As this election season wraps up, I have found it fascinating to read commentators on the right respond to the apparent pending loss of their candidate–and the (well-deserved) total destruction of their hold on the government. I say “apparent,” of course, because we still don’t know how things will turn out, but the actual result of this election matters less for the purposes of this post than how the response of the right sheds light on the character and thought-process of the luminaries of conservative thought in America. I’m not talking about rank-and-file conservatives, of course, but elite conservatives, those who are considered thought-leaders of the Movement.
Mark R. Levin, writing about what he calls “The Obama Temptation,” presents one fascinatingly characteristic response to the pending massive defeat of the Republican party.
I honestly never thought we’d see such a thing in our country – not yet anyway – but I sense what’s occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places… There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex… Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama’s appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the “the proletariat,” as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it’s $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he’s now officially “rich.” The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class)… The question is whether enough Americans understand what’s at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.
What is most fascinating about this response is that Levin doesn’t consider for a moment the possibility that he may be missing something, that he may have been mistaken about Obama–he doesn’t even hint at the possibility of being incorrect. To his mind, anyone who supports Obama must be by definition irrational, either deluded–like Obama’s conservative supporters–or an anti-American lover of soft authoritarianism hoping to lead a proletariat (middle class!) revolution against the overly successful of the world (death to capitalism! Nationalize Denny’s!).
This response would almost be funny if it weren’t so sad. One wonders if Levin means what he says or is being completely cynical. I hope, for his sake, the latter.
When the Democrats lost control of the government, America was apparently a perfectly rational place to Levin’s mind; now, that Americans have decided they’re fed up with Republican rule, they’ve gone mad. If conservatives support Obama, it isn’t even remotely possible that they do so because the boringly centrist mainstream Obama poses absolutely no threat to the future of the U.S., not to even speak of the alleged pending socialist takeover of America; no, they support Obama because they’ve been seduced by his wily charismatic ways. But maybe it’s not the American people or moderate conservative who’ve abandoned rationality and have embraced recklessness… After the Iraq war, Katrina, the suspension of habeas corpus, the systematic use of torture against completely innocent people, the smearing of liberals as anti-American traitors, maybe the American people have decided to reclaim their country from the extremist lunatics who have been at the wheel for the last eight years ((Though one must say that the Democratic party was guilty of doing not nearly enough to push back against the excesses of the ultra-nationalist right, but that’s a topic for another post…))
Anyone who uses the word “proletariat” interchangeably with “middle class” seems like a much stronger candidate for labels such as “irrational” and “reckless,” but maybe that’s just my Obama-seduced/Communist/terrorist/anti-American ((As Levin would label me (and you, too) merely for preferring Obama to McCain)) opinion.