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Thursday, November 06, 2008

FOLLOWUP. One of our commenters on the last post provides an excellent example of the mentality that's driving much of the left today. So I thought it would be worth responding to. Not because anything can change his mind, because nothing can. He's living as happily in his own world as the permanently miserable are ever able to. But it might be instructive to take a closer look at what amounts to an unbroken string of cliches, stupid assumptions, and the kind of arrogant wrongheadedness which can only be achieved by the shallowest of minds. Here's his comment in full:


Now for some closer attention to his content. The nom de guerre he chooses is interesting. It's derisive, of course, which suggests at the outset that his own leftism is of the internationalist, blame America for everything variety. His opening shot confirms it:


Yes, he's a member of the young, superior left. Anyone who opposes  his own rigidly held notions is by definition a "ridiculous cracker asshole." He is stooping even to communicate with us, which is why he couches his question in terms of irrelevant hilarity. I'll get to his question in a bit, because it's one whose answer is not well understood even by many conservatives. But first, we'll uncover what he's telling us about himself in his next blasts.


It turns out that Captain America's reason for rejecting the idea that Obama might be a marxist is that he's a devout marxist himself. The view of America as a wholly corporate enterprise in which the elected government essentially takes orders from big business is, of course, the contemporary packaging of anti-capitalism. What's the alternative to capitalism? The state-run command economies of marxist inspired nations like Cuba, North Korea, and the old Soviet Union, all of which pushed their peoples into poverty and often into famine, mass imprisonment, and slavery. But we're the "ridiculous cracker assholes" for not accepting unquestioningly that theirs was the better way.

The designation of the U.S. as "the great American Imperial Project" is tired old leftism at its worst, a retread of sixties campus radical rhetoric that couldn't be more ridiculous itself in the context of a Soviet Union that colonized and enslaved eastern Europe for close to half a century. His own next conclusion is comically self-defeating. If we're really an empire, why on earth would we care about a "bad rep" in our colonies? Obviously it wouldn't matter what kind of "PR" we were getting, any more than it mattered to the Soviets that their "PR" was bad in Czechoslovakia after they sent the tanks in to reassert totalitarian control.


In case we missed his earlier revelation that he's a pompous twenty-something ideologue, he gives us more crude sexual imagery as a way of reasserting his superiority over us. And then he lets us know the real reason he's upset about our calling Obama a marxist. Captain America wishes Obama were a marxist. He's profoundly disappointed that he can't bring himself to believe it.


Ah yes. The leftist love of doom and gloom, which is supposed to inspire and attract us as followers somehow. Do they ever stop to wonder why this particular part of their anti-capitalist message doesn't bring us all cheering and applauding to our feet? No. They're so infatuated with their own cynical nihilism that it never occurs to them why all civilizations eventually fall. They fall precisely because the people at some point come to believe that their best days are behind them and lose the courage required to overcome ordeals their forebears dealt with successfully before. Captain America and his ilk are the spearpoint of that sentiment in the world of today. They are so self-obsessed their vision confines them to (hopefully on their part) self-fulfilling prophecy.

The argument that we are doomed because of finite space and finite resources is wholly specious. You can argue that it's true at some conceptual level, but it's fatuous at any contemporary pragmatic level. Individual resources may be finite, but the population of potential resources is so numerous as to be effectively infinite. The only real writing on the wall is the childish scribbling of those who don't understand the power of technology or appreciate the power of human ingenuity. The impossibility of continued expansion and growth through many future human lifetimes is a rhetorical trick. It depends absolutely on assuming that we can know what science will not be able to accomplish in harnessing the energy potential of magnetism, sand, and solar winds. We can't.

The doom of the leftists is essentially a romantic ideal, as old and irrational as the endless divine promises of doom in the ancient religions they scorn so ferociously. But the story is the same story. Man is evil and must be punished. They can't wait for the punishment part because they want to belong to the brilliant elite in charge of the punishing. If you're a cynical nihilist, that's as close to something like heaven as you'll ever get.


