The Grand Fanatic – Obama

Will Obama Destroy Socialism?

By Daniel Greenfield

…Obama has only one idea. The same one idea that the left has beaten into the ground repeatedly. The monopolization of power. This monopolization is disguised behind organizations claiming to represent the people, community activists, unions and public interest lobbies, whose only message is the vital necessity of a government monopoly in every economic area of life.

It’s the old Soviet strategy writ large. Every red error brought back to life and pushed forward with cunning and brute force, but no understanding of why it failed last time around. The slower transition of Wells’ “Open Conspiracy” does not make them any better at running a country, than the radical armed revolts of the Bolsheviks did. Repeating the same mistakes at 1/20th the speed does not lead to a better outcome. Only to more chances to see that they are going the wrong way.

The left’s total abandonment of individual choice, its insistence that a moral society can only come from total submission to the rule of the enlightened, does not just lead to tyranny, but to economic disaster. The last term has been another reminder of why the enlightened are not qualified to to run every aspect of a society, and why economic collectivism is no substitute for individualism. A healthy society gains its energy from individual decision making, a diversity of choices leading to a diversity of outcomes. An unhealthy one is tightly constrained by the five or ten year plan of a dictator and his cronies.

The left has never questioned the rightness of its destination, only the best way to get there. And that is its greatest blind spot. Within the left there has been debate on the speed of the transition and the best way to achieve it. Violent revolution or a slow takeover from within. Stamp out the bourgeoisie or brainwash their children into joining your ranks. But these concerns with tactics and the political correctness of one approach over another, always end up overlooking the larger questions. Because it is taken for granted that the system of collective tyranny they champion is bound to work.

Fanatics rarely question their own motives or the rightness of their beliefs. And the left breeds that brand of fanaticism the way the sewers of Paris bred rats. That makes them capable of ruthlessly pursuing a course, but not of recognizing that the course itself is wrong. The left spends so much time fighting to seize a country, unable to realize that it cannot keep it as anything more than a backward dictatorship with nuclear weapons and widespread hunger.

The fanatic’s greatest error is to believe that he shapes reality, rather than reality shaping him. And that is an error which Obama catastrophically fell into. The more his imagemakers surrounded him with an aura of invincibility, the less aware he and they became of the possibility of failure. The very halo that they planted on his head, made his abuses of power inevitable, and also his downfall. To pose in a halo is to deny human error. And that denial of human error by those who are born to the red leads the left to ideological disputes that can only be settled with purges and to economic disasters that cannot happen because their politically correct positions have endowed them with a sense of inevitable historical destiny.

Read the entire article at Sultan Knish: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/