The View From 1776

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan in her August 27, 2010, column (We Just Don’t Understand: Americans look at the president and see a stranger) expressed the growing puzzlement of a majority of voters about the wide gulf between the expectations evoked during the 2008 presidential campaign and the policies and actions of President Obama in office. 

Quote:

“Underscoring the unknowns is the continuing question about him and those around him: How did they read the public mood so well before the presidency and so poorly after? ..."All of this strikes people, understandably, as perplexing. “I don’t get what he’s doing.” Which becomes, in time, “I don’t get who he is.” ..."When the American people have looked at the presidents of the past few decades they could always sort of say, “I know that guy.” Bill Clinton: Southern governor. Good ol’ boy, drawlin’, flirtin’, got himself a Rhodes Scholarship. “I know that guy.” George W. Bush: Texan, little rough around the edges, good family, youthful high jinks, stopped drinking, got serious. “I know that guy.” Ronald Reagan was harder to peg, but you still knew him: small-town Midwesterner, moved on and up, serious about politics, humorous, patriotic. “I know that guy.” Barack Obama? Sleek, cerebral, detached, an academic from Chicago by way of Hawaii and Indonesia. “You know what? I don’t know that guy!”

Continued decline of the president’s voter approval ratings in all opinion polls can’t be refuted simply by imputing racism or ignorance to his critics.  Mr. Obama in office is not the man liberal-progressives or independents thought him to be.

To account for the perceptual gulf, Dinesh D’Sousa’s cover article for Forbes Magazine makes a detailed case that President Obama’s deepest political convictions arise, not from the traditional ethos described as the American dream, but from the African-socialist anti-colonialism espoused by the president’s father.

Durrie Monsma alerted me to a critique of Mr. D’Sousa’s article that appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, written by Ryan Chittum, deputy editor of the Review’s business section.  See this and this.

The closest Mr. Chittum comes to dealing with the central thrust of Mr. D’Sousa’s argument is, “So Barack Obama, who falls somewhere on the middle or right side of the spectrum of modern American liberalism, is now an outsider motivated by anti-American ideals. The birthers got nothin’ on this guy.”

Mr. Chittum’s two articles in the Journalism Review are similar to some of the comments that liberal-progressives post on my website and to many of the private emails they direct to me.  Those communications ignore the basic argument, instead snipe at tangential points or simply dump a load of foul invective.  The matter is settled, in his mind, simply by labeling Mr. D’Sousa’s argument as “paranoia,” “idiocy,” “loathsome,” “stupidest,” “ignorant,” and “racist.”

If his presentation is representative of the Columbia University journalism school’s standards, it’s no wonder that around 70% of today’s journalists are self-described liberal-progressives, who assume that propaganda is synonymous with news reporting.

The inability (or unwillingness) of so many liberal-progressives to respond directly and substantively to serious issues is a marked come-down from Columbia University’s liberal-progressive tradition prevailing from the early 1900s into the 1970s.  Two of President Franklin Roosevelt’s most influential Brains Trust members - Raymond Moley and Rex Tugwell - were Columbia professors who shaped major elements of New Deal socialism. 

During the same period, Columbia professor Lionel Trilling was one of the nations’ foremost literary critics.  In the introduction to his The Liberal Imagination (1950) professor Trilling famously opined:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not...express themselves in ideas but only...in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Professor Trilling’s confident assertion of liberal-progressivism’s superiority was, it turns out, looking backwards.  Liberal-progressives have had no new ideas since the 1930s.  They merely recycle or extend the welfare-state socialism initiated by Franklin Roosevelt.  Obamacare and massive, Keynesian deficit spending are examples.  The only really new ideas have come from conservatives: supply-side economics, lower taxes, and smaller government in President Reagan’s paradigm, along with a growing understanding that Austrian school economic theory, not Keynesian macroeconomics, describes the real world.

In support of Mr. D’Sousa’s position vs. Mr. Chittum’s critique, a few additional points are to be considered.

