The View From 1776

The election of Senator Obama to the presidency will usher in a Federal government in which both the legislative and executive branches will be controlled by leaders who worship at the altar of socialism, a secular religion.  Nearly half of the Supreme Court Justices and a large percentage of other Federal judges are socialists.

The questions to confront are:

First, is Senator Obama a socialist?  The answer emphatically is yes.

Publicly he asserts that he is a Christian.  That, however, is preposterous (see Is Senator Obama a Christian or a Secular Socialist? and Truth).

Second, why is worshipping socialism a bad thing?  What adverse effects on the nation will result from an Obama presidency coupled with a socialist-dominated Congress?

Start with the unremitting campaign of liberal-progressive-socialists to use public education unconstitutionally to proselytize young students for the socialist religion (see Socialism: Our Unconstitutionally Established National Religion).  See also the National Review Online post regarding the education policy thrust of socialism imparted by Senator Obama’s radical colleagues.

A quote from Bill Ayers, a founding leader of the Weatherman terrorist underground of the 1960s-70s and one of Senator Obama’s close friends and colleagues from his days on foundation boards in Chicago:

"That’s one of the things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the relationship between school and society. But John Dewey was one of the brilliant, brilliant writers about what democratic education would look like and was himself an independent socialist. But he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you’re trying to build in a classroom. This contradiction is something progressive educators should address, not dodge."

With regard to the effect of Senator Obama’s connection with radicals like Bill Ayers, see More on Senator Obama’s Friends.

See also The Corruption of Public Education: How It Happened.

In the field of foreign policy, liberal-progressive-socialism is particularly dangerous in today’s resurgent struggle for influence in the Middle East and Far East.  As I wrote in The “Logic” of Liberal-Socialist Foreign Policy:

A confluence of events in recent days [March, 2004] brings into sharp focus the fundamental differences between liberal-socialist political theory and the realistic understanding of human nature and political governance that guided our forebears in writing the Constitution in 1787…

The socialist religion, called liberalism in the United States, is based on the myth that humans are wholly good and kind, when they have not been corrupted by the institution of private property.  Socialism therefore fights to overturn governments based on the natural-law, inalienable, and individual rights of life, liberty, and property.

For the liberal-socialist, there can be no freedom as long as some people have more wealth than others, because that prevents equal access by everyone to all of society’s goods and services, regardless of whether he deserves it or whether he works to earn it.  Earthly paradise is therefore an egalitarian society in which no one may have more than anyone else.  Unfortunately for the socialist religion, history repeatedly has demonstrated that such a political state can exist only under despotic rule by an intellectual elite administering a gigantic and rigid bureaucracy.  France and Germany, sinking under the weight of their socialist welfare-state systems , are the most prominent current-day examples.  The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba are prototypes for socialist “liberty.”

These socialist religious beliefs explain the current attacks on the Bush administration’s foreign policy.  Al Queda and related terrorist organizations are not bad people.  They are the victims of Western society, in particular the United States, which has unjustly taken more than its share of the world’s goods and services.  If we just deal diplomatically with terrorists, we can work out an equitable solution to give them a fair share of wealth, and their fundamentally benevolent natures will be reasserted.  Magically peace and tranquility will be restored to the world.  This is the mythology embodied in the UN and the fictions of “international law” and “the community of nations.”

One of the most puzzling aspects of liberal-socialist denunciations of American foreign policy and Israel’s counter-attacks against Palestinian suicide bombings is liberals’ refusal to condemn terrorism as evil.  Indeed, liberals ridicule and scathingly denounce President Bush’s characterization of terrorist nations as part of an Axis of Evil.  They despise his references to spiritual religion.  What accounts for that?

Again the answer is found in socialist religious mythology.  Socialism, beginning in the French Revolution of 1789, aims always to wipe out spiritual religion’s concepts of morality and personal responsibility.  Classifying actions as good or bad is said to be unscientific value judgment.  French socialists held that the only morality was social justice, essentially equal distribution of wealth, which was to be imposed by ruling councils of intellectuals.  In England of the 1850s and 1860s, Charles Darwin’s great propaganda champion Thomas Huxley declared that there was no such thing as sin or morality.  Society was merely the struggle for survival, a process of evolutionary natural selection.  Marxian contemporaries of Darwin enthusiastically adopted evolutionary theory to justify Marx’s prediction of the inevitable triumph of socialism.

In the United States during the early decades of the 20th century, John Dewey donned the mitre of socialist priesthood and taught his philosophy of Pragmatism that dismissed morality and ideas of good or bad.  There were, said Dewey, only actions that worked for an individual or failed to work.  The end justifies the means, which in his case meant that any action by liberal-socialists to corrode the moral foundations of the nation would be pragmatically acceptable, if the result were the imposition of socialism as the official national church.

In more recent years, students in this country have far too often been taught by our schools that the only virtue is “tolerance,” which means that there can be no standards of right or wrong.  Students are told that they must see everything from the other guy’s viewpoint.  Even the Holocaust cannot be condemned, because Hitler had his reasons…

These are the products of liberal-socialism, a religion teaching that people are good if not corrupted by private ownership of property, that liberty is equal access to goods and services, whether you work for it or not, and that earthly salvation lies in collectivized government, planned and managed by intellectuals.