Bravo America. You have inspired people all over the world, and people living inside your borders to love you again, to be inspired by you, and to see the limitless potential for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This election is a repudiation of the dominant governing philosophy from the last twenty years: wealth redistributed to the wealthy does not "trickle down" to the less fortunate; elections are not best won by dividing the nation as much as possible to achieve 51% (Rovian philosophy); and most importantly, the country is starting to see through the fraud charlatanism of Objectivism, the Ayn Rand creed that is the soul of the Republican party, the creed that says every man for himself. Finally Americans are beginning to realize that all actions have consequences for more than just themselves, but everyone else around them, in their neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, country, and even around the world.
I believe the debate between socialism and individualism is going to be over; as we have already seen, it wasn't relevant to the voters to call Obama over and over again a socialist. I hope there can be a new consensus, based on the interconnectivity of the world, rather than the Randist extreme individualism. When Rand declared that government had no purpose other than to defend contracts, when she insisted it had no business creating social programs to help the neediest people, when she said that taxes were inherently evil, she set up fifty years ago the disaster that we are in today.
All around America, the Republicans, inspired by her contempt of government, have tried to destroy people's perceptions of government. Leading by incompetence, they have hoped to persuade people that programs like Social Security and medicare and FEMA and many others were the problem (not the administrators of those programs); they tried to outsource everything to private sectors (even the military in Iraq). They tried to show through sheer failure, that government could and should not serve people.
But the fact is that philosophy is profoundly anti-American. Thomas Paine, one of the unsung founding fathers of our country, wrote in the days of the French Revolution that a constitution is a compact between citizens, an agreement that gives government certain powers. He wrote that it was the people who gave the government power, not the other way around - this idea was revolutionary. Ayn Rand stated that no such compact could exist between people, and government was therefore evil and morally infeasible.
We see now that the world is connected in ways we never imagined. Iceland's market collapses, and people all over the world feel the aftershocks. The largest energy consumers in the world refuse to act to protect the environment, and the rest of the world suffers. Objectivism, and the Republican party, have no answers to those problems.
An African-American is elected president of a country founded on the contradiction of freedom and slavery, and I guarantee that will resound throughout the world.
The new idea, which will hopefully provide us consensus for at least a little while, has to be how we are all interconnected, not old-fashioned, irrelevant debates between socialistic principles and individualistic principles.
Walter Ramsey
Topic: PRESIDENT OBAMA