President Obama occasionally invites historians to the White House to talk about the lessons of history. During one such gathering last year, presidential historian Robert Dallek asked the president, Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere writes, “what the group could do to help him. Obama’s answer went right to a present-day concern: ‘What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.’”

Mitt Romney wants this year’s election to be about jobs and the economy. Barack Obama wants it to be about fairness and the need for a more equitable relation between classes. Voters appear to favor Romney’s view. When a July USA Today/Gallup poll asked Americans to rate the importance of twelve issues in the coming election, “increasing taxes on wealthy Americans” ranked last; “creating good jobs” ranked first, followed by “reducing corruption in the federal government” and “reducing the federal budget deficit.”

If 2012 is shaping up to be a classic “it’s the economy, stupid” election, President Obama’s attempt to make it a referendum on “fairness” would seem to be doomed. Why does he, how can he think it will work? The answer almost certainly lies in his estimate of the vulnerabilities of the Republican standard-bearer. The electorate may have little interest in the rights and wrongs of wealth in the abstract. But with a flesh-and-blood tycoon at the top of the GOP ticket, Obama is betting that the country will take a second look at the justness of Republican economic policies.

Once upon a time success like Mitt Romney’s — he not only built up a profitable firm but furnished the capital that enabled other companies to thrive — would have been an unalloyed virtue in a candidate. “Sobriety, frugality, industry, and honesty, seldom fail of success in America,” Benjamin Franklin remarked; and faith in one’s ability to succeed has been close to the heart of what James Truslow Adams called the American Dream.

“Advancement — improvement in condition,” Lincoln said, “is the order of things in a society of equals.” In such a society the class antagonisms of the Old World had no place. Where everyone is free to improve his condition, Tocqueville observed,

the gradations of the social scale come to be less observed, . . . the great sink [and] the humble rise, and . . . poverty as well as opulence ceases to be hereditary. . . .
. . . As there is no longer a race of poor men, so there is no longer a race of rich men; the latter spring up daily from the multitude and relapse into it again.

Equality of opportunity, it was true, did not mean equality of outcome. Fair enough, Lincoln said:

I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich;it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.

But there rose up new prophets who knew not Joseph. In the early 20th century, Progressive historians and public men questioned Lincoln’s faith in equality of opportunity. Progressive scholars reinterpreted the history of the republic as a series of class struggles. In his 1914 book The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly maintained that “the traditional American confidence in individual freedom” was untenable because it “resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth.”

Subsequent generations of intellectuals took up the Progressive torch. Writing in the 1940s, Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter argued that whatever reality Lincoln’s “myth” of self-made success might have possessed in the past, the emergence of modern industrial capitalism rendered it obsolete. Had Lincoln lived longer, Hofstadter wrote, “he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build oppressive business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man.”

What journalist David Brooks calls the “opportunity gap” had opened up. “Affluent parents,” Brooks observes, “invest more money in their children” and in doing so give them opportunities other kids don’t have. To remedy this inequality, Brooks proposes “tax increases or benefit cuts so that more money can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”

The problem with Brooks’s argument — which dovetails with Obama’s own — is that enlargement of the nation’s social-welfare apparatus does nothing to increase opportunity: Only an expanding economy can do that. Nor has ever greater spending on public education narrowed the “opportunity gap” Brooks identifies. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute scholar Andrew J. Coulson notes that since 1970 “the public school workforce has roughly doubled,” while enrollment rose only by 8.5 percent. But this “doubling in staff size,” Coulson says, “and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.”

The weakness of the Progressive vision is traceable in part to the sterility of the modern social imagination out of which it grew — a set of assumptions about man’s social nature, Hannah Arendt pointed out, more suited to the herding of animals than the nurturing of human beings. The bureaucratic programs developed under its auspices cannot lift up hearts or instill in people the confidence they need if they are to take advantage of the opportunities around them. The methods that the social-welfare programs replaced — the techniques of pastoral care which once tended the strayed souls in Western communities — grew out of a more profound understanding of human nature. (If you doubt it, have a look at the opening pages of Hugo’s Les Misérables.) But the old culture of pastoral care died away, leaving a moral vacuum the social state cannot fill.

