Charles Krauthammer’s column (see the NRO web briefing) is characteristically stellar. I do want to take issue, though, with one key assertion. Dr. K talks about the so-called stimulus bill rife with “the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.” He then continues:

Not just to abolish but to create something new — a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new.

Prior to the election, a number of us pointed out that, once you decode it, there is nothing remotely new or dazzling about what Obama and his allies variously pose as “bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy.” The problem is, we had a candidate who either wouldn’t or couldn’t make that case. If I may be so bold, this is from an essay I wrote a couple of weeks before the election on Obama’s notion of participatory democracy:

For Obama and his allies, capitalist democracy is an abject failure, habituated to racism, relentless in its materialism. It is an ironic critique: The senator and his fellow travelers are driven by nothing if not a crass materialism: They see themselves entitled to society’s benefits without the burden of its toils. They are, moreover, such prisoners of their own racism — have you ever heard anyone else describe his own grandmother as “a typical white person”? — that race has become their unified field theory for all of life’s disparities. It is a stubborn theory, heedless of the fact that, in our free society, members of all races, ethnicities, and economic classes move up and down the ladder of opportunity by the yardstick of merit. Obama will tolerate no such yardstick. He derides the very core of what makes American society exceptional: individual liberty. Freedom. “We have this strong bias toward individual action,” Obama ruefully told [journalist Hank] De Zutter — and note the crafty shift: his choice of the amorphous action instead of the value-laden freedom, lest the listener realize just what is at stake. “You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” Of course, we already have collective institutions and organizations. They are the branches of a limited government, designed by our Constitution precisely to promote individual liberty and national security. They are the churches, synagogues, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, and other social organizations by which each citizen may freely set the balance between his personal fulfillment and his interaction with fellow citizens. They are the arts, the sports arenas, the charities, the congeries of fulfillment for those who know the personal is not the political. That is American democracy, our Unum. So if not American democracy then . . . what? DeZutter, who interviewed his subject at length, explained that Obama’s strategy called “for organizing ordinary citizens into bottom-up democracies that create their own strategies, programs, and campaigns and that forge alliances with other disaffected Americans.” (Emphasis added.) Like much of Obama’s vaporous rhetoric, it sounds harmless enough — even admirable. Until you look closely. It turns out that these “bottom-up democracies” are phony. They are not democracies at all. They are enclaves of the alienated, where the mob strangles the achiever. Indeed, when [former Weatherman terrorist Bill] Ayers, Obama’s long-time “education-reform” ally, conjures his ideal “participatory democracy” — fueled by what he euphemistically calls “popular empowerment” and what Obama calls “participatory politics” — the “beacon to the world” he points to is Chavez’s socialist thugocracy in Venezuela.