The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology
Political theology, as defined by Wikipedia:
Political theology or public theology is a branch of both political philosophy and practical theology that investigates the ways in which theological concepts or ways of thinking underlie political, social, economic and cultural discourses.
…
Writing amidst the turbulence of the German Weimar Republic, Carl Schmitt argued in Political Theology that the central concepts of modern politics were secularized versions of older theological concepts.
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Center-Left polemicist John Avlon at The Daily Beast claims that “Over the past four years, no less than 89 obsessively anti-Obama books have been published.” This isn’t true — and Avlon knows it — as a casual stroll through “Interactive Hate: The Great Obama-Loathing Canon” reveals. Many of the titles he calls “books,” those who made them understood as short pamphlets. I recognize several that I helped edit and produce for a conservative 501(c)3. Others come from obscure, self-published authors with no influence.
Avlon’s big number of anti-Obama “books” hides the reality: plenty of titles with scary Obama pictures on the cover filled the market since 2008 but few offered little more than a polished collection of what you could find for free doing anti-Obama google searches. To understand the president one must look beyond the new release shelf.
Here are the 15 books I’ve found most useful in grasping the intentionally confusing worldview of our commander-in-chief: 4 recent books focused on Obama by conservative critics, 6 historical books on movements and ideologies, and 5 titles by the president, his supporters, mentors, and influences.
To grasp Barack Obama we need to understand the books he read when he first began his community organizing journey three decades ago. We have to put ourselves in the head of the young, college-age Barry to understand how ideological seeds grew into the disastrous public policy of his administration. To know where to begin we start with the two books by Barack Obama’s best, most underrated analyst, Stanley Kurtz.
1. Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism
2. Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities
Since its publication in October of 2010, Radical-in-Chief has served as my primary map for navigating the stormy media waters of the Obama presidency. I reviewed it here for the publication I edited at the time, instructed all my writers to read it, and applied a blunt headline to summarize its importance: “Case Closed: Barack Obama is a Socialist Working to Destroy America.”
My progressive friends laugh their heads off when I argue this with a straight face. They see Obama as a corporate sell-out still carrying on most of Bush’s war policy. Obama’s just a wimpy, moderate liberal and party hack beholden to Wall Street. To which I respond,
That’s what Obama wants you to think. In his memoir he admits attending Socialist Scholars conferences in New York City in the early 1980s. Stanley Kurtz has verified which ones he attended, who spoke there, and what ideas were argued. It’s there that Obama learned about what community organizing really is all about. And when you read these people’s books — like Saul Alinsky — they admit it quite openly that they are just pretending to be centrist pragmatists in order to dupe do-gooder liberals like I was and you still are so they can gradually implement a European social welfare state. There’s a reason why over 90% of Europeans would vote Obama. He’s one of them.
That’s when my friends usually change the subject.
How do we know for certain that Obama’s ideology is still the same as in the early 1980s when he began his career as a stealth socialist community organizer? It’s not just because his administration draws from the ranks of community organizers and employs the movement’s tactics on the national level. It’s because Obama still works with the same people who are still pursuing the same goals. All that’s changed is now Obama’s the “good cop,” a friendly politician, instead of the hardball activist “bad cop.”
In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, Kurtz shows Obama’s second term plans. He reveals that the exact same community organizing mentors who trained Obama now work for him. Their goal? To quietly, as no one pays attention at the national level, use regulatory boards to implement “Regionalism.” The objective: create regions based around metropolitan areas that can swallow up and redistribute tax money from the richer suburbs to the poor inner cities. They would also seize control of schools, lower educational standards, and implement regulations to stop the growth of suburbia. Kurtz describes it as replicating the collapsing system of the European Union here in the United States. This is the “fundamental transformation.” And Kurtz unearthed documents within the archives of these stealth socialist community organizing groups irrefutably identifying Obama as a partner in the effort.
Barack Obama may have begun as a minor figure within the world of community organizing but by the mid ’90s he was a major player, responsible for directing millions through his position on the boards of numerous charitable foundations. The paper trail Kurtz assembles between his two books of Obama’s deep associations with this ideological movement to transform America lies too deep for any of the president’s defenders to explain. So they can only follow the president’s lead, a favored tactic of Alinsky, and obfuscate.
Just like the youtube deception with Benghazi, and just as we see in the next two books, focusing on the methods of ACORN and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice…
The bedrock of Obama’s political awakening and pursuits from day one has been race. Obama’s success is due to the fact that he’s been able to keep that rather quiet, even with the exposure of Rev. Wright. To whatever extent Obama’s race politics have been exposed, the Left has simply bought into the worst paranoia, urban myths and racial fantasies of the black political Left. What were once considered fringe lunatics have increasingly become mainstreamed. It’s entirely common today to find white liberals assuming without challenge that America is in the throes of the New Jim Crow, something that only a few years ago was an urban myth only touted by the black Left.
