The View From 1776

In Part IV of his disquisition on Eric Voegelin’s philosophy of history in the Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau focuses on Voegelin’s analysis of the deformations of reality induced by modern secular religions.

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In “The Political Religions,” Voegelin classifies secularization under the heading of religious developments but in the direction of pure immanence rather than transcendence. He reminds readers that the “process of withering” that afflicts European civilization “has its origins in the secularization of the soul and the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.” Later in the text, we encounter this: “Precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.” Once the propaganda in denial of a “Beyond” of this world has sufficiently pervaded the social domain the only possible remaining sources of valid propositions are “a powerful person,” “organization accompanied by glamour and noise,” and the combination of “force and terror.” The “powerful person” never invites his followers to test on their own the rightness of his doctrine; he promulgates it in the mode of absolute authority – thus as unquestionable Gnosis, the term that Voegelin would later employ. Voegelin observes that ideological-totalitarian states invariably imitate the trappings of sacred societies. Think of Hitler’s flag-ceremonies or the mummified bodies of the Bolshevik leaders, to which the Communist faithful make pilgrimage.

This is a lengthy piece, but well worth reading.  I post it, first, because Professor Voegelin, under whom I studied for two years at Louisiana State University in the early 1950s, was the most influential teacher I ever was privileged to have. Secondly, because frequently I allude in other postings to the gnostic nature of socialism and its first cousins, Nazism, Fascism, and liberal-progressivism.  See, for example, The Genealogy of American Liberal-Progressive Gnosticism and The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism.

In addition, see my review of Professor Ellis Sandoz’s book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. Professor Sandoz is the director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University, where Dr. Voegelin spent most of his years in the United States. 

Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?

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In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”

In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

Judeo-Christian spiritual religion, the substance of Western civilization, does considerably more than provide a “foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance.” It is the bulwark to preserve individual political liberty and to forestall secularity’s unavoidable tendency toward political dictatorship.

The initial stages of tyranny, as Habermas implicitly acknowledges, come with secular intellectuals’ destruction, in the name of the rational human mind, of society’s devotion to, and awareness of transcendent power and moral authority of Divine Being.  In the free-for-all that follows, as in Weimar Germany of the 1920s or the United States today, social, economic, and political bonds disintegrate, leaving a demoralized citizenry, who welcome the emergence of a Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao - any strong man who promises to restore order.  Without a higher law, a timeless set of moral principles which a society accepts as divinely ordained, such secular rulers have no limits upon their ruthless, tyrannical exercise of arbitrary power. 

For a more extensive treatment of the assertion that morality and the rule of law cannot exist unless resting upon the foundation of revealed, Divinely inspired religion, see Can You be Moral and Ethical without being Religious?

Read Chris DeMuth’s post on the American Enterprise Institute website.

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Gerard Alexander delivered a fine lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last evening, diagnosing a striking feature of contemporary political debate—that liberals regard conservatives as not merely wrong and wrongheaded but illegitimate, dishonest, pathological, and unworthy of being taken seriously. In this view, conservatism is not a philosophy but a conspiracy. Paul Krugman is explicit that conservative policy ideas are, by definition, lies advanced for ulterior purposes. But the assumption is implicit in the haughty rhetoric and actions of a great many liberals, including President Obama.

...many liberals today are also progressives. They believe that the natural course of history is the emergence of secular rationality as the true way to think about problems and of state power as the effective way to organize society along rational lines. If that is your worldview, then such things as revealed religion, cultural tradition, and the marketplace (whose outcomes are spontaneous, not rationalized) are vestiges of our primitive past, sure to be displaced by the spreading application of human reason...President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid are progressives in this sense; many recent Democratic presidential candidates were as well—John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis.

The grip of progressivism is probably the best explanation for the Democratic Party’s astonishing campaign to nationalize the U.S. healthcare sector by all means necessary.

This arrogance explains President Obama’s dismissal of opposition to Obamacare with the comment that people will come to recognize national healthcare’s great benefits only after they have experienced them.  In the president’s paradigm, those who are not liberal-progressive socialists implicitly are incapable of assessing complex programs with only their own intellects.

Such assessments are best left to liberal-progressives, whose intellects enable them to reach definitive, scientific conclusions without even bothering to read the legislation involved.

