James Pethokoukis:

President Barack Obama has now, unfortunately, embraced the anti-capitalist, anti-markets Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as a way of continuing to occupy the Oval Office for another term.

At the Martin Luther King Memorial dedication, Obama said King would “want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there.” (Like, you know, the secretaries, IT guys … and wealthy potential campaign contributors.) Also over the weekend, senior Obama adviser David Plouffe said critiquing big banks will be “one of the central elements of the campaign next year.” And in a conference call with reporters, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest adopted the phraseology of the OWS rabble, saying the president would make sure “the interests of the 99 percent of Americans are well-represented” on his upcoming three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina.

To many Republicans and conservatives, Obama the Class Warrior is now front and center. It’s this incarnation that they’ve been warning Americans actually resides beneath the president’s centrist, technocratic exterior—the guy who told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” the left-wing professor who said it was “theoretically” O.K. for the Supreme Court to redistribute wealth. Let Obama really be Obama, and this is what you get.

Yet here’s what’s weird: Despite Obama’s attacks on Wall Street and the wealthy, his policies have been pro-big bank. The Obama administration favored the TARP bailout. It rejected the idea of an FDIC-like takeover of troubled banks in early 2009. It supported letting banks keep assets on their books at inflated values. It rejected calls for a financial transaction tax. It dismissed calls to break up big banks, reinstate Glass Steagall, or place hard caps on their size. No wonder a major bank lobbyist told me in 2010 that he had “no problem with Timmy [Geithner.]”

Almost, James. But like many others, you simply refuse to take the final step — even though everything in Obama’s personal history and political affiliations tells you precisely what he’s doing and why he’s doing it: Obama’s “pro-big bank” policies are part of the crony capitalism/corporatism that is, as Edward Bellamy outlined in his socialist Utopia Looking Backwards, a necessary step on the road to a socialist paradise. Once the government partners with big corporations, the next stage is to take them over — nationalize them — so that the government is finally fully centralized and can control the entirety of the economy.

In Bellamy’s novel, how this move happens is glossed over — the materialist narrative of the universe need not explain itself, you see — but what the New Left has realized, over the years (and many of their contemporary strategies stem from the their having been massively rebuked in the seventies), is that Americans will need to be “nudged” into making the proper social and political decisions, and that the only way the government will be able to take over industry is if they can get the backing of The People, with the caveat that it has to be The People who are seen as demanding the government step in and take such things over.

Alinsky, Cloward-Piven, the whole of the Community Organizing movement, in which flak catchers are mau-maued — these are all intellectual blue prints for bringing about the desired social upheaval that is to lead to the fall of the capitalist system as we know it, to be replaced (in theory) by the democratic socialism Obama and his left-wing academic cohert desire. Even as this very same cohort knows that liberal fascism and corporatism — a centralized command and control economy run by government in partnership with those big businesses they hold regulatory control over — is the real end point, one in which a new class system is drawn up, with the masses returned to their place as masses, and the government class taking exclusive control over wealth and power, creating a permanent relationship between citizen and government wherein the citizen is dependent exclusively upon the government for survival.

Individualism as imagined by the founders and framers is to be subsumed by collectivism and the ostensible Greater Good. And those who have determined themselves to be our betters will decide what that Greater Good is, and determine further how to bring it about.

This is the end game of progressivism. This is what the left wishes to bring about — by outward appearances, a cosmopolitan type of soft socialism of the kind that is currently crumbling in countries all across Europe, but at its heart the kind of soft tyranny that comes when a “benevolent” centralized power grants itself near complete control over the individual.

What we’ve been witnessing is the left’s attempt to put into play their plans to bring about a growth of scope and power for federal authority that is a necessary stage in the “fundamental transformation” of both a free market economy and citizenry still tethered to ideas of individual autonomy.

It’s right there to see if you bother looking.