Moderate Republicans; Velvet Stalinists

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

                                               Oscar Wilde

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.

                                               Barry Goldwater

Who could be against moderation in one’s personal habits and conduct?  People are usually better off by not doing too much or too little of life’s basics – eating, drinking, exercising, relaxing, etc.   The “mean” was a centerpiece of Aristotle’s ethics – best is a life somewhere in a midway between excess and deficiency.  “Moderation” thus in most any conversation comes with approval and commendation. Extremes are dangerous: extremists are disagreeable and obnoxious.

The word “moderation” applied to an individual’s action or habits both describes and approves of what he does.  A “moderate” drinker is approved of because he habitually hits the proper balance of enjoying the pleasures of a toxic substance with the disciplined, limited (measured) intake of it so as to avoid intoxication and damage to his health.   Pleasure, sobriety and good health are all good things and moderation in this example is what brings these all together in a piece. There is no exact amount of consumption that can describe moderate drinking – “moderation” is inevitably and usefully imprecise and somewhat relative – because circumstances and people are endlessly variable.   

In discussions of politics, however, beware of moderation!  “Moderation” when applied to politicians collapses completely into partisan approbation disguised as analysis and description.  Political pundits and commentators, for example, routinely speak of “moderate Republicans,” a locution they employ to distinguish those so designated from other Republicans – who are what?  “Extreme,” “right-wing,” “radical,” “out-of-the-mainstream.” Moderate Republicans are, in effect, good Republicans, that is, ones that the pundits and commentators approve of.

What then is a “good Republican”?  A good Republican is a Republican who resembles or talks like a Democrat.   The supposed description contained in the phrase “moderate Republican” is really nothing more or less than disguised approval.   The pundit highly approves of Democrats and thus those who insist on distinguishing themselves from Democrats merit approval only insofar as they resemble Democrats.   When the “moderate Republicans” like John McCain or Jon Huntsman compete against other Republicans they are as “moderate Republicans” objects of high praise for the mainstream commentators, but when they eventually come to joust with Democrats, then…well… they are just Republicans and as such members of an inferior, discredited political caste who must then endure the riffs of condescension, derision and contempt from the inhabitants of the fourth estate.

This ideological and partisan use of moderation favored by our mainstream political commentators and reporters is routinely pointed primarily against Republicans and is evidenced by the fact that one rarely if ever encounters the mention of “moderate Democrats.”  If so, who are they?  Who then are the Democrat “extremists” who are distinct from them and who merit the kind of disapproval showered upon Republican “extremists”?   

There are no “moderate Democrats” as distinct from other ones because all Democrats are by nature balanced, reasoned, and above all, moderate.  Thus while there may be some variation among them relative to particular policy, no Democrat will be labeled “extreme” because to be extreme is to be other than a Democrat, outside of that virtuous orbit.  This point can be made with a question:  if President Obama is a “moderate Democrat”, who in the Party represents the extremists on the Left?   
Edward Kennedy as measured on the ideological spectrum was far on the Left region of the Party but at some point in his career he achieved apotheosis and was treated by the mainstream media a pillar of political rectitude, sound reason and moderation. There is some irony in this given Senator Kennedy’s conspicuous lack of moderation in his personal life – his alcoholism, womanizing and abandonment of a young woman companion to drown in the back seat of his car while he conferred with his political handlers.

Since the Kulturkampf of the 1960s pushed American culture to the Left and with it the entire Democrat party, its leading constituents now are composed of teacher unions, trial lawyers and Hollywood actors and directors. The culture-shaping institutions including the universities, the entertainment industry and the media are now dominated by an ideology of collectivism and thus the Democrats as the party increasingly of the Left has established its politics as “the norm” and its candidates as uniquely virtuous, empathetic and rational.  If you are not a Democrat, you are “abnormal,” which is translated by the pundits into the more specific attributes of stupid, mean and greedy.   No longer do the Democrats call themselves “liberals”; they are now “progressives” and since “progress” must be good and what any normal person would desire, non-progressives must be out of touch reactionaries who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them…”

The “moderate “Republican” subterfuge by the contemporary Left is a small part of its practice of “velvet Stalinism”.  Velvet Stalinists share the same premise as their pioneering iron-fisted precursors – power is not to be shared nor critics respected or spared.  President Obama in an unguarded moment made this premise explicit during the 2010 congressional campaign in an interview with Univision when he said: “[W]e're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends ...”   Politics for Stalinists, iron-fisted and velvet, alike, is war. The object thus is to destroy the opposition because it is responsible for all the malignancies that plague society.  In those early days when Stalin was building the socialist workers paradise, the dissenters and unenthused were physically removed from political competition – shot or sent to the Gulag.

