“For every hundred men who can design a utopia on paper, you’ll find maybe three who can run a chicken farm.”
-Author unknown
When Thomas Sowell passes from this vale of tears (Not soon I hope! But he is in his high 70s.) Victor Davis Hanson will have my vote as the wisest man in public life in America.
First, look here.
Conservatives are in a “I told you so mood” – as the 2008 talk-radio bombast about Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, “redistributive” spread the wealth, European socialism, etc., well, turned out not to be 2009 bombast at all.
Moderates and independents sigh, “I can’t believe this is happening to me; he seemed just like Clinton with all that balanced budget talk, balanced energy policy, and mainstream help-the-little-guy talk. What happened to the Barack we trusted?” David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley no longer talk of the knowledge of the great books, of a first class mind and temperament, and a detached calm and sense of competence.
Liberals wonder, “Why is the coolest guy around suddenly flubbing every opportunity to get our agenda passed?” The hard-left laments, “This guy is a triangulator who gave us a nibble, then pulled away the bone.”
His supporters counter, “See, he is a pragmatist and centrist who alienates the extremes.” No, no, no – he alienates them, but now the middle as well. What keeps his approval ratings in the forties is only the idea that the American people cannot quite yet accept a failed presidency after a mere 12 months – one that they had invested such hopes in after the poll crashing of Bush’s final two years.
Stage Three
The finger-pointing and blame-gaming begin since no one can properly address the real and only problem: Barack Obama has had no previous identity or independent ideology. By osmosis (rather than by careful study or life-long experience) he absorbed the trendy left-wing cant that variously manifested itself wherever he traveled, from the Occidental lounge dorm to the Ivy League salon groupthink to Chicago organizing to Rev. Wright’s pulpit to the liberal caucuses of the U.S. Senate. For a while, it was all as easy as sonorously thundering “hope and change.” He never before had to articulate his leftism in any real detail, defend it, debate it, or analyze it.
But now as his polls dip, we hear instead gripes over tactics, not the essence of the problem – the absence of an identity confidently and honestly expressed.
Now here.
I could continue ad nauseam, but you get the picture. So why does Obama serially tell untruths, mislead, and do the opposite of what he promises?
Here are four brief reasons. They are complementary, rather than mutually exclusive.
1) He does this because he can. Obama, from college at Occidental to Chicago organizing, has never been called to account. He was always assured that his charm, his ancestry, or his rhetoric alone mattered, while his record, actions, and accomplishments were mere footnotes. He channels our hopes and dreams and need not traffic in reality. We, the people, like the media, have tingly legs and believe the president is “some god,” and therefore need not question the charismatic face on the screen.
2) Obama is a reflection of an era of liberal academic postmodernism. There are no absolute facts; truth is only an illusion in the eye of the beholder. Reality instead is relative, and predicated on the basis of power. Ergo, what others say is true is simply a reflection of their race/class/gender/religion/cultural privileges. Speaking “truth” to power means simply opposing those who, you deem, have more advantages than you and yours.
3) Obama is a neo-socialist who believes the ends of social justice justify most means necessary to achieve them. As a philosopher-king who knows what is best for ignorant lesser folk, who can’t possibly appreciate all the ways in which he works and suffers on our behalf (Cf. Michelle’s “deigns to run”), Obama reluctantly must employ Platonic “noble lies” to achieve the common good: OK, we don’t understand ObamaCare and therefore fear it and the way it is packaged and sold; but once it is forced down our throat, we will come to love – what is good for us.
4) Obama is a narcissist, who believes that his reality is our reality, that his rules are our rules. If the king, the autocrat, the heart-throb, the prophet, or the messiah says something is true, then facts and reality adjust accordingly. Facts and corrections are boring. And if confronted with contrary evidence, the self-infatuated simply smiles with the assurance that the problem is others’, not his.
And it is, sort of.
Now I’ll add something. I think this is a right-on assessment, because I believe I understand a bit about Obama’s outlook.
And the reason I understand, is I can recall a time when some of that could have described me and people I grew up with – in my teens and twenties perhaps. (Not the socialism though. I was never that much of an idiot. And post-modernism wasn’t so specifically formulated when I was a youth.)
Accomplishments? I don’t gotta show you no steenking accomplishments. I’m really smart!
I grew out of it – eventually. And not without cost to be sure.
And here’s something everybody seems to be missing, for reasons one might attribute to that elusive bogeyman, “unconsious racism.”
Forget his complexion, Obama is a preppie. I don’t believe he’s ever spent a day in a public school in his life. He is the child of privilege through and through, with the same sense of entitlement you find in kids with names like Rockerfeller, Harriman, DuPont and Kennedy.
During that largely innocuous speech to America’s schoolchildren he carefully implied that he grew up the disadvantaged son of a single mother. He didn’t quite say he was poor growing up, but he sure didn’t go out of his way to mention his mother’s PhD or that the grandmother who largely raised him was a bank executive.
Then he kind of slipped and said Michelle “didn’t have much either.”
Michelle father was a Chicago workingman who didn’t have a college degree, but had a decent well-paid job in public utilities, and was an influential Democratic ward heeler as well. An awful lot of folks have done worse.
They were both affirmative-actioned through the Ivy League – and why not? The very wealthy have been doing it for their own not-overly-brilliant or too-lazy offspring for generations.
And, I don’t think they are atypical of this generation of college grads at all. This is what the 60s generation of academics has wrought. A generation of men and women who can build a utopia overnight – just don’t ask them for details.
Or to run a chicken farm.
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