I remain astounded by the continuing naivety and self delusion of so many that Barack Obama is a “moderate” and “non-ideological.”
[Early afternoon update]
A Marxist spirit pervades the White House.
Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.
Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.
Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.
None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.
It was entirely predictable, to anyone not mesmerized last year by “hope” and “change” and how cool it would be to vote for the black guy.
[Update]
The Obama civilian troops were trained by Bill Ayers:
When I write about Bill Ayers, I am often greeted with the retort that the focus on one kooky professor is a waste of time, that we have bigger problems.
But were it not for the “Destructive Generation” instantiating themselves in our schools, the election of Barack Obama would not have been possible. Had we had a generation who understood history, we would have had voters who understood the vacuity of his rhetoric and the implications of “spreading the wealth.” They would have understood how his writings on Saul Alinsky displayed his propensity for stirring up racial animus, demonizing the opposition, and threatening executives with “pitchfork” mobs (that he would rouse up). We would have seen how his teaching a course on “critical race theory” would naturally lead to a nomination of a Supreme Court justice who sees herself as a “wise Latina woman” who can “empathize.”
They would have seen that Obama’s alliance with Bill Ayers, who has been working on behalf of “education” in Venezuela, would lead to a cozy meeting with Hugo Chavez. While Venezuelans protest against a government takeover of the schools, we allow Bill Ayers to spread his poison to future teachers while paying him an annual salary of $126,000.
Like South American dictators who promise peasants a few hectares through redistribution, Obama promises such things as “free” medical care, education, and new cars to his followers. Like Chavez, he appeals to the peasants — literally the illegal ones streaming into the country, promising rights of citizenship.
The historian Richard Pipes notes that the Russian revolution succeeded in large part because of the uneducated peasants. And in this country, the early communists targeted immigrants who spoke no English and were unacquainted with American values.
Today’s communists, like Bill Ayers, work in our schools aiming to keep American students in the same level of ignorance and tribalism as the peasants of Russia and South America.
As that report famously said almost three decades ago, if a foreign power had imposed this educational system on our nation, we would rightly consider it an act of war. And in a sense, that’s what happened. The Soviet Union collapsed, but its toxin lives on in our society and politics.
Well, relying on Glen Beck (which is where the Pajamas Media article is sourced from) is your first mistake. Having done a little digging, the worst you have is that he’s an ex-communist. He was in STORM, but left, and the organization dissolved.
Then he went and wrote a book on how green jobs can save our economy. Funny kind of communist. Or maybe he had a change of heart?
Well, relying on Glen Beck (which is where the Pajamas Media article is sourced from) is your first mistake.
I made no mistake. Neither did Ron Radosh, who knows his communists.
…maybe he had a change of heart?
No, just a change in tactics.
You wonder why the lefties who post on the pro-freedom blogs will almost never own Obama as one of their own. I’m a libertarian: if Obama had a “road to Damascus” moment on his vacation (say, instead of reading those books his flacks said he was going to read, somehow, miraculously, he read Bastiat’s THE LAW, Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM, and Hazlitt’s ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON), came back and said, “Hey, I just realized all that ‘spread the wealth’ business is bull! Fom now on I’m a libertarian. Fredom rocks!”–and actually walked the walk, I’d be running around telling everyone, “Wowee, the president is a libertarian!” Instead, leftist commenters always want to downplay “Il Dufe’s” collectivist roots and statist ideology. What’s up with that? Is it some kind of Alinskyite ploy? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not communist. Corporatist. He’s already done it — see GM. If they were communist, they would merely be equal to us. 😉 They picture themselves more as Plato’s philosopher-kings. To be kept separate. Separate breeding pools and everything.
Palin’s problem is she is the wrong class. The wrong breeding. That is why they object to her so much. I really didn’t want to believe that, but I do now. I still fight it, because I know so many liberals, and I hate to think that their minds really work that way, deep down.
I don’t especially like Palin that much, myself, but not for the same reasons. I found her slightly vapid and too likely to resort to the same sort of populism. But she is at least a breath of fresh air compared to the sack of rocks that DC republicans are.
…maybe he had a change of heart?
No, just a change in tactics.
So you know what’s in his heart? Once a communist, always a communist?
Neither did Ron Radosh, who knows his communists.
Presumably because he was one. Does that mean that he still is a communist?
