Thus spake Will:

Although they have become prone to apocalyptic forebodings about the fragility of the nation’s institutions and traditions under the current President, conservatives should stride confidently into 2012. This is not because they are certain, or even likely, to defeat Barack Obama this year. Rather, it is because, if they emancipate themselves from their unconservative fixation on the presidency, they will see events unfolding in their favour. And when Congress is controlled by one party, as it might be a year from now, it can stymie an overreaching executive.

“Unconservative fixation on the presidency,” Mr Will? Would that be the presidency responsible for appointing czars and peopling the bureaucracies with hard-left ideologues who will prove nearly impossible to remove? The presidency charged with appointing the Attorney General, who oversees voting laws? The presidency that is given the privilege of choosing judicial nominations — and that, under Obama, has attempted to pressure every constitutional seam, looking for tears it the legal fabric of constraint it might exploit to expand Executive authority, thereby weakening the systems of checks and balances — and the very idea of separation of powers — that were put in place to keep the government from becoming tyrannical by virtue of pure momentum, if not by outright intent?

Is this the presidency we Hobbits are so “fixated” on, and “unconservatively” so, Mr Will? Because I would disagree with the premise, and counter it by pointing out that — as I’ve been writing here for years — how we get there matters, be it in what we decide comes to count as a legitimate process of interpretation or in the power over us ultimately granted each branch of government, and that guarding the integrity of process is important, so much so that one might plausibly make the claim that conservatism itself is a principled protection of process, under the final auspices of Constitutional law, against attempts to expand the scope and power of government by those who challenge the authority of the legal compact.

As Mark Levin noted yesterday on his radio show, for you to suggest that there is something unseemly and unnuanced about and engaged citizenry who recognizes the existential threat to our constitutional republic posed by leftist ideologues whose goal has been to steadily weaken constraints on governmental power, is frankly stunning coming from a conservative opinion leader. Because it is not as if we Hobbits are “fixated” on the presidency as just one in a set of co-equal governmental branches, eschewing all others (as the 2010 elections should have made abundantly clear); rather, we are genuinely concerned that four more years of Obama, with his power to appoint judges and czars (not to mention his Justice Department’s penchant for suing states and determining “fairness” based on hard-left egalitarian ideas built on all manner of identity politics), will mark the end of the US not as a physical entity, but rather as a nation where individual liberty and autonomy is guaranteed protection against an overreaching Leviathan.

If ObamaCare is not repealed — if we are disallowed, moving forward, from choosing our own doctors or hospitals or health plans (or even whether we wish to purchase a health plan) — we will have set the precedent for the government to direct us in all manner of things: from our diet to the time we spend exercising to the types of cars we must buy, and on and on and on.

And it is not difficult to see that, once that is accomplished — and once the propaganda arm of progressivism, already entrenched in every major institution, goes to work selling itself as the champion of “fairness” (while simultaneously completing the redefinition of the term itself, moving from equality of opportunity into equality of outcome) — we will be on the inevitable road to the kind of European democratic socialism that is so spectacularly failing right now.

So yes, Mr Will, perhaps we are “prone to apocalyptic forebodings”; but then, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you — and it isn’t nuanced or sophisticated thinking to deny what’s actually happening simply because you want to be seen as nuanced and sophisticated. It is moral and intellectual blindness being deployed as an identity marker — one that, from where I sit, marks you as having given yourself fully over to a game whose rules are controlled entirely by your opponent. And under such circumstances — hey, we can take back the Senate and control Congress (albeit it with Boehner and McConnell as our leaders)! — every small victory seems a validation of your steady, “sober” assessment, even as you remain ignorant to the foundational changes that are working to reform the very intellectual and ideological foundations of the country.

When the government is your God, natural rights, if they can be said to exist any more at all, come from the government. And so they are no longer “natural” or guaranteed at all: they are conditional and contingent, the product of a postmodern and poststructuralist sophistry that preaches egalitarianism and diversity but that is designed, quite intentionally, to enable man — by way of government — to determine what are “rights” in the first place, and then to rule based on that allocation of rights.

The brilliance of our system is that it casts certain rights as unalienable: they come from God (or, if you prefer, from Nature, as a condition of our being) and so can not be taken away by men. And whether or not this is actually so — the postmodernists will argue that all language comes from man, so man is the creator of his own truths, including the supposed “truth” of a set of unalienable rights — matters little: that we accept the premise as our governing authority, that we insist upon it as the foundational principle of our social compact, is all what creates the parameters for our compact with one another. That is to say, you needn’t believe that any higher power has granted you certain rights; just that you have agreed to act as if that is so, as a condition of your being under the Constitution and Declaration.

The Left long ago realized that in order to collect power for itself, it needed to defeat the very idea of individual autonomy and unalienable rights. This President is the embodiment of that academic leftist mindset — and worse still, he has both the platform and the position from which to significantly weaken both of those bedrock principles that allow for a society of free people living equal before the law.

You, Mr Will, may wish to pretend that the real interest lies in the horse race minutia and, well, the politics of politics. And you may wish to chide those who take a broader, less “nuanced” view — you know, the upstart riff-raff who haven’t your encyclopedic knowledge of how inside the Beltway politics works from the nuts and bolts up.

And that’s okay. Do what you wish. But do realize that not all of us are cowed, nor will we be shamed into staying quiet while the kingmakers play kingmaker against our collective interests. We’re “fixated” now on how our country works, and we can see that its ostensible watchdogs in the media, both left and right, haven’t been willing to do the hard work that we purist extremists are now hoping it isn’t too late to do.

You can thank us later.