Wednesday 26 October 2011

Obama and the American Nightmare


In responding to a question on whether or not Barack Obama had shown great leadership I wrote as follows;

I think he is the worst, least competent, president in American history, an accolade I once awarded to James Buchanan but have since changed my mind. I think the buck stops everywhere but the Obama House. I think he shames the free world, which has long expected a lead from Washington, with his stunning incompetence. I think his capacity for high office is zero and counting downwards. I think he is a crypto-Marxist who has created a poisonous ideological atmosphere in the States, standing over a house divided almost as badly as it was on the eve of the Civil War. Do I think he has shown great leadership? Why, of course.

Taking out that final twist of irony that is exactly what I think. I could say that Obama was responsible for America’s present malaise, but he’s really too little a man for that, an individual of no real historic significance, beyond being the first black face in the White House. No, he is more of a symptom of a disease than the disease itself.

The nature of that, the nature of the disease and its pathology, I am really finding quite difficult to determine. But there is America, a crypto-Marxist as chief executive, an America whose business seems to be anything but business, an America where people can gather in one of the nation’s leading cities, decrying the very capitalism and enterprise which made it great in the first place. There, in New York, are the socially and politically suspect, playing at being Arabs, desperados in search of doles, the antithesis to everything that America represents, as bad, in their own way, as the communists and anarchists of the past.

At the end of his 1969 Silent Majority oration, Richard Nixon said of the war in Vietnam “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” Vietnam could not defeat America, the Soviet Union could not defeat America, Iraq could not defeat America, no power on earth could defeat this great country. Nixon was right: only Americans can do that; only Americans have done that.

I’m a historian; I like to draw parallels with the past. Every Empire declines, some more rapidly that others, but who would have believed that the American decline would have been so rapid. It’s just over twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States, Ronald Reagan at its head, as the preeminent power on the earth, the victor in the Cold War. It was the occasion for The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s premature celebration of all that was good and true and noble.

Now here we are, here America is, in retreat across several fronts. It took Rome four hundred years to travel from the zenith of Augustus to the nadir of Honorius. It has taken America a mere twenty to go from the hopes of the age of Reagan to the mediocrity of the age of Obama.

Yes, Obama is a symptom; he’s not the cause, but his own weakness and incompetence has compounded the many problems confronting the nation. There is nothing inevitable here. The problems are bad but they are not intractable. The will and the vision are needed to overcome them; simple determination is needed, the ability to do what is necessary.

I take this point, this present time, to be the trough of American history. There is a way up but only when Obama is in the past, only when American can see this weak, incapable and fatuous man was the wrong choice at the wrong time. With a man like this history never provides a right time. Big, meaningless and windy speeches, head turning this way and then that, that’s the only trace that Barack Obama will leave behind, a silly and insincere voice in the depths of the American nightmare.

36 comments:

  1. My sentiments exactly, Ana. I'll re-post this piece later this week if you don't mind.

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  2. It is somewhat ironic that Obama himself is half-African immigrant, because in many ways the dark side of America is an African dark side. America will never be a socialist country, and the response to Obama, just like Clinton and Carter and so many others before him, proves that. But what America can be is tremendously corrupt. America has equal capacities to be a country of breathtaking innovation, leadership and positivism, and a country of sniveling nepotism and backroom dirty deals. For every American city of technology and capitalism there is a city of old, blue-blooded money that does not welcome unsolicited achievers.

    In many ways, the latter not only grows with people like Obama, but enables them, for you see the people who aren't connected begin crying out for government to destroy those who have shut them out, and government does so but then takes tremendous power for itself in the aftermath. But the worse part is that people like Obama actually expand it, as the gigantic growth of government undermines the boomtowners, allowing the blue-bloods to grow ever more powerful.

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  3. I can't for the life of me understand how so many people fell for what was really nothing but a stuffed shirt, simply because he was black and managed to read from a teleprompter; even educated and smart people from my country (Argentina) and thus without the burden of racial guilt many appear to have in the US swore by him.

