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| The Way to Rise in America | Liberals Against the Tide |
Obama's Three Unforced Errors
by Christopher Chantrill
April 21, 2008 at 12:58 pm
GOVERNMENT is always the rule of the few over the many. Always.
You may think that is obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise. Politicians, for example.
But if government is always the rule of the few, then politicians are always elitists. That puts politicians in a bit of a box because the royal road to winning elections is to convince the voters that “s/he cares about people like me.”
That is why Senator Obama’s three recent unforced errors could be so damaging. They spoil the tear the comfortable illusion that Obama the elitist is OK because he cares about people like me.
They also penetrate the veil of illusion that the Democratic Party maintains that it is the party of the little guy, civil rights, and patriotism despite all the evidence to the contrary.
In the Bittergate (or Bitterquiddick) incident we have Obama treating the working-class whites of Pennsylvania as objects. It’s true his remarks were, from an elite point of view, understanding and thoughtful. But they still showed that for Obama, the working-class whites are the Other. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the “little people.” Bittergate seemed to suggest that it was not.
In the Rev. Wright controversy another veil was punctured. Democrats are supposed to be the party of civil rights. This has been more and more difficult to maintain over the years as Democrats have supported race-based policies and condoned the frank racism of black leaders. Democrats didn’t need to have the racist Rev. Wright in the news.
In the Ayres/Dohrn flap voters are being reminded that the domestic terrorists of the 1960s are considered Just Folks in the Democratic Party. Most Americans, particularly white male Americans don’t get a pass like that. Imagine a Republican candidate with pals in the Ku Klux Klan or militia guys like Timothy McVeigh. Voters don’t need to be reminded that the reflex of many elite Democrats is to Blame America First.
Rush Limbaugh this morning says that none of this matters to Obama supporters. For them, Obama is a likeable chap who believes in the future. The past is the past. Forget it.
As usual, Rush is right. The question is whether the Obama image of a likeable uniter working for the future is getting a little tarnished of late.
Because the truth about Obama is that he is the representative of an old and discredited politics of the past.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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