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Anguish over Obama
Jason writes:
I understand why the Republicans are in trouble. I understand that the current president is going to go down in history as one of our worst. I understand why the Congress changed hands, because we elected people who claimed to be conservatives but governed as liberals. I get all of it.
But has it gotten to be so bad that we are actually going to elect an anti-American, unpatriotic racist?
Has the country lost its collective mind, or is the general population really this stupid? Are we in this blog and a few others the only ones to understand the danger a person like Obama represents? How he hates the country that made him what he is, and seeks to see it torn down? That he says absolutely nothing when he speaks, but because he speaks this nothing so well they think he is the Messiah or something? Or is it that America still feels this collective guilt over something that hundreds of thousands of people died to stop in the 1860s, and part of the country was ruined, and yet it is still not enough for them?
I watch the news, the pundits, talk radio, etc. Nobody has been able to explain to me how we are so close to this. How the political party of FDR, Harry Truman and JFK would sink this low. That the people in that party are so filled with anti-American rage, self loathing, lack of any spiritual guidance, and leftism that they cannot see that they are voting for their own demise.
I just do not understand how we got here, or more important, how we get out. Maybe some of the people at VFR can explain it to me. Because I am at a loss, finally.
Sorry to be such a downer so late at night, thanks for all you do.
- end of initial entry -
David B. writes:
The 2008 Presidential election is a case of the In party being so unpopular that the Out appear certain to win. The Republicans offer nothing but a 72-year old wreck of a man, in Mr. Auster’s words. Obama undoubtedly saw that he would never have a better chance than in 2008. I wrote previously that Obama would have lost by a McGovern-Mondale type landslide had he been nominated in 2004. The circumstances of this year are why Obama has a chance to win. On the GOP side, there is nothing there.
The changes in the culture in general in the last 40 years favor someone like Obama. White guilt and self-hatred has become a religion. Liberal opinion makers are doing everything they can to help him. Eventually a presentable black Democrat was going to combine the McGovern-type voters with the black vote along with other nonwhites to win the Democratic nomination. Someone like Obama was going to be the Democratic nominee sooner or later.
Even so, he is not as far ahead as Jimmy Carter was at the same time in 1976. The cultural changes are why Obama can be nominated. The abysmal failure of the GOP is why it looks like he can win.
LA replies:
And let us not forget the way the Republican and conservative commentariat focused all their energies for a year on the absurd chimera of Giuliani, based on nothing but the idea that he was “tough” and had good poll numbers. They didn’t look at the whole picture of Giuliani, his utter inappropriateness for the GOP nomination, let alone for the presidency (something this website has pointed out for years). Showing the inability and refusal to think that is their hallmark (e.g., immigration, Iraq, Muslim democratization), the neocons abstracted a couple of factoids or slogans about Giuliani into an all embracing notion of his “inevitability,” and on that basis they closed out better prospects, particularly Romney. When Giuliani collapsed (the neocons’ Man of Inevitability won a total of one delegate), and McCain rose, his erstwhile supporters went into a funk, with many of them not waking up and opposing the looming McCain disaster until the week before McCain drove Romney from the race. Without the Giuliani idiocy absorbing all the available political oxygen, without the conservative opinion leaders’ childish rejection of Romney over such supposedly fatal flaws as that he is “plastic” and “not a regular guy,” Romney could have garnered serious conservative attention that would have raised his profile and helped him carry key primaries, and right now instead of Obama facing an aged mediocrity, he would have been facing an outstandingly capable opponent.
Adela G. writes:
Please thank Jason for his late-night musings. They were a downer, sure, any mention of Obama tends to be. But they were also a good summary of the horrible position in which we find ourselves.
I think the left has lost its mind. I now seriously believe extreme left-wing thinking is some sort of mental disorder. But the rest of the population is not stupid, only ill-informed. The left-wing creep (like shariah creep) proceeded so slowly and so stealthily that it took over the media before most people even noticed. So ordinary people going about their busy lives sincerely believe they are well-informed if they read their newspaper and/or listen to the nightly newscast. Until I started reading voraciously online, I had only faint suspicions that all was not well, that things were not as the media told us. But I have plenty of free time in which to ferret out for information online. Most of the women in my conservative town in a red state I know are working full-time outside the home or have children or elderly parents to care for. They don’t have the luxury of browsing online, they simply don’t have the time. They believe what the media says about our country and worse, they believe what the GOP says about itself.
I don’t think this can be stressed enough. I think if the majority woke up to exactly what is going on with the Dems and the left generally, then our biggest problem—that most Americans have not woken up to the fact that there is a problem—would be solved. But that waking-up takes more time than most middle-class and working-class people can spare. They would have to realize that the media are deceiving them, then get the accurate information from the right and then see the left for what it is—an anti-American authoritarian force determined to “deconstruct” our nation by waging “soft war” on its institutions and citizenry. Once we get the majority up on its hind legs, we can start to reverse or even undo the damage that’s been done.
And there’s another problem. I think some genuinely well-meaning people are more willing to embrace Obama just because he is black (he’s actually biracial, not black, of course, but the myth of his blackness is just another example of his telling his “story” the way he wants it to be, not the way it is). It’s not that they are racist but that they mistakenly think this support for a nice young black man somehow shows they are really good people. I can’t blame them for that—I used to feel much the same way. I used to tamp down the uneasiness I felt toward certain blacks just because I thought it was wrong to feel that way toward blacks. Instead, I’d go out of my way to give them the benefit of every possible doubt. I think that’s part of what we’re seeing now. Obama is presentable, articulate (heh heh), intelligent in a way that, regrettably, passes for intellectual these days—oh, and black. What’s not to like? His anti-Americanism and anti-white racism are passed off by the left as peripheral non-issues obsessed over by white racists solely for the purpose of derailing the campaign of our first black candidate for POTUS.
In conclusion, I think a sizable portion of the population would be demanding the GOP provide a truly conservative candidate if only they realized the dangers threatening our country and how pernicious that nice young black man really is. I truly believe the left are still a minority but since they control the media, all branches of government, the educational system and the military, their presence and influence are felt everywhere. We need to wake up the majority of Americans before it is too late. Unfortunately, I have no idea of how to do this.
P.S. Kind of wordy but I wanted to make the case for my belief that most Americans are not left-wing or anything near to it. Most are centrists or conservatives misguided and misled by the left-wing teachings they received in school (and at home if they, like me, were raised by a liberal mother) into thinking that the left occupies the moral ground and any criticism of blacks is racist. Most people simply want to be good people living good lives. The left has defined goodness in this country for so long that their version of the truth is accepted by nearly all now as conventional wisdom.
Mark Jaws writes:
Great entry, Lady Adela - but the Left does not control the military.
Steven Warshawsky writes:
In response to Jason’s concerns about Barack Obama, for what it’s worth I am confident (and have been for many months) that there is almost no chance that Obama will be elected president this November. Yes, there are many reasons to gnash one’s teeth over the present and future state of this country, not the least of which is the near-total failure that the Bush Presidency has become. However, we are not “close” to electing an unpatriotic, leftist, racist to the White House. Don’t believe the hype coming from the mainstream media. As other commentators have pointed out, the results of the Democratic primaries in key states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania demonstrate that Obama has limited appeal beyond blacks, diversicrats, and urban intellectuals. With Obama at the head of the Democratic ticket, even liberal states like New York and California could be won by McCain. Why? Because the average voter recognizes that Obama is the unpatriotic, leftist, racist that Jason fears. This will be too much even for many liberals. White voters in particular will shift strongly to the Republicans this year; Hispanic voters may also. Barring a physical or mental breakdown by John McCain, or a disastrous VP choice that will further alienate grassroots conservatives, I predict that McCain will achieve a decisive victory over Obama. (I recognize that many folks on this site disagree that this will be a good outcome.)
Jack S. writes:
I read your post with interest. It is the symbolism of an Obama candidacy and, worse yet, presidency that would be most harmful to the American psyche. The sons of Europe would be relinquishing control of America to the sons of the Congo. In one bound America will have leap-frogged the worst insanities that liberalism has wrought in Europe to become a Zimbabwe or South Africa in waiting.
The never-ending demands of the black mob and the civil rights hustlers will not be satiated; they will see their victory as a sign of our weakness, a signal for further outrageous demands. Already we see that ever more outrageous black crimes in inner cities are met with calls for gun bans. A black Muslim shot a white Philadelphia cop with an SKS during a bank robbery the other day. Result: the Philadelphia papers are full of calls to ban assualt weapons. A similar discussion ensued after a spate of shootings in Chicago by black criminals a few weeks ago. Obama himself has called for an outright ban on the private ownership of handguns. Widespread handgun ownership is the only thing that has kept (so far) a lid on the worst depravities of black criminals. The risk of confronting an armed prospective victim is a concept that even their lower intelligence can grasp.
By the way, the quality of your correspondents is extraordinary. I find the comments of Howard Sutherland, Mark Jaws, Steven Warshawsky, and Adela Gareth particularly compelling.
Dimitri K. writes:
In response to Adela G., working women from small towns trust their feelings. And their feelings tell them that Obama is a nice guy. And he is a nice guy. Which does not mean that he cannot be selfish, unexperienced or a socialist. Actually, many people believe that money can be printed and distributed evenly. You need to prove to them it is wrong, either by persuasion or by example. The problem with conservatives is that they lost contact with simple working people.
Carol Iannone writes:
Steve Warshawsky has some good points but as far as Obama not winning some of the key states against Hillary, those Dem voters, many of them, probably a majority, will go for him once he is definitely the candidate. That they voted Hill and not O in a primary does not meant that they will go Republican or not vote at all once O is the candidate.
RB writes:
I recently sent the following to a Jewish liberal friend of mine who is on the verge of waking up due to his concern over Obama:
Re our discussion of Obama. As Bob Grant likes to say, somebody’s got to say these things, so it might as well be me. A lot of us are now scared of Obama and his associates. But we must understand that he did not appear out of nowhere. The policies we have indulged in, and even reveled in, for the last 40 years have laid the ground for the inevitable appearance of an Obama like figure on the presidential stage. Yes, before the 1960s blacks, at least in the South, were subject to discrimination and oppression. But in spite of that, or perhaps due to the pressure that they were under, the black family was largely intact and blacks were generally self-reliant. Then we removed the cork from the bottle, so to speak, but instead of raising them up to the level of whites we have defined our own culture downward to their level.
There has been a campaign of relentless propaganda pushed by the elites and the intelligentsia, including all too many of our “co-religionists”. Blacks are always portrayed as the victim in spite of the fact that a far disproportionate amount of violence including inter-racial violence is perpetrated not by whites, but by blacks. Thus stories of white violence are manufactured and then trumpeted by the media as truth—e.g. the Duke rape hoax—and held out as examples of white racism. But real crimes, such as the recent murders of two white coeds in North Carolina and Alabama, are minimized, and if reported at all the racial angle is ignored. Then there is the torrent of films churned out by Hollywood in which villainous or hapless whites are always set straight by heroic selfless “magic Negroes”.
When you combine this with the perpetual vilification of Western culture, incessant anti-American propaganda, constant bashing of religious and evangelical Christians (and Mormons), the pushing of the gay agenda even at the public school level and the opening up of our borders to an unprecedented influx of incompatible third world masses, you should not wonder how it is that we have come to this state. For now you have a totally untested prospective president, the offspring of a ditzy hippy mother with a sexual obsession for foreign non-white men of Muslim background; and one who has many questionable connections and associates and whose only qualification is an exotic name and interracial background.
Now if Hillary manages to steal the nomination from this clown, how many of us will breathe a big sigh of relief and go back to business as usual by voting, once more, for our favorite evil couple? But remember, the soil of our current predicament was well fertilized by the Clintons and their ilk, and if we go back to business as usual we are only setting the stage for the next appearance of Obama or by someone even worse.
Don’t think that McCain is much better. It may be that he is the lesser of the evils (or is it the evil of the lessers) and we may have no choice but to vote for him. But you’d better be prepared for constant vigilance with McNasty. For in his own way he is as bad as most Democrats; he is a pimp for the cheap labor lobby that dominates the Republican establishment. This group is almost as stupidly self-destructive as any bleeding heart American-hating liberal.
So there are fools to the left of us and fools to the right of us. But we may be at a crossroads. The Obama Nation phenomenon may have given us one last chance to repent of our foolishness. And ironically, we can thank the Clintons who with their egomania and amazing sense of entitlement have inadvertently turned the rock over exposing all the scurrying creatures on the other side.
Jason writes:
It has been a pleasure reading everyone’s responses, so thanks to all.
I do have one question, I wish I had as much faith in the American public to see the light as some of the others do. We elected Bill Clinton knowing what a horrible person he was in 1992, and then re elected him after several scandals knowing he was a felon in 1996. As bad a candidate as Bob Dole was, nobody could question his commitment or patriotic feeling towards his country, as they can and still do with Clinton, but people voted for Clinton en masse anyway.
We elected Jimmy Carter, but had enough sense to throw him out after one term. But that was because of Reagan, not because of Carter. What we appear to be counting on is Obama to lose, since it is obvious that McCain cannot actually win.
My fear is that the possibility of a third Bush term, which is what a McCain presidency would be (I hate it when the left is correct, but even a broken clock is correct twice a day), and Bush being such a disaster, that people are looking for any kind of “change” they can find to try something different. Obama will be the only option, unless a miracle happens and either we find a way to remove McCain from the ballot in Minneapolis, or Hillary Clinton manages to convince the super delegates that Obama is truly unelectable (and then if you live in Denver it will be time to evacuate, immediately).
I totally agree that the infatuation the Republican party had with the liberal Giuliani is the reason we have the more liberal McCain now. All of my Giuliani friends (and here in the People’s Republic of New Jersey they were numerous) had what I coined Hillary Fear! They were so afraid of Hillary Clinton and the press and fake polls had convinced them that Giuliani was the only hope. (Little joke here amongst the few Tancredo people who worked with me on a real campaign, Giuliani out spent us almost six to one and only got one more delegate then we did .) [LA replies: And of course that great political genius John Podhoretz wrote an entire book on the inevitability of Hillary’s nomination and the fact that the ONLY Republican who could beat her was Giuliani, and therefore the Republicans HAD to nominate the liberal Giuliani and forget about all their beliefs except for beating Hillary, which ONLY Giuliani would do. Podhoretz spent months trumpeting this book. And from that great achievement of political and cultural analysis, he was elevated to the editorship of Commentary.]
Now of course we have the worst of choices. A racist unpatriotic nut or an old liberal pretending to be a Republican. Unfortunately, we all have to get behind the latter, because we may not survive the former.
I never thought I would find myself hoping a Clinton can pull off a miracle, but here is hoping.
Thanks again everyone,
Mark B. writes:
This is an excellent discussion about the forces driving our upcoming presidential election. From where I live in the liberal enclave of Madison, Wisconsin, it strikes me that one aspect to be considered is that the tensions within the Democratic Party reflect the differences between the academic Marxists who understand that socialism must be international, and the pragmatic socialists who still believe that “socialism in one country” is a desirable goal.
Obama is the figurehead of the Marxist academics and their youthful dupes, cleverly selected to attract a large established voting bloc. Remember, the struggle of the working class in all countries forms the basis for the movement towards Socialism. The Clintons are the more pragmatic intellectual heirs to the “socialism in one country” theory of Nikolai Bukharin. It is this version of national socialism that Stalin wholeheartedly adopted and that justifies all the Nanny Statism smothering Europe and growing in America. Now with the opportunity to gain real power within reach, both sides are going do what they can to seize it, and history is fairly clear that competing socialists really hate each other.
Adela G. writes:
Mark Jaws writes:
“Great entry, Lady Adela—but the left does not control the military.”
Mark, I’m sorry to have to disagree. I have no first-hand knowledge of the military, never having served in it. But actually, it was this recent entry at VFR that prompted me to add the military to the list of American institutions controlled by the left. Several men wrote in to illustrate the PC epidemic within the Air Force at their time of service, the 1980s. PC, like kudzu, only expands over time unless vigorously and persistently attacked so I have no reason to believe it’s any less pervasive now throughout the Air Force than it was then.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But consider this: women are everywhere found throughout the military (indeed reports of women becoming pregnant while serving are common). This wanton mischief in allowing women in other than administrative and back-up roles in our military can only be the work of the left. No true conservative or traditionalist believes there is any place for women in combat.
I say this as a woman who likes nothing better than spending time at the firing range with my AK. I would certainly stand and fight for my country, were the fight to come to my doorstep, as it were. And I would certainly do all I could in a non-combatant way if the enemy were actually on our shores. But women have no business in the trenches and on the front lines—nor reviewing the troops, if it comes to that.
In short, taking together specific anecdotes and well-known actual policy, yes, I consider the left in control of the military. Perhaps our real area of disagreement is in my use of the word “control.”
LA replies:
Adela’s argument that the left are in charge of the military raises a difficult question I’ve discussed for many years, of how do we describe various leftist phenomena as “leftist” once they have been accepted by the entire society including self-described conservatives. As I’ve said before: Is there ANY organized effort by conservatives to end the role of women in the military? No. Is there even any CRITICISM by established conservative writers of the current role of women in the military. No. The most that conservatives say is that they are opposed to women being put in combat positions. (Of course they are already are in quasi-combat positions.) No conservatives—not a single name conservative in this country—attacks the present sex integration in the armed forces academies and in basic training and in other units.
So, once the ENTIRE COUNTRY including conservatives accepts and doesn’t even dream of challenging sexual integration in the armed services, how can we call this policy “leftist controlled”? Leftism has simply become mainstream America. And once that happens, once things that were once unimaginably radical become mainstream, is the left—the left? Or is it simply what ordinary, commonsensical, decent Americans believe?
I had a conversation along these lines recently with a conservative friend who completely rejects the charges made against Obama in the last two months, dismissing them as the “conservative attack machine.” When I pointed out the radicalism of Obama’s Farrakhanite church and his various statements, my friend replied that it’s not believable that Obama and his supporters are so extreme and horrible as I was saying; they’re just people. And there’s the paradox: ordinary Americans, Democratic voters, half the country, consider it unobjectionable for a presidential candidate to have been a life-long member of a church where America and white people are routinely hated as the source of evil in the world. Are people who do not object those things ordinary Americans, or are they radical leftists?
Just today, Thursday, the New York Post’s lead editorial said this about Obama:
So far, the Illinois senator has made remarkable progress, armed with little more than personal charisma, compelling oratory and a couple of catchy phrases.
Now’s the chance to see if there’s any steak behind the sizzle—though Obama’s unsteady handling of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Got that? Obama has been a follower of a black racist anti-white church for twenty years, and has repeatedly lied through his teeth about it, and to the “conservative” New York Post, all that this adds up to is Obama’s “unsteady handling of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright”!
What this says to me is that (1) Obama can be elected, and (2) Obama can serve as president without triggering the white awakening to black reality and racial liberalism that I’ve hopefully suggested might happen as a result of his presidency. Instead, black racism and America hatred will be normalized. Just as every other leftist advance over the last 50 years has been normalized.
