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Don’t Blame Obama
By:
John
Snyder
Host of In the
Public
Square
john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com
It is my opinion that Barack Obama
is getting a bum rap.
Mind you I am no supporter of
Barack. In fact, I was no supporter of his predecessor,
John
Kerry, or the Democrat nominee before that, Al Gore. I was not a supporter of
that party’s nominees because they were wrong about things. Kerry was wrong on
war—both
Vietnam
and
Iraq
.
Al Gore was grotesquely wrong in his tenacious refusal to acknowledge the
results of the 2000 election. He remains assiduously wrong about climate change
and the solutions to address it. But as for Barack, I find him a pleasant,
articulate, well-dressed, and well-mannered candidate. I find him personally
attractive—much more so than his marmish and
sanctimonious predecessors. But I cannot vote for him for the same reasons I
could not support the other two men.
You see, while Obama is different
in some important ways—not the least of which is that he is winsome—the fact is
that the problem for me is not Obama per se. Rather, as a
general rule, I do not vote for a party that consistently advocates more
government spending for programs when it is clear historically that almost all
of it is devoured in waste and fraud.
It is a belief of mine that, when
we fight wars, we should commit ourselves to win them and not run away when the
going gets tough—especially when other people, such as the Iraqis— are
detrimentally reliant upon us, whether our policy was prudent or not, or
whether we have a well-thought-out exit strategy. Our involvement gives rise to
a duty to restore order, whether we like it or not.
I am of the opinion that
regulation—as a general rule—does more harm than good. I feel the same way
about most government programs. Generally, the more we spend on some pet social
projects, the less we get. At some point we actually get a negative return for
our welfare-and-regulatory dollar. For example, the more we spend on education,
the poorer is the educational outcome of our children.
So, to make it plain, I wonder why
anyone, just as a matter of principle, would want to vote for a party that has throughout its history consistently advocated and presided
over wrongheaded things. Things like: slavery; cessation;
John
C. Calhoun; Jim Crow; Woodrow Wilson and his
idiotic 14 Points. And let us not forget FDR’s un-preparedness for WWII, the
national meltdown under LBJ, the collapse of the Shah and 20 percent inflation
in the late 70’s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, worldwide communist
insurgencies in Angola, Central America and Granada on Carter’s watch, the loss
of Vietnam after Watergate, the no-win policy in Korea under Truman, the New
Deal, the War on Poverty, the social security Ponzi scheme, 150 years of
corrupt big cities’ machine politics, the abortion industry, the Trial Lawyers
Association, the ACLU, inner-city blight, welfare dependency, philosophical
deconstructionism, political correctness, environmental hysteria and union
intransigence in the face of international competition. I know this list may
seem impressive. But I assure you that this litany of bold negligences and
appalling culpabilities are only a superficial sketch of an otherwise
astonishing catalog of human stupidities that the political Left and the Party
of Obama have advocated over the past 140 years. I suppose I can forgive the
Left for being wrong about some things— but I cannot forgive them for being
wrong about everything.
Anyway, you see where I am going
with this. This problem with the
Democratic Party is way bigger and older than Obama. Way, way bigger.
Obama did not create this instinct
to self-destructiveness that is the hallmark of the political Left. He did not
personally create the atrocity of Roe v.
Wade. But the Left is in love with it. He did not consecrate the sexual
revolution with his personal imprimatur. But his party would rather regurgitate
platitudes about “privacy” and “personal choice” than address the moral deterioration
of our society, marked by sexually-transmitted disease, out-of-wedlock
pregnancies, divorce, single-parent family poverty, and pornography. The
solution to these enormous social problems is not more
governmentally-administered cash and benefit handouts. The answer to a social
problem comes in the form of a social reformation. These kinds of problems find
solution in character, manners, responsibilities and moral duty —as well as
government policies which refuse to reward and subsidize the behaviors which
eat out the substance of a healthy society. But such insights are beyond the
vision of Leftist social-engineers. The same hand that distributes free cheese
to unwed mothers in a WIC program butters the bread of the pilot program that
employs the Harvard-brainwashed social engineers. No conflict of interest here,
of course.
Anyway, to reemphasize, Obama did
not and could not have created or invented the magnitude of decay, frustration,
and rage that infects almost every innercity in
America
. Nevertheless
he has profited from it. Moreover, his party has refined the manipulation of
these inner-city lost souls into the angry sacrament of their political
machines.
