Melissa Harris-Perry: Radical Communitarian

First, I want you to remove all sharp objects within reach and clear away anything that could be used as a projectile to throw at your monitor.

Done? OK – it is safe to watch this video now:

I can’t decide what is scarier; what Melissa Harris-Perry is saying or the fact that she has a weekend gig on a major cable news network — MSNBC.

Not even Hillary Clinton went this far in her It Takes a Village book. Clinton never posited the notion that the child belonged to the community as Harris-Perry obviously believes, and that parental responsibility was superseded by the needs of the community to “invest” in a child’s development.

I note in comments across the net conservatives trying to connect Harris-Perry’s beliefs with those of Adolf Hitler and the concept behind the “Hitler Youth.” It’s a provocative analogy but mistaken. Nazi ideology elevated the family to supreme status, with the mother being almost a figure of worship. It is true that children served the state, but Hitler was interested in indoctrination, not raising the kids to be good Germans. That was a job for parents. I daresay if Hitler had really tried something along the lines that Harris-Perry suggests, German families would have been in open revolt.

The left is transforming into a sect of radical communitarians, where everything including individual rights, the family, even our immediate communities are inferior to the overall vision of a national community. We are told what is best for all, and that everyone must sacrifice for that greater good. Assets, including children, are shared and nurtured within the larger community. You didn’t build that, you didn’t make that, and any idea you’ve ever had belongs to the community.

The “private idea” that children should be raised by their parents and not the state is an anathema to these people because they sincerely believe they have a much better idea of what your child needs than you do. How dare you deny your kid the benefits of their obviously superior wisdom? In the end, if we follow their ideas to their logical conclusion, someone or some collective body would have to make decisions regarding each individual child. Just who would that be? I can tell you who wouldn’t be in on those decisions; anyone who disagreed with liberals.

They will deny it, but the evidence is there for anyone interested in looking at it. These are not mainstream beliefs. They are — and here I use a word I never use — un-American. The left would never openly run a political campaign telling Americans what they really believe because they would get slaughtered. In Barack Obama, they finally found someone who could promote their beliefs by couching their ideology in soothing, moderate language. But the president can’t hide his radical communitarianism — and his contempt for individualism as expressed in a real voluntary community that most Americans embrace.

Currently, as the president recently admitted, they are “constrained” by the Constitution. A takeover of the House by Democrats in 2014 will likely give us an excellent idea of just how far Obama is willing to go to bring his radical vision of community to life.