I haven’t read Obama’s memoir, so I’m only going to comment on the excerpt at Najam’s blog.

Having lived in Manhattan, during the 1980s and onward, there’s no question that the place is overwhelming. Only people born and raised there or who become Masters of the Universe there can easily stand outside of it or above it. So the specific shock of the place is unique in America, probably in the world.

But you get used to it, and Obama no doubt absorbed it and found his place in the flow. It remains overwhelming, but you can ride it like a wave, and most people do.

What I find most telling is that after his time in this very American city (and, granted, the corrosive effects of Harvard Law) that he would find his place in Chicago in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s black power church.

That suggests to me two things: Obama needed practice being alienated from American capitalist society in New York (my point being that he was both honing and testing an already nascent Marxist faith), and then chose Chicago as his proving ground and made his political bones with the combination of hard (and racist) identity politics and the Marxism in the mask of traditional religion that he found in James Cone’s black liberation theology at Wright’s Church.

His Marxist commitment is obvious yet hidden in plain sight. It’s as if Alger Hiss was walking around as a naked Communist and it was decided, somewhere, that it would be inappropriate to bring attention to the glaringly obvious.

Obama is not a mystery. He’s the latest Marxist gimmick. Yes, of course, the Cold War is over, blah, blah. But it was not a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviets. It was a death match between the sacred individual ordained by God and the sacred collective ordained by men. By the time the Soviets imploded, the Soviet ghost had long roamed the halls of the American university. Obama, with early training from his CPUSA friend in Hawaii, climbed the ladder at Columbia and Harvard, took his internship with Alinsky’s crowd in Chicago, and then moved into the most cranked-up, radical, mad outfit in Chicago: the “God damn America” squad.

And he’s gotten away with it, to this point, with the whole Democratic Party behind him.