Not only will the diversion of more private wealth into ineffectual government programs fail to yield greater opportunity and to enlarge the ranks of success, it will create new kinds of dependence. Capital that, had it been privately invested, would have seeded new enterprise will be squandered on freshly minted tax collectors. The tragedy of redistributionist policies is that, although they are intended to promote upward mobility, they exacerbate the problem they are meant to fix. The higher taxes that sustain them discourage investment in ventures that really do create new chances in life.

President Obama’s call for the rich to pay their “fair share” is not merely the mantra of a flawed economic policy. The deeper problem lies in the pessimistic philosophy that has inspired it, a conviction that the dream of self-made success that has long been fundamental to the American experience is dead. In the president’s view, Hofstadter and Croly were right. Lincoln was wrong. Self-made success is a myth. Or as the president phrases it, “You didn’t build that.”

Mitt Romney, a private-equity man who labored in the gardens of growth, is in many ways the ideal candidate to make the case that Lincoln’s vision of success is not a myth. But the former head of Bain Capital has been unable to get his message across. The Obama campaign’s distorted ads have made Romney’s experience in fostering new enterprise look like a liability. Few Americans know much about the work Romney did at Bain. But millions have been told, in a baseless ad by a pro-Obama super PAC, that a woman died of cancer because of it.

Part of the problem is that Romney is the first tycoon to have won the Republican nomination in a very long time. It’s not that Republicans subscribe to the liberal superstition that rich or otherwise privileged men make acceptable presidents only if they are Democrats. Theodore Roosevelt dominated the GOP in the first decade of the last century. A little later Republicans put Herbert Hoover (a mining investor worth upward of $70 million in today’s dollars) at the top of their ticket. Alf Landon (an oil millionaire) was next in the succession. But Hoover and Landon went down to epochal defeats, and for a long time a spooked GOP was partial to nominees who had done well but not too well where money was concerned — Ike, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Dole. (Goldwater, with his family department-store money, was an exception: but he wore cowboy boots.) Eventually the Bushes broke the glass floor, but only after they expiated their Brahminical sins by moving to Texas.

Romney, without a model to emulate, has been on the defensive during much of the summer, harried by the president’s picadors. The republic may be on the road to fiscal collapse, but a recent news cycle was consumed not by anxiety about the $10 trillion in new debt Obama seeks to incur over the next decade but by variations on the headline “Romney: ‘I paid taxes every single year.’”

Even so, he gets it. In a recent appearance on CBS This Morning, Romney called the president out on the “divisiveness” of policies “based upon income, age, ethnicity, and so forth,” an agenda designed to breed “a sense of jealousy and enmity and anger.” “President Obama attacks success,” Romney said in Irwin, Pa., “and therefore under President Obama we have less success.” Instead of creating jobs, Romney argues, the president fosters a “culture of dependency.”

All Romney has to do is connect the dots and the rationale of his campaign becomes clear. President Obama has spent the last four years preaching a funeral oration over the American Dream. The age of heroic opportunity, in the president’s view, ended a long time ago. The idea that ordinary men and women can raise themselves up through their own efforts is for him an antiquated fable. No one, the president maintains, can build anything himself: Americans must look to Washington for help every step of the way. If, in the Pleistocene age of Lincoln, a culture of self-made success enabled the country to transcend the class antipathies that divided the nations of the Old World, those days are over.

Unhitch your wagon from the star. We’re all Willy Lomans now. The equality the president envisions is an equality not of opportunity but of mediocrity and dependence. Having all but buried the American Dream with a melancholy GDP growth rate — it was 1.5 percent in the second quarter — the president seeks to divvy up an ever-shrinking pie even as his minions in bureaus like the Social Security Administration purchase tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition (hollow-point bullets) in anticipation of coming unrest.

If Romney can expose Obama’s vision of “fairness” for what it is — a gloomy, almost Malthusian testament to the president’s belief that America’s best days are over, a dark oracle of class struggle and fiscal doom — he will gain the high ground. If he persuades people that the president has been premature in composing the epitaph of the American Dream, he will dominate the debate, and will be able to talk about the bright days that lie ahead.

– Mr. Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author, most recently, of Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life.