You see, Obama marches in a great
parade of men and events that have plundered and shamed the United States for
200 years—whether Jackson’s shameful and unconstitutional dislocation of the
Cherokee Nation or his crony war on the Bank of the United States, to
Jefferson’s love affair with the French Revolution, to Madison’s misdirected war
against Britain, to the Mexican War fought to expand slavery westward by a
Democratic president and congressional majority of the time, to Roger Taney’s
despicable Dred Scott decision, or
Wilson’s utterly delusional notion that war could be ended for all time with a
League of Nations. The Democrat party has refined its ability to be on the
morally wrong end of every national controversy.
The feckless policies that gave
rise to American involvement in two world wars can be traced to State
Department policies implemented during democratic administrations, as can be
the reinstitution of segregation in 1913, FDR’s New Deal alliance with the
racist south, and the National Recovery Act that never succeeded at anything
except providing a futile delusion that “change” and “hope” in themselves were
an actual national recovery plan. The
one thing to transpire out of this flirtation with the progressive fascism of
that day was to surrender vast constitutional powers to the Court, which in
turn gave over to government regulators powers that have destroyed
America
’s
industrial might and strangled a pre-depression economy that had a reputation
of growing at nearly ten percent a year.
The one true thing that can be
said about the Democratic Party is that it is a party wrong about everything.
It is a party of historical amnesia and inflexible adherence to
self-destructive and morally deplorable positions. It has always been that way,
and always will be because the Democratic
Party is not really so much a set of political ideas as the politicized natural
appetite of unregenerate human beings to pursue things that harm themselves and
others. We might call it the self-destructive instinct.
Being a Democrat, therefore, is never having to be informed or reformed. It means never
re-evaluating, reconsidering, or learning from experience. This causes us to
identify this intractable age-old and eternal adolescent character flaw as
having the attributes of political ideology. Stiff-necked opposition to reason
and moral compunction may seem ideological in its brazen recalcitrance but it
is more easily seen as simple bad manners or more to the point: a calcified,
un-self-aware character flaw.
In the 19th century the
Democrats hated the Bank of the
United States
. In the 20th they used its successor, the
Federal Reserve, as the means to control the economy. In the 19th century Democrats were notorious, hotheaded militarists. Men like Jackson,
Tyler
and, Polk were
unapologetic jingoists. The democrats encouraged private “filibusters” to
invade Latin American countries like
Cuba
. Now they are the party of pacifism and arms-reduction. In
the 19th century they were the party of slavery, now they claim to
be the party of international human rights. In the 19th century they
were for state’s rights, now they are the party for massive federal government.
In the 19th century they were the party of free-trade, in the 20th they were the party of protectionism. In the 19th century they
adamantly opposed land distribution to common people in the west, now they tell
us they are the party of the little guy. In the 19th century they
fiercely opposed subsidizing internal work projects like the national highway
and the railroads, today the entire thesis of the Left is to hand out money.
What I am trying to reach at here
is that the Left is not a political ideology. Ideologues are deeply engaged to
philosophical presuppositions. And because the Left seldom or never reevaluates
its presumptions (something we call meta-cognition or self-awareness); they
look and act very much like people motivated by stern ideology. But that is to
miss the fascinating calculus of what the Left really is. You see, what we call
the political Left, does not have philosophical presumptions as we understand
them. And for that reason, notwithstanding Right-wing political cant to the
contrary, the Left is really the political expression of moral nihilism. It is
very willing to compromise to get what it wants. And often does so very slyly.
Ideologues really do not compromise. In almost all cases, the left is the party
of incrementalism. It will take half a loaf. Republican activists, on the other
hand, are much more ideological. They will make enemies of anyone who settles
for limiting abortion if they cannot or will not spend all their political
clout on its absolute and immediate legal extirpation. That was the same
attitude of the Republican abolitionists of the 19th Century.
Ideologies are deeply concerned with the fine points of a worldview. For better
or worse, Republicans have indulged ideological sentiments throughout their
history; the democrats have long been the party of opportunism.
This is the "tell" in
the great poker game between the Left and Right.
