Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Battle for Wisconsin is the Battle for the Future of America

Posted By Matthew Vadum On February 23, 2011 @ 12:18 pm

Contrary to what the Left says, it is not a sign of mental disturbance to believe that President Obama is deliberately fomenting crises in order to advance his radical agenda. I might even argue that it is a form of denial to fail to recognize that the Community-Organizer-in-Chief’s deliberate, exquisitely calculated, ongoing campaign to sow discord and chaos is part of a larger strategy. Crises, as Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton remind us, present opportunities that should not be wasted.
There is no conspiracy because to my mind that implies that the plan is hidden. It is not. The evidence is there for anyone who cares to look. There is a plan to smash America’s longstanding institutions and render the U.S. Constitution meaningless and it comes from Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and from others in a rogue’s gallery of liberty-hating revolutionary activists and thinkers. Not every aspect of the plan is clear-cut and not all radicals agree on every aspect of it but there is no denying that there has been a meeting of the minds on the hard Left for the last 50 or so years. They know that the kind of change they want will not come organically, not in America with its wonderfully anti-authoritarian cultural biases. As Che Guevara remarked, “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”
As an adjunct law teacher and Illinois state senator Obama was very clear about his objections to the basic political architecture of America. In a 2001 radio interview he expressed his contempt for the limits the Constitution placed on governmental power. He said he was unhappy that it did not promote “redistributive change,” i.e. so-called social justice. And what is Obamacare really? It is a vehicle for social justice, this inherently fuzzy abstraction. Obamacare is more about redistribution of wealth than about helping to heal the sick. It is about giving the government almost total control over every American in the pursuit of a sick, perverted vision of humanity.
Of course one can make a decent argument that at the time of its original adoption the Constitution was flawed for a number of reasons but chiefly because it condoned the abominable practice of slavery. (The Civil War and the Civil War Amendments cured what might be called a congenital defect in America’s great charter.) But slavery, which everyone nowadays condemns, is not something about which the future President Obama concerned himself in the above cited radio interview and throughout his intellectual development.
Material inequality, that is, the fact that some people have more money than others, is a near-pathological obsession with him. This is what peeved the future president about the Constitution: its supposedly quaint, archaic preoccupation with the protection of the economic freedoms that by their very nature guarantee that some will be wealthier than others. This appears to be the foundation for more or less the president’s entire worldview and he shares this concern with many other socialists and Marxists.
That said, how does President Obama hope to accomplish his transformative goals? I would argue he’s already shown us in word and deed all the years he’s been politically active. He believes strongly in polarization because it brings things to a head — and that’s when change occurs. As has already been documented exhaustively, Obama is an Alinsky devotee, and Alinsky believed that polarizing society and demonizing opponents was useful. Obama lived and breathed Alinsky’s teachings as a community organizer in Chicago and he continues to do so. Obama is not a stupid man and neither was Alinsky. Obama understands the power of Alinsky’s organizing techniques to move society in a specific direction. It is for this reason that community organizers should not be mocked, as Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani delighted in doing at the 2008 Republican national convention. Sure, their one-liners were funny at the time, but in retrospect, unwise because they made normal patriotic Americans drop their guard.
Alinskyite organizers are deadly serious and always willing to crack skulls — literally. As Alinsky wrote in his organizing tome, Rules for Radicals:
The organizer simultaneously carries on many functions as he analyzes, attacks, and disrupts the prevailing power pattern. [...] The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displaced by new patterns that provide the opportunities and means for citizen participation. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new. [...] The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. [...] An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which the people can angrily pour their frustrations.
It is the organizer’s job to make people angry and then to harness that rage and use it to change society. The objective is to rip society apart and then sew it back together. This is what Obama has been doing ever since he declared his candidacy for the presidency. It’s all he does. Bringing Americans together is to be avoided because it is a recipe for stalemate and the status quo, as he sees it. Conflict, on the other hand, produces clarity.
The always insightful Stanley Kurtz lays it out plainly, pointing out that stirring up trouble has been the president’s goal all along:
American politics just keeps getting more polarized. Be assured that Obama wants it that way. I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama’s long-term hope is to divide America along class lines (roughly speaking, tax payers versus tax beneficiaries). Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court at his 2010 State of the Union address, his offensive against the Chamber of Commerce, his exhortation to Hispanics to punish their enemies, and several similar moves were all efforts to jump-start a populist movement of the left. Like his socialist organizing mentors, Obama believes that a country polarized along class lines will eventually realign American politics sharply to the left.
Obama the organizer keeps pounding away over and over and over again until he gets results. That’s what he’s doing in Wisconsin right now, acting like some Latin American caudillo, rounding up his thug supporters to intimidate the state legislature and to use physical violence if necessary. He’s been using Organizing for America, a project of the DNC which is now, incidentally, run by stealth ACORN/SEIU operative Patrick Gaspard, to do his dirty work as Kurtz and the Politico acknowledge.
Obama wants to initiate a low-grade civil war. He has been preparing for it for decades. He doesn’t care if people get hurt in the process. Those casualties are just collateral damage in the quest to impose his pie-in-the-sky ideology on an unwilling nation.
As Kurtz warns:
We are destined for still more polarization. [...] We either scale back government and the power of public employee unions, or we move toward a structurally higher tax burden and a permanently enlarged welfare state. The very nature of the American system is now at stake.
Kurtz isn’t exaggerating. This is America’s last chance to turn away from a species of statist tyranny in which elections won’t count for anything because the Leviathan will be too heavy to budge.
As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation.

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