Forward!

The Obama administration allowed millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds to go to foreign companies, despite recent statements by President Barack Obama that he opposes “shipping jobs overseas.”

“I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs and factories overseas,” Obama said in a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Tuesday.

“As long as I’m president, I will keep fighting to make sure jobs are located here in the United States of America,” said Obama.

However, Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus spending law–the $787 billion American Recovery and Reivnestment Act–gave millions of federal dollars to foreign companies or funded domestic companies that built factories in foreign countries or bought foreign products.

Okay. So they’re hypocrites, the left.  Such a revelation!  OUTRAGE TO FOLLOW!

Look → Stanley Fish gave the game away.  Hypocrisy doesn’t faze the left because the left is about the ends justifying the means. They’ll argue differently in different circumstances because they have no fidelity to outmoded and discredited ideas like “truth” or “logic” or “intellectual rigor” or consistency (the latter, as John Roberts has told us, being less important that reaching the proper conclusion.  If by “reaching” we mean starting there and then pretending to “reason” backward).  As anti-foundationalists, leftists  have but one objective:  power, seized and secured by whatever means, for whatever means they wish then to wield it.

The rest of their worldview consists of justifying what is in essence a totalitarian and necessarily tyrannical ideological stance, and working on ways to create the “realities” they need created for a specific context in order that they might justify the seizure and securing of power for themselves.  So that they can own it and wield it.

It really is that simple.

We’ve helped them out, naturally, by not beating back many of their most dangerous and incoherent intellectual assertions, from the animating forces behind post-structuralism to Said’s Orientalism (which provides the fundamental rationale for identity politics) to the tyranny of the “diversity” movement and its efforts to destroy the individual and replace him with a politicized piece that either complies with — or else is marginalized by — its identity bloc.  And of course, the “democratizing” of hermeneutics, which turned “interpretation” into its opposite and works insidiously to rob the individual of his autonomy and personal sovereignty to the benefit of some motivated, politicized collective.  But in the end, to beat the left all that’s necessary is to reject as flawed and intellectually dangerous the very assertions they rely upon to frame our culture and the very epistemology under which we conceive ourselves to be learning and knowing.

It starts with the simplest of pieces:  a reassertion of intentionalism.

Lord, how I wish some of the drivers of conservative and classical liberal and libertarian philosophy would either learn this lesson themselves, or else take advantage of my willingness to both teach it and defend it.

So much of what ails us as a society lurching ever leftward is readily fixable.  But it takes more than elections or conservative appointments to federal courts; it takes a reassessment, and a reassertion, of foundational principles. And as my academic work showed, intentionalism, properly understood and applied as a tenet of how language functions, protects natural individual rights far more institutionally than can any court that doesn’t first accept that intentionalism just is.