One thinks of the book of that name, Common Sense, which provided the philosophical underpinning for the American Revolution in a short publication which became universally read in the colonies. It is straightforward, it is readable, it is lucid, it is compelling, and it is directed to you and me.
One thinks of Uncle Tom's Cabin which some argue precipitated the Civil War and which used fictional imagery to animate the antislavery movement to the point that slavery became morally repugnant and ultimately intolerable.
Cass Sunstein's works are not of that order. Most importantly, they are not directed to the common man and they do not seek to arouse the common sense of the common man rather they seek to supply intellectual cover to elitists and their ambitions. The author of this article in criticizing Cass Sunstein's inconsistencies and revealing them to be only so much intellectual jujitsu exposes his elitism. His job is to provide the talking points for activists and politicians to justify their predilections, read: their ambitions.
Nor is it an accident that the most prominent politician of our time, Barack Obama, has swallowed whole the Sunstein syllabus. Many conservatives miss the mark when they accuse Barack Obama of lack of intelligence. That is about as far off the mark as accusing him of being incapable of persuasive intercourse when he is unsupported by Teleprompter. He is quite effective without a Teleprompter and will be be very difficult to defeat in debate in the next election cycle, just as he was in the last. Nor is he unintelligent, but his intelligence is ungrounded and therefore more akin to cleverness and certainly not a generator of originality. All his life, Barack Obama has traded equally on his ability to talk the talk and on the color of his skin.
Was it PJ O'Rourke who said that a gaffe by a politician occurs when he is caught out telling the truth? Certainly, Joe Biden's assessment of Sen. Barack Obama as a clean-cut African-American who is articulate went to the heart of the matter and, since it was honest and accurate, it was regarded to be a gaffe. Biden's gaffe simply encapsulated the essence of Barack Obama. All his life he has advanced well beyond his level of experience and competence because he has been able to master the vocabulary and present it with the cadence and tonality exceptional in an African-American. So he advanced through academia right through Harvard Law school and then to the teaching position at the University of Chicago. During his academic career he learned quickly the liberal line, that is, after all, what he had been spoonfed all his life, and he perfected the technique of spitting it back.
He is a chameleon who shapes his argot with perfect pitch to his audience. He is as good, perhaps better, at this art even than Bill Clinton. So Obama can talk trash with the black political power structure of Chicago or with black liberationists like Rev. Wright; he can wax ardent with the elitist white revolutionaries like Bill Ayres; he can sound euridite with fellow senators in the Illinois legislature and with Senators in the United States Congress, or with progressive academics (to indulge in redundancy).
Nor is it an accident that Obama is an elitist. It is the nature of progressives to despise the common sense of the common man for the very reason that an elitist is a progressive, that is, because he wants to impose his ambitions on the common man and the common man's common sense is a stubborn obstacle to those ambitions. More fundamentally, an elitist is an elitist because he wants to play God, no, because he is compelled to play God.
It is this compulsion which is the driving force of leftism (it is instructive here to equate leftism or progressivism to fascism) and it explains why there is no fixed star, no true North which are the fixed and immutable truths which animate these people. The whole idea to play out one's ambitions in the lives of others so there can be no fixed truth apart from one's own conceptions.
So it is that Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama enjoy a synergistic, if not a "sodomnistic" relationship. Neither one has the elegance born of true insight, which generates straight talk such as our colonial ancestors discovered in Common Sense.
