Even then, Alexis de Tocqueville Knew!

Funny how a person, 177 years ago, by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French philosopher and diplomat, could’ve foresaw what has happened during the year 2012 with the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama.

The strategy of making many citizens (potential voters) dependent upon the government for much of their sustenance, was parlayed into reality by the Obama campaign in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

It seems that the Obama campaign, headed by David Axelrod, decided to target certain groups that were ready to be exploited. These special interest groups included Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, college students, gays, Jews, families with incomes under $30,000, and union members. A relentless barrage of ads and appeals were made to motivate these groups into thinking that only Obama cared about their needs and wants and that his opponent, Mitt Romney, did not care. Romney was depicted as an “evil” exploiting capitalist whose only interest was giving rich people tax breaks and making the middle-class and poor people poorer.

Through the office of the President, he implored Blacks to support him because he was Black (he actually set up a group called “Blacks for Obama”) and that by being Black himself, he could empathize with their special problems. He did this a couple of years back by signing off on giving Black farmers a total of $1.2 billion (Pigford vs. Glickman) which was adjudged by many to be a form of racial reparations, and he had a program to give poor inner city people cell phones and he increased the food stamp program along with other “goodies” from the federal treasury (the Blacks voted 95% for Obama); he targeted Hispanics by instituting the “Dream Act” which made it possible for children of illegal aliens to get reduced tuition in colleges, and he implied that he was going to get them some form of amnesty (which he didn’t do in his first four years) in the future (the Hispanics voted for Obama at a rate of 71%); he appealed to gays by changing his previous position on gay marriage and by refraining to enforce the Clinton era “Defense of Marriage Act”; he appealed to college students by offering to lower the interest rate on student loans and by making Pell grants more available; he adopted a moratorium on half the payroll taxes thereby giving workers more take-home pay; and he promised the members of the unions (which gave 95% of their campaign donations to Democrats) that he will push for more laws (even if by circumventing the Congress by use of Executive Orders) favorable to increasing union membership in his next term. He owes the unions big time for their financial aid and for their campaign workers on the ground, especially in the battleground states.

Being the President, he was able to do many of these things by presidential decree (Executive Orders) that Mitt Romney could not do. It looked like he was President “Santa Claus” as he handed out all those presents to his loyal followers and gullible voters.

So, as Alexis de Tocqueville stated 177 years ago, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years”. We are in that time frame now.

After the election, Mitt Romney commented on the facts mentioned above and he was roundly criticized for being a sore loser - what, for telling the truth? Also, Bill O’Reilly said similar things and was also criticized with venom by the Obama supporters and by even some Republicans. They must’ve hit a nerve to get such an “outraged” reaction. Sometimes the truth hurts, and they can’t stand the truth (as Jack Nicholson said in the movie, “A Few Good Men”).

I wonder if de Tocqueville had someone like Obama and the Democrats in mind when he made that famous statement 177 years ago?

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann