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Born too late to worship at Stalin’s feet, Time apparatchik finds a leader she can love
Nancy Gibbs writes in Time:
Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack Obama never talks about how people see him: I’m not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are. Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people’s faces. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, he liked to say, but people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King began….To call this a purple-thumb day or a velvet revolution, referring respectively to Iraq’s first election following the removal of Saddam Hussein and to the overthrowing of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia, is to say that America never had an election before the election of Obama, never was free before Obama became president. Only now do we become a free and democratic country. Prior to November 4, 2008, America was the moral equivalent of Iraq under Saddam and of Czechoslovakia under the Soviet thumb. Yet, as suggested in the title of this entry, if Gibbs had been writing in the 1930s, when Soviet Communism was in favor with the American left, then instead of making the liberation of subject peoples from Communism her model of progress, she would undoubtedly have been among those lauding the great Soviet Communist Experiment as the model of progress that backward and stifling America should follow. True, by the later days of Soviet period, the American leftist “mainstream” media had turned against the Soviet Communists who resisted Gorbachev’s reforms. However, it didn’t refer to these loyal Communists as Communists, it referred to them as “conservatives,” thus implicitly putting them in the same camp as the conservative President Reagan and the conservative Margaret Thatcher. Like the Koran, the left’s script is unchanging, but highly adaptable. The unchanging part is the devaluing of whatever is seen as oppressive, backward, unequal, and conservative in favor of “progress.” The adaptable part is who gets cast in the role of stifling conservative, and who gets cast in the role of salvific progressive. Thus Communism in the ’30s was progressive and good, while Communism in the ’80s was conservative and bad. Yet notice that whether we’re speaking of the ’30s, the ’80s, or today, America is always cast as the retrograde conservative force. In the ’30s, Communist Russia was better than capitalist and constitutional America. In the ’80s, conservative America under Reagan was paired with the backward “conservatives” in the Soviet Union who tried to stop Gorbachev’s progressive reforms. And today, all of American history up to the election of the progressive Obama is joined with Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Central Europe under Communism.
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