Wave of the Eighth Century
8th December 2015
Scott Johnson at PowerLine is not impressed by Obama the Preacher Man.
President Obama fancies himself a progressive in the Progressive tradition. He wants not only to ride the wave of the future but to sense where it is going and give it a nudge. As with all good progressives, it is history by which Obama takes his bearings, not the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. Thus in his Oval Office speech this past Sunday, he declared that “we are on the right side of history.” Steve Hayward deals with the thought underlying this claim here.
The argument from history is a weak argument to begin with, but Obama does no honor to it. Recall that Obama came out in favor of preserving the democratic “process” in Egypt in order to support Mohammed Morsi. Obama sought to preserve Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt. The damage Morsi’s authoritarian governance had done to rule of law and the other fundamentals of a free society were left unspoken.
But this is inevitable. The core dogma of ‘progressivism’ is that Progress Is Inevitable (‘right side of history’) and so Change Invariably Leads To Progress; so, if at first your changes don’t succeed, just keep changing until the desired progress comes around on the guitar.
Obama would love to find a way to get the United States aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas branch in Gaza and Iran’s Hezbollah subsidiary in Syria and Lebanon. They are the logical destination of his Middle Eastern fantasies. Coincidentally, Obama has just named a fan of Hamas as his Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria. In the Middle East, anyway, Obama is riding the wave of the eighth century.
And so, to the extent that Obama is on any side of history, his is the Wrong Side — that ship sailed over a thousand years ago.
WE ARE ENGAGED IN A GREAT EXISTENTIAL WAR with an oppressive totalitarian ideology that has been Stealing People’s Stuff for over 1400 years. It isn’t going to change any time soon. And our leaders have to bit the bullet and accept reality, or we are going to keep losing.