Today’s Stalinists not possessing quite the monopoly of force as the General Secretary of the CPSU, deal with their competitors by simply pronouncing them to be unfit, thus there is no obligation have to contest their criticism or ideas.  Nor should they have to since they are by definition “out of the mainstream.”  The competitors are assigned to realm of the stupid, the greedy, the mean-spirited, Fascists, Nazi’s and racists, categories that mean that the opposition should be taken seriously except as a pathological aberration.     

Moderation is wonderful, but it is meaningless in politics.

Obama, the Jacobin, or, The Coercer-in-Chief

“The revolutionary government owes to good citizens all the protection of the nation. It owes the enemies of the people only death.”

                                                  Maximilian Robespierre, 1793

We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.

                                                   Barack Obama, 2010

In 1793 the Jacobin rulers in Paris carried their war against the Church into the Vendée and sent federal troops to attack the refractory priests, small town dwellers and peasants. These people were the French antecedents of our own “bitter clingers to their guns and religion” of rural Pennsylvania, the targets of Candidate Obama’s demeaning, condescending sneer in 2008. The Jacobins carried out a scored earth response to the resistance of the Vendeans.  They burned farms, raised villages and killed indiscriminately.  Reynald Secher, a French historian, has called what the Jacobins did, A French Genocide, the title of his book, published in 1986, translated into English and published by Notre Dame University Press in 2003.

These Republican disciples of J.J. Rousseau were fixed upon the destruction of the old order, a “transformation,” so to speak.  This was a different regime, new in history, run by ideologues who sought to create a new kind of man and a new kind of society.  This was the birth of the concept of the modern totalitarian state as described decades ago by J. L. Talmon, in his book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. The first Jacobins were French, but their ideology was a highly exportable commodity taken up later by Russian, Chinese and Cuban intellectuals who were all practitioners of what they called, “Revolution,” a euphemism for their program of complete annihilation of the ruling class they loathed, including the confiscation of their property, the eradication of their liberties and finally their physical destruction.

Americans have long been reluctant to give power to revolution-prone grievance mongers but in 2008, the voters put a Jacobin into the Whitehouse, a grievance-nurturing man whose 20 year mentor and pastor was an America-loathing fanatic.  Five days before his election Barack Obama proclaimed that “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He did not at that time elaborate what he was intending but nearly four years later it is pretty clear what he had in mind.  Fundamental transformation was Obama-speak for Revolution and it is what he has been about since the day he was sworn into office.  

Jacobins, whenever and wherever they come to rule over others, step into their positions of authority with overweening ambition and loaded with the arrogance of power. The Jacobins arrive with a fanatical moral certainty that lets them give full indulgence to their utopian impulses, no matter what the practical destruction that occurs. They are intent not on governing but on “transformation” to use the President’s own terminology. Institutions must be dismantled, tradition overthrown, people made (coerced) into being virtuous. Tax them, regulate them, fine them and revile them appears to be President Obama’s modus operandi.  “Punish our enemies and reward our friends,” as the President himself so succinctly expressed it in 2010 to his followers – the velvet glove of Hope and Change is now the mailed fist of My Way or the Highway. Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona seem to be part of President Obama’s own Vendée, places whose inhabitants need to be brought under heel and taught who is in charge.

