By Barry Rubin
It is remarkable how little serious research and analysis there has been about the political earthquake that has shaken American politics out of all recognition.
Earthquake? That’s a serious understatement. The situation is more akin to the scariest scenarios of global climate change analysts: large areas of land have disappeared under water, formerly productive farmland has been turned into desert, and so on.
One reason there hasn’t been more examination of this revolution is that a lot of people are saying other things. Many conservatives say, Well this is what liberalism is all about. Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is exactly like Bill Clinton.
Academia and the media, two institutions that should be talking about such things, are too busy glorifying the new order or painting Obama as some kind of centrist. On the latter point, they use evidence of things he did against his will. (He kept the Bush tax cuts; let the Guantanamo Bay prison stay open, and is even talking about budget cuts!)
And a large proportion of the American people (40 percent? 50 percent?) say that nothing has changed at all.
Yet here is a very short analysis of what’s happened. A book-length narrative is required so the text below is going to over-simplify and obscure some points due to its necessary brevity.
The United States has long had a “Left” that has always been relatively weak, even at its previous peaks. Starting with the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, there were also many groups including Trotskyists, anarchists, and so on. These groups had a lot of problems due to different factors: America’s success, growing prosperity, and expanding democracy and rights–a set of things that are called “American exceptionalism” were among them.
In addition, the Left had specific internal problems. The Communists tied their fortunes to the USSR and put its interests first, which brought many conflicts. The Left had an ideology (including a strong dose of anti-Americanism; anti-religion, stands on certain social issues) that the masses didn’t like, as well as not like its stance on many issues. Perhaps it was just too far ahead of its time.
After the 1960s–that is by the mid-1970s–the New Left disintegrated. But many (most?) of its members held the same views. The new strategy was called “the long march through the institutions.” Leftists would hide their views; get jobs in such key institutions as universities, schools, the media, foundations, and other institutions, then use these positions to change America the way they wanted to do so.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. It is quite easy to document. The people involved knew precisely what they were doing and talked in those terms. Was it easy for them to do so? You bet.
One little anecdote. Some years ago a college friend asked me to recommend him for a job at the Environmental Protection Agency. I had no contacts there and also knew he was an unrepentant Stalinist (and I don’t say that lightly, he really did love Stalin!) So I couldn’t and wouldn’t help him. Besides, I thought, with his record he’d never get a job there anyway. He was hired and as far as I know is still there.
So the first element was the New Leftists who took powerful positions, especially dominating academia (and using it to indoctrinate people) and foundations (where money given often by conservatives were used to fund leftist causes. Bill Ayers is only one such person. There are many whose names you’ve never heard.
The second element was the left-wing of the Democratic Party. It was capable of nominating candidates for president–notably George McGovern–but they always lost because they were viewed by the general public as too extreme. Jimmy Carter, of course, won in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, but I think his character and views were not understood by the electorate.
Thus, the third element had to be a candidate capable of embodying the Leftist/left-liberal alliance and also overriding the American people’s dominant moderate liberal-centrist-conservative worldview. That was Barack Obama. His hidden past (kept so by the media and “experts”), lack of a track record (in some respects), and skin color distracted from the normal considerations of American politics. He thus defeated the more mainstream liberal Hillary Clinton and then defeated the lackluster, defeatist-minded Senator John McCain.
Once he was president, Obama didn’t have to worry about the non-left part of the Democratic Party or federal bureaucracy. He was giving the orders. About 75 percent of the Democrats in Congress are not on the left but few dare defy the leadership.
In addition, Obama–at least at first–seemed an amazing success, a great genius, a wildly popular and ever-victorious politician. Read Victor Davis Hanson’s article that embodies that atmosphere perfectly.
A foreign policy bureaucracy, which loathed George W. Bush, and armed forces command also have their problems with Obama, who rejects their most basic assumptions and dismantles what they view to be their greatest achievement. But they, too, have to follow orders.
And so the Leftist/left-wing liberal alliance triumphed. This is not a pragmatic liberalism in the pattern of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and even Bill Clinton. It is the most left-wing government in U.S. history and it is more interested in promoting its ideology than in doing a good job of governing the country. Even reelection doesn’t dominate its calculations, though it thinks that a 2012 victory is possible on its own terms.