You see, the Left is much less a
set of philosophical assumptions about the world as it is a set of rigid id-directed appetites. It is an aggregation of opportunists who conflate their personal
interests with the good of society in general. And, to tell the truth, this
flawed habit of mind and character has been the primary enemy of decent civil
government from time immemorial. From Caesar to Sgt
John
Doe, from Mussolini to Kin Jung Il, there is a
consistent parade of humans who have always believed that what they envisioned
and personally wanted was justification for using the state as an extension of
their person desires. That is what makes Leftists so fiercely impervious to
argument or experience, or a sense of the common good. It is not a commitment
to a set of ideas per se which
enthrall them; rather, it is a commitment to a list of things they want. In
short, this is to confuse the Christmas list a child presents to Santa Claus
with a hyper-educated professor scribbling gloss in the margins of Das Capital. They are not the same
thing. Again a list of things may sound
like an ideology. But ideologies actually are constructed in an effort to
create a coherent view of the cosmos. I do not think the Democrats have
anything at all like a coherent worldview. Nancy Pelosi may seem to be
ideological, and so may Harry Reid, but please do not confuse them for Trotskys or Lenins. Rather, they
have all the ideological idealism of Imelda Marcos, or Evita,
or a band of
Cheyenne
braves extorting cows from the passing cattle drivers. There is no appeasing,
no compromising, no questioning in any rational way what is best for the
structure of human relations, society, laws, treaties, economics, regulations,
businesses, environment rules, or life in
America
. There is never a moment of conscious thought about things
invisible like the morality of what they are doing. Just like termite
infestation, the rest of us simply must work overtimes to compensate for the
structural damage they produce.
.
You see, if you really want to understand what is at the root of the Democrat psyche,
just ask yourself, what is the immediate thing you want today, and continue to
want that thing until every other November. Anything before and after that
moment is irrelevant to the instinct to get what you want at a particular
instant in time.. For as surely as Louis the XIV could
not see that he was not the state, Edward M. Kennedy for want of character
cannot perceive that what he wants does not give him the prerogative to take it
from others.
The ironic upshot of all this is that the entire universe of ideas
and ideology in this country is packed into the three-ring circus tent of the
present GOP. That is the only place where ideas and arguments have any traction
or value at all in modern
America
.
Feeling and desire is the coin of the realm over on the Left. One does not need
to sully a good feeling with an actual line of reasoning. If you do not like
the war, get out. Base your campaign on “Hope.” Whatever that
means. If you like clean water, take away property rights and give the job of supervising wetlands to faceless bureaucrats
in the Army Corps of Engineers. If you want lower gas prices, outlaw
speculation. If you’re unhappy with the fact that
Iran
may be making a bomb, just
deny the threat as if the consequences of being wrong do not matter. Profess
your love of mankind, condemn the effects of poverty, but always, always love
pristine nature more. It all gets better that way. If you want free health care
for 30 million uninsured Americans, just tell everyone that if you add them to
a national health service, overall costs will actually decline. You see,
contrary to commonsense and experience, increased overhead and demand will
actually make prices go down! Do not ask them about the rest of the equation.
That has nothing to do with what they want.
Anyway, because the Left is no
longer a place for sane people, everyone with an idea in their head and an
argument scribbled on a note pad has fled to the political Right. And this is
why there is a political identity crisis right now in the Republican Party. The
GOP is beginning to look like
London
in 1940. Here in the big-tent alliance set against the common enemy of
expansionist, militant nihilism—everyone is talking a different language and
set of objectives. That does not make everyone on the political Right actually
conservative or even right-wing, any more than everyone against Hitler believed
in republican democracy. Rather, the political Right has become a party of
refugees from the encroaching insanity of the Left caused by the terrifying
aggressiveness of their imperious indifference to personal rights, economic
freedom, religious liberty and social order. This fear is the only common denominator that can possibly account for a
party that simultaneously shelters Michael Savage, Pat Robertson, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill
Crystal, Jon Voight, Trent Lott, Ron
Paul, Dennis Prager, Tom Tancredo, Gary Bauer, Antonin Scalia, David Horowitz, and the late Charlton Heston under one sagging, rain-soaked big tent.
This explains the soul-anguished
self-destructiveness of Professor Doug Kmiec and journalist Ann Coulter. Under
the sheer menacing power of the approaching juggernaut of Leftist aggression
many a steward has gone mad.
Libertarians, Christians,
neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, patriotic blue-collar democrats,
political and economic realists and simple non-ideologues who are afraid of
Leftist self-destructiveness are gathered like the remnants of many old and
ancient states. They huddle in the final conflict with a world-consuming
nihilism that underlies the social-consumerism of the political Left.
