Eight Wasted Years - And the ratchet slips free.

National Review Online ^ | November 05, 2008 | John Derbyshire

[neverdem]

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November 05, 2008, 9:30 a.m.

Eight Wasted Years
And the ratchet slips free.

By John Derbyshire

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

Thus Barack Obama, writing in his autobiography about his time at the expensive liberal-arts college Occidental in California. I’d like to tell you that he goes on to mock his young self for naïvety and infantile leftism, to deplore the way those “Marxist professors” used their prestige and influence to fill young heads with poisonous rubbish long discredited by events in the real world. I’d like to, but I can’t, because he doesn’t. Obama doesn’t think Marxism is rubbish. He thinks it’s basically … correct.

Not that our president-elect is going to roar through the U.S. economy nationalizing the means of production, distribution, and exchange. (The current administration has that well in hand, in any case.) Nor, I am pretty sure, will he incite a violent class war, with the losers hustled off to labor camps or driven into exile with the family jewelry sewn into their petticoats. We are long past the point where classical Marxism has any application. Obama can’t incite the workers to seize control of the factories: the factories are all in China. He can’t consolidate peasant small-holdings into communal farms, because there aren’t any peasant small-holdings; and if he tried anyway, no one would notice, farming being the occupation of less than half of one percent of us.

Barack Obama does, though, have the heart and soul of a cultural Marxist. He sees history in terms of class struggle, with pitiful, soulful Oppressed being brutalized and impoverished by arrogant, heartless Oppressors. Anyone who sees matters in these Who-Whom terms has absorbed the essence of Marxism, even if he has never held a hammer or a sickle — even if, like Obama, he has never held anything heavier than a Community Organizer’s clipboard.

This was the import of the Joe the Plumber incident. In a long campaign your true self is bound to emerge once or twice. No matter how tightly your handlers apply the shrink-wrap, a sharp claw or beak will work its way through now and then. In Barack Obama’s worldview, the Who and the Whom are locked in a bitter struggle, from which the Whom is bound to emerge victorious at last. Then the victors, purified by suffering, will lead mankind on to the sunlit uplands where from each shall be taken according to his abilities, to each shall be given according to his needs.

That these doctrines are utterly false, completely mistaken, and catastrophically destructive in practice, is a thought Barack Obama cannot think. That “ability” and “needs” turn out to be shapeless and slippery concepts when politicians try to corral them, has not occurred to him. (I need a new car. Will whichever citizen has been delegated to pay for it, please mail the check to National Review? Thank you.) How could such thoughts have occurred to him? He was a red-diaper baby, offspring of a love-the-world, hate-America sixties gal and an African socialist in the Mugabe mould, raised by leftish grandparents addled with “Uncle Tim” racial guilt, and mentored by a hard-Left labor radical.

Pat Buchanan (Whom God Preserve!) gave his own autobiography the title Right from the Beginning. If Barack Obama had been a tad more honest when writing his, he could just as well have titled it Left from the Beginning. He was honest enough though, lavishing praise on coarse, fascistic radicals like the odious Jeremiah Wright. (You can let Rev’m Wright out of the basement now, guys.)

Margaret Thatcher used to talk about the “ratchet effect.” When the Left gets power, she said, they drive everything Left; when the Right gets power, they slow the Leftward drive, perhaps even halt it for a spell; but nothing ever gets moved to the Right. U.S. politics in the 21st century so far bears out this dismal analysis. What does the Right have to show for eight years of a Republican presidency? I supported George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he had a conservative bone in his body somewhere. I supported him in 2004 because I thought him the lesser of two evils. At this point, I wouldn’t let the fool park his car in my driveway. Bruce Bartlett was right, every damn word.

I see that some of my NRO colleagues are scratching around for shards of optimism — of Hope! — in the general wreckage. Good luck to them. I see nothing for conservatives to hope for in an Obama administration. We just have to stick it out. This shallow, ignorant, self-obsessed man, who held an actual job for just one year of his charmed life (low-grade editing for an obscure newsletter — he felt, he tells us in Dreams, “like a spy behind enemy lines,” the enemy of course being capitalism), this red-diaper baby and his wife, will be our First Couple for the next four years and some weeks. It’ll be interesting. Interesting.

[Clock King]

I know, I know. It is wrong to fight evil by becoming evil. But we have to face some serious facts: the people who make up the voting public are not logical and severely mis-educated. They go for “cool”; style over substance. So even though conservative ideals have produced the wealthiest nation with the greatest personal liberty and freedom, people just won’t care. Even those who are wealthy, like Warren Buffet, will side with the Socialists so they can steal from the American Public. So we will need another approach. I’m just suggesting that a group be formed to look for other ways, but consider all options, even unpleasant ones. It’s either that or wait 2000 years for humans to evolve away from such group-think.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy."

Such a comical and cartoon-like self-caricature of leftist clichés.
But it's not satire???

He could be a chapter in Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals.

[mtntop3]

Bush seems to have kept the author’s worthless ass and a lot of others safe the last eight years.

[Just another Joe]

It’ll be interesting. Interesting.

May you live in interesting times.