Mr. Obama possesses all of the requisite Jacobin traits.  First, he is a “Knower,” of rare and remarkable powers.  From the early days when he burst upon the national scene as a serious candidate for the highest office there broke forth from his enthusiasts a loud and steady chorus proclaiming his unmatched brilliance and vast intellectual powers.  Unlike his predecessors he was “smart,”  “a great teacher, sort of a god, standing above us,” having “the highest IQ of any President.” Mr. Obama himself was no less assured of his unique status as a universal genius as he strolled before his adoring crowds promising to “change America and the world,” to “heal the planet” and similar modest undertakings.

His vast cognitive superiority in his own mind entitled him to exert as much power as he needed to do whatever he wanted. Thus we see in him the second core element of the Jacobin’s soul – a relentless quest for control over the lives of other people. 

Controlling the lives of people is what Jacobins are all about and explains their love for coercion.  Because they know and understand what others do not they believe themselves to be entirely justified in forcing the refractory, “bitter clingers” to be what they, the Jacobins, want to them to be, which is reflecting  mirrors, imperfect albeit, of themselves.  Jacobins not only demand obedience, they require constant adulation and admiration as well.   

Obama like all Jacobins is a lover of coercion, the most conspicuous manifestation being ObamaCare, a massive, incomprehensible 2000 page work of complexity, confusion and obfuscation.  Its fundamental purpose is to be a legal instrument of such expansive and intrusive reach as to render all Americans in matters of health (physical and mental) completely dependent upon government lawyers, bureaucrats,  and lobbyists – helpless before their Jacobin masters who, of course, have never sought anything but the well-being of their subjects. Obama Care is an unprecedented labor of coercion.  The oversight of your physical and mental well-being amounts to total control over you.  Mr. Obama is also loading up the IRS with many additional agents – a coercer-President needs many additional hands to do his work of forced extraction.

 Government coercion is a constantly expanding and dominating feature of American life. To see the work of our government at its coercive best go to any airport. Watch the countless number of ordinary, law-abiding citizens forced (coerced) to act like motely inmates of a county-jail work detail as they are made to strip off their clothes – jackets, belts, shoes, jewelry – and  thrust their wrist-clasped arms above their heads in symbolic surrender before the scanners of their naked bodies. Ordered about by the legions of federal warders, they must watch them paw through their personal belongings, pat down old women and young children, their hands intruding into very private parts of the body.   

It did not use to be like this and does not have to be like this.  Little of these humiliating and stupid rituals have anything to do with security: their secondary purpose is to harass and intimidate which underlies the primary purpose which is to make everyone clearly understand that their government can do what it wants whenever it wants to whomever it chooses.  Airport security, of course, is what those of us who are ruled have to endure.  Complain and see what happens to you. The rulers, themselves, of course, never have to experience these indignities, submit to the gropers, have their possessions handled by the rubber-gloved crews. And why should they?  Jacobins make the rules for others to follow. For beings of superior virtue and wisdom, they are not necessary.

The airport model of coercion is what the current Jacobins would like all of life in America to be like for those in their charge.

The Reign of Resentment: Barack the Solipsist

 “We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

                                                            Barack Obama

Solipsism:  a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.

 

Some of President Obama’s detractors think that he is a Socialist.  His supporters scorn the notion. It is difficult after reviewing much of what he has done, said and written to believe that he is not.  His autobiography and the account of the authors he read and admired, his mentors, his actions as a politician, suggest that he is. The Europeans still love him, and why not?  He is one of their own, a dogmatic, secularist statist, contemptuous of men and women who make their own way in the world, even more disdainful of  the red state un-sophisticates who as he put it, “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them.” This is a man whose world view expressed in his own words in Dreams from my Father is fundamentally shaped by alienation, resentment and grievances.  He came to see himself as a man with an historic mission – to fix the grievances – the classic Marxist.

Like all the great Marxist ideologues who find themselves historically appointed to order other people’s lives, Obama apparently fancies himself to be a genius, a man far above all others. Stalin was the “Great Teacher,” Mao, the “Great Helmsman,”….  Obama in 2008 became … “The One”, “the Change we seek.”  He would in his own words, “heal the planet” and “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” This is not the rhetoric of regular campaign politics, not the typical blustering of an aspirant to high office. It unabashedly expresses the fantasy of an egomaniac. The monumental energy and enthusiasm of his campaign came not from his ideas or vision or achievements.  There was no content beyond the candidate, personally – his eloquence, intelligence and personality.

