Stanley Kurtz on the “illusion of pragmatism” — something you’ve read here from time to time to time:
Reflecting on all that I’ve written about Barack Obama over these past six months, four inter-related points stand out: Obama’s radicalism, his stealthy incrementalism, his interest in funding and organization-building, and his willingness to use  or quietly support  Alinskyite intimidation tactics. Since we stand on the cusp of the election, I’ll lay out the bottom line. For those who want to know more, go back and read the detailed studies on which I base these conclusions.
Obama’s troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama’s sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes  wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party’s plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama’s supported “major redistributive change.†Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?
Similarly, Obama’s “association†with Wright was far more than a mere pastor-parishioner  or even mentor-protégé  relationship. Obama’s work with the Gamaliel Foundation required him to “organize†left-leaning churches into a larger political force. His real interest in Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks was to turn them into the nucleus of a far broader politicized coalition of radical black churches  as shown, for example, by his work with them on the Illinois racial-profiling bill. Again, we are not dealing with mere “associations,†but with intentional political partnerships.
Although media malfeasance is at the heart of our ignorance about these broader patterns, Obama’s absorption of Alinskyite strategies of stealthy incrementalism have helped to hide the truth. Following well-worn organizer strategies, Obama knows how to wrap ideological radicalism in the soothing rhetoric of “pragmatism†and classic American values. There is a kernel of truth to the pragmatism, however. Radical though his ultimate goals may be, Obama follows classic organizer strategy  pursuing his ends in tiny, incremental, and cumulative baby-steps. The municipal “living wage†campaigns supported by Obama, Wright, and groups like ACORN and the New Party were never designed, in themselves, to bring fundamental economic change. These ordinances actually applied to only a very small number of companies. The broader purpose of these battles was to build coalitions for deeper structural change on the national level, when the moment was right. Obama would likely hew to this incrementalism in power, with the same radical long-term goals in mind.
[…] In his now infamous 2001 radio remarks, Obama’s preferred strategy for promoting “major redistributive change†was through society-wide organizing from below. As president, Obama would connect his massive youth-volunteer program to his favorite community-organizer groups, thereby creating a political force for long-term restructuring of the American economy. This was the program of the New Party, and I believe it is still Obama’s long-term goal.
In pursuit of his goals, Obama has shown himself willing to quietly support, and sometimes to openly use, radical Alinskyite tactics. At the Woods Fund, Obama’s allies bragged about the way their “post-ideological†cover had allowed them to fund ACORN’s confrontational tactics, while escaping public criticism. Obama has shamelessly used Alinskyite “direct action†to silence and intimidate political foes during the current campaign (a matter well-known to conservatives, yet little noted by the mainstream press). Victory would only cement the conviction in Obama and his allies that these tactics had “won,†and therefore should be used again.
Has Obama changed? Was he merely using his radical Chicago allies to gain national renown, and thereby an opening for a more moderate political program? I find this view unconvincing. Obama has often claimed that his early community organizing, and his redistributive legislative work, were at the very core of his political identity. We’ve heard his radicalism on the radio in 2001. Does anyone really believe that he’s changed in 2008? Obama’s political radicalism consolidated his shaky personal identity. It formed him as an adult. He cannot abandon that inner stance without losing hold of an already precarious self. Obama chose to live in Hyde Park  chose that radical setting as the site of his adult self-creation. Hyde Park was never the place Obama needed to conquer in order to escape. On the contrary, it was the personally chosen home he now hopes to nationalize by spreading his organizing gospel to America’s youth.Obama is clever and pragmatic, it’s true. But his pragmatism is deployed on behalf of radical goals. Obama’s heart is, and will remain, with the Far Left. Yet he will surely be cautious about grasping for more, at any given moment, than the political traffic will bear. That should not be mistaken for genuine moderation. It will merely be the beginning stages of a habitually incremental radicalism. In his heart and soul, Barack Obama was and remains a radical-stealthy, organizationally sophisticated, and  when necessary  tactically ruthless. The real Obama  the man beyond the feel-good symbol  is no mystery. He’s there for anyone willing to look. Sad to say, few are.
And so sums up the last several months worth of postings here on Obama, Ayers, Alinsky, Wright, post-partisan, post-racialism, pragmatism, progressivist kernel assumptions, and the re-invention of the New Left as the controlling faction of the Democratic party — and the adoption of the “liberal” they once spat at as bourgeois fecklessness that stood in the way of real change.
As Kurtz notes, though the press has done its best to keep it hidden, it is available for all to see — right down to the arrogance its adopters have begun to exhibit, knowing as they must that the “revolution” they sought in 1972 is finally now upon them.
