'Obama Doesn't Really Think This Way'
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:19:14 -0700 (PDT)
'Obama Doesn't Really Think This Way'
By Christopher Chantrill
This last week conservatives spent a lot of time in the vomitorium.
Everything that Candidate Barack Obama has done has seemed like a n an
invitation to upchuck.
We are talking about the kumbaya speech at the Siegessäule in Berlin,
the culmination of Barack's Excellent Adventure, where we learned that
Germany and the United States came together in partnership to solve
the problem of the Soviet isolation of Berlin 50 years ago.
Don't worry, writes David Brooks, "Obama doesn't really think this
way."
When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last
year, he spoke about his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their
shared awareness that history is tragic and ironic and every political
choice is tainted in some way.
Sorry, David old chum, but I don't feel reassured when some liberal
quotes Niebuhr. Indeed, the conservative experience of the last seven
years is that while liberals talk a good line about irony and
political choice when it comes to walking the walk they hate President
Bush precisely because he insists on taking the tragic view, and
accepting that tough decisions must be made, taint or no taint.
We understand why that should be so. It's because President Bush's
tough choices and obstinate record of actually fighting global Islamic
extremism instead of talking about negotiations is an unwelcome
challenge to every twentysomething cultural creative sipping a latte
in the metrosexual neighborhood of some fashionable ideopolis.
With Barack Obama it's more like the Nietzschean notion of Zarathustra
coming down the mountain to bring his creative Übermenschlichkeit to
the world.
Even if Sen. Obama is just as hard-headed as Brooks says, there
remains the problem of what we might call the Democratic executive-
appointee community, the folks in the Obama campaign presently
hammering out policy positions who will end up as White House staffers
and deputy and assistant secretaries of federal agencies.
Our elite liberal friends are people who have grown up in the
assumptions of the liberal elite culture. Liberals are the most
educated, most evolved people on the planet, they know. As the most
educated, most evolved, most qualified people they understand what the
world needs now, and what it needs is people like them who can
negotiate with people like them in other countries to resolve our
differences.
As for domestic policy, it is evident that Michelle Obama has sat in
on enough planning sessions to understand that domestically the Obama
presidency will be rather different. "Lexington" reports in the London
Economist:
"Barack Obama will require you to work," she says. "He is going to
demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions.
That you come out of your isolation...Barack will never allow you to
go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
We conservatives understand what this is all about. Our conservative
thinkers have written all about it. Writes Danny Kruger, in his book
Fraternity:
[Elite liberal politics] is the philosophy of the state. Its ethic is
equality and its characteristic is coercion - the power, in the last
resort, to exert force over individuals and groups. It says 'you
must...'.
Isn't that exactly what Michelle Obama was trying to communicate to
her audience?
A few weeks ago, I brilliantly explained how the apparently
incompatible combination of liberal politics of international kumbaya
and domestic compulsion can be understood. It is the notion of "The
Moral Equivalent of War," an essay by philosopher William James
adapted from a speech he delivered at Stanford University in 1906.
Given that we all agree that war is permissible "only when forced upon
one," how will we motivate people for political and civic purposes?
His answer is to do it with the moral equivalent of war.
This explains why the first impulse of liberals is to negotiate with
thug dictators abroad but to demonize their domestic opponents at home
as mean-spirited sexists and racists. When you are waging the moral
equivalent of war in domestic politics you need an enemy just as much
as when you are the head of the military-industrial complex ginning up
the nation for a real shooting war.
Conservatives don't believe in the moral equivalent of war. That's
because, like Danny Kruger, we believe that all Americans are in this
together.
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and
its characteristic is authority - the non-coercive social persuasion
which operates in a family or a community. It says 'we should...'.
Minette Marrin says it more succinctly. "Conservatism is compassion
and community without compulsion."
The reason I quote these Brit thinkers all the time is that I think
that they are the conservatives doing the serious thinking. You'd
expect that. British conservatives have just spent eleven years in
the political wilderness, and that helps to concentrate the mind.
It is not clear that Sen. Obama has ever sojourned in the political
wilderness.
.
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