Obama's brave new world :: Political News and commentaries

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June 9, 2009

Obama's brave new world

In what serves as an excellent follow-up piece to our previous post titled "IBD: Barack Obama's Stealth Socialism, Powerline's "Obama's brave new deal" refers to the conclusion of Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler's review of the books and speeches of Barack Obama - that Obama is a serious and ambitious politician who has set about to engineer a transormative leftward shift in American politics and government. Of interest is how close the two views parallel, and how both indicate a far-left socialist turn in America, what Kesler politely refers to as "a politically controlled economy."

As referred to our previous post, IBD wrote:

[...] a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

Via Scott's piece at Powerline, we learn that Kesler speaks of "three waves of liberalism" and concluded with these thoughts on Obama's inaugural speech:

His ambitions are clear: The speech was a pastiche of themes adapted from FDR and Ronald Reagan, the last two presidents to pull off major electoral realignments (less enduring in Reagan's case). What Obama hopes for is a similar breakthrough for the forces of liberalism in this generation.

An enduring Democratic majority is not out of the question. The wild scramble to stop the economic and financial downturn may well leave America with a politically controlled economy that would corrupt the relationship between citizens and the federal government - sapping entrepreneurship and encouraging new forms of dependence on the state, as in much of Europe. That would be consistent with the more socialized democracy that liberalism has been striving for ever since the Progressive Era.

Obama likes to emphasize that America is more like the world than we realize, and must become still more like it if the US is to remain the world's leader. Despite his summoning oratory, his sense of American exceptionalism thus is far less lofty, far more constrained, than Reagan's or FDR's. The greatest stumbling block to Obama's ambition is likely to be the inability of this exceptional president to persuade Americans to follow him into so unexceptional a future.

Given Kesler's conclusions, Scott sounds a warning similar to our own in "IBD: Barack Obama's Stealth Socialism":

As the history of the Reagan administration tends to show, each wave of liberalism has produced results that are extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to reverse. The liberal program has an impetus that is difficult to resist. Here Kesler's metaphor of the waves has its own power. To borrow from Bob Dylan's restatement of the creed: "You better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone."

Unfortunately, as far too many Americans continue to allow themselves and their politicians to sit pacifically by in the name of being politically correct and in fear of being called a racist, America is indeed "sinking like a stone" into socialism. We either start "swimming" out of our malaise or we're going to end up at a "bottom" with no entrepreneurship, no free market, and most of the freedoms that we now enjoy just history.

Click over to the rest of Scott's comments and links here.

Posted by Abdul at June 9, 2009 8:58 AM

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