At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent — Joseph Sobran
The Cult of Obama is disintegrating before our very eyes, and fundamentally transforming America has not proven as easy as Barack Obama had once anticipated. Now, it’s only the True Believers and the uninformed who cling to him still.
True Believer and democratic strategist Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, this past Sunday in the New York Times wrote that the American public has been “desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led.”
Yes, you read that right: “they were ready to follow wherever the president led.”
As a True Believer, Drew Westen was not, I assure you, speaking hyperbolically.
If you’ve ever wondered how tyrants come into power with the full sanction of the people whose minds they control — that, reader, what you just read by professor Drew Westen, is precisely how.
There’s also True Believer Charles Fried, of Harvard Law School, who echoed Drew Westen’s above sentiments in a piece entitled — incredibly — “Obama Is Too Good for Us,” wherein, according to his saracastic counter-commentator David Harsanyi, “he disparaged a system that allows mere simpletons to transfer their free market absurdity to Washington through elections.”
And True Believer Jacob Weisberg of Slate wrote that because of “intellectual primitives” on the right, “compromise is dead” and “there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed.”
In response to which, the same David Harsanyi quoted above said, with more irony still:
“Reasonableness is shoving a wholly partisan, Byzantine restructuring of the health care system through Congress in the midst of an economic downturn. But chipping a few billion off a $3.7 trillion budget in exchange for raising the debt ceiling is an act of irrationality that has, apparently, sucked the very soul from the American project.”
Yes, the Obama cult is disintegrating. The primary reason: Obama’s dyed-in-the-skein neo-marxist politics, which, among other things, led to Obama’s brainless acceptance of a cultic doctrine called Keynesian economics — a colossally flawed doctrine which, mathematically speaking, can never work, no matter how many Nobel Laureates propound its virtues.
I speak not to the True Believer (because he no longer has ears to hear me) but to the moderate believer when I say that the sooner you come to terms with this fact — the fact that Keynesian economics with its endless borrowing, printing, and spending can never lead a country or a county out of poverty and into prosperity — the sooner, then, that this country will begin to heal at last.
In the same way (and for the same reasons) that the majority of socialists do not know they’re socialists, so, too, the majority of Barack Obama’s followers don’t know the political-economic ideology they’ve accepted. For most, it never mattered. And yet what I wrote in 2009 is, I believe, more relevant now than it was even then; so I’ll say it again: those millions who fainted and swooned over Obama’s easy platitudes but never bothered to question his actual political-economic ideology, even when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming America,” that, reader, is the stuff of nightmares and nationwide cults. The reason the majority of Obama’s disciples don’t know the socialist ideology they’ve accepted is that the majority have no actual understanding of even the most basic political-economic principles, and that is why the propaganda of the leader — e.g. “We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free market principles” (Obama, 2009) — works well on the believers. This, of course, is as true of the right as it is of the left.
But one thing Barack Obama had not reckoned on which has proved his undoing:
Because of America’s unique origins, there exists in the minds of many, many Americans a bedrock belief in the principles of liberty, individualism, and hard work, which are the diametric opposite of the entitlement mentality that socialism fosters. This conviction is almost never explicitly codified by those who hold it, and for this reason that hold is tenuous and poorly defended. And yet the conviction exists. As a matter of fact, it’s bred deeply into the very fabric of America, so that uprooting it by force, as Barack Obama intended when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming America,” created a massive counterforce from coast-to-coast which has stunned Barack Obama, his whole clownish administration, and ultimately precipitated the disintegration of the Obama cult.
Because of America’s origins, the spirit that’s become engrained in the minds of so many Americans would rather the country were torn asunder than let a race-obsessed, intellectually weak, neo-marxist poseur succeed at fundamentally transforming it.
It is, finally, important to note also that the principles of individualism, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which define the American spirit I speak of, are not, contrary to popular belief, anti-charity, coldhearted, or unkind. Just the opposite: America has been by far the most generous and charitable nation in human history, and for one very good reason: we could afford to be.
Until now.
Obama’s plummeting approval, as of August 11, 2011.