The 2008 campaign of Barack Obama was thus a huge paradox – on the one hand it was all about HIM, his brilliance, his charisma, his style, but at the same time he was nothing (NO THING) that could be defined or described in a substantive, empirical way. His complete lack of executive experience, scholarly, intellectual depth and legislative accomplishment turned out to be an advantage, a useful nothingness that let him be an alluring mirage, completely protean, a wholesome, earnest, moderate, “pragmatist” who could charm the independent voters disillusioned by George W. Bush, but at the same time  let him play the role of a cerebral “activist,” radical enough to enthrall the elite Leftwing stalwarts and the Hollywood limo-set of his party who loath those Neanderthals who drive pickup trucks, go to church and live in awful places like Texas, North Dakota and rural Indiana.    

The Obama campaign was all about The Obama who managed to be everything to everybody.  Once elected, however, he could not avoid revealing that his enthralling message of Hope and Change was smoke and mirrors.  Hope and Change could be nothing other than nothing because nothing, after the fumes of his soaring oratory dissipated, was what Obama was offering in the way of a better America.

Obama has always been exclusively about Obama.  Every political office he has held was merely a prelude to the next step up; his career a non-stop exercise of self-adulation and self-promotion.  Obama, one must conclude, governs as he has lived, that is as a solipsist. The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.  Obama as our leader has turned out to be that complete "Self" undergoing the only modifications that matter, his own. He contemplates nothing but his own self’s facets of perfection, preternaturally blind to certain intractable features of a world outside of that Self that he will not and cannot comprehend.

Obama’s solipsism should have been recognized during his campaign, not so much a political campaign but rather the successful creation of a cult of personality.  The personality cult is the culminating phase of solipsistic rule where the number of courtiers who eagerly chime in a unison voice to affirm the ruler’s wisdom and infallibility, reaches a critical mass. And so it was. As Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, Evan Thomas announced on television to fellow Obama-worshiper, Chris Matthews, Obama was “a sort of god.” (“In a way, Obama's standing above the country, above -- above the world, a sort of god.") Mr. Thomas never elaborated on just what “sort of god” we all might expect Obama to be, but suffice it to say that he and his colleagues who formed the bulwark of the Fourth Estate had conceived a mighty strong “crush” on this U.S. Senator of two years tenure, most of it spent campaigning for President. The crush demolished whatever critical capacities they might have exercised. The Gods exist to be admired and worshiped, not criticized. With their fawning adulation and uncritical devotion, by the time of his inauguration Obama became the genius who was the resurrection and amalgamation of Abraham Lincoln, FDR and JFK.

Obama was the refreshing, stunning contrast first to the harridan, been-there-done-that Hillary Clinton then to George W. Bush, by the end of his Presidency deemed to be intellectually, morally flawed and deeply so. Bush now was a palooka, a political Piñada whom everyone took turns whacking. McCain, helpless and old was no match. Obama in stark contrast was a star – cool, contemporary, photogenic, an Olympian standing high above the fray, descending only to bestow calm, impart his wisdom and receive thanks.

Bush was served up as the benighted antipode to an unblemished Obama, a uniquely singular individual (The One), morally and cognitively complete, a phantasm proclaiming that “We are the Change we Seek.” Obama thus became a totality, both the question and the answer, that Self, outside of which nothing else is important or relevant. There was, however, no “We”. There was only Obama himself mirroring the “Genius of Obama” to be held in contemplation, admiration and … anticipation.

The anticipation is long over and so is much of the admiration. With his re-election campaign of character assassination and four-plus years of solipsistic rule we possess a real, empirical grasp of the “Change we seek.” Our Chief is that Change, a change that has not turned out not to be what many people who voted for him had in mind. Something very essential was lost in the translation from rhetoric to reality.  Like all of the other solipsistic princes, his modifications of Self have produced nothing that seems to have made his subjects, other than his friends and political supporters, any better off. 

