Obama’s perversion of the meaning of America

Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Wisconsin tonight consisted of a long list of limitless promises that government will provide people with every conceivable human material need. His vision is socialism from start to finish. But then he says, I’m not unrealistic, I’m not pie in the sky, I know this won’t be easy, I know you have to work hard and struggle for things. But what he means by working hard and struggling is not the work and struggle of people to advance their lives, to build things, to produce wealth—it’s the work and struggle of people to pass government programs to take care of their needs.

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Terry Morris writes:

Liberals such as Obama and the people who follow him are like thieves. They’re very creative and talented, and invest a great deal of energy and thought in the advancement of their illegitimate, self-centered designs to make their livings off the property and labor of others. If they would just redirect their energies to the pursuit of just and moral means for providing their own sustenance, they’d have no need of stealing the wealth and substance created by those who actually produce and make a legitimate contribution. In reality liberals are in a perpetual state of rebellion against the command of God that “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread all the days of thy life.”

LA to correspondent:

It’s awfully empty. He looks good, has good delivery, does not seem like a sleaze. But his rhetoric is appealing to a debased population that expects government to meet every conceivable human material need.

Correspondent to LA:

Did you see the McCain speech too. The contrast was remarkable.

LA replies:

What about the McCain speech? I didn’t see it.

Correspondent:

Well, coming after Obama’s McCain’s was real sleepy and instead of a good crowd he seemed to have only a few people who clapped rather feebly at lines obviously begging for applause which really said very little, such as we’re going to Washington to serve the American people. And he was flanked by John Warner and some other old guy. It really looked like the geriatric corner.

LA replies:

Wow! “We’re going to Washington to serve the American people!” For substantive meaning and oratorical inspiration, that’s right up there with Bob Dole’s signature line in 1996: “This is America.”

Thucydides writes:

The enthusiasm with which Barack Obama is greeted has reached the point where even liberal columnists are put off. Joe Klein calls it “creepy.” There are recent reports of women, even of middle age, screaming and fainting as they once did for Elvis or the Beatles. I have friends, otherwise sensible people, who have rushed to cast a primary vote for a candidate about whom they know nothing at all, to be nominated for president. They find Obama’s speeches highly inspiring, even though they consist of no more than the usual tired liberal proposals.

This mania proceeds not only from Obama’s careful presentation of himself as a blank screen for hopes and fantasies, but also from a particular vision of politics, deeply rooted in our Anglo-Protestant history (the “shining city on the hill”) and in Enlightenment fantasies of a rationalistic reorganization of society, which dominates public thinking, especially but not only liberal thinking, and to which both political parties pander. In this vision, government is conceived as a vehicle for the pursuit of the ideal. Transcendent hopes are entertained of abolishing want and of a cessation of human conflict, goals that are by definition impossible of any ultimate fulfillment. All good things are to be provided to whomever wants them at no expense to the recipients. Government then is the means to the imposition of a common dream, to be implemented under the direction of a highly charismatic leader in whom complete faith and trust is to be reposed. Nothing less is envisioned than the abolition of human tragedy and contingency.

There is an alternative vision, much more practical and down to earth, which is now very much in eclipse. It starts from a recognition of human imperfectability which casts grave doubt on the feasibility of anything more than cautious efforts at modest improvements to our collective circumstances. Further, it recognizes that human values will often clash. For example, who can say how much justice and how much mercy, or how much liberty and how much equality is right in some given situation? It sees that forms of human flourishing are many, and most of them will not conform to some one ideological point of view. From this point of view, the idea of the collective pursuit through government of some unified ideal society is not merely difficult or impossible, but simply incoherent.

This vision sees government as providing a framework within which individuals, acting jointly in private association, or on their own, can pursue their own projects and dreams. Government protects individuals from one another. This is close to the vision of our founders, but it does not seem we can preserve it, for we are besotted with millenarian hopes. Our politics has become a sort of substitute religion, and a much degraded one at that, in which the highest ideal of citizenship is mobilizing to demand benefits for ourselves at the expense of the community.

LA replies:

It’s the very success of our society that gives rise to these unworldly hopes. How do you argue for the old fashioned conservative vision of “a recognition of human imperfectability which casts grave doubt on the feasibility of anything more than cautious efforts at modest improvements to our collective circumstances,” when America, and modern life in general, has by its specacular materal successes gone so far beyond such a limited view and thus created hopes for even greater fulfillment?

Transatlantic Conservative replies to RB:

You write that an “Obama presidency actually [would] reinforce the “Traditionalist” polarity in American society”

Is there enough time for that waiting game? Think Islamization! Think nanny state! I tend to think like you on this but I do have severe doubts on the feasibility of waiting for four or eight years. I also do know that McCain is no alternative.

When I look at how democracy becomes perverted I doubt whether a further move towards the left in America can ever be remedied in the future.

How is democracy supposed to continue to work when a significant majority of the people sucks on the teats of the Nanny State? When a minority (us) finances the existence of the care-dependent majority? Conservatism will never be able to influence life and politics in the U.S. again by sticking to democratic means. 60 or 70 percent of state-subsidies junkies in a population will continue to vote for political heroin from the left. We will pay for the stuff until the system collapses.

LA replies:

I remind readers that Transatlantic Conservative immigrated to the U.S. from Europe after 9/11 (though he hasn’t told us from what country). He has seen close up how the Omnicompetent Provider State subjects people to an unaccountable bureaucracy, removes their initiative and spirit, takes away their freedom, strips away their identity, and empties them of life. They turn into passive things.

The closest the U.S. came to that was the Clinton proposal in 1993-94 to place the entire U.S. medical industry under state controls. At the time of that battle, I experienced more fear about a political event, fear in my gut, than about any other issue in my lifetime. I felt that once this bill was passed, we would have lost our freedom and there would be no way to get it back.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 12, 2008 11:39 PM | Send