Liberal-progressives’ profession of concern for “the little guy” is really a propaganda tool for gasping the power to dictate behavioral limits for abstract social, economic, sexual, and racial classes.  Imposing liberal-progressives’ vision of social perfection, as Lenin supposedly said, figuratively at least has to come out of the business end of a gun barrel.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society grab-bag of welfare-state entitlements is a notorious example.  LBJ told a Howard University audience that the Great Society aimed to produce, not just equality of opportunity, but equality of result. 

This necessarily meant contravening the recently enacted Civil Rights legislation, which expressly forbade government discrimination among individuals or groups.  It required forced equality of income and wealth, without regard to personal ability, effort, or achievement.  That equality was to be achieved by confiscating property and income from workers and giving it to groups whose cultures glorified sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, and obsession with sensual satisfaction of all types.

Results were the opposite of liberal-progressive expectations. Crime soared, unemployment skyrocketed, education fell off the cliff, drug addiction became common, single-parent families and illegitimate births rose to proportions never before experienced in history.  Yet, the liberal-progressive aristocracy remains firmly wedded to the Great Society and similar programs dating back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

Liberal-progressives fought tooth and nail against welfare reform.  But it produced none of the feared results. Instead, it reduced welfare rolls, greatly improved people’s lives, and gave them a sense of personal worth and accomplishment as they began to support themselves with real jobs.

The same blindness to reality was exhibited during the 1920s and 1930s, when liberal-progressives worshipfully supported the Soviet Union’s liquidation of millions of its own people in the name of a theoretical, perfect political society to be realized at some undetermined future date.

There are two main explanations for this disconnect between utopian, liberal-progressive theory and real world results. 

First is the sense of entitlement-to-rule that liberal-progressives derive from their self-perception as beings of superior worth and intelligence, compared to ordinary working people.  See Today’s Revolutionary Aristocracy and Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

A second explanation for the disconnect between policy and reality is liberal-progressives’ affection for abstract, ivory-tower, academic theory.  As is said of the French, who inflicted socialism upon the world, they love theories, especially when the theories don’t work.

The common element in liberal-progressive theorizing is reifying, or treating theoretical categories as if they were single, objective things that respond predictably to government policy: fairness, the poor, blacks, Hispanics, women, education, the economy, the world community.

Spiritual needs, of course, do not exist in the secular world of liberal-progressivism.  Liberal-progressive sociologists and psychologists see humans as merely receptors of sensual pain or pleasure, induced by manipulating physical conditions.  Liberal-progressive policies, of necessity, always relate to providing or withholding material things, such as money, housing, medical care, clothing, and education.  Spirituality and personal morality, for liberal-progressives, are relics of Judeo-Christian ignorance.

A prominent present-day example of reification is Keynesian macroeconomics, which treats the economy as a single “thing” that can be manipulated precisely and predictably by raising taxes, imposing business regulations, and indulging in Federal deficit spending.  The nation’s economic activities are conducted by many millions of individual people, but liberal-progressives see only abstract, reified economic classes. 

The intellectual heresy of reification underlies 19th century theories of history propounded by Hegel in Germany, Comte in France, and Marx in his travels from Germany, to France, thence to England.  All three viewed history as a “thing in itself,” a unified phenomenon that could be analyzed “scientifically” and could therefore be predicted.  Comte preached the inevitable arrival of the age of science, the highest branch of which was to be his new abstraction, sociology.  Marx proclaimed the inevitable triumph of so-called scientific socialism.

The fundamental obstacle to liberal-progressives’ expectation that they can control the course of history with their welfare-state programs is that socialism is not science.  It’s a secular religion based on false premises.

Physical sciences like chemistry, cosmology, engineering, and nuclear particle physics deal with specific, tangible things.  These objects of scientific inquiry, allowing for surrounding conditions, are the same anywhere on earth that scientists study them. 

Sociology and psychology have no laws like those of chemistry or physics, which can predict chemical and atomic particle reactions with extraordinary accuracy.  Behavior of individual humans and social groups of humans is almost the polar opposite.  Human nature imposes broad limits upon emotions and physical capabilities. But expecting individual humans all to act in accordance with liberal-progressive designs is wishful thinking.  Socialism’s faith that government programs can change human nature is dangerous ignorance.