The disappointment that inevitably follows in the wake of the prince’s shortcomings of Self turns the solipsism into a rather ugly spectacle of blame and resentment.  Since the Self is perfect, the appearance of the gross disparity between perfection and reality which inevitably happens cannot be the doing or fault of the prince. With the arrival of the dashed high expectations and the unfulfilled promises someone or something must be blamed. The great solipsists have always been prodigious blamers. There is nothing else, practically, for them to do, and when the time for it comes … be careful.  For the misery of his realm, Stalin blamed the “wreckers” and “Trotsky,” Mao, the “capitalist roaders” and “running dog imperialists,” and for Castro, it was “Uncle Sam.”  Obama blames George Bush, the Republicans, and the European financial crisis. There is always a scapegoat du jour. The blame brings into clear focus the objects of the solipsist-prince’s acid resentment, namely those who have failed to recognize his genius and conform to his perfect understanding. The blame enables the prince to preserve for himself his image of his unsullied Self. 

The fate of the solipsist-Self is an immersion in resentment.  It seems reasonable to predict that over the next several months one will see in President Obama a man full of blame, increasingly resentful. When he finally departs, resentment will be all that remains.

Greed versus Arrogance

The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. I need money. That’s what I want.

                                                               Little Richard

                    

Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.

                                                                                     Sun Tzu

Greed – the thought of it seems to make people crazy and resentful. It drives them into the streets looking for things to break, someone to injure.  In the gathering storm of the financial crisis in Europe protestors gather themselves in a collective high dudgeon. They set upon the police, smash bank and store windows and execrate the “greedy rich” who refuse to pay their “fair share.”  Greed, they lament, is the cause of their misery and the reason behind the threatening economic collapse. The protesters apparently know exactly how much wealth other people should possess and clearly they understand that the rich among them are just too rich.  Rich enough and too rich – by what measure, what rationale does one separate these two regions whereof residence in the latter makes someone “public enemy number one?”  It is not an easy question, given all the complexities of human motivation and aspiration, I would think, certainly not one left to an angry crowd roaming the streets and not to an ambitious politician eager to play Robin Hood if it works for him. 

Most people, I would wager, would like to be rich, certainly most poor people – all else being equal, rich is preferable to poor.  Moreover, if they could be rich, how many of them, I wonder, would not want to step over that line and be too rich, and how exactly would they know if they were?  

However, I think less about greed than I do about arrogance.  In my life I have met very few people whom I could recall as greedy, genuinely, voraciously greedy, but I have encountered more arrogant, vainglorious people than I can remember.  Arrogance does, and has done, incredible damage … to individuals, to associations, to institutions.  Arrogance unlimited makes otherwise smart and talented people reckless, stupid and insufferable. I find it remarkable and lamentable that more attention, discussion and commentary are not given to this wretched corruption of the human personality. No one likes an arrogant person. Yet, there are so many of them in so many places. Why is this?  

Consider first where it lives. Arrogance tends to follow all of the conventional measures of success, which is, of course, why so much of it is tolerated and even indulged. The poor, the wretched, the down-and-out are not often to be found in the ranks of the arrogant. This is not to say that all successful people are arrogant. Many remember where they came from and how much of what they have what and what they are comes from the fickle favor of fortune.   

The personal arrogance of someone can be more easily born if there is at least some compensation for it. Spectacular genius, immense productivity, and rare talent can make arrogance in the bearer tolerable and somewhat forgivable. At least you or someone gets something in return for the condescension, haughtiness and disdain that must be endured. In individuals whose accomplishments and talents are unremarkable or imaginary, it is insupportable and infuriating.             

Arrogance, if you will, is a kind of epistemological malfunction caused by errant beliefs about one’s own capacities and stature and what they ought to signify to others.  Most people become arrogant, I suppose, because they believe what they are told about themselves from those around them: parents, their handlers, their professional agents and publicists, the sycophants, camp followers, ass kissers and favor seekers.  At some point, early or late, they come to imagine that they are special, more talented, more intelligent, more gifted and pure than anyone else in the world.  And so, because they glow brightly and stand far above all others, they claim exemption from the annoying norms, customs and expectations that govern the lives of lesser beings. “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,” as Leona Helmsley was reportedly overheard to say by her housekeeper.    

