Obama is right: all that (most) Americans really care about is fleshpots, not God, nation, or freedom
Steve D., a first time commenter, has an original and insightful angle on Obama’s statement. He writes:
It seems to me that a very important point has gone missing within all the furor over Obama’s recent San Francisco remarks:
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them Š And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The point has been made, repeatedly and well on your own site, that Obama neither understands the mainstream, white population he courts, nor why his remarks should have stirred up so much controversy. To him, they are merely self-evident truth. The point that I think is missing is that Obama is right.
He’s not right for the reasons that have made him claim to have merely spoken the truth clumsily. Obama believes, as you point out, that conservative “beliefs” must be mere epiphenomena, the result of larger issues like “economic dislocation.” Usually, the cause is put down to weak and ineffective government, and the solution is simply to grant government more power. That there could be a reasoned, consistent, and traditional view to the contrary is not a possibility Obama or any other liberal is willing or able to consider. In that sense, he and his supporters are wrong.
But in a very important way, Obama is right, and knows he is. For most of my life, things have been good in this country. People have been well-off and comfortable. They’ve griped about some things—like the slow ratcheting down of their individual liberties—but so long as they could afford larger homes and faster cars and cooler electronic gadgets, they (for the most part) willingly played the role of the docile herd that Washington has scripted out for them. It is only because we have been so distracted—and so compromised—by our material success that we have allowed such core values as religious faith, property rights, self-defense, and national sovereignty to become peripheral issues.
Obama is correct in seeing them as peripheral issues, but only because he has correctly perceived the utter corruption of the American body politic. What he has expressed recently is simply the belief that if someone (he humbly offers himself) were able to turn the economy around, to re-instill hope (read: satisfied avarice) in America, then these other issues would again fade to the periphery. That there are people for whom these are not peripheral issues has escaped his notice for the simple reason that there are far too few of them who are not willing to become corrupted by a good-enough offer. He’s right: given enough material wealth and security, America will quite willingly bow down in political worship of Obama—as he raises above the altar, in one hand, everything this nation was supposed to stand for…and in the other hand, a knife.
Liberalism—of which Obama may be not merely an example, but the exemplar—is in reality nothing but idolatry. And idolatry always ends the same way, every God-damned time. But that is unfortunately a lesson that America needs to re-learn. The big question is whether or not the lesson will kill us.
Paul Nachman writes:
Steven D. is admirably fleshing out that stunning sentence by Roger Clegg to which I’ve pointed you and others whenever I could:
But, on the other hand, perhaps it is a measure of Madison’s success that he helped create a republic in which most people don’t have to worry much about politics, and can take freedom for granted, and don’t worship the authorities. [my emphasis]
(from the very brief “Madison Memory.” )
As insightful and eloquent as I think the Clegg sentence is, it’s not evident to me that he grasped his own larger implication: Such a system can’t be stable, because it doesn’t select for the kind of people who can maintain it, as Steven D. describes. We’re living on capital (i.e. deep, historical insight into human nature and the resulting practical limitations on human institutions especially the state), now heavily spent down, with which the Founders had gifted us.
David B. writes:
Steve D. comments that Obama is right that most Americans care about material things rather than God and nation. I wrote previously that Democratic voters don’t object to Obama’s comment. However, as recently as 2004, being a nose-in-the-air liberal would sink a Democratic nominee. There have always, up to now, been ENOUGH voters to defeat this type of liberal. That is why Dukakis and Gore did not make it.
You have asked whether Obama’s election would bring a large conservative response. I tend to think that if Obama can win, such a reaction would not be large enough. If there is a “reaction,” it would keep Obama from winning in the first place.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2008 11:22 AM | Send