The View From 1776

The implicit belief of liberal-progressives is that their socialist religion will, by equally redistributing income and wealth, fundamentally change human nature.  Eliminating socialism’s version of original sin - private property - theoretically will eliminate aggression, crime, and war.

Only capitalist greed, in that religious conception, stands in the way of a harmonious, one-world socialism. 

One-worldism, however, leads to moral relativism, because necessarily it both rejects the spiritual dimension of the individual human soul in favor of political collectivism, and it demands rejection of patriotism and pride in one’s own nation and culture.  This dogma is hammered into college students today, accounting for the disparagement of American business and the rampant anti-Americanism on campuses.  The latter was evidenced in a minor way by the remark of Senator Obama’s wife that in the past she had seen nothing of which to be proud in the United States.

Socialist one-worldism accounts for Senator Obama’s presumably sincere, but utterly naive, belief that talking face to face with our national enemies without preconditions will magically defuse their burning desires to destroy the United States.  It leads to Senator John Kerry’s foreign policy “sensitivity” and liberals’ apotheosis of the UN and a non-existent “thing” called the international community.  It requires giving the UN a veto over our own national security interests.  It requires a faith that diplomacy alone can forestall international conflicts.  And it dictates a diminution of our military strength and pulling immediately out of Iraq. 

Liberal-progressive philosophical speculation necessitates that history be a tangible “thing” moving along a discernible, predictable, progressive path, inexorably toward a single world government.  A single world government, of course, would require the ultimate in collectivist, iron-fisted power, unless it is possible, as liberal-progressive-socialists believe, to change human nature fundamentally, using materialistic means. 

This possibility first was articulated in the early 1800s by socialism’s founders, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, then taken up 20 years later by Karl Marx.  Different ends of history were postulated, but the underlying principle is that the “thingness” of history exists and can be predicted.  All three saw the increased productivity of science applied to industrialization as the engine of historical progress.

Comte articulated his Religion of Humanity, in which the entirety of the human race, as evolved by the progress of history, was to be the object of human veneration in a godless world.

Marx, of course, saw the end of history as the socialistic state in which transformed human nature would result in gradual withering away of formal government, with political power in the benevolent hands of the workers of the world, united by the Socialist International.

Thus liberal-progressives can denounce Judeo-Christianity and fervently embrace the mythology of their socialist religion that under a President Obama our nation and the world would become peaceful and harmonious, with plenty for all. 

Despite Senator Obama’s 20-plus years’ embrace of the heretical Black Liberation Theology variant of Christianity that he now rejects, his method of change is not the spirit of Divine love preached by Jesus Christ. Instead he proposes to harmonize society with sharply higher taxes, greater Federal deficit spending, and massively expanded regulation of business and personal activity.  This also rests upon the doctrine of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, who saw the laws of history as driven by atheistic, material factors. 

That is the substance of Senator Obama’s messianic call for change.  He, as the Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich of socialism harnessing the laws of historical progress toward a one-world government, will change human nature, enabling us to end domestic strife and wars.

It stands in happy contrast to liberal-progressives’ certainty that President Bush toppled Sadam Hussein solely to benefit capitalist corporations like Halliburton and major petroleum companies that presumably wanted to gain monopoly control of Iraq’s oil.

While the great wars since the 19th century have had underlying economic causes, those economic causes ironically were the product of liberal-progressive socialism, not of capitalism.  Capitalism has never produced a totalitarian state, but liberal-progressivism inevitably tends toward totalitarian tyranny, which has been the source of the great, total wars since 1900.

For a realistic assessment, read Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Causes of War.

Far from moving our nation toward international cooperation and peace, electing Senator Obama to the presidency will move the United States closer to economic autarky, the goal of Hitler’s National Socialism, and heighten international conflicts.  One can see this economically self-sufficient, autarkic thrust clearly in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s willingness to dump a free trade agreement with Colombia, one of our staunchest allies in South America, in order exclude foreign competition, to the benefit socialist labor unions, at the expense of average American citizens.