          Arrogance has a number of curious facets.  One is stupidity.  John Edwards – one can hardly think of a man more stupidly, perhaps insanely arrogant. A former United States Senator, Democratic Vice President Nominee 2004, top contender for the Presidential nomination in 2008, while campaigning in the primaries as a champion for the poor and a devoted husband to a terminally ill wife, he was frolicking backstage with a campaign groupie who eventually bore his child, belatedly acknowledged. His lying, evasion and double dealing have forever rendered him a sorry, contemptible fraud, and, a barely escaped convicted felon.  

How was someone so ambitious, successful and supposedly bright so utterly stupid as to think that he would not be exposed and eventually ruined? Moral and ethical considerations aside, a simple consideration of self-interest should have warned him that he would soon fall to earth.  Arrogance, unbounded arrogance turned this supposedly intelligent man into a pathetic fool who ruined his life and betrayed his family and supporters. This was a man done in not by failure, lack of opportunity, or bad luck, but by success.  False, vain and deeply cynical, Edwards was unable to recognize and appreciate the gifts of good fortune, and he never seemed to possess any sense of humility that might have helped him govern his personal life and act like a decent human being. 

Often arrogance also makes people reckless as well as stupid. Two words – Monica Lewinsky – capture the face of arrogance in one of the more astonishingly reckless spectacles that have ever risen to a national level of attention and entertainment. For whatever it was that he took away and treasured from his encounters with the chubby White House intern, Mr. Clinton, a very popular and likeable man, put his Presidency at great risk while also demeaning the office. He humiliated his wife and daughter and permanently soiled his reputation. He became the butt of countless jokes and fueled the lewd antics of the late night television jesters. Only arrogance can explain such reckless and inexplicable conduct.  He was, like Mr. Edwards, another victim of success.  He clearly thought that he could do whatever he wanted to and was exempt from the norms that govern mortals.

Arrogance is destructive. Taken to extremes it brings about for some such a heightened self-regard and self-infatuation that even the most self-interested forms of prudence fall away. Off they stroll self-confidently down paths of self-demolition with their detractors and critics unable to contain their glee.  Anthony Weiner, a New York congressman, destroyed a rising political career with sordid and embarrassing conduct that any rational individual should have known would eventually be discovered and ultimately ruinous.  When exposed Weiner initially fumed with a feigned indignant posture.  He maligned and defamed those who had accused him. When the evidence of his embarrassing “hobby” became incontrovertible his arrogance suddenly collapsed into abject self-pity. Devoid of honor, class or dignity, he blubbered and talked incessantly as if the inflated verbiage emitted would undo the lies that trapped him. His pregnant wife, of course, had to witness the pathetic downfall.  

Arrogance comes in different forms. There is the arrogance of power, spoken of above.  Power like alcohol intoxicates and distorts the judgment. Like the drunk behind the wheel of his car who cannot perceive his own (temporary) impairment and unfitness to manage the basics of driving and the danger he threatens, the arrogantly powerful man cannot seem to grasp the reality of his own human limitations and shortcomings and consider the feelings, the opinions and the legitimate interests of other people.

There is also an arrogance of talent. Like power, it can distort the possessor’s judgment. What the arrogantly talented man fails to understand is that his talent, most talent, comes via lottery, a genetic lottery.  Rather than appreciating the good fortune, the arrogance takes charge and like all arrogance distorts and impairs judgment. The possessor of a special talent in his own imagination magnifies its importance so as to establish his universal superiority and hence his own deserved elevation above his peers.  The arrogantly talented man believes that his special talent makes him an on expert matters far and wide.   

          Consider, however, intellectual arrogance, the arrogance of people who know more and understand better than anyone else.  Intellectually arrogant people tend to be the worst of them all. Why?  Talented and powerfully arrogant people usually focus on themselves. They are in their own estimation special and unique. They just want and need be treated differently – adulation, special entitlements and heightened consideration. But intellectually arrogant people want to run and manage other people’s lives because they know what is best not just for themselves but for everyone.  They know what you should eat, drink, smoke, drive and, of course, think.  Those who think differently are not just wrong, but bad or stupid or corrupt.  Intellectual arrogance is the apex of arrogance because it culminates with a desire and compulsion to make everyone be what they are supposed to be according to the blueprint that they, the superior knowers, have intuited.  That the blueprint might be defective or flawed never occurs to them.

