“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Barack Obama, speaking before a crowd of wealthy liberal donors at the Getty home on Billionaire’s Row in San Francisco, April 6, 2008.
Obama’s rivals have been making the most out of these comments. Hillary Clinton, a Yale Law grad worth well over $100 million, has used the quote to claim that Obama is an elitist. Conservative pundits have taken his comments as proof of the left’s disdain for rural America. Despite all of the controversy that has followed the speech, I’m guessing that Obama’s audience took the comments in stride. To a crowd of uber-rich, left-coast, limousine liberals, the idea that the bumpkins in flyover country cling to religion out of bitterness over their lot in life is as common as vacation homes in Napa.
It’s no secret that, generally speaking, San Francisco liberals shelling out $2,300 per person for America’s left-most senator have a real disdain for mainstream religion. Having met more than a few during my time in California, it has been my experience that they consider themselves as enlightened, rational, and highly secular. They pride themselves on the idea that they have evolved beyond the need for religion, that opiate of the masses.
As I was considering this latest election-year dust-up, though, it struck me that these people are every bit as religious as the “hayseeds” they look down upon. The only difference is that they worship government power – their god is the State. And theirs is a jealous god, indeed.
It may sound like hyperbole at first, but consider the degree to which they imbue government with all of the characteristics of the God of the Bible. If Hillary Clinton is to be believed, the federal government has the power to heal the sick (think Hillarycare). Al Gore has created an entire industry out of the idea that government can control the weather (global warming). The US Army Corps of Engineers seemed to believe that they could, if not exactly part the Red Sea, then at least tell the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain what to do (levees). Politicians of all stripes claim that government can create something out of nothing, Genesis-like, through the miracle of inflationary economic policies. Gun control advocates and drug warriors both seem to believe that politicians are like Moses; that laws written on stone tablets in Washington have the power to make all the bad things in life just go away. And all statists in good standing dogmatically believe that government can make us more moral (Sarbanes-Oxley, the War on Drugs).
So which group is really the more sophisticated? The statists on Billionaire’s Row, or the residents of rural Pennsylvania? As I have said before, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. But faith in government is belief despite all evidence to the contrary.