You see Democrats do not believe
in anything. Please do not think I am just being mean. And please do not
confuse the shallow rhetoric of “justice,” or “equality” or the politics of
“hope” as having anything but marketing-campaign significance. People who
believe in things think about those things a lot. And they can explain what
they mean and what it would look like to attain them. Ideologues actually work
to explain their worldview and how it would work. But Democrats do not explain
how anything will really work or what the long terms effects will be. Rather it
is sufficient for them to merely assert desiderata—something
desired as essential— as if that
assertion in itself were a sufficient basis for a political party. None of this
is ideology. Rather, it is avarice.
Id.
Appetite. It is merely a child’s tantrum about what it wants. There is no good faith
effort to actually deal with the logic of problems or the dilemmas of hard
choice.
And this is why I think Obama is
getting a bum wrap. Because none of this has anything to do
with Obama. All Mr. Obama is is the purveyor
of things that Americans want. He is a good salesman. And he promises to give
you what you want. He is the everyman product, with a quality brand name,
new-and-improved flavor, exciting packaging, pushing for increased market
share. This cynical salesmanship in politics was here long before Obama
descended from
Columbia
and Harvard to dwell as the incarnate logo of consumerism and dwell among the
common flesh-and-blood consumers of government products and services.
What all this means is that
nowadays most Americans view voting and politics in much the same way we think
about visiting Wal-Mart. One hundred years of Madison Avenue have conditioned
Americans to think of government as a provider of services to be shopped. And,
like trained consumers, we respond to the marketing of services according to
vacuous and deceitful promises. It is all part of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge of
puffing and salesmanship. Of course, the promises of national health insurance
and a cradle-to-grave welfare state will bankrupt the country and chase off
productive industries and siphon-off the remaining wealth, so that
America
will no longer possess the industry or wherewithal to defend liberty the next
time it is threatened. But the supplier of false promise is not concerned with
whether you overrun the limit on your charge card. He just wants you to buy his
product. We are all willing slaves to this manipulation in one way or another.
We rejoice in it. In fact, we like being lied to. Reality is just not
interesting enough to hold our attention for more than a few fleeting seconds.
So we must invent reality as we go along. And so we have a Democratic Party to
entertain us with the magic lantern show of thoughtless folly without
consequence.
This culture of self-indulgence
cannot help but produce people who conflate the things they want with a
principled position in a party platform. This phenomenon of human depravity
will exist long after the nation is hamstrung and poisoned by the party of
Obama. Because the problem is way bigger than Obama and his
party.
The blame falls completely and
absolutely on all of us. In fact, it is
the necessary and predictable outcome of human wickedness parading as virtue.
You see 100 million voting-age
Americans cannot seem to see that Obama is patently an empty suit. A pet rock. A hula hoop, chia pet,
shredded money in a box, a Hummer, Nike sneakers, a MacDonald’s happy meal. He
is all marketing, all packaging, all ad campaign. And nothing else. But that is what Americans like. We love
it. That is what YOU demand! He’s pretty. He’s articulate. He’s nice. He’s
smart. He looks good on the front of a magazine. In the age of Dr. Phil and
Oprah Winfrey, what do you expect? He’s as charming as a game-show host. Insightful as the TV weatherman. Sexy as a
movie star. What else is there? We couldn’t identify substance even if
it was the million-dollar question on our favorite game show. And that is not
an ideological divide. So please do not be angry at Obama for being everything
to you want him to be.
So let me be clear for those of you who are unsure how to react without a laugh track. It is
America
,
not Obama that has become a vacuous, empty-headed culture of decadent self-indulgent autoerotics.
It has lost its ability to discern substance. Or value quality. Or honor
goodness, truth, or beauty. We cannot distinguish between video games and reality,
abortion and freedom, vulgarity and art, tattoos and beauty, scatology and
humor, masturbation and love, personal identity and body-piercing, decadence
and modern art, celebrity and heroism, homosexuality and marriage, babies and
organic sludge, rock concerts and religion, drugs and happiness, horoscopes and
religion, money and purpose, cynicism and profundity, Indian gaming and
prosperity, Winfrey and wisdom, malls and meaning. For that matter we think
Taco Bell sells food. Yo Quiero! We
have no identities except in the baseball hats we wear, the football teams we
watch, the cars we drive or the TV programs we absorb like Charmin paper
towels. There is no us, no you. If there is something distinctive about
yourself or your neighbor it is probably a designer label. We cannot think,
cannot communicate, cannot read, and cannot add. We do not know history, have
no interest in God, truth, or anything that we can’t spread on a sandwich or
fold into a wallet. We reserve passionate opinion only for unsightly hair,
Viagra, winning the lottery, or the Superbowl. We
have no thoughts except what we regurgitate from YouTube or hear on talk radio
on our drive to work. Our computers are for playing games. The internet is for
pornography. Music is noise. Our lives have become a substitute for life
itself. We are uneducated, spiritless slobs that cannot communicate in anything
but grunts and sound bites. And all your heroes are the same way. Even our
Church services have become surrogate rock concerts.