When intellectually arrogant people acquire power, the result is disaster. Imagine having your life and the lives of everyone around you managed by a self-proclaimed, self-appointed cadre of consummate know-it-alls.  Once in charge you will be expected daily to celebrate their wise counsel, thank them for their benevolence, and comply enthusiastically with every new whim they conceive, all of course for your own well-being and improvement. If you don’t, there is punishment in the form of reeducation, that is, if you are lucky.  If you decide that you would rather live in a place governed by less enlightened mortals, they won’t let you leave.  This describes the lives of tens of millions people throughout the twentieth century who have lived in the classless, Socialist Workers paradises where everyone is equal.

Of course, the professional know-it-alls don’t know nearly as much as they think they do and when things fail to work out as they had predicted, they always  find someone else to blame, never themselves. From the delusion of omniscience comes the desire for omnipotence.  For these superior knowers to admit to being wrong would mean that they would have to relinquish that coveted, unlimited power over the lives of others and to be accountable for shortcomings that they can never admit having.

The great crimes and ravages of the twentieth century are largely the work of intellectually arrogant men, the supreme knowers, lethally overconfident – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot. Their special knowledge they thought entitled them to a kind of power over others no one else had ever had.  “Unlimited power above all law” as Lenin would have it for his own Bolsheviks. The knowers would sweep away the old, corrupt order. Mao spoke of the “four olds”:  old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas that he wanted all of China to be done with and transmitted his own astonishing arrogance to his young Red Guard to make it all happen, by violence and force. The “old” was made and maintained by the unenlightened.  The elimination in China of the “four olds” made way for the three C’s – corruption, coercion and collusion, the essential, defining features of every Communist dictatorship. Mao’s “wisdom” from the beginning was a kind of insanity born of his arrogance. His political heirs who still rule over a billion and a half people in his name could not survive if the Chinese people were offered alternatives.          

Barack, we never knew you!

[The Obama administration]… is to a unique degree a presidency of inference.

                                                                                       Peggy Noonan

Un homme est qu'il fait, pas qu'il dit.

                                                                   André Malraux

In a column in the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan suggested that Barack Obama’s Presidency was an unprecedented work of inference.   One can hardly exaggerate the significance of this observation. Indeed. Somewhere in those dark, vast rhetorical regions bordered on one side by the soaring words, “there is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America”, and, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” on the other, the real political convictions of this man reside.  What are they?  What is he really about?  As Ms. Noonan astutely concludes, even after three and a half years one can only infer what these might be.  Making these inferences seems to be a full time occupation for the pundits.

          The verb “to infer” has at least two basic meanings: (1) to derive conclusions from facts or premises, and, (2) to guess or surmise.  It does not seem unreasonable at this juncture to surmise that “Hope and Change”, the campaign slogan of 2008 was a cynical but brilliantly crafted ruse calculated to make it possible for any voter in that broad middle spectrum of the electorate to infer that the young, fresh earnest candidate from Illinois was … The One, exactly the right person to replace the man everyone seemed to have grown tired of. The premise used to make this inference was completely and deliberately vacuous – inviting a blind leap of faith, so to speak – compensated for by the pastoral, inspirational tone of Barack Obama and a soothing personal imagery unfortunately with no connections to any empirical reality. Complicit also was the press corps who forsook their professionally mandated oversight and signed up with the self-proclaimed “genius” routinely demonstrating his modesty with tropes like: “we're going to change the country and change the world.” Overnight the so-called reporters turned into groupies, surrendering themselves to a man who was promising to “heal the planet” and proclaiming to his followers “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” In retrospect, how could this vapid effusion from such a bloated ego have been taken seriously by sober or grown up people, much less news people who are supposed to be critical and skeptical?  