MSNBC is at the forefront of having adopted hook, line and sinker the views of the black Left. Racist nutters like Al Sharpton, Melissa Harris-Perry and Michael Eric Dyson figure prominently in the MSNBC line-up. Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and particularly Chris Matthews sound increasingly like Cornel West or Tavis Smiley. One could make a serious argument that all are borderline lunatics, yet there they are, mainstreamed.
With no evidence whatsoever, the Left asserts Romney is a racist who is more comfortable around whites and two men have been fired from Politico and Yahoo for asserting as much but the drum beat continues.
The other prominent institution that has become nothing more than an arm of the NAACP is the Dept. of Justice under Eric Holder.
Obama’s goal is to uplift black Americans by whatever means he can since he appears to have a firm belief it’ll never happen in the normal course of events. Obama’s other goal is to make it seem as if he is disinterested in race and a centrist. But in truth, Obama will leave no stone unturned to make America itself a de facto affirmative action political entity. Obama will also do every thing he can to assure the Dems stay in power by keeping illegal aliens right where they are and making sure a stream of illegals will continue to enter America. That’s why the DOJ sued AZ.
Obama’s speech at Hampton U in 2007 was unadulterated anti-white hate speech. Too many Americans are simply not believing their own eyes and saying, “No, that couldn’t be.” Well, it was.
Obama is not complicated – not at all. It’s race – period. That’s what Hope and Change meant.
Another book worth reading is Paul Kengor” The Communist, about Frank Marshall Davis.
I’ll just stick with “Atlas Shrugged” and “That Hideous Strength”.
15 Books to figure out this scoundrel?
Man thats just WAY to much work!
Not when just TWO readings are needed to sufficiently separate ALL the wheat, from ALL the chaff, everywhere on THIS earth….
1) The Gospel of Jesus Christ (heck, even the “latter-day” saint stuff is good-to-go because they include that all important “prequel”)
2) The Koran/Hadiths of Mohammad.
Get some of them both under your belt, and its all pretty clear who’s ideas make them worthy of your time, and who’s just a Total Dick. Everything you’ll ever need to judge what works, and why, verses what is complete bullshit that inevitably leads to catastrophic failure:
Life verses Death
Love verses Hate.
Honesty verses corruption.
Freedom verses Slavery
Conservative verses Liberal.
I don’t need 15 books to figure out HALF of the political spectrum.
When just TWO puts all the others on their proper shelf
Those first two tell me pretty clear which “shelf” all the other ideas, platforms,
“Only if Obama wins reelection do conservatives have a chance to hold him accountable for Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and all the crimes we don’t even know about yet. The man has blood on his hands and we can’t let him get away with it.”
No,no,no,no,no. Unfortunately Republicans will not control the Senate so even if the House votes Articles of Impeachment, he will never be convicted. The U.S. cannot afford the risks of a second Obama term when he can let Holder’s DOJ and the EPA loose on innocent citizens.
Being defeated and rejected by the voters would be the worst punishment we can inflict on him and his scum supporters. Only when no more power rests in the hands of the Holder brownshirts will the players around Bengahzi and Fast and Furious feel safe enough to step forward and tell the truth.
More personally, an actual election defeat would be a wrenching moment for The One, and one I suspect he would never recover from.
This is a man whose “narrative” holds that he is perfect, unconquerable, has struggled against odds, is a Lightworker destined to bring the evil West into the enlightenment of the East, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Or, as Clint Eastwood once said, “(he’s) a legend in (his) own mind”.
He’s never lost an election, or been denied anything else he wanted, mainly due to his own skills at gaming the system plus capitalizing on others fears of being called “racist” if they oppose him. This is one reason his reaction to Romney has been so extreme; he simply cannot believe that anyone would dare to run against him. And if he wins, rest assured Romney and all who participated in his campaign will be “punished”- not necessarily legally.
Obama sees his life much the same way Joseph Desire’ Mobutu saw his. He’s better known by the name he gave himself as president and dictator of Zaire; Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga. Which means roughly, “the warrior who sweeps from one victory to the next, destroying all his enemies and leaving fire in his wake”.
Mobutu pretty much practiced this in Zaire, one of the big reasons that the country (now once more known as the Congo) is a mess today. Obama may not know much about Joseph Mobutu (he’s an Orientalist, not an African scholar), but he is driven by many of the same imperatives. He does not seek to govern; he seeks to rule. He does not recognize legitimate differences of opinion; he sees anyone who disagrees with him as an enemy of all that is Right, Good, and True. He does not seek common ground; he seeks power. He does not believe in consensus; he believes that all must be his.
