Wards of the State: Saw Obama Coming (Ideas) (The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc Foreshadows America‪)‬

THE BEST BOOK on Obama's America has already been written. The president has two more years in office, six if he's lucky, but already we know enough about the contours of his mind, his governing instincts, to predict that the volume in question will not be bettered. This is a large claim for a book that never once mentions Obama or America or the gushing wells of oil and words that seem to be, so far, his chief gift to us. Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country. The Servile State is not quite Democracy in America--for one thing, it is less than 200 pages long--but it has the prophetic power and moral imagination, the sustained intelligence and insight of that earlier volume. Like Democracy in America, it harbors a healthy skepticism of the political class, deplores the corrosive effects of money, recognizes the value of restraint and self-control. Above all, both volumes lament the seemingly inexorable growth of the state.