    I entirely agree that Obama is just a symptom of a far larger problem; I've read several articles comparing in american and english newspapers comparing the US entitlement problem and the fiscal consequences it brings about with the causes of the decades-long decadence of my country and I have to say that the outlook is grim.
    Once a sizable part of the nation starts to think that "where there is a need there is a right" and "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" becomes accepted as the basis on which public policy terms are discussed, there is unlikely to be a way back.

    By the way Ana, have you taken a look at the history of the Oxford History of the US Series? I am currently going through my second book of the series and I really like what I've seen so far. I would really like to read your reviews of these works.

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  4. The Tea Party are changing American politics Ana. In my opinion UKIP are the British equivalent. Let us hope that both the Tea Party and UKIP go from strength to strength.

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  5. I'm afraid that I fall back on Ayn Rand. Obama and the Democrats are the looters. Unfortunately the other party in Atlas Shrugged has yet to appear. It certainly isn't the Republicans.

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  6. Crypto-Marxist?! Sorry, but that just sounds bizarre, and lacking any correspondence to reality. I really like your blog, but this reads as faintly ridiculous..

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  7. Nobby, yes, and another yes on the Tea Party. :-) They really need to drop the fundamentalist connection, though. Religion is an important virtue in American politics, but as an adjutant, not as a commanding officer.

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  8. Jeremy, yes, that's an important point about corruption, the pork-barrelling and Tammany Hall tradition, if I can put it like that. I would not be too sanguine about the impossibility of socialism, though. There have been major demographic changes in the country over the last twenty years or so that make this a distinct possibility. Big government is already in place. Socialism is just the next step.

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  9. Wilson, I absolutely agree.

    On the Oxford series I've only read McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, his account of the Civil War era, which I thought was superb, both as a piece of writing and as a work of scholarship. That was a few years ago now but I shall try and draw from the wells of memory sufficiently to write a review. :-) I'll catch up with the others in due course.

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  10. Michael, I retain faith in the GOP...and the TP. :-)

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  11. HIM, thanks. In the light of your comment you might be interested in The Manchurian Candidate, a piece I posted on 10 February of last year.

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  12. Indeed the Big Government and the moves towards Socialism are in place, and America is not happy about it, including even many groups that were previously considered very pro-Socialism (e.g. Latinos, Young people, and the City of New York). Why do I say this? A combination of polls showing Obamas support among Latinos collapsing to under 50% and his support among young collapsing to near 50%, and a series of elections in which urban Democrat districts in the Northeast have shockingly changed hands, even when (as in the case of the district in Queens) the opposing candidate was actually pretty good.

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  13. I don't believe Obama himself is historically or politically significant, except as a sign of the desperation of statism to find ways enact its towering dreams of centralized command and control over every aspect of life . . . while all around us the existing edifices are decaying and collapsing faster than new ones can be constructed. He is poster boy selected by committee with no more autonomy than a glove puppet. His failures are the failures of one sterile branch of the ruling class, just as the idiotic campaigns of Palin, Bachmann, Perry, et al represent the failed imagination of the other branch.

    Party politics has been over-massaged and sterilized by vested interests who fear any true liberty and innovation in politics and commerce will allow others to prosper and displace them. They fear change will sweep them away - and they are right. But change will come nonetheless.

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  14. Ana, As you know Americans are less embarrassed about their religious beliefs than most English people who are often condescending in their attitude towards what they describe as 'fundamentalism'. It is a different culture and Americans are often less inhibited about religious expression. Conversely, in the UK, if someone even mentions the word God in public the chances are they will considered a nutter. This is quite strange when you consider how religious the rest of the free world is - I mean societies not previously under the yoke of atheistic communism. What I am saying is that in this respect it is not the Americans that are odd it is the English.

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  15. Barack Obama is President 'cos he Speakseasily.
    :-)

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  16. Hi, Ana. I re-posted your essay today with a small preface of my own:

    (http://crockettlives.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/an-unnatural-disaster/)

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  17. Ana, I very much agree w/your opinion of BHO, and was horrified when he was elected President of the US. What little record he had demonstrated that he was little more than a far-left wing political hack. Then again, as the main-stream media refused to vet him, and he outspent his opponent 7-1 for political advertisements, I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised. I am more than a little concerned that he already has $1B of campaign funds on hand (compared to the ~$679M he spent against McCain the last election).