[WOSG]

“The GOP is not an effective advocate for Conservatism”

What a silly comment....
“Reagan and Gingrich are proving to the the exception and not the rule. “

Monumental exceptions! These 2 men between them helped keep USA on a more conservative path from 1980-2000.

The GOP is the only political vehicle out there capable of advancing conservatism... WE have to get in and drive it in the right direction. Drivers are needed!

[WOSG]

“Gingrich is very much an exemplar of “the rule.” When it came down to it, Gingrich’s Contract for America was nothing more than a campaign tactic that was quickly discarded once it became apparent that Gingrich had neither the political ability nor the political power to carry it out.”

FALSE on a number of levels. First, it was a positive and real agenda. Second, all the 10 promises made were kept in that Gingrich got the bills through the House, in the end most of the proposals went through the Senate and ended up getting passed. In welfare reform case, we have the signature conservative reform of the era, it worked and it made a big difference in reducing welfare dependency.

“The first is that, despite what the Contract said, “conservatism” has no clear meaning;” Did the contract even use the word conservative? It was 10 point specific program.

[WOSG]

Not that he doesnt deserve blame, but there is a serious mistake in pretending we didnt get a big benefit from having Bush for President.

2 reasons: Alito, Roberts

When Heller was decided, it was a 5-4 vote. We had Roberts and Alito on the good side. All the Clinton appointees were against our RKBA. That wasnt the only key decision where Roberts and Alito saved us from something awful.

Now I ask you. If Gore or Kerry were President WOULD WE EVEN HAVE A 2ND AMENDMENT TODAY?

Then there are the tax cuts, which the Democrats may take away in part of in whole, and/or bring back the death tax.
Would Gore have even passed it? No.

Not to mention the many ways that Bush properly waged the war on terror despite the Democrats flogging him at every turn.

To call it ‘wasted’ is simply wrong.

[LibertarianInExile]

BTTT, everything you said.

[supercat]

You’re right but the answer is NOT starting another party

How would you suggest conservatives fortify themselves against the RINOs who will actively seek to undermine them?

[tpanther]

We have to become involved! From the local level right to the top! Explain that we will not vote for them, they serve us, not the other way around!

As hard as it is, I may not vote for Saxby Chambliss in the run off. I’ve got some time to think about it, but I think we’re getting his attention.

WRITE! SPEAK UP!

[mrsmel]

This is true, and so is another point that he made-that conservatives, as the advocates of small government and more individual liberty, necessarily leave a vacuum in government, especially in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, that liberals and socialists are more than happy to fill. As they have done, in government, in academia, in media (the last two being almost almost wings of liberal/socialist government these days). How do we as conservatives resolve this? How do we stay true to our principles of limited intrusion of government in any form-parental rights, etc-and not leave the vacuum for the socialists to fill, as expanding government and collectivism is their agenda?

[mrsmel]

And anyway, Gingrich is a believer in the man-made global warming religion, which by its nature calls for a more expansive and regulatory government. IMO the global warming ideology is just another path to big government, by the back door.

[neverdem]

And anyway, Gingrich is a believer in the man-made global warming religion, which by its nature calls for a more expansive and regulatory government. IMO the global warming ideology is just another path to big government, by the back door.

IIRC, Newt didn't buy the global warming argument as much as saying that the argument was lost in the media, and that we should use technology to reduce carbon emissions without reducing our standard of living.

[mrsmel]

Everything I’ve read here at FR indicates that he himself subscribes to man-made global warming, but I will google this and find out for myself. I generally trust the consensus at FR, but it never hurts to “trust but verify” :)

[neverdem]

Gingrich Explains Why He Did Global Warming Ad With Pelosi

[mrsmel]

I read it, he seems to imply that he hasn’t completely made up his mind, but wants to proceed on the idea that if we don’t engage, the left will control the agenda. This goes back to what I posted earlier-either way, it’s still a back door to expanding government, but if we don’t engage, it leaves the field wide open for the left who whole-heartedly endorse bigger government. How do we resolve this? I don’t see helping them reach the same goal, only at a slower speed, as very helpful.

[neverdem]

How do we resolve this? I don’t see helping them reach the same goal, only at a slower speed, as very helpful.

It buys time. Temperatures haven't increased for a decade, and have decreased for the last 3 years, removing the increased in temperature from the last 50 years, IIRC. Sunspot activity is minimal.

[mrsmel]

I mean how do we resolve the fact that by buying into man-made global warming, even if only as a “contingency”, how do we avoid participating in the expansion of government, and increasing strangulation on business and personal life through regulation? Aren’t we then just part of the problem, no matter how we try to rationalise it that we’re merely trying to slow it down? If we’re not trying to “slow it down” by simply opposing a theory that is by no means universally accepted even in the scientific community, aren’t we still, no matter what we call it, contributing to the stranglehold of government and the erosion of natural liberty? And for what? Something that isn’t even a proven fact. That seems ridiculous.

[neverdem]

If we’re not trying to “slow it down” by simply opposing a theory that is by no means universally accepted even in the scientific community, aren’t we still, no matter what we call it, contributing to the stranglehold of government and the erosion of natural liberty? And for what? Something that isn’t even a proven fact. That seems ridiculous.

Newt's acceptance of man made global warming seemed doubtful. He doesn't mind green energy if it's done through the market, not the gov't. He wants energy independence.