But I believe I already said that I, like you, recognize the mania of the Obama movement. This may be the only thing you and I ever agree on.
I find the irrationality of the movement very troubling. Obama has done nothing for these voters (unlike many populists in the past, who had given patronage to their followers) and he promises nothing very specific, except some implausible transcendence and unity. You'll notice that when Obama drops out of uplift mode to talk about policies, much of the magic seems to be gone; that's not what his followers are hungry for.
I am reminded of Evan Sayet's theory of Modern Liberalism, which is that Modern Liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism (he calls them "big L" vs. "little l"), has replaced striving for justice & individual rights with striving for indiscriminateness, having decided that everything wrong with the world has resulted from man's attempt to discriminate between good and evil. So the answer is to refuse to discriminate, so you can arrive at the world of John Lennon's song Imagine. No countries. No religions. No wars. Universal Peace.
That is so much the mindset of the Modern Liberals. It's not that they are not aware of all the things that we're aware of; it's that they need to reject them in order to remain in this five-year-old's utopia that they've been told is the only hope for mankind: a mindless indiscriminateness.
So what you're left with is not really adults, but citizens of voting age who cannot judge their own positions but are virulently antagonistic to any position other than their own. Why? Because when you've been brought up to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative, any position other than their own must have been arrived at through the employment of discrimination. This is why Bush is Hitler; this is why Reagan is Hitler; this is why Giuliani is Hitler.
heritage.org
I know you won't like this idea, but don't laugh it off. There has to be some powerful factor at work that gets millions of people who call themselves "liberal" and "progressive" to march in the streets to protect a mass murderer like Saddam Hussein. To make it easy for these same people to call George Bush a "fascist" but impossible to call Saddam Hussein a "fascist".
Evan Sayet is a former liberal, btw. He says the reaction to 9/11 crystallized his conversion to conservatism:
I tell a story. It's not a true story, but it helps crystallize my thinking that brought me to become a conservative. I say: Imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend, and you're catching up, and suddenly he blurts out, "I hate my wife." You chuckle to yourself because he says it every time you're together, and you know he doesn't hate his wife; they've been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters, and they're just like her. No, he doesn't hate his wife.
So you're having dinner, and you look out the window and spot his wife, and she's being beaten up right outside the restaurant. You grab your friend and say, "Come on, let's help her. Let's help your wife," and he says, "Nah, I'm sure she deserves it." At that moment, it dawns on you: He really does hate his wife.
That's what 9/11 was to me. For years and years I'd hear my friends from the Left say how evil and horrible and racist and imperialistic and oppressive America is, and I'd chuckle to myself and think, "Oh, they always say that; they love America." Then on 9/11, we were beaten up, and when I grabbed them by the collar, and I said, "Come on, let's help her. Let's help America," and they said, "Nah, she deserves it."
At that moment, I realized: They really do hate America. And that began me on what's now a five-plus-year quest to try to understand the mindset. How could you possibly live in the freest nation in the history of the world and see only oppression? How could you live in the least imperialist power in human history and see us as the ultimate in imperialism? How could you live in the least bigoted nation in human history and, as Joe Biden said, "see racism lurking in every dark shadow"?
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