Science is observation and analysis of natural processes occurring in the physical world.  Scientists, in the physical disciplines like chemistry and physics, hypothesize possible explanations of observable behavior, which must be tested and confirmed by other scientists in order to become accepted science.

Liberal-progressive intellectuals reverse the scientific process.  They posit an abstract theory, then select bits and pieces of history to “prove” it, in the manner of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, shrieking, “Verdict first, trial afterwards!” They seek the power to force everyone, supposedly for his own good, to follow their orders.

At bottom, the liberal-progressive aristocracy’s “caring for the people” is no more than an egotistical exercise to usurp political power, rationalized by utopian abstractions.

Since the last decades of the 19th century, the United States has suffered slowly escalating conflict between its founding ethos and the ideology of secular socialism, the latter represented by the liberal-progressive elite.

The aim of the conflict initiated by liberal-progressives has been nothing short of revolutionary overthrow, however gradually executed, of the original constitutional structure of the nation and its replacement by an all-powerful, collectivized national government.  Such a government reduces the citizenry of the United States to servility under liberal-progressive bureaucrats in Washington, DC.  Think, for example, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s unilateral move to usurp regulation of CO2 in the face of majority opposition in Congress, an action that will bureaucratically doom much of the nation’s manufacturing and mining industries. 

Writers of the Constitution assumed the existence of a natural aristocracy of citizens, each of whom had, in his home district, earned the respect of his fellow citizens for his capabilities and judgment.  The structure of our Federal republic rested upon the expectation that such men would on the whole people local, state, and Federal legislatures and occupy executive positions in the various governments.  As that ideal could never be fully realized in a world of human beings, our Federal republic was structured to pit interest against interest in order to forestall aggregation of too much power in too few hands.

Recently united in common purpose to assert political independence from Great Britain, the citizens of the United States and their leaders in 1787 shared a common ethos.  That ethos was the product of centuries of English government, sharpened by the events leading up to England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution, which unseated autocratic James II.

The Glorious Revolution produced the English Bill of Rights and John Locke’s Treatises of Civil Government, which stated the case for inherent, inalienable, individual rights to life, liberty, and private property.  Locke wrote of a government founded in a social compact of mutual advantage for protection of those individual, natural-law rights against arbitrary exertion of power by the sovereign and against foreign enemies. 

In that conception, government did not grant political liberty to its citizens; government was to be restrained from infringing upon its citizens’ natural-law rights.  Today, in contrast, the liberal-progressive elite of the Democrat/Socialist party assert an aristocratic authority to cram down the people’s throats, purportedly for their own good, unpopular measures that abrogate our historical political liberties.  Such is President Obama’s intention to crush private health insurance companies and to nationalize healthcare, by whatever autocratic means he can employ.

The natural aristocracy of the United States, in its first century and a half of national existence, was composed of men of practical experience as independent farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. 

Today’s putative liberal-progressive aristocracy is an anti-business, academic class basing its claims upon academic, utopian theory.  It is an aristocracy without benefit of practical experience in the world of trade and manufacturing.  Today’s liberal-progressive elite, like the French in 1789, are confident that an ideal government can be conceived abstractly in the minds of academic intellectuals, who are ignorant of economics and devoid of practical business experience.

That intellectual presumption gave France the bloody Reign of Terror and a century and a half of unstable government, oscillating from socialism to restoration of the monarchy, under more than a dozen different constitutions.  Our liberal-progressive aristocracy has shoved the nation down the path toward servile dependence upon government and towards international bankruptcy, domestic inflation, and eventual domination by foreign powers.

How did the liberal-progressive aristocracy come to be?

Excesses of wealth in the post-Civil War Gilded Age gave impetus to the new class of intellectuals, who looked for their model of government, not to England and America’s past, but to the Continental European statism of France and the newly emergent German Empire.  There the prevailing ideology was the collectivism of the socialist political state.  In opposition to the English and American conception of natural-law, inherent, individual political liberties, the Continental powers envisioned the political state as creating and granting, when it deigned to do so, selected privileges to its citizens.

