Ayers on America, 2007

In order to puncture Barack Obama’s claim that the far leftism of his associate, the terrorist William Ayers, is far in the past, Powerline plays a brief tape of Ayers speaking in 2007. The latter part of the tape is standard unhinged anti-Americanism. But the first part, I must say, sounds like a reasonably accurate description of the Bush/neocon/McCain policy:

Empire resurrected and unapologetic. War without end. An undefined enemy that’s supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism …

War without end, undefined enemy—sounds like VFR’s critique of Bushism. Where Ayers gets it wrong is that the ideological core of this “empire” he’s denouncing is not arrogant jingoism, but rather a hyper-liberal Wilsonianism. He does get it right, though, when he calls this a “new kind” of patriotism. As I’ve said many times (see “The ambiguous thing that America now is”), the essence of the dominant neoconservative ideology is that it employs patriotic slogans and emotions, of both the noble and the jingoist type, in order to advance right-liberal, though increasingly left-liberal, ideals. The idiocy of Ayers and of the entire left is that they think Bush is a far-right figure, when in fact he is a man of the left, promoting equality throughout the world and inviting the nonwhite world to engulf America and the West. Ironically, even as Bush seeks to destroy white America via open borders and to Islamize Europe through the admission of Turkey into the EU, Ayers, blinded by his leftism, attacks Bush as a white supremacist.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 23, 2008 07:45 AM | Send