To smash the system from the outside created nightly news footage that undermined the Cause. To destroy the system from within, once it is couched as “change” and “reform,” attracts nothing but willing acolytes and useful idiots who, thanks to years of institutionalized leftwing propaganda, haven’t the foresight to recognize that they are signing away their own freedoms for the short term thrill of joining a “wave” of “change.”
Just as dissent is not heroic in itself, change is not noble simply for being active. Sadly, too few people are either engaged enough or interested enough to figure this out — making the media’s complicity that much more nefarious.
The “changes” that are coming will be virtually impossible to undo. Come on, Bradley Effect.
Has Obama changed? Was he merely using his radical Chicago allies to gain national renown, and thereby an opening for a more moderate political program? I find this view unconvincing.
He’s either a poser who used people and associations to get where he is now, or he actually is a radical. Those are the only two options. If voters could let that idea smack ’em in the noggin a few times, perhaps they would be less anxious to vote in Teh One.
Obama will fix your HTML!!!
I just hope a few months into the O presidency the media will tire of patting O’s and their own back (the historicalness of it!) and start to dive into all these things they missed. How Ayers must be relishing this moment…the underground advisor to O and the New World Order, who made it through the campaign without being exposed by the big media.
Shaking my head. Sputtering.
I feel your pain, Timstigator, but would they go through all this trouble to get him elected only to turn on him like rabid coyotes?
Kurtz makes entirely logical assumptions about a future under Barack Obama and says what we all quietly suspected: There’s not too many places O! will head but right back to his roots. Unfortunately, one of the quieter, more concerning tenets of the Obama platform is the very likely influence he intends to have on family and education, topics that haven’t gotten sufficient exposure and like so much assumed Obama policy, will only expose themselves over the time it takes to make them just that much more intractable.
Based on Barack Obama’s associations in education, I have grave doubts about how the family will fare under his reign.
We can start with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. While Bill Ayer’s past indiscretions finally get some much needed airtime, the man’s future aspirations, based on that past and on the position he currently holds, must be assumed to run on the same energy and in the same continuum as Obama’s, even as Kurtz logically predicts them. Ayers is an elementary education theorist. Dohrn, meanwhile, is director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.
Let that sink in: A professor of educational systems and an architect of juvenile and family justice policy. How might these, um, talents be put to use by a comrade?
Now jump over to Obama running mate Joe Biden for a moment: He’d been primary architect of what many know to be perhaps the most onerous and unfair (if not downright unconstitutional) pieces of legislation of the recent past. The Violence Against Women Act has caused more systemic harm and ruin to a narrower class of innocent victims than perhaps any other policy known today. (Now it’s going international as the IVAWA, where it’s already decimating places like India.) The VAWA has become a fundamental tool for an enormous federal program in this country to disenfranchise an entire subset of American parents, primarily fathers and among them, primarily black fathers.
Being bound up in enormous social security and welfare systems, VAWA policy enables systemic injustice via the kangaroo family court system, huge federal monetary kickbacks to the States for implementing child support by virtually any means they wish, and in general making the State a co-parent over the protests of what used to be a child’s natural father (or mother). VAWA’s beneficiaries and most vocal lobbies are the NOW and trial lawyers.
To thrive, such a system naturally embodies heinous myth and stereotype about men and women typical for the class of radical feminists pw readers have become all to familiar with over the years. Those familiar with the VAWA and the federal child custody and support regime have noted that it already operates in conjunction with state-endorsed thought about education and welfare, child-raising and gender, and about public vs private values. Fortunately, even a short list of pertinent statistics debunks the rails VAWA and the juvenile justice, support, and custody systems runs on. As does much of pop leftism, especially in the press and academia – anybody remember the Duke case?
For another indicator of the terrific bias of instituted sexism, Palin derangement syndrome exposes how she’s been vilified simply because she’s a traditional mother, who, while in a position of authority reformed but a portion of the reckless power that runs state machinery. The problem to authoritarians is that neither of those qualities befits a top-down system of child welfare, education, and justice, Marxist redistributionist-style.
But back to Biden: The man was likely motivated by his own early experiences, experiences that brought to him an apparent sense of male inferiority and submission. From this came an entire national system of disenfranchising men and fathers, and a budding international system of bringing this bias and ruin of rights to the globe whenever possible. And Obama’s early experiences, how influential and far reaching might they be? Did he, somehow, leave them all behind at the same time he rejected Rev. Wright? I think not. Obama and Biden are a potentially lethal team for the independence and the basic rights of the American family.
Now come back to both Ayer’s and Dohrn’s current activities; an elementary education theorist with radical, even Marxist tendencies and an apparent hatred of traditional families and parenting, and the director of a children and family justice center. Might the Biden choice speak far, far more to Obama’s intentions than most other evidence as have about the man? Joe Biden is tied to distancing children from parents as official policy. But Ayers designs what are presumed to be radical “solutions†to educating kids and Dohrn is intimately familiar with the systems of juvenile justice.