Three more details should be added here. One is financing. Historically, a poor, David-like Left took on capitalist-backed adversaries. But today, the situation is largely reversed. Due to George Soros, Left-dominated foundations, and the heirs of the old conservative capitalists, the Left is the well-heeled side most ofthe time.
Second, control mechanisms. It is truly a remarkable system. Political Correctness means: I can make my arguments but you can’t challenge them because your arguments are racist, Islamophobic, etc. Mutliculturalism means: You cannot assert that the American system is better than any other in the world.
In short, you have created the perfect way to win every argument and without repression. The “innocent bystanders” in the public are persuaded of things that are often the precise opposite of what they believed ten years ago and they and their forebears believed for many decades.
Here’s are three examples:
–Stopping people from illegally entering the United States and then expelling those who did so is widely considered to be an evil, immoral idea.
–Believing that exploding deficits are a great danger makes one a right-wing nut in many circles; similarly, challenging the growing size of a government whose bureaucracy is doing lots of useless and even harmful things is portrayed as reactionary nonsense. Yet since when had liberalism declared a government far bigger than any in American history that continually increased in size to be a sacred value? When did the economic views of Keynes come to mean going into massive debt from spending money on non-productive purposes? How did the justification for regulation become unlimited and the space for individual freedom increasingly limited? Indeed, in Canada it was the Liberal Party that balanced the budget and made the kinds of changes now needed in the United States.
–The most basic realistic precepts of diplomacy have been abandoned. When did a realistic foreign policy become antagonistic to liberal principles? This is not the approach of the liberal Democrat Harry Truman but of the leftist-front Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and the 1960s’ New Left.
Finally, there are the changes in the American (and European) societies themselves. These are the hardest things to assess. Demographic shifts; the ever-larger sector of the middle class cut off from economic productivity; a growing distance between elites and masses; the unlimited welfare state mentality; massive indoctrination in schools and media; along with a pessimism about Western civilization have all grown. Is this reversible?
Viewing this revolution as merely the result of “normal liberalism” doesn’t tell us very much or help us very much. To argue that nothing has changed is the enemy of solving the current problems facing the United States and the Western world.
Yes, the hard left is triumphant among Dems now, but they didn’t have all that far to go. Obama’s policy goals were as much a mystery to the American electorate’s as you say Carter’s were.
Clinton? Not much ideology there, so he doesn’t belong in this discussion. (The Clintons aren’t for or against America, they’re for the Clintons – the Democrat Party and lefty ideas were there to serve them, not vice-versa. Rocket science to China for campaign cash, the Gorelick 911 Wall to keep the FBI out of Chinese and Indonesian campaign cash. Bill was the worst prez ever, but not from incompetence.)
State and the EPA are full of Reds, yeah – and it was just as true with State when Alger Hiss was running the Asian Desk in the run-up to Mao’s triumph. True, nobody’s shocked now like the HUAC panel was then.
FDR wasn’t competent at foreign policy or he wouldn’t have sent congratulations to the Peace-in-Our-Time guy after the Munich Conference, and he would have built our armed forces up twixt ’39 and ’41. Truman wasn’t competent or he wouldn’t have embargoed bullets to the KMT or let Acheson shoot off his mouth about Korea being on its own six months before the Reds invaded South Korea.
FDR and Truman were leftists, and they had deeply red followers in key positions throughout their administrations.
Johnson? What’s your point about him, that country came first? Examples, please.
An interesting read, though – thanks.
The trick is of course to get elected and to do that a candidate has to convince a majority of the voters that his goods are their goods.
My generation, the post WWII baby boomers, the largest single generation ever spawned in the history of America, is now holding much of the political, cultural, and economic power in America. Many of us are unrepentant flower children, free love advocates, part time hippies, former or even active SDS type radicals, one time anti Viet Nam war and Civil Rights demonstrators, and many of us are still deeply in love with the 60′s and 70′s Berkely sort of radicalism that dominated that era.
We are the ones who were enchanted by the siren hope and change song of Obama and who voted in droves for him and who still largely support him, even though he has failed all of us, and most of America, miserably.
No conservative Republican will ever split this group off from their love affair with Obama. The only thing that can accomplish that is their own ongoing unemployment and home foreclosures, and even then, many of us will still bow down to the Obama Golden Calf while holding George Bush responsible.
