Ortega was onto something.
Writing in 1929, José Ortega y Gasset described the new phenomenon emerging in post-World War I Europe. The masses had come to believe themselves entitled to the technological benefits of civilization without understanding or preserving the cultural underpinning of that civilization.
That, unfortunately, is applicable to the United States since the 1960s student anarchist upheavals. Senator Obama and his supporters are dead sure that everyone is entitled to whatever he wants, at government expense, and moreover, that we can afford it. This without understanding the economic realities that have produced what we have already.
Adulation for the ephemera of Senator Obama’s rhetoric reflects a populace that has rejected John Adams’s observation that our Constitution of limited Federal power can survive only when our citizens are firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian morality.
For more about Ortega’s perceptions, read The Mass Man by Joseph Bottum.
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