Candidate on a High Horse
By George Will
Real Clear Politics
WASHINGTON - Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
Real Clear Politics
WASHINGTON - Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.
Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.
By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.
posted by Andy W. Rogers | 9:27 PM
3 Comments:
What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people...
I don't get what Will is saying here. Is he yet another so-called "conservative" with fond memories of the Roosevelt Administration, one of the most openly fascist regimes in American history? I don't call the march toward totalitarianism under FDR anything like a celebration of American values. Obama's brand of liberalism isn't the result of a transformation, it is simply the continuation of the progressivist march to the left that began under Theodore Roosevelt and was only brought up short by the birth of the American conservative movement in the 1950s.
As you know, Ronald Reagan considered FDR one of his heroes.
If you read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, you will begin to wonder about Reagan because of that. Under Roosevelt, this country came as close as it ever has to living under a totalitarian, socialist regime (which is the operational form of fascism). In fact, many of Roosevelt's mainstream advisers were telling him to seize power and nullify the constitution. They insisted that the country was in need of a "benevolent" dictator and that FDR fit their description of "benevolent."
The leftists who control public education have worked hard to obscure most of the actual facts of life during that era. Anyone making a claim to conservatism or a love of liberty could only admire Roosevelt out of ignorance or disingenuity.
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