obama echoed Wilson's sentiments in a slightly different way during his second inaugural address, saying, “When times change, so must we.”

LIE 4

The dream of upward mobility that made this country a model for the world feels further and further out of reach and many Americans understandably feel frustrated, even angry. . . . Some are calling it a
throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons.

—HILLARY CLINTON, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION, 2014

To my mind, if you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top one-tenth of one percent, you know what, we've got to transfer that back
if we're going to have a vibrant middle class.

—BERNIE SANDERS, 2016 CAMPAIGN

Hillary Clinton says that “income inequality” is
one of the “biggest issues we face.” She wants to “
reshuffle the deck” to address the issue. Bernie Sanders railed against
both “income inequality” and “wealth inequality” during his campaign for president.
Liberal outlets such as the
New York Times
routinely publish columns and editorials discussing the need to act urgently in the crisis.

Behind these sob stories is a pervasive fear. Some rich guy somewhere is taking more than his fair share. He's cheating you. He's using you. Only by giving power to progressives will these nefarious profit seekers be stopped. Only through progressivism will income distribution be balanced.

Rich liberals have no real interest in fixing “income inequality”—at least as it applies to their
own
income. Take Michael Moore, the socialist filmmaker who loves to rail against the evil millionaires in high-rises in New York who are looking down on the Everyman. While leading the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, Moore pretended to be a working-class hero, just like the demonstrators. When Piers Morgan asked Moore on national television about being part of the “one percent,” Moore feigned shock and flat-out lied, responding, “Of course I'm not. How can I be in the one percent?” But independent analysts have estimated
Moore's worth at around $50 million. In 2012, the cutoff for the “one percent” in America
was a net worth of $20 million.

In other words, Moore lied. But why? Because even he recognizes the absurdity of a multimillionaire telling a working family that they aren't paying enough taxes. Because Moore is, in fact, the aloof millionaire looking down on poor people, just like the imaginary enemies he rails against.

Moore isn't the only millionaire entertainer who wants to make sure a wise progressive government makes decisions for us. Just look at some of the unbelievably wealthy celebrities who, along with Moore, supported Sanders in 2016:

• Singer
Neil Young, with a net worth of $65 million, supported Sanders
and let him use his music at rallies.

• Actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, while no longer a Hollywood power couple, threw their weight separately behind the democratic socialist and still have
a combined net worth of more than $100 million.

• Dick Van Dyke, who has
amassed a net worth of $30 million
during several decades on the stage and screen, specifically said he supported Sanders because he reminded him of
a “New Deal Democrat” from the Franklin Roosevelt era. As we show in this book, Van Dyke is more right than even he probably knows.

You might further think it strange that Clinton, who
made $3 million for giving three speeches in 2013, is telling the rest of us to fork over more money to the government. But it's not strange. It's predictable. Because none of this is really about helping the poor. It is about control.

What exactly does the phrase
income inequality
even mean? To take a literal definition, it's the fact that some people earn more money than others, something that obviously can't be prevented unless all salaries are set by the state. No modern-day progressives will go that far—at least not yet—so what they've said they really mean is that they want to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor in America. But that is a lie, too. Progressives don't have a realistic plan to make the poor richer. That would involve encouraging independence, entrepreneurship, ambition—all qualities the Left deplores. All they really do know is how to make everyone else poorer. Except, of course, themselves.
Do as I say, not as I do.