For the last four days, Paul Rahe, author of Soft Democracy, has been telling us how Americans have slowly succumbed to the “servile temptation.” Poor though they may have been by contemporary standards, the Americans that Tocqueville encountered 150 years ago enjoyed—and insisted upon—robust liberties. Americans now? Wards of the nanny state. Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Paul Rahe argues that, just maybe, Americans are about to reassert their old liberties at last.
Barack Obama has helped [conservatives] out. He has proposed a grand takeover of a very large part of the American economy. Preceding that [the Democrats] passed …a looting bill, that takes money from the future and pays it into the hands of constituencies of the [Democratic] party. [Now] there has been an enormous eruption, including the tea party movement. I cannot think of any anti-government protest on this scale in the United States since the eruption against the Tariff of Abominations in 1828.