He looks in a mirror- and sees a god.
Gods do not lose elections. If he loses this one, the confrontation between his self-perception (i.e., Lightworker/Messiah) and reality (a politician rejected by the voters) is one that would strike at the very core of his self-image.
And he has shown in the past that, petulant adolescent that he is, he tends to strike out at even perceived slights. Let alone a comeuppance of this magnitude.
The time between tomorrow and January 20 of next year could be very weird, and possibly dangerous. But still not as much of either as waiting for 20 January 2017 to see The One leave the White House.
If, indeed, he would voluntarily do so, even then.
clear ether
eon
One note in an othewise excellent post. Obama did lose one election; BOBBY (fellow co-founding member of the Chicago branch of the Black Panthers) RUSH – who has remained a black caucus congressional member ever since.
It is worth noting though that loosing this early attempt at congress steered Obama into the dual tract of part-time academic and part-time state legislator.
A fork in the road moment that exemplifies the new Democrat Party – not only Obama’s place in it but more importantly how the Academic wing of the Party has established itself as the ‘tip of the spear’ – be it in circumventing congressional spending via the beaurocracy (EPA, HHS, DOJ, you name it) – to originating and implimenting the massive ‘comprehensive’ legislation (Obamacare, Dodd-Frank), legislation deliberately designed to ‘unwind’ over multiple election cycles.
Talk about your ‘march through institutions’ leftism; The Pelosi/Reed Democrat party, not just Obama, is infused with such marxist principles. The most anit-democratic assault on American polity and commerece since Woodrow Wilson.
So, as much as I just love to read D.W.’s great posts – I have to respectfully disagree about todays outcome.
O-man has got to go.
Don’t care if he boogies to a comfy space/job in Honalulo or skulks back to Murderland south side to cheer the Sox. Or if he joins Jimmy Carter to hassle the Jews via some ‘pathway talks’ or whatever.
The best way to undo the substantial damage this idiot has wrought is to make him a one-term disaster.
Yes, indeed. I do sincerely think it’s paranoid conspiracy theory-think to wonder whether The One will come up with some idea to “postpone” the inauguration and transition of administrations … but I can’t quite bring myself to conclude it’s outside the realm of possibility. And that make me uneasy.
Regarding Islam, I also found Robert Spencer’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) very helpful.
Prairie Fire
-like polemicists end up almost immediately in the bargain book bin — if Obamaconomy hadn’t closed most bookstores. Used to listen to John Batchelor on the radio, but now wait for his commercial-free podcasts to be posted later in the evening. Lets one avoid Avalon, who has always mocked Romney unless John Fund or Avalon’s spouse is on the show to easily rebut his findings. Here’s one: not only more books were published attacking Bush than Obomo, but Bush attacked in film and television, etc., as VDH has recounted time and again. But even Doc Hanson forgets that as soon as Bush took office, there was a comedy about him called “That’s My Bush”. Of course, if Gore were President, we can be sure it would have had the same actors and been called “That’s My Gore”.
Do you really think even if he wins reelection (which I do not anticipate) he’ll be held accountable Dave? Really?
Don’t be naive sir, he’ll will only face an accounting for what he’s done when he meets his maker, and the best punishment for him is to live out the rest of his life, a failed president, who will never be relevant again.
He will be held accountable if we as citizens choose to hold him accountable and when we discover and reveal the evidence that establishes his criminality beyond a reasonable doubt.
No, he won’t. As much as I’d like to see the man frogmarched out of the White House in chains, it. Won’t. Happen. Should he be impeached and removed from office Biden will pardon him.
And SHOULD. It would be a disaster for the country for any president to be held criminally liable for political decisions.
If you do not learn to temper the idealism of youth with a little practical pragmatism you will lead a miserable life.
“It would be a disaster for the country for any president to be held criminally liable for political decisions.”
I have no idea what this sentence means. If the President breaks the law and we hold him accountable for it it’s a disaster?
“If you do not learn to temper the idealism of youth with a little practical pragmatism you will lead a miserable life.”
I’m not a youth, Patrick. I wish you would stop condescending down to me as though I was. I’m either your professional equal who you treat with respect or we just won’t talk. But I’m really tired of your ad hominem attacks against me every time you disagree me. Who I am and how old I am mean nothing in relation to the arguments I make which either stand or fall on their own merits.
It’s simple. If you start holding presidents criminally liable for political acts while in office then they have no incentive to step down when they lose an election or their term is up.
