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A Unified Field Theory of the Obama Presidency
Victor Davis Hanson’s insightful article about the logic of our President’s foreign policy inspired an excellent post by member Mike Rapkoch and a lively Ricochet discussion. I wanted to comment in a separate post on an aspect of the VDH article that wasn’t directly addressed in Mike’s discussion.
VDH brilliantly shows that, although Obama’s foreign policy may look like a hot mess from a traditional vantage point, his strategy falls into crisp focus when seen through the lens of Obama’s worldview.
I think Hanson’s theory of the Obama foreign policy is exactly right. But while VDH identifies the four pillars of Obama’s foreign policy, he does not tell us much about the underlying worldview on which these pillars are founded. This underlying worldview explains not only Obama’s foreign policy, but most of his actions as President. It’s not Marxism or socialism, exactly, as some commenters in Mike’s discussion have suggested (although they are certainly in the toxic mix), but something more malignant.
In its winter 1967 issue, the leftist literary journal Partisan Review published a symposium titled “What’s Happening to America?” The editors framed the question as follows:
There is a good deal of anxiety about the direction of American life. In fact, there is reason to fear that America may be entering a moral and political crisis. If so, the crisis isn’t to be explained by any single policy, however wrong or disastrous. There seems instead to be some more general failure or weakness in our national life.
They went on to ask some of New York’s most rarefied intellectuals to comment on some specific questions regarding America’s culture, politics, economics, civil rights, wars and future in general.
The only memorable essay in the symposium is by Susan Sontag, the doyenne of cultural criticism and perhaps the American Left’s most influential intellectual figure of the second half of the 20th century. After several pages of heaping highbrow insults on the violent rubes who make up most of her fellow-citizens, Sontag takes a deep breath and says this about her country:
Everything that one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the awareness of American power: of America as the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man’s biological as well as his historical future in its King Kong paws. […] First of all, then, American power is indecent in its scale. But also, the quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth[.]
And then this:
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. […] The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.
Sontag was a complicated figure who, in later years, stepped back a bit from these views, which were controversial at the time. Nonetheless, these quotes are a perfect distillation of what most of our liberal intelligentsia now simply assume to be true. What is more, this poison has seeped into the culture, to the point that most of our educated class has — to one degree or another –internalized and assimilated it.
In my opinion, Obama believes these things in his bones. He is not a deep or original thinker, and I don’t think there is much more to his worldview than is found in those Sontag quotes. But that’s quite enough to explain, not just the mad rush to deep-six Churchill’s bust, the bowing and scraping before Third World despots, the Islamophilia and the gutting of defense; but also the teachable moments, the eco-fantasy, the constitutional lawlessness, the war against the police, the engineered race riots, the smirking contempt for the Bible-clingers in flyover country, Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and much else.
Most especially, it’s enough to explain his policy toward our southern border. This policy has nothing whatsoever to do with future Democratic votes; Obama couldn’t care less about future Democratic votes. What he cares about is the future ethnic makeup of the United States.
Image Credit: Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock.com
Published in General
Gee, O, I’m glad you’re on our side. I haven’t read much Sontag. I recall only an essay or two in college, but her description of the world from her extreme point of view does seem to dovetail with Obama’s. It’s late here so I am less than full minded at the moment, but I really appreciate the post, and will have more to say in the morn.
Great stuff. We need your research skills.
That about sums it up.
I suspect that Obama does harbor the 1967 Sontag view of America. That was how he was raised, and how his close associates were raised, and the environment in which he was educated. And it does provide a unified theory of his actions.
It would render him a racist, wouldn’t it? At least in the sense that he bears hostility towards white people and strives to afford them inferior legal rights and protections. It would also mean he is trying to eradicate the civilization that he was born in.
So how morally superior to white people is he? How morally superior would the America he strives for be?
There is a very big and powerful constituency that agrees with his world view. By conventional criteria (what he ran on and continues to state) his policies have produced only disasters foreign and domestic – more war, terrorism, pollution, inequality, instability, and declining wealth, and divisiveness. His rhetoric is absurd – whatever he states now, he stated the opposite in the past, often only days earlier.
That he is considered credible by anyone at this point is very hard for me to understand.
A good article by Michael Doran here:
http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2015/02/obamas-secret-iran-strategy/
was highlighted by Hugh Hewitt yesterday. This makes a similar point as VDH, but looks into how he implemented his world view when in power.
This article, as VDH’s, is well worth reading.
