Change We Can Believe In
by Thomas Brewton (6/14/08)
You’d better believe it. Senator Obama and his supporters dislike traditional Americanism, preferring the Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary change expressed in moral relativism.
Senator Obama’s army of followers are energized by inexperienced and immature students and by Baby Boomer anarchists eager to relive their activist days of the 1960s and 70s. They stand opposed to the historical traditions of the United States. Theirs is a world in which change is equated with sensual self-indulgence.
Underlying this vision of change is Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, applied to politics and social interaction by John Dewey in the early 20th century. Dewey taught Columbia University students that Darwin’s idea of evolution applied to morality as well as biology. This meant, said Dewey, that there can be no such thing as timeless principles of morality. Rules of social conduct are continually undergoing evolutionary change. All that matters is action that gets you what you want.
This is moral relativism, the rationalization for Senator Obama and his followers arrogating to themselves the right to change society’s standards of acceptable behavior. “Bringing us together” in Senator Obama’s terms means that traditionalists must conform to the ever-changing social standards of left-wing liberal-progressives.
Senator Obama’s social change amounts to Hollywood’s and mainstream media’s beloved drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, rampant divorce rates, fathering and abandoning children to single-parent upbringing, murder by abortion to facilitate sexual promiscuity, and same-sex marriage, all undermining the traditional family as the basic unit of society.
In this view, breakdown of traditional morality is liberation of the individual. It stands in contrast to the nation’s founding Judeo-Christian understanding that such conduct is sinful defiance of God’s Word and that sin is bondage and death.
In classic socialistic doctrine, we must abandon traditional loyalties and find our life’s meaning in the collectivist society. We must become Lenin’s New Soviet Man, taking only what we need and contributing whatever we have to the political state. Supporting that doctrine, Senator Obama stands firmly behind affirmative action, confiscatory taxes, and expansion of the welfare state to restructure society in conformity with the liberal-progressive-socialist vision of social justice.
Senator Obama’s foreign policy rests upon an abstract intellectual concept called the community of nations. The Senator and his followers are eager to change our Constitution and to replace it with a one-world government under the UN, or some other subsidiary of the Socialist International. Hence the rejection of military power to protect our national interests and the naive vision of a changed world in which property and wealth are redistributed equally, a world in which everyone magically will thereafter have the same attitudes and aims, and a world in which Senator Obama’s oratory will persuade lions to lie down in peace with lambs.
Those views descend from the 1960s Baby Boomers of Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the bomb-throwing bank robbers and murderers of the Weatherman underground, led in the 1970s by Senator Obama’s friends and political backers Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. His fascination with those models led to the Senator’s initial foray into politics as an SDS type of community organizer, working with Saul Alinsky to foment demands by welfare “clients” for increased handouts from taxpayers.
The bedrock of SDS and Weatherman belief was that ills of the world result from the twin evils of Judeo-Christian morality and economic laissez-faire. This paradigm derived from the 18th century French Revolutionary doctrine that saw private property rights, Christianity, and aristocratic privilege as the only things standing in the way of earthly social perfection.
French revolutionaries gave us the Reign of Terror: murder of more than 70,000 French citizens in the name of the Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, Baby Boomers took to the streets and college campuses, as Weatherman put it, to bring the Vietnam War home, ice a few pigs, kill their parents, and destroy Amerika. To that end they resorted to bank robberies, bombings, and murders of co-workers and innocent bystanders.
Liberal-progressive-socialists rationalized this violent destructiveness on a cold-blooded theoretical plane, as they had Stalin’s mass murders in the 1930s. The perpetrators, they said, were driven to it by the criminal nature of traditional American society. Violence to combat the evils of spiritual religion, moral codes, and capitalist individualism was justified.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 issued the Port Huron Statement, its version of the Communist Manifesto. In language that would fit neatly into Senator Obama’s standard stump speech, Tom Hayden, Hanoi Jane Fonda’s first husband, wrote:
...can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?...”
The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today...”
We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity…
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles: that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
...that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation…
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond…
The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies...
Never lose sight of the historical fact, however, that this lovey-dovey world of SDS and Senator Obama, called participatory democracy by socialists, necessitates the subordination of individual rights to the collective good. And the collective good is always defined by liberal-progressive-socialist leaders. It is the sort of democracy in which the Soviet Politburo could be regarded as speaking for the democratic will of the people.
Thomas E. Brewton
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