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.

At the outset of the 1930s Depression, General Electric president Owen D. Young was among the heads of major corporations who advocated more government controls of wages and prices to help big business regain its economic footing. 

Since the days of the railroads, the first great, interstate corporations, many of our largest corporations have maintained an uneasy, often close relationship with the Federal government.  Large, interstate corporations prefer working with a single set of national regulations, rather than with 50 different sets of state regulations.  Their smaller competitors are less able to bear the monstrous compliance costs that result.  Business that are big enough, as we have seen, can secure special financial and regulatory dispensations from the Federal government.

Just as Wall Street clamors for the Fed to flood the market with yet more fiat money to inflate the stock market, General Electric wants special favors from the government to give it competitive advantages, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010, 4:11 P.M. ET
GE CEO Says U.S. Is Falling Behind in Energy

By PAUL GLADER

General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeff Immelt warned that the lack of a comprehensive U.S. energy policy and the “stupid” current structure of the industry are causing America to fall behind in new energy fields.

In sharply worded comments at an energy event in Washington, Mr. Immelt on Thursday praised China’s approach to energy and criticized what he called a stalled effort to revamp U.S. energy policy. The remarks came as GE is facing tougher competition around the world from rivals in the markets for renewable and nuclear energy that the company believes get more help from their governments.

“The rest of the world is moving 10 times faster than we are,” Mr. Immelt said, referring to the U.S. during a speech at the Gridwise Global Forum. “This is a great country. But, you know, we have to have an energy policy. This is just stupid what we have today.”

The head of the Fairfield, Conn., conglomerate said China is moving faster to develop clean technologies such as nuclear power, electric vehicles and wind power. He also said China has the right mix of a big local market, innovation in technology, a low-cost supply chain and government policy support. China’s State Grid utility, he said, is larger than nearly all U.S. utilities combined.

Meanwhile, Mr. Immelt characterized the energy regulatory system in the U.S.—split between federal and state authorities—as “a relic of 1860 or something” and said “it has fundamentally no basis in the modern world.”

Countries such as Canada, Australia and China have much simpler regulatory structures for energy and are moving more quickly, he said. The U.S. must decide, he said, if it is serious about updating the 100-year-old “antiquated [power] grid” and whether the much-talked-about “smart grid” is “a hobby shop or a real business.”

GE has long expressed frustration with what it sees as a lack of government support for new energy technologies in the U.S. and for sales of nuclear power and other technologies overseas. The conglomerate’s nuclear unit has won little business in the current round of reactor development around the world, and its wind-power unit faces heavy competition from Chinese manufacturers.

China could spend billions on advanced electricity transmission and distribution systems—collectively known as smart-grid technology—but GE will face competition from State Grid, which is shaping up to be a rival producer as well as the country’s main customer.

Mr. Immelt’s comments appeared aimed at prodding the Obama administration, Congress and public toward action, particularly in areas where GE does business. But not all competitors and peers share his viewpoint.

“It’s easy to point in all directions,” said Guido Bartels, general manager for global energy and utilities at International Business Machines Corp., which sells software and services to help upgrade power grids. “We just need to step up to the plate.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged the need for an overhaul, but said the administration is working meanwhile on steps like funding clean energy technology and research. “We are not going to sit idly by,” he said in an interview at the session.

Mr. Chu, however, said a completely centralized model like China’s would hurt innovation. Laura Ipsen, general manager for smart grid at Cisco Systems Inc., agreed. “There are some potential downsides to having one national utility,” she said in an interview, including overcommitting to what turns out to be poor technology. Cisco hopes to sell $15 billion to $20 billion of grid-related equipment in the next seven years.

Mr. Immelt on Thursday repeatedly talked about nuclear power and how the U.S. has failed to maintain and expand its nuclear industry. “There should be a nuclear renaissance in this country,” he said. “The nuclear industry is here because government supported it in the United States. This notion that government is not a catalyst in this industry has no basis in fact.”

He joked that the nuclear industry’s “most important output these days is press releases.” He said most Americans probably don’t realize the U.S. is building only one nuclear power plant, and at a slow pace, while the rest of the world is building nearly 50.

He also said most Americans don’t realize how slowly the U.S. is moving on electric vehicles, “clean coal” plants and other technologies. “That’s kind of the state of play,” he said.

On another front, Mr. Immelt said GE in the past aimed to produce only “quality, expensive, high end” products to sell around the world, but that strategy is changing in nearly every product from wind turbines to medical scanners.

“Now, I want to occupy every corner of an industry. I want to have the value product all the way up to the high-end product,” he said. “We don’t want to give any space to a competitor” from places like China and India.
Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Proclaiming himself a citizen of the world, President Obama seems more comfortable with the barbarism and authoritarianism of the Muslim and socialist worlds than with the ethos of arms-bearing and Bible-reading citizens who fought in 1776 for independence from arbitrary government power.  Witness his coziness with enemies of the United States in socialist Venezuela and Cuba, as well as his unwillingness to stand up against Islamic Iran and Syria.  Domestically, add to it his institution of the most radical and pervasive web of social and economic controls since the socialism of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

In a Forbes Magazine cover article, Mr. D’Sousa describes the close links between the anti-colonialism that animated President Obama’s father and the president’s repeated apologies to other nations for what he appears to regard as imperial, and therefore criminal, past foreign policies of the United States.

