The Case for Optimism

Thomas Sowell is a Brushfires’ favorite—one of America’s most brilliant yet down to earth economist/philosophers—but his latest column has a sort of palms-to-the-ceiling feeling of despair that seems to suggest a providential miracle as the only thing that will save America now.

We’re not so despondent, or maybe we sense that the miracle is actually ongoing but we don’t yet appreciate it. The miracle is evident in the power of the worldwide web to blow up the Potemkin villages that the liberal bubble media are so desperately trying to build around Obama. There is no shortage of people who already know the emperor has no clothes, and their numbers are growing every day. This is what gives us hope.

The assault on truth by today’s godless intellectuals is no different in substance than in generations past—think of it as today’s iteration of Marxism—but what is different is the inability of today’s Marxists to control the flow of knowledge and information. When the New York Times announces a poll claiming 75% of Americans are optimistic about the next four years with Obama as President, a huge portion of sentient adults immediately KNOW this is false. Not just clever shading of the truth, but out-and-out falsity; pure Potemkin propaganda to try and cover for a guy who is plainly seen by serious people of both political parties as wildly over his head, and has been given an unprecedented vote of no-confidence by the national and international financial markets.

For all the scorn heaped on Rick Santelli as an out-of-touch ‘trader’, we’ve known a few traders, and they aren’t out of touch; in fact, they are among the most in-touch when it comes to assessing real players vs. lightweight phonies. And Santelli’s rant had the ring of truth, which is why it went viral and is even now prompting the re-staging of ‘Boston tea parties’ around the country. The message hasn’t cut through the fog of Washington yet, but it’s going to. In the circles we’re familiar with, we’ve never seen anger and the desire to get engaged at the level we’re seeing now, and there is zero reason to think it will cool down.

We don’t think the truth-spreading power of the internet can be stopped. Even if some version of the Fairness Doctrine is reinstituted and the voices of talk radio are reduced or silenced, the web will keep buzzing.

Now, we know the web is not enough by itself to turn things around. It’s going to take major moral courage from many people not used to demonstrating it. The fraud that is Obama, and the fraud that was his election are going to have to be called out as such (and we’re happy to have done our part--click on "Essays"). And it’s going to take faith of the mustard seed variety to ignore the experts who will tell us there is nothing we can do but wait for another election. We don’t have to wait. This house of cards—and make no mistake, the Obama group is a house of cards— can fall instantly.

Here’s why we remain optimistic. The web wasn’t around and wasn’t needed during World War II and President Reagan’s winning of the Cold War—there were enough alert Americans to see and respond to those dangers without regard to what the media may or may not have reported. And it is of course discouraging that there were not enough alert Americans to prevent the election of Obama. But truth prevailed in WWII and in the Cold War, just as it will now.

As we said in the beginning, the ongoing miracle is evident in the power of the web, but the miracle isn’t the web. The miracle is that there is such a thing as truth, and there is a power behind truth that all the leftists in the universe cannot defeat or control. It’s the power and truth of God, and of man in God’s image and likeness, entitled by divine right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s the truth that underlies America. That’s where the reservoir of moral courage is found (and is full); that’s why faith endures. Truth may appear to be ignored or arrogantly dismissed for a time, but it is never altered and never moved by popular opinion. And men and women ultimately discover they are filled with this truth, respond to it, and are animated by it. This is happening now.

Years from now, we predict amazement at how the Obama administration arrived, flamed out, and disappeared from the scene in a manner not foreseen in February 2009. But the amazement will be the ‘how’—the latest example of fog before Valley Forge, or the fortuities of the Battle of Midway—not the why. Truth is the why. And that’s why we’re optimistic.

Paul Gable

Posted February 24, 2009