Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Krauthammer

“Fairness through leveling” is a deliberately barbed phrase: it takes a warm, morally loaded word and welds it to an image of forced flattening. Krauthammer isn’t debating a tax rate; he’s trying to preempt the debate by defining the motive behind Obama-era policy as envy disguised as justice. “Leveling” evokes the old conservative nightmare of egalitarianism as demolition rather than construction: if some people stand taller, the state’s job (in this telling) is not to build ladders but to cut legs.

Calling it the “essence of Obamaism” does two bits of rhetorical work. First, it turns a presidency into an ideology, as if Obama’s agenda were a coherent doctrine rather than a contested mix of stimulus spending, health reform, and post-crisis regulation. Second, it uses the suffix “-ism” to smuggle in historical associations with authoritarian systems - an insinuation that redistribution is a slippery slope to coercion. The line is crafted for a media environment where branding beats policy detail.

The context is the late-2000s/early-2010s argument over inequality and the financial crash, when “fairness” became a central Democratic frame and conservatives sought to reframe it as punishment of success. Krauthammer’s subtext is that Obama’s appeal to fairness is not about opportunity or social insurance but about engineering outcomes. The intent is less to critique specific programs than to delegitimize the moral vocabulary Democrats were using to sell them.