Mr Obama, in common with the vast majority of the American hoi oligoi, the self-nominated elite of our politics, our mainstream media, our academe, our molders of public opinion, has lost faith in the US as a collective endeavor as a result of rejecting faith in the American people. Mr Obama represents a fatal current in our collective existence, one which may well lead the US to the same graveyard as the Soviet Union.
Think back to the sudden and (to all too many of those for whom conventional, received wisdom is the only wisdom) shocking collapse of the Soviet Union and its outer empire, the Warsaw Pact nations. Many reasons have been put forth as to the fall of the monolith. Rarely mentioned is the main cause of the implosion. Loss of faith.
As far back as the early Eighties, before the gerontocracy had shuffled off Lenin's Tomb for one of their own, the aging leadership had lost faith in the power of Marxism-Leninism to achieve even an imitation of success. At the same time the rising Soviets were recognizing the same ground truth. The apparent rationality, the presumed scientific objectivity of Marxism, was irrelevant in the lives of real, often less than purely rational, humans.
Loss of faith, loss of confidence in the merits of one's beliefs, one's sense of values, one's goals and aspiration translates at the governmental level to the institutional equivalent of depression in the individual. That equivalent is loss of political will. It's the replacement of the will to do, the will to at least attempt, with a what-the-hell?, it-isn't-worth-the-effort attitude.
Gorbachev and others realized that the continued failure of the Marxist-Leninist system and its underlying philosophy of centrally applied rationality could no longer be blamed on the excesses of Stalin or the failure of Khrushchev's "Virgin Land Scheme." The Soviet Union was doomed to extinction because there was no cause for faith, no basis for the self-certitude without which an empire or a state cannot long endure.
The Soviet monolith fell to the astonishment of the ever-so-rational analysts of the Agency and academia from a seemingly irrational cause--loss of faith and national self-confidence. The leadership saw no reason to go on. No justification for continuing. No impetus to do other than admit failure.
The loss of faith leading to the loss of a seemingly impervious, efficiently repressive system was not a first in human history. Other states, other empires, have fallen for the same reason. From the earliest times onward to the present, the loss of political will consequent upon a loss of faith has been, if not the only cause, a primary contributor to the collapse of empire or state.
The same dynamic, the trajectory of loss of faith, abandonment of certitude, resignation to fate and failure has been alive and growing in the US since the mid period of the Vietnam War. At the giddy-up it was a pathology unique to the New Left. As the years passed, the meme of "America-the-Evil spread wider.
Part of the reason for the spread was the proliferation of "rights" movements. Rather than celebrating the capacity of We the People and our nation to recognize and make good faith efforts to remove impediments and provide remedies to those forced to the margins, the "rights" industry instead hyped the politics of victimization. It became ever more critical for those who were members of the "rights" brigade to find, or invent, new categories of victims--and more categories of oppressors and victimizers.
Another critical vector for spreading the loss of faith in ourselves and our institutions comes from the rise of that insidiously seductive intellectual fad of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism and its very close cousin, post-modernism, which asserts (without substantial factual merit) that everyone's "narrative" is equally true, and, as a corollary, that no genuine history or language exists, rather that both are the construct of the politically potent of any given time and place.
Both of these philosophical strains have a very real appeal to Americans, particularly those who are afflicted by specious guilt over their access to education, to advantages both political and economic, and seek to offload this guilt by standing as self-appointed tribunes for those who are not similarly situated. Guilt is assuaged by demanding the newly discovered (or invented) victims be celebrated and the newly discovered (or invented) oppressors be cut down, punished, sent to an eternal Coventry.
The professorate is a natural habitat for the perpetually guilty, for all of those who avoided the perils of life by seeking refuge in the ivy covered havens of academe. It was there that the faith sapping ideas of "Blame America First," "Invent the Victim," and "Finger the Oppressor" emerged and spread.
In the detached academic petri dishes of American higher education, the pathogens attacking faith in the American people, the American ideals, the American experiment spread from generation to generation. Ultimately, these germs could be found not only in the tertiary level but in the secondary and even primary levels of our school systems.
It comes as no surprise that the rising generations of the American "elites" including the current president, many in the mainstream media, the judiciary, the political class, are all fully converted to the view that the US and the American hoi polloi are damaged goods. It is not at all shocking that these folk have no faith in either the US or the American people. It is only expectable, then, that these exemplars of cultural relativism, post-modernism, "America-the-Evil, wish and work to see the US humbled, diminished, rendered impotent.
In the real world of clashing interests, the net effect is for the US to accept defeat, even degradation, as such fits with their faithless worldview. This loss of faith, abandonment of confidence in the country, We the People, American ideals and values leaves the globe open to those with confidence, with faith in themselves and their goals.
The tragedy is simply that the people with faith, with confidence, with ambition, free of faux guilt, false modesty are those who would put women in garbage bags, cut off heads for thought crime, and fly airliners into buildings. This is a tragedy not only for the US and other civilized countries but for those (as in Iran) living under the brutal boots of primitive ideologues.
We can comfort ourselves with the realization that not only have we elected a man without faith in America, but we allowed the pathogens which will defeat us to breed unchecked in our midst for the past forty years.
Comfort? How so, Geek?
It is a comfort because that which we allowed to be created by us can be ended, destroyed by us. That is, if there are enough of us who still have faith in ourselves and our country.
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