President Obama, with a little perspective
7th November 2008
Mencius Moldbug explains it all.
Basically, dear Americans, this disqualifies you from voting ever again. You’ve been pwned. You’re out.
There are – or at least, were – lots of plausible candidates for chief executive who don’t have any kind of murky ties to murderous political fanatics. I mean, duh, you know, if history teaches us any lessons, I think one of them is: “don’t elect leaders with murky ties to murderous political fanatics.”
If nothing else, this is the first time I’ve seen “bezoar” used since I first encountered it in law school.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the current euphemism for “communist” is “progressive.” This is not even a new usage. My father’s parents always called themselves “progressives,” for instance. In fact they were CPUSA members. (Before Grandma fell down the stairs at Juilliard and smashed her frontal lobe, one of the last messages she imparted to me was that Frank Rich writes a really great column.) “Progressive” is also all over the place in my ’80s Soviet Life magazines. And La Wik helpfully informs us that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is (a) the largest voting bloc of Democrats in the House, and (b) the affiliation of the Speaker. And now, of course, the President. Summary: the Cold War is over. Communism won.
This post is just full of so many good things that it’s hard to pick out the best ones.
History remembers a number of things. One of them is that, over the last four centuries at least, the left tends to win and the right tends to lose. If you’re a young, ambitious man or woman, power is what you crave, and scruples are not your thing, history tells you: go as left as possible. Join the SDS, not the JBS. March with Martin Luther King, not Louise Day Hicks. Be a Patriot, not a Loyalist. And so on. Exceptions exist – but they are exceptions.
The fact that Billy Ayers has indeed become one of the most successful educators in the United States, without so much as apologizing for his crimes, tells us quite a bit about the terminal malignancy of the American polity. It also tells us quite a bit about how a Barack Obama could be elected: unless he or she grows up in some kind of cloistered uber-Christian cult, it is simply impossible in the present day for an American child to reach voting age without being indoctrinated in Ayers-style, “small c” communism.
This is the great thing about President Obama’s “change.” What he means by “change” is, of course, “power” – as in the phrase, “change the world.” Everyone wants to change the world. That is, they want to exert personal influence on the world. That is, they want power. This will get them laid, or so they think. It’s really not all that complicated.
As for conservatives and mainstream libertarians: forget it. You’ve lost. You’re in roughly the same position as a Southern segregationist in 1968. History may or may not vindicate your cause, but it has determined your chance of victory, which is zero. If you have a life, go live it. If not, now is probably a good time to get one.