The HUAC used to ask people “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Do you want to bring that back?
So you know what’s in his heart? Once a communist, always a communist?
I haven’t heard him renounce it.
The HUAC used to ask people “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Do you want to bring that back?
When it comes to vetting political appointments, yes, I have no problem with it at all. And I’d say the same thing about the Klan.
“The HUAC used to ask people ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Do you want to bring that back?'”
Not with HUAC, but it seems a fair enough question for private citizens to ask someone running for president. If McCain or Palin (especially Palin) had had an “Uncle Franz” who was a member of the National Socialist Workers Party, and had spent most of their lives hanging around with members, fellow travellers and sympathizers of the National Socialist Workers Party–or even people who disavowed the party but expressed admiration for its key goals and beliefs (“I’m not a Nazi, but I do believe in a Jewless society. The Nazis just went about it the wrong way . . . .”) , you can bet members of The Hive would be putting a similar question to them. And rightfully so.
Then he went and wrote a book on how green jobs can save our economy.
What qualifies him as an expert on either green jobs or the economy?
The HUAC used to ask people “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Pelosi’s version of the HUAC would ask, “Are you now or have you ever been against universal health care?”
So you know what’s in his heart? Once a communist, always a communist?
Rich coming from the side which constantly brings up every “sin”, real or imagined, supposedly committed by the Right, as a way of saying the Right’s ideas and ideals are illegitimate and discredited. As if Hoover and Nixon and McCarthy and Goldwater and Reagan are still running the GOP and conservatism from the grave. We’re just applying your standards (such as they are) to you and your side. Get used to it, learn to deal with it.
It’s our post-war passion for college, fueled by its immense subsidy by the taxpayers, what did it. Just go to any high school today. You will find it stuffed with “college prep” classes, or AP classes, on literature and English and history and much besides. What you won’t find are the shop and home ec and accounting classes of yore, stuff that prepared you at age 18 to get a job and start your own household. And since parents now almost all expect their young ‘uns to go to college, they put up with the transformation of K-12 education across the board into a “college prep” business, where you are trained to write papers, express yourself critically (and in accordance with the accepted shibboleths), debate on your feet with wit and aplomb, et cetera. But not, as I said, to have any practical skills.
It’s worked quite well. I’m always impressed by how sophisticated the generation in their late teens and early twenties is at debate and philosophical argument. They have skills in this kind of thing way beyond their years.
Of course, on the other hand, they are appallingly unprepared to do anything constructive. Astonishingly few know how their car works, let alone how to fix it, or even oversee its repair. They have vague and fuzzy ideas of the relationship between interest rates and risk, are often positively delusional about the relative worth of different forms of work, and profoundly ignorant of the general workings of an economy, even at the very microscopic level of an individual small business. All of these things their parents, or better still their grandparents, knew far better.
Maybe that’s is at it should be. Maybe the Republic has evolved to a world exporter of philosophy and ethics, a Keeper of the Flame, like the late Romans thought of themselves. But I kind of doubt it. I doubt the rest of the world wants to pay us the highest wages of all for the wonders of our philosophical and esthetic insight. It sure didn’t work for the Romans, or the Athenians before them.
In any event, I think it’s quite natural for young people to be collectivists and statists and (modern) liberals. When you are just learning to flex your intellectual muscles, it’s natural to think that properly enthroned intellect can and should rule the world, sweep away all the cobwebby drudge of experience and tradition.
It’s experience that changes this. It’s earning your own money, trying to manage other people, keeping your house together and solvent, raising children, forging agreement with business partners, that drives home the quirkiness of human nature, and the profound value of individual liberty, and the woeful shortcomings of any intellectualized theory of utopia.
We go too long, way too far into adulthood, before we acquire that experience, these days.
Just to keep a historical perspective: If you look at the programs advocated by Marx and Engels in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, the general run of Democrats and middle-of-the-road Republicans wouldn’t have a problem with most of them. And less than a hundred years later, socialist candidate Upton Sinclair announced that he was giving up his regular runs for the presidency, because the socialist agenda had already been “co-opted” (as they would say in the Sixties) by the New Deal, whose legacy only hard-core libertarians would want to uproot now. The statist ante is always being raised, which is why conservatives always have to be re-drawing the line.