If you know you’re going to prison, why NOT try to become dictator? The president’s behavior on Benghazi, while reprehensible, doesn’t rise to the level of criminal. Cowardly yes, criminal no.
I repeat, sir, it’s a bad precedent to set.
It appears you and I have a different understanding of what’s going on with Benghazi if you don’t recognize that he’s engaged in impeachment-worthy, criminal acts here. I agree with Roger Simon, Andy McCarthy, and Roger Kimball that should Obama make it to his second term (and I think chances are he will on the basis of voter fraud unless we’re lucky and it’s an undertow election blow out) then Benghazi certainly amounts to impeachment-level crimes. http://pjmedia.com/blog/election-predictions-from-pj-media-columnists/?singlepage=true
Obama revealed the core of his ideology in one word, “Revenge”. The outstanding question is revenge for what? I have a gut suspicion, but it is too vague to articulate.
Can anyone put into words ‘revenge for what?’
Revenge for being free. That we are all free for making our own lives and creating our own happiness is as much of a curse at is a blessing.
“Revenge for daring to disagree with Me, and for refusing to worship Me.
” For I am a jealous God.”
That pretty much sums up his entire way of thinking. Unless we accept that this man suffers from one of the most extreme Messianic complexes ever seen, we will continue to be mystified by his behavior. Because only in that context does anything about his psychology or actions make the slightest bit of sense.
Darius the Great would have understood him perfectly.
For that matter, so would Caligula.
cheers
eon
I think eon’s got it in a nutshell, although David is onto something too. Obviously, Obama can’t bear the thought that somebody, somewhere disagrees with him, and has the ability to thwart any of his schemes. Such people must not only be defeated, but they must be punished, and silenced. We are not only Obama’s political opponents, we are, to use his own word, his “enemy.” Such is the mindset of the New Left, which I think has also had a big influence on Obama in addition to the other strains cited by David.
I meant to write above, “In Obama’s mind, and in many of his supporters’ minds, such people must not only be defeated, but they must be punished, and silenced….”
“The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer & “The Vision of the Anointed” by Thomas Sowell
I’m a fan of both and intend to include them in a future edition of my Counterculture Conservative book list.
Folks….please…..we should all, right now this Election Day, be concentrating on how and why we the public were so snookered by Obama and his crowd to begin with.
It seems to be a reflection of how a flippant electorate could be so unthinkingly adolescent to even think that it’d be “cool”…I hate that word….to vote for a Black Man….who in fact is half White, who is such an empty product of Affirmative Action….on and on…..voters for Obama were/are actually rebelling against America.
Some one else nearby has said that if Obama is re-elected, then we deserve the results….which I’d predict would be a descending socialistic mess that will envelope us all. I think that that ‘someone’ is correct.
In any event, we’re going to need a generation to recover from this mess created so far. Benghazi…for a glaring start…is an in-our-faces example of the White House and our elected political establishment’s diffidence wrecking enormous and tragically dramatic precedents. What are these people thinking? Then, and now?
What must be going through the minds…. today…. of the likes of that loathsome Hillary, the long time Washington-Insider Leon Panetta, the brilliant General Petraeus….and the Speaker of the House who is in a position to be thinking of instituting Impeachment procedures?
In the Secret of Joy, or whatever the title is, the Alice Walker book, at the end, the characters are in Africa, holding up a banner saying ” Resistance is the secret of Joy”- ?The Color Purple? has that scene?
Anyway, it’s what turned me from reading her. She couldn’t imagine a world where her characters were in charge, running anything, being responsible for anything. Their highest goal in life was back-benching. Who wants that? Who is that broken? There are Eagle Scouts- 15 year and 16 year old boys- black and white and yellow and tan and red- who have more responsibility and sense than are in her sickened, depraved, broken soul.
It’s revenge for not being the winners in, oh, 1901, or something like that.
Okay- Dave, here’s a quastion: who all are Jesse Jackson’s myriad proteges? Michelle Obama was his daughter’s best friend: I think that explains why Obama got speech training from JJ: he wasn’t a special snowflake- he married a well-connected black woman. Sarah ?? at Simplicity Patterns, mentions dear Uncle Jesse Jackson- she’s a young teenager with a website, a sewing training program, and a design line at Simplicity patterns- she gets money every time someone buys one of her patterns. She made a Trayvon Martin quilt. It’s on her website. Who else is he mentoring? I have to say, he’s building a respectable machine, if it can put businesses in the hands of young people, and a man in the White House.
For comparison- most adults have to jump through hoops on Project Runway to get name patterns, or they have, at most one or two patterns, with very little support. Arkivestry, with its Goth costumes is maybe an exception. But, front of the book? That’s amazing.