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  18. Jeremy, my hunch, and I confess it is a hunch, not having looked at the figures you refer to, is that the new immigrants, particularly those from the Latin countries, are far more sympathetic to socialism and state intervention than the WASP community. I see these people as the backbone of the Obama vote, along with black Americans. The discontent, I suspect, is because the great change is not happening or not happening fast enough. Do you think this discontent will turn to a Republican vote next year? I suspect not.

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  19. Calvin, I certainly hope so, not just for your sake but for ours also.

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  20. Nobby, yes, I understand. Religion is important in American politics but it has never occupied the centre ground. The problem with The GOP's dalliance with fundamentalism is that it risks losing much of the moderate vote. The centre may be soft but it's still decisive.

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  21. CI, as he wanders out of a speak-easy. :-)

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  22. Bob, many thanks. I shall have a look in a bit.

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  23. CB, where does the cash come from? That's something that I must look in to.

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  24. "Do you think this discontent will turn to a Republican vote next year?"

    Actually Ana the evidence at the RCP Polling Average, one of the more scientific approaches to polling available, along with Special Elections, seems to indicate that it will. And the thing about the immigrants is that up until now a few GOP firebrands like Mr. Tancredo (ironic name, considering what he's famous for) have done a great job of making them feel like the GOP is against them, even when in many cases they really aren't the way the debates and the dialogue is carried only the most careful of listeners would be able to, and with Obama and his policies causing many of them to literally leave the country as they find themselves without any work or possibility of it, they're starting to change their tune. Keep in mind that Americas welfare state is nowhere near as elaborate as Britains (though ironically some other forms of state control may be more so), and as a result people and especially immigrants are much more connected to the economy and the results of bad economy policy.

    Unlike Tancredo, Herman Cain, a real American black growing up in the Jim Crow South to do and be so many amazing things, presents a starkly different face. Even if he loses the primaries, he's gotten far enough to leave an impression that someone else CAN win and that minorities are truly welcome and important to the GOP.

    The great irony is that America actually has more to be afraid of in terms of immigration and border then it did 4 years ago, but Americans in general don't consider the issue as important as they considered it then maybe in part because other concerns have grown more pressing. That helps the GOP greatly, as the antagonizers of the "Mexican Reconquista Watch Brigade" have largely gone home, stayed quiet or been ignored.

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  25. Ana, as I recall it came in equal amounts from three different sources (roughly 1/3 of the total amount was illegal).

    The first of it was from his "Left Coast" bundlers - wealthy homosexuals from San Francisco, Silicon Valley investors, and Environmentalists.

    The second big chunk was from online contributions, but given the $2300 per contributor legal limit, it is more than a little suspicious that Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Mickey Mouse each contributed over $20,000 to his campaign. I used to work in the consumer credit industry, and I was amazed when I saw that the DNC and Obama webpages didn't include any edits to confirm that they were valid credit card purchases which didn't exceed the $2300 limit. I wonder how much money the major cards had to "charge-off" when all of those clever college students defaulted on their balances.

    Finally, on the East Coast, despite that the Republicans are viewed as the party of the big banks and big business, Obama received 2 to 3 times the contributions from the big Wall St houses like Goldman-Sachs and Citicorp as did McCain. On the "Near East" Coast, two brothers that were known to be connected to the PLO would buy "Hope and Change" T-shirts from the Obama campaign and resell them in the Gaza Strip. $38,000 isn't much money, but illegal is illegal. Of course, his receiving millions from the various labour unions and College professors is a given.

    Regretfully, Obama's people have demonstrated one thing - if you win the election, you don't have to worry about being procecuted for inconsistancies surrounding your campaign finances.

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  26. Jeremy, thanks for that. I look forward to next November!

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  27. Ana, I think you write beautifully, and it's refreshing to visit an intelligent blog (they are certainly the exception). But, I have to say ...

    I just recently watched the House of Cards series (yes, I know, 20 years after the fact), and I thought the Francis Urquhart philosophy was an unfair exaggeration of a conservative world view. But I wonder if I was wrong.

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  28. Jon, I could not possibly comment. :-)

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