The unprecedented strategy by Obama’s fantasist-managers was not to expose him – his personal history, beliefs, or accomplishments – to the electorate but to conceal him. The concealment was aimed to put the voters in the position of guessing what the translation of Hope and Change into practical politics from a man with a meager political career might look like and what its enactor really believed and wanted to accomplish.  A few of his detractors suggested that he might be, of all things, a “socialist,” a charge sneeringly dismissed by the camp following legions.  What nonsense! This was only an inference based upon facts about the man’s many long and close associations with friends and mentors, in writing and in person, who actually were socialists, as well as his actual political record which was far to the left of most of his political colleagues.

 Obama was as some have observed a Rorschach candidate. The absence of a lengthy and substantive political career meant for the aspirant and his handlers that he could be … whatever.  From the vacuity of Hope and Change one could “infer” anything which was exactly how it was supposed to work, and did work.

  However, the first definition above of “infer” – “to derive conclusions from facts or premises” is also highly germane in the contemplation of this “presidency of inference.”  In 2008 whatever was actually known about Barack Obama that might be relevant to his fitness to be President was ignored or misrepresented as noted above. Specifically: his lack of executive experience, his questionable associations, his penchant for “going for the groin” with his political opposition.  Never before was the manufactured image of a candidate – post partisan, post racial, moderate, transparent – such a glaring departure from the flesh and blood individual.  

   A highly relevant document from which conclusions about the President’s political beliefs, attitudes and personality might actually be derived is his autobiography, Dreams from my Father.  Did anyone who voted for him actually read it?  Consider this angry and bitterly tinged extract from it, an account of his gravitation toward Marxism during his undergraduate college years, how it was expressed and how in retrospect he considered it.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated." [From, Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

For those inclined to think of Mr. Obama as a pragmatist, a moderate, a seeker of bi-partisan compromise, what sort of inference should be made of this?  By itself and without much context one should perhaps be generous and dismiss it as hyperbole and melodrama, unfortunate utterings of a spoiled and prolonged adolescence, transcended by eventual maturity – from Marx at twenty to Milton Friedman at forty.  But this is not a confession.  The last sentence gives it away – “We were alienated.”  This is a vindication.  Never in the book does the author show a change of heart or perspective in this regard nor give any evidence of having moved beyond this tortured perspective of being a victim in an unjust and rigged system. Nowhere in the book is there any indication that the future President ever came to believe that his “alienation” was in large part a product of his own immaturity and limited experience, that the “constraints of bourgeois society” were not “stifling”, and that, the America that nurtured him and eventually raised him to its highest legislative body was not, as his wife put it during the 2008 campaign, “just down right mean.”

          One important personality feature that can be reasonably attributed to Obama after a reading of Dreams is that author (around 30 at the time of the writing) was a deeply alienated and resentful man. From his own writing it is quite clear that resentment was and is the driving force of his political career, and that his growing up was shaped by a lasting sense of anger and grievance. Also clear is that this resentment was played out in his choice of friends, associates and mentors, individuals also deeply alienated from American traditions and filled with grievance and hostility toward American traditions and customs. 

          The man in 2007 who told his audience, “I don't want to pit Red America against Blue America. I want to be President of the United States of America,” is no longer around. The Audacity of Hope, lifted from one of Pastor Wright's sermons, became the audacity of bait-and-switch.  Unfortunately, the real political convictions of Obama, the ones he has carried from his university days and artfully concealed, came out in his Univision radio interview in late 2010, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Hope and Change, whatever it was supposed to mean, has given way to condescension and condemnation and the pursuit and destruction of his enemies, the rich.  His message for reelection, “fairness” now is built on the foundation of his primal motivation – resentment, converted with considerable demagogic skill into righteous indignation.  Those who have more are to blame for those who have less.  The resentful young man who “ground out his cigarette butts in the hallway carpet” never relinquished the anger and hostility that guided him to “chose [his] friends carefully.” 

Early in his Presidency the smitten adulators in the media were comparing him with Lincoln, FDR, and JFK.  He now looks and sounds more like Huey Long or Juan Perón.  But perhaps the President might look to Oscar Benevides, President of Peru in the 1930s for his 2012 campaign slogan, one quite consistent with his words and deeds – “For my friends, anything: for my enemies, the law.”