As Bing Crosby said to Bob Hope in The Road to Utopia, “Leave your name with the girl, and we may get to you for some crowd noises.” That’s the citizen’s role on America’s road to Utopia: Leave your name with the girl and, after the background check, you may qualify for the crowd scenes.

Early in his term, President Obama called in some fellow smarties to test out some slogans. FDR had a “New Deal,” so Obama thought he’d wrap up his domestic innovations under the umbrella title of “New Foundation.”

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cautioned against it. “New Foundation,” she said, sounds like a lady’s girdle.¹² Actually, it’s more like a whale-bone corset. When the American citizen climbs into the “New Foundation,” the stays get cranked tighter and tighter, but incrementally—so you barely feel it, till you realize the bottom’s dropped out, and you’re coughing up blood, and they’re still cranking.

THE STATIST QUO

FDR was the first American president to pass off Big Government as technocracy. He had a so-called “Brains Trust.” As with so many pious liberal concepts, the term started as a throwaway joke. Back in the trust-busting days of the 1890s, a wag at The Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, mused:

That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives.

You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”¹⁴ He subsequently “apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.”¹⁵

“Everybody”? Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the New Yorker, that nobody she knew voted for Nixon.

Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,”¹⁶ so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something everybody knows is true.

“Everybody” knows this stuff, especially if he reads the New York Times or listens to National Public Radio. “Everybody” knows that raising taxes is responsible, and “everybody” knows that cutting spending is just crazy talk.

“Everybody” knows that the governmentalization of health care—the annexation of one-sixth of the economy, the equivalent of the U.S. taking over the entire British or French economy, or the Indian economy twice over—“everybody” knows that that’s sober, prudent, technocratic, reasonable. And “everybody” knows that wanting to repeal ObamaCare is extremist, radical, dangerous. “Everybody” knows that serious proposals to address a looming shortfall in obligations of tens of trillions of dollars puts you in wide-eyed nut territory, just as “everybody” knows that massively increasing government spending is a moderate, centrist approach to stimulating the economy. Why, it’s in the Washington Post! As the paper reported, after yet another anemic quarter:

So the establishment newspaper of the capital city of the so-called hyperpower thinks economic growth and government growth are the same thing?

Maybe if we’d had a 20 or 30 percent “big rise in growth” of government, the economy would really be roaring along.