Anti-colonialism historically is entwined with both socialism and Islam, one the epitome of economic tyranny, the other a societal ethos in which all aspects of government and economy are subordinated to the religion of jihad and sharia. 

Socialism, of course, is a secular religion, and Islam a theistic one.  Authoritarian political control is the common aspect, as it is with the actions and aims of the Obama administration. 

Most of the African nations gaining independence after World War II are or have been devotees of so-called African socialism and believers in planned economies.  President Obama’s father was a Kenyan advocate of African socialism. 

Inherent in the doctrines of socialism and Islam is the necessity to eradicate traditional religious and political structures of Christian Western Europe and the United States.  The Koran commands Muslims to conquer and subject all peoples to Islam.  Both socialism and Islam require exercise of arbitrary political power at the expense of individual liberty.

African nations fancied, and President Obama apparently still does, that eradicating existing social and political structures leads to social and economic perfection: economic egalitarianism.  Obama blames the George W. Bush administration for failure of his socialistic economic and political policies; African socialist nations blamed their difficulties on the legacy of European colonialism. 

This piece of historicist rationalization originated in the modern world with Voltaire and his fellow French philosophes of the 1789 revolution, who blamed French society’s problems on the Roman Catholic Church.  Confiscation of the church’s property and suppression of Catholicism, instead of ushering in social harmony, opened the gates in 1793 for the bloody Reign of Terror under Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety.

Underlying Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign rhetoric and his program in office is the secular religious doctrine enunciated by Jean Jacques Rousseau in mid-18th century France.  In addition to his thesis that humans are inherently good unless corrupted by a society that protects private property rights, Rousseau’s conception of the general will seems to be fundamental to Obama and his Democrat/Socialist Party congressional leaders.

People in Rousseau’s idyllic state of nature were all free, lived in harmony, and enjoyed readily abundant sustenance.  That ended with the advent of private property and the organization of political societies by the strong to protect their property against the weak. 

For Rousseau, an ideal society would be one in which the law and political institutions instead created and protected economic equality.  Instituting such a society demands subordination of all citizens to the general will.  Capitalistic individualism stands in the way of this version of social perfection. 

In Rousseau’s words, “...whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free...for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence.” The welfare state trumps individual political and economic liberties.

Such is the secular religiosity supporting the confidence of Obama and his Democrat/Socialist Party colleagues that massively intrusive programs such as Obamacare are to be crammed down the throats of the objecting majority of voters, for their own good.  It is the rationalization for a regime aiming to collectivize control of the nation in the hands of a socialist elite, an elite that controls the financial sector, healthcare, major manufacturers, and energy production.

Alan Greenspan’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve was marked repeatedly, after the 1987 stock market crash, by his flooding the financial system with fiat money to offset declines in the stock market.  Famously he chastised excessive financial market exuberance, while, in effect, pouring gasoline on a raging financial fire.

That is exactly the monetary policy, in spades, that current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is pursuing.  Coupling it with an excessive and misdirected barrel of congressional pork, the so-called stimulus program, has dug a deeper hole for the economy to climb out of and has made economic recovery unnecessarily difficult.

A Wall Street Journal article in the September 15, 2010, edition reports:

The former head of the Federal Reserve said fiscal stimulus efforts have fallen far short of expectations, and the government now needs to get out of the way and allow businesses and markets to power the recovery.

“We have to find a way to simmer down the extent of activism that is going on” with government stimulus spending “and allow the economy to heal” itself, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told a gathering held at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday.

At this point, “we’d probably be better off doing less than more” because “you’d be far better off to allow the normal market forces to operate here,” Greenspan said. That’s largely because stimulus spending is not proving as effective as many had hoped. “To the extent the evidence suggests very large deficits concurrently crowd out capital investment, there is a debit to the stimulus program that is somewhere between a third and a half of what the gross stimulus is,” he said.

When things began to go south after the 2008 crash, Mr. Greenspan lamented that it is nearly impossible to detect burgeoning speculative bubbles.  He also admitted that no group of economic seers, at the Federal Reserve or elsewhere, can possess the knowledge and skill to manage the entire economy, as the Fed is charged by Congress to do.

Mr. Greenspan still fails to acknowledge that the entire cycle of financial bubbles, from 1987 through the dot.comm boom and the housing and subprime mortgage collapse, resulted from an excessively easy monetary policy.  If the Fed, in addition to its role as lender of last resort to member banks, were to concentrate upon maintaining a stable dollar value, there would be no massive, system-wide financial bubbles.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010
Health Outlays Still Seen Rising
By Janet Adamy

The health-care overhaul enacted last spring won’t significantly change national health spending over the next decade compared with projections before the law was passed, according to government figures released Thursday.

The report by federal number-crunchers casts fresh doubt on Democrats’ argument that the health-care law would curb the sharp increase in costs over the long term, the second setback this week for one of the party’s biggest legislative achievements…

The law’s early provisions will increase overall health-care spending, the report says, while adding to benefits for consumers. The creation of new high-risk insurance pools, a requirement that children can stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26 and other early provisions will increase U.S. health expenditures by $10.2 billion through 2013, the report says…

U.S. health spending is projected to rise 9.2% in 2014, up from the 6.6% projected before the law took effect [i.e., 39.4% higher].