Obama's "Gift" to America
I have not been writing much lately. I have been reading, studying and learning. I have been trying to make sense of what is occurring in the midst of America’s ongoing political drama of 2008. I have learned a great deal. I have been reading about the history of liberalism, the links to things dark, and the changes in the Democrat Party that have occurred right before our eyes without us seeing or understanding.
In the middle of all this study, I ran across a commentary by George Will that tied together much of what I have been learning. In his commentary, Mr. Will focused on Barack Obama and what he teaches us about liberalism.
I have very little respect for Mr. Obama for many reasons (e.g., the fact that he and his wife seem to have great distain for America; the fact that he remained for 20 years in a church led by an anti-American reverend; the fact that he said he would have left that church had the reverend not left, although he made no move to do so before the heat was on; the fact that he said he wouldn’t want his daughter “punished by a child” if she became pregnant; and the fact that he seems to have as much distain for middle class Americans as he does for human life in general and for the country as a whole.)
Still, Mr. Obama’s candidacy has served a purpose and has done two good things for America. First it has shown us all the remarkable difference between the Democrat Party of the past and the Democrat Party of the present. Second, it has shown us the incredible difference between the Republican Party of the present and the Democrat Party of the present.
I want to share a bit of what George Will wrote (Minneapolis StarTribune, 4/15/08). He wrote that:
“…Barack Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are ‘bitter’, he said they ‘cling’ to guns, religion and ‘antipathy to people who aren't like them’… His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry (highlight mine) are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
“By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin D. Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
“When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, ‘Yes, but I need to win a majority.’ Michael Barone, in ‘Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan,’ wrote: ‘Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture’…
“Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals. According to Barone, they sought from him ‘not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance.’ They especially rejected ‘American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent,’ rather than -- in Michelle Obama's words – ‘just downright mean.’
“(Liberal) Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that…manipulable masses are easily given a ‘false consciousness’ (another category, like religion as the ‘opiate’ of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
“First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.” (highlight mine)
It is interesting that it is primarily through litigation and judicial decision-making that everyday Americans have lost so many freedoms at the hands of the left.
“(Leftist) Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree. Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.”
George Will is an astute observer of the political scene and his commentary is spot on in defining the issue of liberalism today. What is missing is a broader history of how all this came about. In the near future, I will write about that history and more about the dark world of modern day “progressive ideology”. In the meantime, I suggest that you spend some time reading “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 2007). Now THAT is an eye opener!