Liberal-progressive paternalism was evident in President Clinton’s response to proposed tax cuts.  He thought it a bad idea, he said, because American citizens would spend the money on the wrong things.  This presumption is evident in the current Democrat/Socialist government’s assertion that it will force socialized medicine upon the nation, because the people don’t know what is best for them.  It is evident in Democrat/Socialist regulatory desires to compel banks to make unwise loans and to pressure manufacturers to change production from profitable products desired by consumers to “green” products.

This new aristocracy, imposed by revolutionary means under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, was prominently delineated by Herbert Croly in his 1909 The Promise of American Life and in the 1913 A Preface to Politics by his colleague Walter Lippmann, who had been president of Harvard’s socialist club during his student days.

Croly and Lippmann were founding editors of The New Republic, the flagship journal of liberal-progressivism for most of the 20th century.  Both admired the German Empire’s focus upon professional administration of political functions and abhorred the messiness of legislation and administration in our Federal republic.  As had Auguste Comte in the 1820s of French socialism, Croly and Lippmann urged the subordination of legislative bodies to professional administrators.  Both favored a strong executive, who, like Bismarck in Germany, would seize the controls of political power and impose an educated, trained bureaucratic administration upon our nation, which, in their view, was mired in the outmoded beliefs of Jeffersonian individualism.  America was to achieve greatness to the extent that it emulated the statist governments of Continental Europe.

President Obama assertion that Americans will learn to like socialized healthcare after he has imposed it upon them is a quintessential example of the arbitrariness of beliefs and presumptions that define today’s liberal-progressive aristocracy.

Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck detested individualism, preferring collectivized control by an aristocracy.  One of his insults was to dismiss an opponent as “no more than an English shopkeeper.” In the 1880s he created the world’s first welfare system.  The purpose, he candidly acknowledged, was to enable him to herd the German people like cattle (cf. FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and Obama’s multitude of socialistic initiatives).

Despite the German Empire’s great industrial, scientific, and educational achievements, laissez-faire individualism made, first Great Britain, then the United States, the greatest commercial and industrial powers in world history.

Tom Emerson emailed his summary of the case for allowing individuals political and economic liberty, without the suffocating embrace of Big Brother, to find new and efficient ways to improve human productivity and thereby to raise everyone’s standard of living.

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In a web discussion group, a liberal member issued an ad hominem attack on Washington Post columnist George F. Will for his recent column titled “Awash in Fossil Fuels”.  I felt compelled to write an answer, and that answer follows.  I thought your readers might enjoy reading it.
 
1.                   Let me begin with a defense of George F. Will.  Whether you agree with him or not (liberals always impugn the people they disagree with, rather than answering directly the points those people raise), George F. Will is an intellectual with a first-class mind.  His article was well-researched and purported to demonstrate that fossil fuels are not likely to be exhausted any time soon.  This argument can be buttressed by the observation that the earliest vascular land plants first appeared on our planet about half a billion years ago.  They have been thriving and evolving on our planet ever since, converting solar energy into hydrocarbons whose remains we refer to today as fossil fuels.  The idea that humans have, in a little more than a century, burned any sizable fraction of the stored energy of these prodigious life forms is, it seems to me, thoroughly ridiculous.  Humans are, in fact, now discovering new fossil fuel deposits at a rate that exceeds the rate at which we are consuming this resource, so it is not likely that fossil fuels will be depleted for at least several millennia.  When, at that far-distant time, fossil fuels are depleted, technology surely will have evolved to replace this energy and materials source with far superior sources of energy, plastics, etc.  The “scarcity argument” is a convenient liberal ruse to sell otherwise unappealing dogma to ignorant masses – not an argument to be taken seriously by serious people.

2.                   No one that I know is in favor of mankind destroying its nest, or even significantly fouling it.  That said, the same people who worship at the altar of environmentalism were, 30 years ago, warning just as vociferously of the dangers of “global cooling”.  Their arguments were not taken seriously then, and should not be now.  Their real agenda is not to “save the planet”, but to empower government to vastly increase its control over our people and redistribute wealth.

3.                   If they had been serious about clean energy, they would not have vigorously and irrationally impeded the proliferation of nuclear energy for the last 30 years.  They are now arguing that we can’t build more nuclear plants because there is no place to store the spent fuel rods – oblivious to the presence of the completed and very safe Yucca Mountain facility which they themselves have blocked from operation.

