The Washington Examiner:

The problem now for Democrats is that, though both presidents took office with a weak economy, Reagan’s pro-growth policies worked, while Obama’s big government agenda has failed miserably.

The numbers tell the story. The Commerce Department reported yesterday that the U.S. economy grew at an anemic 1.8 percent rate during the first quarter of 2011, more evidence that the Obama recovery has been tepid, at best. At a comparable point in Reagan’s presidency, the shaky economy he inherited was headed to a robust recovery, with gross domestic product surging by 5.1 percent in the first quarter of 1983. For the rest of 1983, the economy grew at a 4.5 percent rate, then leaped 7.2 percent in 1984, as Reagan won a landslide re-election. Today, the Federal Reserve Board projects GDP growth of 3.1 percent to 3.3 percent in 2011, and 3.5 percent to 4.2 percent in 2012. Note, too, that Reagan took office after a year of 13.5 percent inflation, but by 1984, it was 4.3 percent.

The contrasts between Obama and Reagan couldn’t be starker. Reagan signed the biggest tax cut in history, removed burdensome regulations on businesses, and began to release the nation from the choke hold of labor unions, as exemplified by his firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Obama has pursued the opposite course, opening with an $862 billion economic stimulus package even though similar policies proved ineffective during America’s Great Depression in the 1930s and Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s. He spent over a year pushing for his government takeover of the health care system, legislation that included $813 billion in tax increases in addition to a raft of new regulations on businesses.

His response to the financial crisis was to create burdensome new layers of regulatory bureaucracy. On energy policy, he’s smothered domestic oil and gas exploration at a time of skyrocketing gas prices and unleashed the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate every corner of the economy by capping carbon emissions. And he’s allowed his union cronies to run amok in the Labor Department and on the National Labor Relations Board. There is one way Obama is like Reagan – he’s moved the country decidedly to the right by vividly reminding Americans of the destructiveness of liberal policies.

This may be so. But it also may be beside the point. Obama doesn’t need to lead the country as a whole — and in fact, “progressive” politics is itself unconcerned with any kind of singularity of an American vision, save that of an US profitably (from their political perspective) Balkanized, pitting identity group against identity group, man against his neighbor.

Instead, Obama is happy enough to helm a majority, comprised of those he’s hoping will “vote their economic interests” — that is, who will vote to give him power over those he wishes to steal from, to mutual benefit. Progressives have no desire to unify. They have a desire to rule — and they recognize that all they need to do so is to hold that majority, properly place some judges, unleash the unelected bureaucratic apparatus to act as extralegislative bodies, and treat the foundational documents — which hold the constitutional protections of liberty — as if they are just an extension of politics.

This is why Obama doesn’t seek to compromise when he has the clear majority. It’s why progressives work tirelessly to demonize and marginalize those who would rebuff their policies.

For Obama, it would matter not that “he’s moved the country decidedly to the right by vividly reminding Americans of the destructiveness of liberal policies” if he was certain that he’d reached the tipping point for government dependence, such that he still has a majority come election time.

Yes, what’s happened is that Obama’s policies have inevitably caused the mask to slip (unless, for instance, you’re David Brooks, or Rick Moran, say), exposing him for a conniving quasi-Marxist whose incantations of “transformation” he actually meant, even while cleverly hiding them in plain sight, incorporating them into what we’ve been conditioned to hear as nothing more than the superficial and phatic language of political campaigning.

Even now, Obama has no desire to compromise. He — and the left — are all in, and they are using the EPA, Interior, the NLRB, et al., to wage war against classical liberalism at the level of a law they’ve been taught is nothing more than an extension of power. There is no anchor. The rule of law has, like meaning in the leftist idea of language, has become unmoored from its originary source, and can now be fought on the field of will to power.

This was inevitable. And we’ve been conditioned to accept the premises that allow for such a coup.

What is important now is to pitch the idea of America to those whose economic interests are, in the short term, better served by surrendering to the Leviathan. Only that way — through principle — are we going to assure that the majority chooses the promises of freedom and economic liberty over short-term self-interest.