A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.
By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Remember when I analyzed the socialism in Obama's Inauguration Speech?
Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.
I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.
That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.
Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."
Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.
In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.
Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.
Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.
But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.
Not much, however. Here's what he says in Foreign Policy in 2009 after Obama's first win, but describing a more bleak time after Reagan's win:
A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."
I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.
Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".
So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?
Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:
Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure “competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our skepticism of central authority.”
He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.
Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.
To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:
This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”
Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state sovereignty.
This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!
Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.
Says Judis:
Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights interpretation of democracy.
Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."
John Judis has been debated in the conservative blogosphere. But it's symptomatic of the awfulness of the leftward turn at New Republic that he won't get a debate from liberals now at TNR.
The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.
Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.
Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.
James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.
I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?
Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.
Oh.
I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.
They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side, say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".
No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.
In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).
Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:
We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.
We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.
Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.
I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.
It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.
Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:
If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.
The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.
Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.
For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):
Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy, “high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.
Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.
While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:
Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make “central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security, that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and groups like ACORN.
Armed? Really?!
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