4.                   I believe that liberals fundamentally misunderstand what made America a great nation and the envy of most of the rest of the world.  The first permanent settlement of Europeans on the North American continent was Jamestown, VA (1608), followed closely by Plymouth, MA (1620).  So we and our ancestors have been here a little over four hundred years.  (I know that the Vikings and the Spanish were here earlier, but they didn’t stay, so that doesn’t count.)  In those four hundred years, America has given the world a lot of things:  The cotton gin, the steamboat, the telephone, the motion picture camera, the electric light (the last three by the same American inventor), radio (with some help from an Italian), television, nuclear power and weapons, the transistor, the microchip, the microprocessor, most of the software that runs the planet, the conquest of yellow fever, polio, measles, mumps, and dozens of other diseases, ultrasonic and magnetic resonance imaging, the movie and recorded music industries, animated cartoons, computer-generated graphics, the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, the transcontinental railroad, etc.

5.                   American contributions to science have been just as prodigious.  The building where I worked for the last 10 years on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus has been awarded seven Nobel Prizes (Herb Simon, Franco Modigliani, Merton Miller, Robert Lucas, Finn Kydland, Edward Prescott and Oliver Williamson), and that’s just one of Carnegie Mellon’s buildings!  Overall, Americans have won more Nobel prizes in science (let’s forget about Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s peace prizes and other irrelevancies) than any other continent or region.  America’s great universities and our leadership in scientific research are envied the world over.

6.                   Americans have built a great civilization where no civilization existed in just a bit over four hundred years, but the American experiment in democracy began in 1787, and thus is less than 225 years old.  The men who assembled in Philadelphia to write the U. S. Constitution didn’t trust government very much.  Thomas Jefferson said it well:  “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.  The hand of man may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”  He also is alleged to have said, “That government governs best that governs least.”  A profound distrust of concentrated power (whether governmental, military of economic) is an enduring part of the American ethos.  The recent liberal power grab in Washington is running into that buzz saw as we speak.

7.                   Since our founders didn’t trust government very much, they filled the Constitution with blocking mechanisms.  A bi-cameral legislature, Presidential approval of laws, confirmation of Presidential appointees by the Senate, the Presidential Veto and the two-thirds vote of both houses to over-ride, an independent judiciary to oversee it all, with a Supreme Court that had no direct powers except to interpret and nullify, but was all-powerful in those functions.  The Constitution was amended ten times before ratification to add James Madison’s powerfully and succinctly written Bill of Rights, which imposed significant limits on the powers of the government.  “Congress shall make no law. . . “  The founders were also concerned about the protection of private and intellectual property.  Perhaps you didn’t know, but the first U. S. Commissioner of Patents was Thomas Jefferson.  The founders believed strongly that a citizen should be entitled to the fruits of his own intellect – an unknown concept prior to 1787.  

8.                   Winston Churchill always marveled at the power of “an aroused democracy”.  There are many examples of this, but the best probably come from the WW II era.  To illustrate, consider that, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U. S. Navy operated four aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean (Hornet, Lexington, Yorktown and Enterprise).  Three months after Pearl Harbor, we lost the Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea.  Three months after that, we lost the Yorktown in the Battle of Midway.  So in June of 1942, the U. S. Navy had two aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean.  Fast forward two years to June of 1944 and the Battle of the Philippine Sea.  Twenty-three fully armed and equipped U. S. aircraft carriers took part in that battle alone.  That means ships, crews, armaments, airplanes, trained pilots and weapons.  And that “aroused democracy” did that while fighting a major war in Europe!  In fact, by 1943 the City of Pittsburgh was producing more steel than the Continent of Europe.  Yes, there is great power in an aroused democracy.

9.                   I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

10.               In January of 2006, I spent 10 days in and around the Indian City of Bangalore, where an entrepreneurial revolution is going on.  I visited many of the companies that were leading that rebirth of Indian capitalism, including a 15-year-old company called Infosys.  Infosys had gone from zero to more than 50,000 employees in less than 15 years.  (Talk about creating jobs!)  Their ultra-modern campus in Bangalore would put Microsoft’s Redmond campus to shame!  (I have visited both.)  I asked the founder of Infosys what accounted for the company’s phenomenal success.  His answer was revealing:  “Dr. Emerson, the government got out of the way!  When we started this company 15 years ago, we had to pay three times the world price to buy a computer.  Today, we pay the world price.  The government got out of the way!”

