The recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the limitless human appetite for power.
James Burnham, The Machiavellians
Let’s not pretend that Marxism doesn’t run through the current Democratic party.
Indeed, the death struggle in 2008 was really a fight over who controls the party. It was the far Left Wing (the Marxists) versus the remnants of the New Deal coalition, represented by the few remaining white liberals (Obama gets a paltry 35% of the white vote) and lead by the Clintons.
The Marxists came to power in 1972 after the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1968, overthrowing the Old Democracy and replacing the Southern racists and the Chicago Machine with a new coalition of blacks, Marxists, unionists, and radical feminists; and they espoused anti-Americanism, redistributionist policies, and a racial spoils systems. SDS’ Mark Rudd “portray[d] the U.S. as an imperialist, sexist, racist society led by Caucasian male oppressors — in a word, ‘Amerika.’”
Rudd was co-founder of the violent Weather Underground with Obama benefactor Bernardine Dohrn, who described the United States as the “Fourth Reich,” and that “We live behind enemy lines.”
This is the ideology which infiltrated the Democratic party, so that by the 1970s there were strict racial and gender quotas on who could serve as a delegate to the DNC, and by the 1980s President Reagan was described as a monstrous dictator waging war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and who fed school children ketchup as a vegetable. There was loose talk that the US trained assassination squads.
But the Marxists lost every election, and briefly lost power to the Clintons, who attempted bringing the party back to sanity (and was stabbed in the back for trying — like Jimmy Carter).
Barack Obama is the pinnacle in this 40 year march to rid the party of moderates and liberals, and to create a country where the federal bureaucracy so overwhelms citizens that elections make little difference, and the polity is dependent on handouts in a weak country with high unemployment, much like Central Europe.
This is not, of course, about idealism. The “Hope and Change” of 2008 was a cynical use of liberal idealism to seize power, channeling Kennedy’s New Frontier and Clinton’s “I still believe in a place called hope.” Many liberals were hoodwinked by Obama’s appropriation of their rhetoric. The hip black guy even spoke like them. Little did they know from whence he came: the son of Marxists parents and the student of Alinsky.
Two important acts were essential after the election: a massive payback to interest groups in the “stimulus” and then the cementing of the revolution through Obamacare, though cleverly disguised to take effect after the 2012 election. Obamacare is the vehicle for the Managerial Revolution, the final shift in power from the hands of free men and women to that of bureaucrats.
Some argue that bureaucrats — albeit those in private industry — already run healthcare. But look at Obama’s illegal amnesty of illegal immigrants as a warning. And by giving an illegal immigrant a speaking place at the DNC, the Marxists announced once and for all the their hostility towards working Americans and their intention of displacing them, particularly those blue collar whites in coal country so despised by the elite. (Famously derided by Obama as those who “cling” to their guns and religion.)
Once power is vested outside of Congress’s law-making purview, the Executive can then bend that agency to his will regardless of the “legality” of the action. As James Burnham, co-founder of National Review wrote, “only power can restrain power, thus the need for a strong opposition.” Today the opposition to the Managerial State shrinks and Obama is overt with his Marxism. Romney was correct that Obama has a lock on 47% of the vote; as they say, work harder: millions on welfare depend on you.
Thank you for the excellent analysis and history lesson, Bud. Scary.