From an absolutely accurate essay by George Will:
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.
The emblematic book of the new liberalism was “The Affluent Society” by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a “false consciousness” (another category, like religion as the “opiate” of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
- First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant.
- Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness.
- Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms.
- Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.
“…Those reforms usually must be imposed…” The Liberal Elite know better than we do what we want and need from life, and they will impose that decision upon us, the “great unwashed.”
Communism.
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims — the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.
Obama’s dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.
Obama voiced such liberalism with his “bitterness” remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.
No matter how Obama tries to spin it, his statement assumes Midwestern voters are idiots. And note that in Obama’s original remarks, the audience laughed at his assertions in their condescension, and recognition of his. That says a lot about San Francisco.
A lot has already been said about race in this election season. Some say they won’t vote for Obama because he’s black, while others say they will vote for Obama just because he’s black. I won’t vote for him because he’s red.
Obama, liberal, Marx, progressive
