Early in the campaign season, Michelle Obama made comments about how she thought America was becoming a mean and base society. Unfortunately conservative pundits tried to use the statement to make a case that the Obama's, somehow, didn't love America.
Truth is, I agreed with Michelle Obama. Reading hundreds of blogs and forums, I had encountered numerous examples of the deteriorating state of civil discourse.
The question in my mind, then and now, is if the Obamas realized the source of the tension, or if they are simply playing the game of projecting all of their dislikes onto their partisan opponents. (The process of projecting negative labels onto one's opponents is fundamental to leftist thought).
Like a good voter should do, I invested a substantial amount of time trying to decipher and understand the substance behind the Obama campaign. I read his books, watched debates and listened to speeches. By the time of the election I saw nothing but a repeat of the Marxist campaign model where the candidate pounds the message of failure in the direction of their opponent while demanding a nebulous change.
Obama, of course, is not the one who invented the change campaign. The left had been manufacturing events and sentiment for running a change campaign in 2008 since Bush took office in 2000. Quite frankly, I believe that the Clintons had a lot more to do with engineering the 2008 change campaign than Obama. He was able to step into the role of agent of change designed for Hillary.
I like President Obama as a person and I sincerely wish him well as a president.
In my opinion, the question of whether or not he will be a good or mediocre president resides in this question of whether or not he sees the source of the deteriorating state of civil discourse, or if he will spend his presidency wearing political blinders and simply project all ills of the world onto the hated opposition party.
The source of the discontentment is, of course, the change campaign.
The change campaign starts with a concerted effort to manufacture discontent and disaffection. This really isn't hard to do. A demon trained in the technique could probably get a host of angels discontent with the fluffiness of the marshmallow clouds in heaven and eventually raise enough angst and tension to run a change campaign.
It is possible to manufacture discontent by pulling tricks like questioning the motives of your political opponents, framing issues in negative light, running whisper campaigns about conspiracy or coupled with "Colbert Report" style ridicule. When a partisan group controls the universities and press, they can manufacture a ground swell of discontent without ever even addressing issues.
Once the discontent has established critical mass, one need simply pound the drum of failure for a solid three years with claims that the economy will crash and the world will crumble. Since the market is a product of the mind, a well structured change campaign can even reach the point where people lose their confidence and the market declines.
This Marxist style change campaign is effective. It is what put Lenin, Hitler, and Mao in power. Historically, it has also been one of the most destructive methods of political ascent.
Now, I think we are fortunate that Obama stepped into the position of agent of change because there is a glimmer of hope that he has seen and recognizes the fundamental good in American society. There is even hope that he's caught on to the fact that many of the players on the far left like Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright are fundamentally rogues.
President George Bush clearly had faults. These faults were more of the blundering buffoon type of faults. Such faults rarely do deep intrinsic damage to a country's psyche.
The change campaign, by its very nature, creates extraordinarily deep resonating divisions that are hard to heal. Historically, this Marxist style of change campaign has led to steep declines where it was employed.
If Obama continues to follow the dialectic, he will spend his administration ringing the partisan bell. Change requires the marginalization then the eventual elimination of the hated opponents of change … the conservatives, Jews, or whatever ethic or social group the change agent framed as the villain of history.
Authentic efforts to reach across the aisle to heal the scars created by the change campaign will earn Obama the ire of his political base … the far left. Nobody in the history of civilization does a better job of hating than a radical zealot.
In several speeches, Barack has asked us to look beyond the "Red and Blue State" divide that dominated the Bush administration.
This looks like a positive step.
If you step back and consider the post election calls for unity in context of the source of the disunity, one finds that such efforts lack authenticity and are part of a self destructive pattern. The calls for unity are a bit like the platitudes of the sobering drunk who flutters with positive messages of sobriety in build up to the next binge.
A few political strategists like Karl Rove and Dick Morris aside, the red state/blue state divide was never core to Conservative beliefs. Moral principles are the core to conservative beliefs. To most conservatives, the divide was an aberration of history.
The red/blue division was much more central to the Left. The Dialectic is philosophy about division. You pull underhanded tricks to magnify division when you are out of power, and then make calls for unity when in power.
Calls for unity placed on foundation of disunity are apt to fail.
The very nature of this change campaign places Obama in an extremely difficult position. To really go forward, we have to break from the action/reactionary politics inherent in the process set forth by the Democratic Party.
Obama was not the originator of this campaign strategy. He might be able to avert the consequences of the strategy's design. The best start is to recognize that Material Dialectics held by the left (and reactionaries on the right) is the source of the problem.
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*NOTE Other than a few immigrants residing in servant quarters, illegal immigrants can't afford to live in Boulder, San Francisco or even in oppressively zoned Salt Lake city limits. Intellectuals can make pretense to altruism on immigration because they have effectively shielded themselves from the issue with high costs of living and tight zoning restrictions.
2 comments:
Projecting what you don't like onto your opponent is actually a fundamental human behavior, not something unique to "leftist thought."
Ironic you would partake in the same divisive behavior you attempt to decry in this post.
Yep, "projection" was popularized by Freud who had claimed to use dialectics to undercover the deep inner conflicts that wrack our collective conciousness.
Yep, I make a point of using projection, labeling, framing and other dirty tricks whenever I talk about them.
See, one technique is to use the group you wish to marginalize as the negative example. Some of these are really nothing more than instruction books on how to muddle the waters.
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