Post-script: I think one of the lessons we can draw from the fact that the Stalinist ideology is not dead now, 56 years after his demise, is that it did not — does not — need a living Stalin or Soviet Union to sustain it. It’s a mistake to find the roots of these problems in a historical figure, or a historical period, regime, writing, whatever. The roots are in us naturally. There is something in human nature, or at least in the nature of some humans, that makes them prone to Stalinism, like some people are supposedly prone to alcohol abuse and drug addiction.
That is, in short, to paraphrase the famous statement about God, if Stalin and the Soviet style of thinking had never existed historically, we can be quite sure someone would invent them. It’s a disease we’ll fight forever.
At the time of the HUAC, Comintern was deliberately and actively recruiting in Hollywood and among public servants.
If I ask someone if they are a traitor to this country, if they aid traitors, if they support an ideology as incompatible with the existance of America as Nazism was- and that announced its intentions to destroy America- and they say they don’t want to answer taht becasue it might make me believe taht they are a traitor…
…they aren’t heroes, Jim. They’re traitors. And anyone who idolizes them or demonizes HUAC is… probably a Liberal or a Democrat.
Carl… listen to Rand… listen to Rand… So we can read more from you!
At the time of the HUAC, Comintern was deliberately and actively recruiting in Hollywood and among public servants.
With little success. By 1957 the CPUSA was down to 5,000 members, 1,500 of them FBI agents and informants. J. Edgar Hoover flirted with taking over the party by ballot; instead he paid the dues that helped keep the CPUSA afloat, so as to have a justification for devoting most FBI resources to anti-Communist investigations rather than, say, organized crime (which, according to Hoover, did not exist).
It’s been a long time since the Communist Party was any sort of threat in this country. Even when it was a threat, anti-Communist investigations did more harm (e.g. by hampering the civil rights movement) than the CPUSA did directly.
It only we could say the same thing about the communists (little ‘c’) in the Democratic Party.
Er…Jim, d’ya suppose the Soviets were stupid enough to suggest that their Western agents openly join the Communist Party of the USA?
Do you suppose when the British recruited spies inside German-occupied France in 1941, it advised them to join the Resistance, too?
Jim’s obviously the kind of guy who, if Gus Hall, Lillian Hellman and Dalton Trumbo had assassinated Eisenhower, would have said, “Yes, but the real threat to this country is from the anti-communists!”
Buy note that Jim has now sidetracked the discussion away from Marxist influence on Obama to a debate on HUAC, the Red Scare, etc. It’s like Kos or some Alinsky summer camp hands out a training manual on the SOP for posting on pr0-freedom blogs. ‘Today, kids, we’re going to discuss one of the basic tools in your kit: the Shifting Sands argument. . .”
The Soviets were stupid enough to fund CP-USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP-USA#The_Communist_Party.2C_Soviet_funding.2C_and_espionage
Indeed, Bilwick — there are people who still, to this day, blame the JFK assassination on right-wingers.
It’s like Kos or some Alinsky summer camp hands out a training manual on the SOP for posting on pr0-freedom blogs. ‘Today, kids, we’re going to discuss one of the basic tools in your kit: the Shifting Sands argument. . .”
Exactly. Who needs agents when there are memes? Agitprop has outlived the USSR the way influenza has outlived wtf organism first spawned it.
As that report famously said almost three decades ago, if a foreign power had imposed this educational system on our nation, we would rightly consider it an act of war.
Instead, it’s a civil war. One that should be fought whole souled but isn’t. It seems all but lost and makes every other fight possible. I still have trouble not thinking we are living in some alternate SF universe to elect a president with these credentials. Or that a murderer can be hailed as a lion of the senate.
Instead, it’s a civil war.
Indeed; it’s just a cold one for now.
Bill Ayers was invited to speak at a University in Nebraska and when Nebraskans found out about it they got very angry. So the University there uninvited the Weather Underground leader. Why should this man be allowed to continue to influence our children in our schools?
The Weather Underground organization was responsible for the death of 3 police officers, 1 in San Fransisco and 2 in New York city, when is justice going to catch up with Ayers and his cohorts? Is it finally starting to happen now.
Of course not. He should be scorned & vilified. It’s a shame too many in power cling to the false “glory” of the revolutionary 60’s.
He shouldn’t be allowed to continue shoving all of his terroristic ideals into the education system. Until parents of students in schools have some form of outcry towards him then maybe he will be removed from his post.