So why are you blaming Obama?
If you think any of these things
are ideological in content, you are too far gone to even understand what I am
saying— whether you know it or not. As I have tried to point out, the Left is
not a set of political ideas; it is the political aggregation of the eroded
character of our country. As it has always been. It is
just getting bigger and growing into ascendancy. It is the languishing opium
den of self-destructive American appetite over-dosing on too much freedom and a
distributed prosperity created by other generations and sustained by an
ever-diminishing number of sober Americans, like the young heroes fighting for
us in
Iraq
.
So that the only motivation of the Democratic Party that can truly be called
political exists in harnessing the pathetic urchins of
identity-less existence, whether they are mind-numbed environmentalists or
welfare recipients or kids who want free stuff like college, to the
professional salesmen who can give them what they want. Their plan is nothing
more than to feed the illusions and appetites of people who consume and produce
statism by exhorting all of us in the illusions of choice, and leading us to
the point of sale, which just happens to be the November polling place—where we
can vote ourselves our next fix.
So don’t blame Obama. That is like
being angry at the mirror you look into each morning. Or the
man who gave you your sub-prime loan. It is like being angry at
Wal-Mart. They all reflect the things you want.
Okay, you may think that I am
being harsh. Let me ask you. What are you more passionate about right now: the
death of young Americans by Iranian-subsidized terrorists or the price of gas?
You answer that question.
Like Barack’s astonishingly
meteoric rise, so too are we witnessing the swiftest, most astonishing decline
in intellectual and moral virtue in the history of the world. Forty years ago,
we put a man on the moon. Within two short generations we cannot even figure
out that if we do not drill for oil— we can’t drive cars. If we do not build
power plants—we create an energy crisis. If we do not work—we cannot eat. If we
do not make things— we cannot sell them. If we do not have babies—Mexican
immigration is the only alternative. If our population declines—there will be
no one to pay our promised social security. If we chase business out of our
country with taxes and regulation—we lose our industrial base. If we make every
piece of extra farm land into endangered species habitats or wet lands—food
prices must inevitably rise. All these are cause-and-effect relationships that
should have nothing to do with political differences. Arguing about these
things is like arguing about whether two plus two is four. There can be no
honest difference of opinion on these points. Rather, these relationships
having become issues of political debate only because the Left is no longer
anchored in anything but its own adolescent delusions and moral and
intellectual degeneration. Politics does not, cannot and never will transcend
the deficiencies of character. The role of character and moral sensibility is
always the central feature of any important political divide.
This is not rocket science.
We have arrived at the tipping
point, or are very near to it, when it is too hard for this generation of homo imbicilicus—whose
free-lunch life from the cradle to the grave, as shaped by a tawdry,
self-indulgent consumerism, by a ubiquitous brainwashing ad-campaign culture—to
be anything but a nation of nihilistic welfare ninnies. At least 50 percent of
us believe the two oldest lies in the world— the first, that we can eat of any
tree without consequence, which is to say that the
only rule of life is that there are no rules. And the second is like unto it:
there is such a thing as a “free lunch.”
For the rest of us, among the
ever-diminishing number of conscious Americans—huddled in the big, wind-ravaged
tent of the Republican Party and chattering with political refugees who do not
speak the same political language—we must watch the despoiling of our country—the
naked, confused exodus from the closest thing to a promised land in
two-thousand years. And there may be nothing large enough to sew together after
the desecration of this bountiful garden to conceal our contemptible and
deplorable shame. And none of this is because of political ideology. None of it
has anything to do with Obama. None of it. It is not
Leftism. It is not even the Democrat Party. It is the death of character. It is
the demise of moral consciousness. Rather we all are in rebellion to the actual, real, and ordained economy
of cause and effect in a morally-ordered universe.
So please, do not blame Obama.
Like the serpent in the Old Story, he is just giving us what he promises—and
that is to say—what we want.
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