But the point here is not that Obama’s worldview is self-loathing and anti-American. Obama is only putting into practice what the vast majority of liberalism believes. The quote from Sontag in 1967 only goes to prove that this self-loathing has been festering for a long, long time – decades before Obama.
As each new generation goes through an educational system that harbors and promotes that Leftist view, coupled with an influx of foreigners who (through no fault of their own) have no idea what American ideals really are, we are likely to drift more and more away from the ideals that actually worked and brought us to the power in the first place.
Yes, you’ve come very close to a credible unified theory. I wouldn’t put the entire emphasis on race, though. Whiteness isn’t what put America on the pinnacle (even if that’s what Obama believes). It’s the Jerusalem (Judaism) – Rome (Christianity) – Athens (Reason) – Scotland (Enlightenment) nexus under which the Left chafes. It’s our civilization’s ideals it would destroy.
And it’s frightening how many have fallen for the lies the Left tells. It’s positively Biblical in scope, where this fall from grace has been described before. In only one generation we’ve lost sight of who we are.
Thanks for this. I think it accurate. Let me distill it further. Obama is not defined by his aspirations; he is not defined by what he loves; he is defined by what he hates — and so he is a friend to America’s enemies and an enemy to our friends because what he hates is everything that this country has achieved. It is this hatred that, to an ever increasing degree, is taught in the textbooks that our children are forced to read in the public schools; and, of course, it is to an ever increasing degree taught in our colleges and universities. If we do not take our educational system back from the left, we are bound to be defeated.
Paul, thank you! Yes, you are exactly right — hatred is at the root of leftism. And, I would add, so is violence – from Robespierre to Lenin to Bill Ayers. Or at least a very high tolerance for the right sort of violence.
Western Judeo-Christian civilization is the culmination of God’s work of civilizing His creation. It has been going on since the beginning of human existence, recorded most comprehensively in the Old Testament of the Bible, with tens of thousands of other supporting documents throughout recorded history.
If we accept the Biblical account of God the Creator, then we also identify His antithesis, satan. That being the case, he, satan, has been amassing an army to defeat God’s plan for humanity, That is; Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
Deuteronomy 30:19 says — “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”
Obama has chosen his army, and satan is his king.
I guess we need to wait for Mr Obama’s third (ghost-written) autobiography before we know what he really thinks about America.
But we already know.
There is a flip side to the “white skin, power, technological progress, and affluence are evil” mindset; and that is that dark skin, weakness, and material poverty are, in and of themselves, good and noble. Obama and the Left are working to make America “good and noble.”
I agree with WC, the whiteness aspect is less important than the Anglo-American tradition. And it is the Anglo-American tradition that is important as the left still has lots of admirers of Continental European traditions like the social welfare statism of Kaiser’s Germany.
(WC, one quibble. The Enlightenment was a British invention (Scotland was as much or more important to the Enlightenment than England was).)
There’s nothing wrong with ensnaring the ensnarable in a web of cooperation so as to avoid the need to assemble a posse to slay them as monsters. The trick is in figuring out who’s ensnarable, and who’s really a just monster.
It would take a genius to conclude Iran was a partner worthy of cooperation. Err…
No, it would take a genius to turn Iran into a partner worthy of cooperation. Too bad we haven’t got one in office.
Thanks. Corrected.
It’s not uncommon for women of my age to suffer from mental-pause. Ahem.
Or for people to say England when referring to all of Britain or even the whole United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It’s the same sort of synecdoche that allows foreigners to call people from the South “Yankees.”
I approach the big O by understanding that he is deeply scarred from small inadequate genitals.
Or, yeah, then there’s DocJay’s explanation.
Yes, — but it’s more important just now to have one other trick and that is to discern which are monsters pretending to be ensnarable.
But, in keeping with all the 3 articles (VDH, MR, Oblomov), I realize that Obama really doesn’t care what the truth is in this regard. He just wants the appearance of a new way of dealing with the world. He’s not wedded to it and can give it up anytime. And he will blame America if it fails. This is a foolproof president. And our media will keep him that way to the fullest extent of their power.
Even if it were possible, we’ll never be able to take back our educational system in time to save our country. The sad reality is that we’re already defeated—it’s a done deal—and we’re just spinning our wheels before the other shoe drops.
WC, I totally agree with you. But with Obama it’s ALL about the race thing though. Wasn’t that the title of one of his many autobiographies? “It’s All About Race and Inheritance” or whatever?
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Can’t say I’ve read it by the way. Not that interested in post-colonial marxism.
Has anyone read it who was not paid to do so?
I doubt Obama himself has actually read it.
As I said…