RICH LOWRY: President Obama’s Re-Founding

For the left, this is what winning looks like. President Barack Obama gave a second inaugural address that just as easily could have been delivered by progressive darling Elizabeth Warren.

If the president didn’t repeat the phrase that Republicans threw back at him so often during the 2012 campaign — “you didn’t build that” — the speech was a meditation on the same theme of the limits of individual action. The address was a paean to collectivism, swaddled in the rhetoric of individual liberty and of fidelity to the founding.

He began and ended with the Founding Fathers and threaded the Declara...