By Mark Rhoads -
Conservatives who attack President Obama's motives often miss the point. The president cannot help being who he is because like all of us he was shaped by his youth and education.
The problem is that for all of his pretenses to broad erudition, in fact, Obama had a very narrow formal education limited to fuzzy extra-legal and anti-constitutional contortions and social sciences dominated exclusively by Left-Wing teachers and role models.
Moreover, he was never even exposed to any alternative intellectual tradition in all of his schooling and he never was curious enough to explore alternatives for himself because he correctly understood that his teachers would only reward him for his total compliance with their group think.
Obama's speech writers take their cue from the President and are from the same mold of intellectually confused and frivolous socialist academics. Obama's speeches are filled with meaningless cliches of the Left. One of his favorites he used again when he tried to pay a compliment on Sunday to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for agreeing with Obama on admitting many Syrian refugees to Germany.
As he has so often said before, he said that Merkel was "on the right side of history." This is one of the most common and persistent meaningless cliches in the Left-wing rhetorical stew. History is what it is and only provides us with a written chronology of events. It has no right or wrong side.
But the cliche first became popular more than 70 years ago with Communists who believed in the myth of "dialectical materialism" which promoted the fantasy that the eventual victory of Communism was "inevitable" because as the acorn grows into a tree, so also would Communism replace Capitalism in the forward march of history.
Socialists are so completely self-delusional that their definition of the march of history is synonymous with anything that advances the subjugation of individuals to the state and diminishes their individual rights to be free of arbitrary force that destroys moral autonomy. Socialists justify their lust for power because they claim they know better than individuals what is best for society and your rights are not all that important.
In their world, the state and its elitist leaders are a secular substitute for the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. And like the God of Moses, their secular god is also a jealous god who is offended by any other god that people might worship. That is one reason why federal judges so often have a conflict of interest when it comes to their hostility to freedom of religion because they do not want to admit to any higher authority to the government from natural law.
There are other cliches of the Left that are just as nonsensical. When a socialist says that individual rights are more important than "property rights" they, of course, clumsily overlook the fact that only individuals own property and that ownership is also a primary individual right.
But the more important reason for that cliche is to attack the very premise that individuals are entitled to benefit from the fruits of their own labor rather than surrender their lives in taxes to pay for the all-powerful state. For a great analysis of the contradictions of left-wing cliches, see the web site for the Foundation for Economic Education.
Well written and thoughtful. The question is how does this message ‘get out there’ across a broad spectrum of people.
Right on, Mark. I would respectfully identify “historical materialism” as the source of their speculative philosophy of history. Along with the dialectic, the two “guarantee” the inevitable triumph of the revolution. This inevitability in turn grounds Communism’s ethical reductionism, that is, anything that advances the revolution, like killing, say, more than 100,000,000 people, as Communists did in the 20th century, is justified for its hastening of the inevitable. This is humanity snuffed out. Obama is an intellectual twerp. I don’t think he was trained either fully in the Western tradition, or in his leftist stew, but he viscerally identifies, as you point out, with the worst of the stew. He is simply a nightmare.