"WHY I DESPAIR": The Lament of a British Expatriate

White House Dossier points us to an exceptional piece of writing by Charles C. W. Cooke, who emigrated to the United States from England and watched the 2012 election results in horror.

A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

Cooke points to The Life of Julia, the brutish caricature of a woman's life promoted by the Obama campaign, that put government at the center of each female's life.

...the two central achievements of Obama’s first term [were] the spending of an unprecedented amount of borrowed money on the president’s political allies, and the turning of the health-care system over to the bureaucracy in a “reform” that, inter alia, stipulates that to be alive is to owe something to Washington. The latter move involves a claim on the people that no free government should ever make, and that no American government has ever made before. For these grave missteps, the president suffered an epic loss in Congress in 2010. The revolt looked promising, but then — for whatever reasons — he was reelected. Now, Obama has the chance to remake the Supreme Court and remake America’s Constitution, too. Who doubts he will take it?

The unions and Obama's campaign bundlers in aggregate received tens or hundreds of billions in the taxpayers' funds courtesy of the 44th president. And an incurious media watched and said -- for the most part -- nothing.

Economic gravity will prevail, as it always does, and it will eventually yield another conservative president. Indeed, the nature of the two-party system all but guarantees it. But this won’t do much good in and of itself...

...The growth of the state is a one-way ratchet, and its size and intrusion are almost never retrenched. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788 that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” “A government bureau,” added Ronald Reagan, “is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

In good times and bad, government grows. And neither party -- with the possible exception of "the extreme right wing" of the Republican Party -- seems the least bit concerned that our debt-to-GDP ratio long ago hit the danger zone.

Alas, there is nothing written in the stars that says that America will always be America. “Rome,” as Joseph Heller brutally reminded us, “was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in 25 million years or so.” There will be little virtue in America if it becomes a larger version of Britain...

On Tuesday, America took another giant leap away both from its revolutionary mission and from the classical liberalism that it has successfully incubated for so long. This is a rotten thing for America, and also — though it might not realize it — for the world...

One of the few bright spots on Tuesday evening was the reminder that Obamcare, Dodd-Frank, the EPA's incessant overreaches -- to name but a few -- will hit all Americans equally. For that is what big government does: it spreads misery.

We are seeing this effect even now as dozens of companies have announced plant closings and layoffs since Wednesday morning.

Those newly unemployed workers who voted for Obama have only themselves to blame.