The left’s total abandonment of individual choice, its insistence that a moral society can only come from total submission to the rule of the enlightened, does not just lead to tyranny, but to economic disaster. The last term has been another reminder of why the enlightened are not qualified to to run every aspect of a society, and why economic collectivism is no substitute for individualism. A healthy society gains its energy from individual decision making, a diversity of choices leading to a diversity of outcomes. An unhealthy one is tightly constrained by the five or ten year plan of a dictator and his cronies.
The left has never questioned the rightness of its destination, only the best way to get there. And that is its greatest blind spot. Within the left there has been debate on the speed of the transition and the best way to achieve it. Violent revolution or a slow takeover from within. Stamp out the bourgeoisie or brainwash their children into joining your ranks. But these concerns with tactics and the political correctness of one approach over another, always end up overlooking the larger questions. Because it is taken for granted that the system of collective tyranny they champion is bound to work.
Fanatics rarely question their own motives or the rightness of their beliefs. And the left breeds that brand of fanaticism the way the sewers of Paris bred rats. That makes them capable of ruthlessly pursuing a course, but not of recognizing that the course itself is wrong. The left spends so much time fighting to seize a country, unable to realize that it cannot keep it as anything more than a backward dictatorship with nuclear weapons and widespread hunger.
The fanatic’s greatest error is to believe that he shapes reality, rather than reality shaping him. And that is an error which Obama catastrophically fell into. The more his imagemakers surrounded him with an aura of invincibility, the less aware he and they became of the possibility of failure. The very halo that they planted on his head, made his abuses of power inevitable, and also his downfall. To pose in a halo is to deny human error. And that denial of human error by those who are born to the red leads the left to ideological disputes that can only be settled with purges and to economic disasters that cannot happen because their politically correct positions have endowed them with a sense of inevitable historical destiny.
The manifest destiny of socialism has been the left’s greatest article of faith. It says that one way or another they must win. The stages of history make it inevitable. That knowledge of inevitable progression, from feudalism to capitalism to socialism blinds them to the realization that their way is nothing more than feudalism under a red flag. Which is exactly what it became in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
Obama’s greatest asset was that sense of inevitability which he projected as confidence. But that confidence is now at odds with a country where massive unemployment has led to resentment of his Versailles lifestyle, the parties, globe trotting tours and vacations more appropriate to royalty, than the elected official of a republic. The public has never shared the left’s sense of historical inevitability. It does not understand why Obama is so cheerful when the rest of the country is suffering. It is less interested in Isms, than in functionality. And the state of nation under Obama is a state of extreme dysfunction.
That dysfunction is causing Americans to question many elements of the left’s slow takeover, elements that they would have left alone if the radicalism of their new masters had not occasioned a blowback that is sweeping well beyond a mere repeal of the Obama years. The media had positioned Obama as a new FDR, but instead he is emerging as the Anti-FDR. Not the man who will sell Americans on socialism, but the man who will finally turn them against it.
The left mistook the economic disaster they had orchestrated as the end of capitalism. It was however a premature celebration. While the media rebukes the public for its glumness, its unwillingness to see that the time of hope and change means that the economy no longer matters, that a bad economy becomes a good one if we say so– the recovery that comes may be an ideological one. A recovery from the ideology which first brought on the disaster. While the left had hoped to use the economy to destroy the free market as a vital force, it may be that their own attempt to do so will instead destroy socialism.