First, Mr. Chittum derogatates Mr. D’Sousa’s analysis on the grounds that Mr. D’Sousa spent the first seventeen years of his life in India, implying that a foreign observer’s insights are invalid. Mr. Chittum should recall that one of the most admired analyses of American culture and politics is Democracy in America, written in the early 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville, a scion of minor French aristocracy, after his visit to this country.

Second, Mr. Chittum counters the thesis that the president’s subliminal motivation is anti-colonialism by labeling the nation’s founders as anti-colonialists.  Does party B’s anti-colonialism disprove party A’s?  Mr. Chittum’s “so’s your old man” riposte inferentially accepts Mr. D’Sousa’s thesis. 

Third, Mr. Chittum asks, “Did anybody come away from reading Dreams From My Father with the idea that Obama thought his father was a hero? I sure didn’t.”

Mr. D’Sousa’s point was, not that the son regarded his father as a hero (there is no evidence that he did not), but that his policies and actions in office suggest that he identified with his father’s cultural dreams.  Despite Mr. Chittum’s failure to do so, some book reviewers did detect a self-identification between the future president and his father, heroic or otherwise.  For example:

Book Review For “Dreams From My Father,” by Steph Burkhart

Obama and Auma visit with one their grandfather’s wives, “Granny.” She tells Obama’s father and grandfather stories to him. It’s a riveting tale of two people and it helps to define those aspect of Obama’s self and his heritage he was seeking.

From Books, New President Found Voice
MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 18, 2009

Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barak Obama, 1995
Crown Publishing 
480 pp.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

Barbara Foley, an English literature professor at Rutgers University, wrote in her 46-page interpretive essay on Dreams From My Father, “As Obama puts it in his 1995 Introduction, the text records “a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American”

Fourth, Mr. Chittum writes, “Finally, D’Souza denies in his blog post that the piece is racist, but of course it is. Indeed, it’s racist at its rotten core. That’s the whole point.” There is a difference between racism and loathing someone’s policies and practices.  Rejecting Adolph Hitler’s National Socialism or Islam’s jihadism, for example, is not racism. 

Fifth, the president’s policies and actions, not his soothing speeches, are remarkably congruent with the views articulated by his father.  In an article titled Problems Facing Our Socialism in the July, 1965, edition of East Africa Journal, the president’s father wrote:

...let us assume that we take these as our ideals and objectives in Kenya and assume that...we want to satisfy these objectives within the context of African Socialism...the African tradition is fundamentally based on communal ownership of major means of production and sharing of the fruits...to the benefit of all.

...We cannot deal with [foreign ownership of property] unless and until we deal with ownership and within the African socialistic system...we ought to look at the matter within the social context. Looked at this way, we can avoid economic power concentration and bring standardized use and control of resources through public ownership…

Individual initiative is not usually the best method of bringing land reform.  Since proper land use and control is very important if we are going to overcome the dual character of our economy and thereby increase productivity, the government should take a positive stand and, if need be, force people to consolidate...If one were to suppose that the state is an instrument of society and if the society regards growth, as well as the correction of the lopsided development which has characterized this country, as important, then, the society, through the government, which is its instrument, should enforce means by which this growth and change can be brought about…

Certainly there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation...It is a fallacy to say that there is this limit and it is a fallacy to rely mainly on individual free enterprise to get the savings…

“What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains...Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 per cent of income…

There is an additional source for the president’s anti-colonial, socialistic mindset. 

Student radicals in the 1960s and 1970s aimed to destroy “Amerika,” which they declared was a ruthless colonial power subjugating the Vietnamese and the black “colony” within the United States. 

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 issued the Port Huron Statement, its version of the Communist Manifesto.  Weatherman, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and similar underground organizations said that they were merely responding to the criminal nature of our individualistic, capitalistic society. 

Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn were leaders of Weatherman, who as late as 9/11/01 were publicly unrepentant.  When the president entered politics in Chicago, they were his close friends, colleagues, advisors, and early political supporters.