I have American friends who will never speak to me again because I dared to voice the slightest criticism of their god, Barack Obama.
“I have American friends who will never speak to me again because I dared to voice the slightest criticism of their god, Barack Obama.”
That happens with middle school girls all the time, which is about where the first wave of Baby Boomers became stunted at. “We want to do our own thing,” they cried as they enforced conformity to the clique with Stazi ruthlessness. This group was ripe for the picking by the leftists born in the mid to late thirties who came to lead them. Then, as they grew, they turned to the violence of the Seventies in fits of tantrum before discovering their material needs as their youth waned. It was then they turned their efforts to worming into the “establishment.” “To change from within…,” they told themselves but in reality to leach off the work of others for their own material comforts so adult reality wouldn’t intrude on their childish dreams.
We can only hope for the rise of another Reagan on the ashes left by this current debacle so that as they go to their graves, they will see their castle of sand washed out by the sea of human progress.
(full disclosure: by technical determination, I am a Baby Boomer but being born at the end of the surge, I have nothing in common with the “Baby Boomers” often cited.) But it should be noted that many if not most of that generation have nothing in common with the meme that defines them being neither flower child, into free love or attending Woodstock, although many did spend that time in the mud but it had a distinctive Southeast Asian flavor.
This is a very perceptive analysis. I live in Canada and for the past two years have wondered why the left in Canada is fiscally responsible and sensible with respect to such factors as immigration (illegals are kicked out), foreign policy (friends are remembered and respected) and the military (Afghan dead are honoured by a turnout of citizens along the highways when they return). The left down in the States seems somewhat crazy when viewed from up here.
What is interesting from the perspective here is that Obama and his minions are discrediting the entire left wing in the U.S., and the “regular” left doesn’t seem to be noticing. The past equivalent in history was when the Bolsheviks (extremists) drove out the Mensheviks (moderate) communists out of the communist party in Russia, inevitably dooming the communists because of the bad economics and totalitarian tendencies of that wing of the party. Although Obama is clearly destroying the U.S. economically, the possible good that will arise is that the American extreme left will be permanently discredited by the American people.
“The long march through the institutions” is usually ascribed to the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, though it was probably coined by one of his followers, but it captures the essence of Gramsci’s strategy for a gradual revolution to be achieved by first transforming the culture and society bit by bit to gain the support of the masses, which he called a War of Position, which only then will be followed by an armed insurrection, which he called a War of Manoeuver. This cultural transformation will be achieved by the Marxists infiltrating and becoming the dominant voice in all the cultural and social organs of civil society, such as the education system (which Gramsci considered central to his strategy), the media, popular culture, churches, social clubs, workers unions, political parties, and using their position to undermine the dominant ideology, values and common sense (which according to him support the rule of the dominant group in society, or the ruling class), spread Marxist ideas, generate socialist consciousness, and encourage revolutionary organizations.
You can read a relatively short article in plain language about him here:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7809
There’s a lot more you can read online, and of course in books. It’s highly recommended for a better deeper understanding of the process that has taken place in the West (and much of Latin America as well) in the last several decades.
If you’re really into it you can read this MA Dissertation about the wonders the Gramscian strategy did in Brazil, which is BTW ruled now by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) whose official color is red and official symbol is the red star, and whose leader, currently the president of Brazil, is a former Marxist guerrilla. But don’t get me wrong – it’s just mainstream censtrist democratic socialist party, the kind many Americans would like to have, and eventually also will if the right and the non-Marxist liberals don’t struggle to reform the education system (you know, the institutions that produce not only the intellectuals, but also the journalists, politicians, teachers and just the common college graduate). The Soviets used to say it takes 15-20 years to demoralize a nation because this is the time required to educate one generation. Imagine what can be achieved by indoctrinating several consecutive generations.
In case you won’t read the link, I’ll just post two cheery quotes from it, see if any of it sounds familiar (remember, they are about Brazil, not the US or Europe). One by Coutinho:
And another one by Olavo de Carvalho:
Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian thinker now living in the US. You can find some inetersting articles on his website at olavodecarvalho.org/english/
Funny, the similarity. Muslim Brotherhood claims it’s not extreme….