Crescit Eundo

This is a splendid example of the real America. The America of big municipal government, strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, very high levels of co-operative membership, housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, small farmers who own their own land, and the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

The America that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. The America that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.

And the America of traditional marriage, non-discrimination against working-class white men, heavily regulated (if any) gambling, and the reduction of abortion through support for pregnant women.

After all, who voted for Obama? The people who, on the same day, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, Obama’s own view. Who, on the same day, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, allegedly the hardest people for Obama to reach. Who, on the same day, voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. And who voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going.

Those last, at least, have been rewarded with the kicking of the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, while the enactment of the Pregnant Women Support Act is set to follow instead. At that point, Obama will move from being merely no more pro-abortion than any main party nominee since Jimmy Carter, to being the most pro-life President since 1981. None of his pro-abortion votes in the past ever made the slightest difference. He was on the make within the Democratic Party. But now, he has made it.

The Pregnant Women Support Act’s sponsor, Senator Bob Casey, endorsed Obama against Clinton. So did almost all of morally and socially the most conservative Democrats: Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak, et al. Do they sound to you like part of a Marxist putsch?

Does General Jim Jones? Do the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters? Does Christopher Buckley? Does the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec? Does Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp? Bill Ayers is nowhere near the running of anything. It was Bush who was surrounded by veteran Trotskyists. Yes, there was a sectarian Leftist coup, several decades in the making. It happened in 2000. Its Manchurian Candidate was Bush.

But that is the past now. The Republican Party is set to nominate in 2012 the prophet and apostle of socialised medicine, Mitt Romney, who ran for the Senate from the left of Ted Kennedy. Or Mike Huckabee, economically one of the most left-wing governors in American history, but who happens to be against abortion and same-sex “marriage” while in favour of Second Amendment rights, like huge numbers of what are really his fellow Democrats.

Or, although this is much less likely, Sarah Palin, with her admirable history as a Buchananite battler for job protection, war aversion, immigration control and family values against the archenemy of all of them, the global “free” market, and as Governor of Alaska on the basis of publicly administered natural resources held in common ownership.

One of those three will be up against Obama. The lost years of 1993 to 2009 will at last be consigned to the history books.

The real America has reasserted herself.