Prerogatives of Presidency?

With the death, yesterday, of socialist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the reelection, recently, of United States president Barak Obama, some observations on leadership prerogatives and style of politically powerful individuals begs expression.  This is not to make explicit suggestion that Mr. Chavez and Mr. Obama have more personal or political commonalities than this writer's respect for public office and politeness would allow, but one who, like me, is not a fawning fan of either might have cause to wonder.  

I have always been cautious about charismatic, folksy, bombastic, grandiose, nationalistic ‘leaders’ who, when they get power and then don’t easily get their own way resort to hard-core tactics to prevail.  The amazing thing to me is that the ‘masses’ seem to buy it and that they don’t see down the road what is in store for them.  I think many must have been asleep when they were taking their high school history and political science classes.  On second thought, perhaps many were not in this country or in school when historical realities were taught. 

Authoritarianism and despotism historically come to be the way of many leaders-to-be when conditions in a country are depressed.  Look at the Hitlers,’ the Stalins,’ the Castros,’ the Moammar Gadhafis,’  the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads,’ or Hugo Chavez, the “silver-tongued preacher-in-uniform,” as he was described by the Wall Street Journal.  For me, I looked askance and with embarrassment at the scare-tactics of our own president last week when the government ‘sequester’ was imminent and he was unlikely to get his own way.  (Many, besides the House of Representatives didn’t buy it.  Neither did investors, apparently, because the stock market today peaked at its highest point in history.)

One commonality of all of these ‘strongmen’ leaders was/is their ability to forge a direct populist emotional link with the poor or uneducated or discontented or unempowered—the minorities who now have a spokesman.  They were/are 'given' or promised something by this 'leader' and loyalty was thus secured.  When people have an axe to grind, or they don’t understand simple economics, they fall for the candidate who typically has the strongest rhetoric and who is perceived as not afraid to take on whomever might be in power regardless of established rule-of-law or the moral rightness/wrongness of the strong-man’s trumpeted ‘enlightened solutions’ or policies. 

These ‘leaders’ promise to their constituents the world and then take, or try to take, by whatever means, what they call an increasingly large ‘fair share’ from those who have been the real producers  or the defenders of the moral foundations of the nation.  But what happens when the producers  or defenders cannot or choose not, because of regulation or expropriation or nationalization, or discouragement, no longer produce?

When Atlas ‘shrugs’ (if any of my readers have not read Atlas Shrugged [fiction] by Ayn Rand or The Book of Mormon [non-fiction] read them) or the producers outsource or go elsewhere to produce, or live, or the high-bracket taxpayers move out of, say, California to go to a more tax-friendly state rather  than stick around to pay for politicians’ promises or mistakes, then not only do the bills not get paid, but the seeds of anarchy are planted. 

In the days of Moses, the children of Israel chose to leave Egypt when things got too bad.  In our much ‘smaller’ world where do we have to go except to some principle-driven churches, our conscience, our Constitution, and our ballot box to try to get things stabilized or on track once again?  What we do not have to do is to submit to the prerogatives of an inflated presidential ego or a morally ungrounded elected political leadership any longer than the time of the next election.  If we continue to submit or buy into the rhetoric or think the 'freebies' can last forever so long as the 'government' is paying or promising or demanding we will pay a dear price for a long, long time.  You think the national debt is high now?  Think again.  Interest and 'takers' will never stop.