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Optimism Is A Force That Gives Us Bigger Government

Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism — a force that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, used to rally the country when it was deeply challenged. ~Adam Cohen, The New York Times Of course, building confidence and inspiring hope are desirable traits in […]

Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism — a force that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, used to rally the country when it was deeply challenged. ~Adam Cohen, The New York Times

Of course, building confidence and inspiring hope are desirable traits in leaders.  It is not desirable when the people’s trust and confidence are used as part of a swindle to rob us of our inheritance.  To the extent that modern presidents have tapped into American optimism, I think it has usually been to rob us of far more important things–our liberty, our property and our self-government.  Not all presidents are equally guilty of this, but typically it is activist presidents who want to use American optimism to fuel some cockamamie project that ends up making Americans poorer, more dependent on the state, gets them killed in a foreign field somewhere or causes some maniac to come blow up Americans over here.  Ironically, the “optimistic” presidents are the ones most inclined to talk in rather depressing terms about all the overwhelming challenges and obstacles that exist–but which they, with our help, will surely overcome; it is the “optimistic” presidents who rattle on about how “we” will “bear any burden,” but in the same breath will tell us that we should not have to bear the burdens of the world as we have known it to date.  We do not have to endure the structures of our existence; but we ought to endure the strictures and costs of their policies.  The problems of humanity will be solved, but solving them has become our problem without end or hope of solution.  It would be my hope that the failures of political optimism would discredit this style of leadership forever, but that would be all together too optimistic. 

People continue to buy into these failed ideas because they desperately want and need for them to succeed and, more than that, they desperately need to be the kind of people who believe that they will succeed.  As sure as there are unchangeable structures in human life that the optimists will never overcome, modern Western man’s cultural need to look for improvement and to believe in grandiose visions of change is deeply rooted in his mentality and will probably never be abandoned entirely.  The durability of such cultural attitudes is precisely one of those things that optimists believe they can alter with a few turns of the institutional or political knob, and it is here where they are more wrong than usual, which is why Western man’s addiction to the idea of progress, and the particular American brand of optimism, will not disappear or significantly weaken.  A mentality that sees the 20th century as a success story will not be shaken from its certainties by something as minor as the tragedy of the Iraq war.

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