11.               The U. S. economy will recover far more vigorously and quickly if the U. S. Government will stop trying to “help” and just get out of the way.
I could go on, but the above is probably enough of a rant.  The bottom line is that America’s great achievements have been the result of an industrious and creative people operating in a free-market system where government allowed both success and failure, protected private and intellectual property, and didn’t worry too much about the fairness of outcomes, as long as everyone had an equal chance at success.  Government should intervene to prevent concentrations of power from impeding the success of individuals, but failure is part of what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction”.  Failure is thus essential to continued success.  We would be far better off in the long run if Chrysler, General Motors and a few more large banks had been allowed to fail in the recent crisis.  That is not to say that their depositors should have been hurt, but the “moral hazard” of bailing out shareholders, failing managements and outmoded unions should not be encouraged by government.
 
I appreciate that liberals have good intentions, but you know what they say about the road to Hell.
 
S. Thomas Emerson, Ph. D. 

The David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Chair in Entrepreneurship

Carnegie Mellon University

Change that candidate Obama promised turns out to be restructuring society to achieve social justice, which in the socialist lexicon is egalitarian redistribution of income and wealth.  That means higher taxes, tight regulation of all sectors of the economy, and further enervation of a population increasingly dependent upon the political state for its sustenance. 

The president’s pattern of industry czars and heavy new regulations, along with government financing and partial government ownership of major private companies is reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s and 30s, as well as of Hitler’s tight regulation of German industry after 1933.  In neither case did these dictators seize full ownership of private industry, which liberal-progressives tell us is the definition of socialism.  Instead, Mussolini and Hitler followed the prescription of socialism’s early theorists: regulation alone is sufficient to impose socialist statism.

Elite councils of people like David Axelrod, a Chicago socialist agitator who formulates the president’s views, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who were leaders of Weatherman assassins, and San Francisco socialist Nancy Pelosi will decide what is best for you and me.  As the president said with regard to people who question his programs, they should shut up and get out of the way.

More threatening to the survival of the United States is Obama’s continual diminishment of American political, economic, and military stature as a step toward world government, a sort of international egalitarianism.  If the United States is impoverished by high taxes and socialistic regulation, and other nations become equally so, a world government will be at hand.  Hypothetically war will cease to exist as an instrument of national policy.  All of us will live harmoniously while scrounging for crumbs that remain from the former period of capitalistic plenty.

The president’s proposed National Socialist healthcare program is an example on the domestic stage.  Obama offered several different rationalizations for partial socialization and extensive restructuring of our medical care system, all of them shown to be false or of doubtful effect.  If the president’s aim had been only to provide medical insurance for the 15% of American citizens who allegedly lack it, there were far less costly and less intrusive ways to do so. 

Choosing instead government takeover of most of the medical care industry makes clear that his vision of change, in consonance with the Democrat/Socialist Party platform of the past five decades, is British and Canadian style socialized medicine.

The same sort of thinking is apparent in the president’s nationalizing two of the Big Three automakers, as well as in his partial nationalization of the major banks.  His czars, with the guidance of Congressmen like Representative Barney Frank, are regulating executive compensation, the types of loans that banks can or must make, facilities locations, and the sorts of automobiles that Government Motors will be permitted to make.  And, in the automakers’ case, the president disregarded priority rights of bondholders in order to give substantial control of company assets to those quintessential exemplars of socialism, the labor unions.

On the foreign policy front, the president’s faith in pagan worship of Al Gore’s global-warming myth will grind industry to a halt, eliminate millions of jobs, and reduce all Western nations to poverty levels equal to those of the lowest tier of economically emerging nations.  To a vicious degree, propositions supported by Obama will impose egalitarianism here and abroad.

The president has toured the world, kowtowing to Muslim dictators and to socialist strong men like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers.  His obsequious pleas to Iran have been met with insulting counter demands.  He is now proposing to make meaningless the sacrifice of our armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq by premature withdrawals and curtailment of military support.  This cowering self-denigration of the United States before the world’s forces of evil is again in consonance with the aboriginal doctrine of socialism, supported by the Nobel Peace Prize committee in socialist Norway.