The overall lay of the land on which is already built a State system of education and parenting is fast moving toward an even broader, more encroaching institution. Consider that the Department of Health and Human Services already consumes some ten trillion dollars a year. How much will it require under an Obama Administration? And for what end?
Nobody knows but like Kurtz, we know it’s coming. With state education and family influence already at record, even epidemic levels, where could it possibly go but vastly higher under Obama & Co.?
Kurtz does us a great service laying out at least a portion of what an Obama presidency surely must stand great risk of at the least — how much right-leaning change can anyone realistically assume has occurred in the man’s mind in seven years and to what end? But given where Obama and his pals stand on the family, children, education, and especially the juvenile justice system, which is currently overrun with NOW-inspired radical ideologues, is an area of extraordinarily great concern.
By straddling the fence between both parties and across many demographics, the family law/family justice/government education issue finds it hard to gain reform traction – concerning child support and fathering, law’n order Republicans like heavy-handed enforcement strategies waged against urban drive-by fathers. Leftists love the gender feminist overtones and State-run myth making and child raising. But especially since outnumbered conservatives and classical liberals haven’t been able to take back education and child-raising, or even agree it’s a very big issue, it seems the next Administration is quite possibly going to institute near-mandatory preschools, remove remaining obstacles to the California-style destruction of private education, and amp up the rhetoric and government aid for those who finally submit wholly to the State as parent.
This is a major new topic and one the right must grapple with as soon as possible. This has been the quiet 800lb gorilla in the corner of the pre-election racket and debate. This one is for all the marbles, for it, true to hard left ideology, is the one that creates new generations of State dependents right from the virtual cradle.
Jeff, of course this reinvigorates work on language, intent, exposing the new language of State, and highlighting the shifting of meaning in order to pull it off, now, among the youngest and most impressionable. This is fundamental to the new system of control Barack Obama’s name has become synonymous with on both sides of the political divide.
In 2008 we have alarming degrees of central policy and control, even pre-Obama. In a day we’ll possibly start a new experiment in finally taking that accelerating phenomenon directly into the school and home.
Excuse me, “as it does much of pop leftism”, seventh paragraph. Jeff, maybe you can edit that…
I just hope a few months into the O presidency the media will tire of patting O’s and their own back (the historicalness of it!) and start to dive into all these things they missed.
They won’t turn on their own creation. And they fear intimidation — they’ve reported on a few cases of reporters being shunned or corrected, but there are likely many more, and they are cowards.
The media will praise the incrementalism. Obama’s has already warned his supporters to lower their immediate expectations, and there is much that can be done behind the scenes that the media will consider too boring to report. Why note the appointments of radicals as Under-Secretaries, or the cancelling of Executive Orders when one can write bubbly-good stories of how the presidential daughters are adjusting to the White House, or how Michelle is redorating the Rose Room?
Part of the problem is that a large number of those folks that weren’t indoctrinated proper, in public schools or academia, have that version of ADD that is brought about by living in our sound bite, instant gratification, society. Unless it is something “important”, like American Idol, MTV, or televised sports they are simply unwilling to put in the due diligence required to become well versed on issues that will directly effect, as opposed to simply amuse, them.
Having been spoiled for so long by a slow moving system, and esoteric sounding policy discussions, they instead take their individual freedom, liberty, and right to influence the system for granted. So, while expending the time and energy to memorize countless athletic statistics or computer game worlds, they hand over a blank check to lord hopenchange, his minions, and their regional representatives; trusting those politicians to do what is in the peoples bestinterests without ever really understanding what those same folks actual beliefs are…
This can be clearly seen right now after lord obamus’ latest revalation about his intent to bankrupt industries choosing to employ coal energy sources-one of our nation’s most prevalent natural resources. Rightly so, this is an issue of grave concern to folks in states where the coal industry is a major employer-and not suprisingly some of the major swing states in play-admittedly or not-in the northeast. But, because the MSM chose to concentrate on platitudes instead of the “issues” they so breathlessly declared their intellectual fealty to we have heard only about slogans and feelgood buzzwords-even though O! made these pronouncements in San Fran last January! Indeed, even this morning on CNBC they allowd Sen. Bob Casey of Pa. to repeatedly, and falsely, insist! that O! was a friend of coal and supported the clean burning strains use in coming to grips with our national energy situation…
Can you imagine, though, the MSM outrage! if the mine operators called in each shift today, played them the video of O!s remarks, and explained in simple terms how a number of them would lose their jobs should he be elected…?
While the MSM would call this more RethugliKKKan fear mongering, I might be tempted to call it; change I could believe in!