Captain America closes as he began, of course, with crude sexual imagery and another one of his odd, built-in self-rebuttals. Accusing us of being the ones who desire "big, strong, powerful" "leaders" is pure projection. The commenters he's trying to respond to only want a president, a man who loves his country and regards himself as being in their service, not in control of every aspect of their lives.

This commenter is, regardless of his chronological age, a child and therefore consumed with childish things that require no logic or explanation. However, he has asked one question that's worth real consideration. Who knows? He might even like the answer.

Why do some of us "cracker assholes" assert that Obama is a marxist? Because his own autobiographies describe an intellectual education that repeatedly found marxist ideas and marxist-inspired activists a congenial resource. The taproot of all his political philosophy as a young man was the radical anti-Vietnam War movement that arose in the late 1960s. If it wasn't in the beginning, this movement rapidly became expressly marxist, allying itself with the communist North Vietnamese and therefore explicitly opposed the "capitalist, imperialist pig" Amerika. Don't tell me this is isn't so. I was there. I saw the dreary stream of mimeographed diatribes that papered the campuses in those days.

As the movement splintered into more radical and openly revolutionary factions, Mao's little red book became a bible of groups like the Weathermen who thought they were the spearhead of an actual violent, and yes, marxist, overthrow of the United States government. It was during this period that they became formal partners with the violent fringe of the civil rights movement, which spawned the Black Panthers as well as the Nation of Islam. The combination of black nationalist political entities with the marxist/Maoist tactics of the far radical left is what led to the Black Liberation Theology of people like Jeremiah Wright, a lineage you can trace in its vocabulary and politics. (The religious component is a threadbare figleaf; lovers of Christ who hate almost everyone are a contradiction in terms and more importantly an easy route to tax-free status.)

It was the alumni and remaining activists from this heritage that were most appealing to the young Obama as he recounted it in his two books about himself. He read and admired the content of Saul Alinski's manual for how to subvert systems from within. He teamed up with Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn to promote a far left radical agenda to Chicago schoolchildren. He served as a teacher for ACORN recruits and what he taught them was the tactics of the Alinski manual on revolution  He formed a twenty-year association with Jeremiah Wright and his church, where the rhetoric of anti-Americanism was culled from the same marxist sources Obama had learned to admire in other aspects of his life and careeer. I'm not even going to link this stuff, because the source materials for it are overwhelming, unassailable, and easily accessible.

Indeed, the only argument that can be made against these influences as central to the current political philosophy of Barack Obama is that he's older now than when he first formed his political orientation. We are being fed a bland assumption, based on absolutely nothing, that the years must have mellowed him and if he now speaks like a moderate, he must in fact be a moderate.

Why must he be? Can anyone point me to the third volume in his autobiographical trilogy that recounts his intellectual repudiation of marxist radicalism in favor of moderation? I don't think you can. This tireless writer hasn't written that book because the transformation everyone wants so much to believe in never occurred. Remember that he never repudiated Wright until political expediency absolutely required it. In sounding like a moderate, he is only following the instructions in Alinski's manual, saying whatever it takes to get inside the power structure you wish to subvert.

I don't doubt that he's a marxist because there's no evidence he's ever been anything but. And there's abundant evidence that there's nothing he professes to believe in public that he won't change, retract, or reverse himself on at a moment's notice.

Which means the only remaining question is just how daring and successful he will be in steering this country very sharply to the left. I concede the jury is still out on that one. Maybe he's as callow and fatally over-ambitious as he seems to many of us. Maybe his courage will fail him. Maybe his political skills aren't up to the task. Maybe the congressional and other leaders in his party will bully him into pursuing a less suicidal course for the party and the nation. And maybe, as Captain America believes (though for all the wrong reasons), the free market will ultimately defeat his intentions.

The American people still get a say, too. If Captain America believes that a solid majority of citizens will ever buy into his favorite arguments, we still have a chance to get our country back. Whatever he thinks he's selling, Americans won't be buying in the kind of numbers that would be required.

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