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Fluffy, benign platitudes may have helped a certain former talk show host bond with her audience, but their use by politicians is nothing more than a clever attempt to distort the law into a means of control.
The urge to wield government power under the guise of self-empowerment is nothing new; it’s a classic bait-and-switch where actual justice is replaced by its counterfeit. Indeed, more than a century ago, French economist Frederic Bastiat warned of this very danger, highlighting how politicians would twist the legislative process into a tool for plunder rather than protection.
That warning is still strikingly relevant, as our political class keeps chipping away at our standard of living while hiding behind Oprahisms — those fluffy, seemingly benign platitudes that conceal their real aim: rendering us wards of the state.
Oprah Winfrey, of course, is the wildly successful former talk show host who made a fortune serving up psychobabble to connect with her female audience. Her upbeat banalities were mostly harmless: “Live your best life,” “Don’t put a ceiling on yourself,” and “Think like a queen.”
And who could forget her famous giveaways? “You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car!”
But today’s politicians, especially on the left, have hijacked Oprah-speak and weaponized it for far more sinister purposes.
Their version of “You get a car!” includes promises to make healthcare a right, offer free pre-K, subsidize home purchases, hike the minimum wage, distribute reparations for slavery, erase student loan debt, and enact paid family and medical leave — all courtesy of Uncle Sam.
These campaign pledges are then wrapped in buzzwords like hope, change, joy, and “smarter government,” with a token nod to “strengthening the middle class.”
Moreover, these Oprahisms are usually padded with “iconic” images of gullible voters crying profusely over a politician, even as a fawning media serves up cringeworthy questions to those in power, like “How are you feeling?”
The trouble with Oprahisms is that they are emotional bait, plain and simple. Eventually, someone needs to be an adult and say, Politicians shouldn’t be crafting a “plan” for you. They’re not your life coach nor are they there to stir your emotions with happy tears. When politicians position themselves as the ultimate source of your strength, wealth, meaning, and worth, it’s a short step into idol worship territory, where the leader perceives himself or herself as holding unbounded authority.
This kind of political overreach has been done before. Frederic Bastiat dubbed it “philanthropic tyranny.” To him, these sorts of politicians see citizens as mere objects to be shaped at will, akin to a gardener pruning his plants.
If you haven’t heard of Bastiat, he was elected to the French legislature shortly after the country’s revolution and was an early proponent of free-market and limited government principles.
In his concise but powerful book The Law, Bastiat sounded the alarm about the rise of redistributive politics masquerading as societal altruism. Bastiat recognized the growing socialist tendencies in France as a corrosive force that turned the act of governance into a weapon of oppression, undermining the very freedoms elected leaders were meant to uphold.
The Law begins with this foundational truth:
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
They are, he continued, “gifts from God [that] precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.”
For the French statesman, the law is simply the “organization” of the natural right to defend one’s life, liberty, and property, and it is for this reason that we form government and pay taxes.
Let’s pause to recognize how closely this view aligns with the biblical model of the civil magistrate. In Romans 13:1-6, Paul emphasizes that the state’s role is to punish evil, not to serve as the taxpayer ATM. And likewise, in 1 Timothy 1:8-10, Paul reminds us that the law exists “not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels.”
Yet when the law is misapplied to “spread the wealth around” or to enforce social engineering agendas, it morphs into a vehicle for legalized plunder, which Bastiat defined as benefiting “one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
This is where the progressive left often has a brain freeze, unable to envision any social welfare system that is based on voluntary associations and not government compulsion. Bastiat exposes the absurdity of believing that if we don’t want government officials doing a job, we must not want it done at all. As he puts it, “The law is not a breast that fills itself with milk.” Every dollar in the public treasury is forcibly taken from citizens.
He drives the point home:
“We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
In Bastiat’s time, the left fell into the same trap as modern-day progressives — treating government as a stand-in for “mankind” and pushing the idea that the law must go beyond justice to encompass “philanthropy” as well. Bastiat saw the inherent flaw, noting, “These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.”
So, the next time you hear an Oprahism from any American politician, whether from the right or left, see it for what it is: a clever attempt to distort the law into a means of control, diverging from its true purpose of protecting individual freedom and liberty.
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