Although media malfeasance is at the heart of our ignorance about these broader patterns, Obama’s absorption of Alinskyite strategies of stealthy incrementalism have helped to hide the truth.
I wonder if Obama is getting too much credit and he is a Manchurian Candidate, or a Frankenstein monster if you prefer, created by the “movement”, that is, the “organized” coalition of BLT, Ayers et al, ACORN, Soros, etc., and given the body, to further the monster analogy, of Harry Reed et al,the New York Times et al, Hollywood et al, and etc.. Not to say Alec Baldwin, Congress critters, and the AP are in a conspiracy, they are allies of convenience lured by the opportunity for their own exploitations. Obama is the animated miracle presented by people who don’t like America as She has been.
If it’s the other way around, and this has been Obamas vision and creation from the beginning, we are dealing with an even more dangerous monster. In that case, I suggest you cling tightly.
Well…either way actually…
“Igor! Since when do we use RED thread on a GREEN monster?”
J Howard: Bravo!
Once one moves past the smoke and mirrors that Obama’s supporters are selling, it still comes down to political and governmental principles. In McCain we have a badly flawed candidate who we at least know what he stands for. Obama is a cypher wrapped in Axelrod’s fog of change.
In almost any other year it wouldn’t even be close as to how people would vote.
lee, et al:
Everyone seems to misremember the Manchurian Candidate’s prime plot point: the front-runner in the election wasn’t the Candidate, it was the Veep slot’s wife that was the true Manchurian Candidate. Angela Lansbury was using the moderate candidate for Prez as a stalking horse.
For Obama to be a true MC, Biden’s wife would have to be the evil overlord in league with the Commienazis. I ain’t seein’ it.
*grin*
“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy has been seen as a metaphor or analogy of WWII, the Cold War and lately the War on Terror.
Taking it as the Cold War this election seems to be the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”. Winning against the Communist/Socialist overseas then coming home later to find it has been camping in your own backyard all along.
My conservative/libertarian brother is completely in the bag for Obama now, to the point where he is metaphorically putting his fingers into his ears and screaming “La, La, La, La!!!” I sent him a link to Kurtz’s article: this is what I got back:
Yup, investigative reporting is “psychobabble. I want my brother back.
BJTexas:
Yes, but has he “donated” his Facebook status to Obama’s campaign? I’ve had several otherwise reasonable folks I call friends opt for this in-kind contribution to The Cause.
No, no, Doug, not quite that bad. He’s just so pissed off at Republicans for wrecking his party that he sees leadership qualities in Obama’s debate responses and speeches. This is a very intelligent conservative of over 30 years with a highly analytical brain. His daughter and I are befuddled but they both live in R.I. so their vote ain’t gonna matter anyway.
That Facebook thing creeps me out.
So here’s what worries me most: Obama and a hearty portion of his followers seem to buy into the notion of the Perfectability Of Man. They really believe that we can, essentially, bring Heaven here to Earth merely by human action.
My worldview, both religious and (religiously-informed) political, boils down to the fact that humanity is, at base, sinful and therefore necessarily Sucks. I know I’ll never be perfect, nor will anyone that I encounter from now until the day I die. If I rely upon others’ good will and unselfishness, I’m going to lose out in this world. And, if I believe that I can force others to have good will and unselfishness, well, I’m a fool of the first order.
I don’t take issue with Obama and crew’s end goals — namely, that everyone be at peace and happy with their lives. It’s their methods, which rely so heavily upon 1) their own ability to perfect themselves and 2) the necessity of enforcing “right” behaviors on everyone else that worry me so. C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength is an absurdist piece that takes utilitarianism and university politics to their “logical” ends. It’s unfortunate that we’re likely to see those precise sorts of tactics and philosophies come to the fore, should Obayers come to power.
C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength
Thanks, Doug. That one needs to go on the list.
SBP:
It’s weird, but during my reading of Lewis’ work this past summer, I was struck by just how prescient the man was. So much of Jeff’s reasoning on the abstraction of words and meaning, Lewis nailed 60+ years ago. Truly he was a gifted writer and a God-given talent. It’s just unfortunate that he, you know, wrote the truth, ’cause man can it be a bummer.
What I find particularly hilarious is when you confront the more secular Obamatons who believe in the Perfectability of Man, and inform them that perfection is impossible — it violates causality. It’s like you trip a little circuit breaker in their head and they need some time to reset it.
Radical or poser?
Watch the Dem leadership. If Pelosi and Reid are moved out first thing in the spring and the DNC chair goes to an Obama surrogate, it will be time to go John Galt.
Fairness doctrine will be the first item of business of the Obama administration, followed closely by the Google/Government Partnership for Internet Standards.
We’ll all be happier in the camps.