Simon F. writes from England (May 11):
Thanks to all for helping to fill in some of the baffled blanks in this Brit’s necessarily-partial scan of the ongoing U.S. political process. I’m frankly amazed at how a country I regarded as deriving its icons through their reconciling self-reliance with super-patriotism can have these three characters as its main players (for PUBLIC consumption anyway). Evidently it’s not just because I’m a foreigner overseas, without the live feeds. Is there any historical record of a precedent for the kind of cognitive dissonance so many seem to be reporting about the changing political/cultural character of their societies?
LA replies:
Just to clarify, by cognitive dissonance, do you mean the thought so many of us are having over here: “How can America be considering electing such a radical”?
Simon F. replies:
Yes, I suppose that’s what it manifests as over there—over here it’s possibly, “How does the pretence that the public have agreed all along with such radical changes continue to escape full acknowledgement?”
LA replies:
You’re talking about what I call the radical mainstream, which Adela G. described perfectly the other day:
“… modern liberalism is self-perpetuating and self-adjusting. However far leftward it moves, it somehow manages to relocate the center of the political spectrum to somewhere within itself. Thus it never appears extreme to its adherents or too extreme to well-meaning but clueless moderates and conservatives.”
Thus perfectly ordinary and decent, or least non-radical, people support very radical things with no sense that they are very radical, e.g., they have no problem with saying that anyone who opposed the McCain amnesty is a “nativist,” or they have no problem with Obama’s 20 year membership in a viciously anti-American church. The paradox of the radical mainstream came up in an especially clear way for me last week when a conservative correspondent, who is so against McCain and the Republican establishment that she won’t accept that conservative attacks on Obama, including my tough attacks on Obama, said to me, “Do you really think that all those people who are for Obama are so evil, like devils themselves?”
There’s the mind-bending paradox of the radical mainstream. People who remain ordinary, decent, etc. are going along with manifestly evil and bad things.
However, the way you’ve put the British attitude (though I’m not sure you mean the British attitude toward America, or toward Britain):
“How does the pretence that the public have agreed all along with such radical changes continue to escape full acknowledgement?”
does not strike me as a thought that many people would have. That’s a thought that only critical thinkers on the right would have.
Also, one other point I forgot to make before. I reject your description of America “as deriving its icons through their reconciling self-reliance with super-patriotism.” Yes, of course, there is such a thing as super-patriotism in America. But America did not derive its icons from super-patriotism. It derived its icons from patriotism.
Jon W. writes:
After I revisited this thread, these probably trivial thoughts came to mind.
When we acknowledge that Americans’ and the West’s frayed links to the transcendent (God to me) account for our moral decay, why are we groping for explanation of the Obama-Hillary-McCain juncture or phenomenon? We have not only drifted far from God. Collectively, we no longer know who we were or are; there is no grounding in a knowledge and understanding of history. You and, most recently, Adela G. limn the success of the Long March advocated by Gramsci. When anchors are loosed or dragged in bottomless mud the people perish.
Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.
— Prov 29:18
For a Traditionalist conservative vision to be influential, I believe it must resonate to an Emersonian Iron String of societal self-knowledge. That string has been slackened or broken.
McCain offers no hope. Every feather in his peacock tail represents the one and only thing he exceeds at: dogged determination coupled with a calculation of how to continue presenting himself as a hero, while devoid of all substance.
“Hey hey ho ho, Western Culture has got to go!” Nice work in driving in one of the last nails, Jesse Jackson. The now strangely silent Jesse is due credit for laying those palm fronds in the path of the Obamessiah.
Adela G. writes:
You write:
“You’re talking about what I call the radical mainstream, which Adela G. described perfectly the other day:”
“… modern liberalism is self-perpetuating and self-adjusting. However far leftward it moves, it somehow manages to relocate the center of the political spectrum to somewhere within itself. Thus it never appears extreme to its adherents or too extreme to well-meaning but clueless moderates and conservatives.”
In all seriousness, I came up with that description by trying to find words for the mental image I had of liberalism—that of a huge, amorphous blob of ectoplasm devouring everything in its path. It was only later that I realized I was thinking of Wilbur’s ghastly twin in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2008 10:09 AM | Send
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