Van Jones delivers the red meat version of Obama’s frequent stump speech, the one in which the President talks about his opponents’ “narrow, cramped view of liberty” (without ever defining liberty himself) and mocs such foundational American ideals as self-reliance, personal responsibility, and individualism while promoting a kind of social collectivism camouflaged in the language of Christian charity. Only with a big beneficent central government as the Godhead promising to protect you from a life that would otherwise prove nasty, brutish, and short.
That the President does this in an historical moment where entitlement programs in the US are legion — and other entitlement societies that sell themselves as progressive nannystates are going bankrupt and crumbling into civil unrest — just adds the surreal flavor of all this.
So when you listen to Van Jones, remember: this is what Obama himself believes, and this is what he’d preach were he not constrained by electoral politics to try to win over “moderates” and “independents” and those whose religious convictions are tied to ideas of a “social justice” that they’ve come to mistakenly conflate with governmental morality and secular piety.
As TRS notes:
It’s not that [Jones] misunderstands libertarianism. Just like Obama, it’s a part of America that he must consistently demonize and challenge in an attempt to knock it down. Because he wants the government to do everything so that it controls everything and therefore can give special treatment to groups he feels have been treated unfairly. Van Jones is nothing more than a representative for a special interest group, one that believes in redistribution of wealth and rejects individual charity. He’s a socialist/communist. It’s that simple.
Let me add, too, that those on the right who continue to promote this idea that Obama is a “good man” who is merely in over his head are doing this country a tremendous disservice.
The truth is the truth and should not be hidden out of fear that revealing it will upset those who’ve been taken in by the lie. It likely will. And yet it needs airing.
In a country that relies on an informed citizenry (at least in theory) to select its leaders, the management of truth — on both sides of the political aisle — is, dare I say, unhelpful.
And those who hide it from you — even when they claim to have your best interests at heart — rarely do. Or rather, they’ve come to conflate their best interests for yours, while projecting their insecurities onto you.
It’s time to call them out. Find your inner Visigoth and go knock down some facades.
But they race about at such high speed so, generally halfway around the world with me still in one sneaker.
So, really, what’s the difference between the views of Van Jones and those of the National Socialist Worker’s Party?
Some fella at No Left Turns mentions that Obama’s (and Jones’, by extension) derivative ideas — their political ideology let’s call it — is frozen in yesteryear: “Uncle Barry’s moral ideas are from fifty years ago. His Progressivism is trapped in the past. His living constitution is the prisoner of 20th century Progressivism.” The implication is that neither Barry nor Van know how to move forward in fact, being as they’re stuck with a broken model. Flail and flounder on the order of more Solyndras is a reasonable expectation of such stuff, and flail and flounder is what we reap. It’s funny that “progress” could be embodied in such stark “stasist-ism”. Apologies to V. Postrel.
The English language has more nuance than German.
Germans can pile nouns together like a son of a bitch though, gotta give ’em that.
As a prodigious consumer of lesbian-themed media, I object to this blatant mischaracterization of me and my political ideology.
And you have to wait until the end of the sentence to find out what happened.
More Jones.
What if he came out as white? I get the suspicion that iVan’s analysis would not hold.
Crawford,
That is easy.
These people want to destroy us politically and socially marginalize us–and I am using a very broad definition of the Right, from David Brooks on one side to Ron Paul on the other–on the path to implementation of their “vision.”
The Nazi’s were abundantly clear that a central tenet of their economic and cultural platform was the physical eradication of Jewry and the immediate implementation of Hitler’s quackery on racial/cultural purity; an impure state, one with Jews, Communists and Slavs, could never obtain its economic potential, let alone effectively expand militarily (to right the old “wrongs” that kept Germany from “Its place in the Sun.”)
They need us since we make things of value and grease the wheels of enterprise and so to that end we are exceedingly useful to them. Thus, they are the opposite of Nazi’s: They want us alive and working, creating some excess above cost or book value, to be taxed and redistributed to a grateful and growing body of people who cannot or will not do what we do.
It sounds as if he is cheerfully trying to implicate Eric Holder’s people in some sort of racism scheme or dogma or such.
Roddy, if you honestly don’t think mass extermination isn’t in their heart of hearts, you haven’t been paying attention.
And who’s the racist here?
It’s funny that “progress” could be embodied in such stark “stasist-ism”. Apologies to V. Postrel.
Statism and stasism go hand and hand so often, for a good number of years I actually thought ‘statist’ meant reactionary.
It just about any place it’s used you could read it either way and never miss a beat.
And who’s the racist here?
Why, that would be YOU for pointing it out, silly.
I like how he’s trying to paint libertarians as being fuddy-duddy godbotherers though.
Libertarians (aka the Legalize Pot party) hates gays and body piercings? WTF?
Libertarians (aka the Legalize Pot party) hates gays and body piercings? WTF?
Well, libertarians wouldn’t give the gay mafia actual legal enforcement powers…
I’m not having it. I’m done with with it. I have come this close || to finding my inner Ostrogoth for the reasons described, and now this? I’ll not make the adjustments in — what is it, some matter of religious cannon? — required for such a drastic late switch.
WordPress asks shall I remember you and I say yes and she does not remember me and now you know how I must hurt.
Crawford,
I don’t. If, at a PW meetup in Denver for instance, the entirety of this message board was slaughtered if a gas main exploded near the bar or what have you, that’d be some social utility right there.
But their goal is to box us in, for instance, the way the Klan is now boxed in: entirely marginalized, a toothless menace from days of yore, whose proponents dare not mention it publicly. Killing us would be violently detrimental to their goals; whereas killing the Jews was no big deal to the Germans then.
They NEED us. Just like there is no Obama without the 2008 economic collapse–and rich hedge funds–Van Jones and his Marxist tools don’t get to implement their vision without the power of strong cashflows coming in to the Treasury. They are pornographically mistaken on every level, and would assure The Right decades of rule, but they need us working and paying higher and higher incremental taxes.
England 1974 is their model, not Russia 1934.
” . . . killing the Jews was no big deal to the Germans then. “‘
Hmmph, I wonder what Leo Szilard and Al Einstein thought about that?
They saw it for what it was and put an ocean between them and Hitler; sadly, a fair number went to France. Most of their co-religionists however did not.
Another one of our sins was not believing them earlier when they said they were being killed and allowing more of them to come here and be safe.
I’m thinking rather of their potential usefulness along lines parallel to the usefulness you posit to the credit of the productive class in the US, not their distance from the place Roddy.
SDFerr,
thank you. I hadn’t taken that from your comment.
Understood.
The story I remember Roddy involved E. Teller’s telling of the second visit of Szilard (in which Teller drove the car! Such skills!) to Einstein at Princeton to firm up the letter to Roosevelt explaining the potential for a nuclear weapon. Our founders would have called Hitler’s antisemitism Divine Providence, whatever we may think it.
Molon Labe.
I just hate commies. Is it still okay to hate commies?
‘kay, thnx