A Manic-Depressive Polity

In the individual the states of mania and depression can cycle in a matter of weeks or days, even hours.  The collection of individuals known as a society, or as a political actor, a polity, being larger takes longer.  Still the result is the same, a cycling from the peaks of mania to the depths of depressive despair.  Ten years represents the cycle length for We the People.

Ten years ago the majority of We the People were exploring the delightful high country of collective mania.  The dot com bust having been weathered with surprisingly little broad gauge effects, a sense of hyper confidence in both today and tomorrow had taken hold.  It may not have been the unlimited sort of let-the-good-times-roll mood which typified the highest point of the Sixties, but it ran a close second.  The economy was not just sound, it was rip-roaringly good.  The impact of outsourcing had not yet spread through the ranks of potentially unemployed.  The housing bubble was inflating rapidly driven by a mix of ill-advised governmental actions and the nice, old fashioned greed of financial institutions.  Jobs, money, liquidity, the notion of one's home as an ATM with two bathrooms were all abroad in the land.

The US was at peace.  Or so we thought, being tone deaf regarding the hostile religious music tooting through sections of the Mideast.  Islam was simply one more religion, not the source of terror and war it would become.  The president, George W. Bush, promised a foreign policy based upon both American leadership and strength and a concomitant "humility."  Strong but meek constituted a view of our role in global affairs which rang well and true with most of We the People.

American preeminence, American leadership, and American restraint were seen as both appropriate and laudable by the majority of us.  There was no question regarding the truth of "American exceptionalism."  We were on a roll both globally and at home.  There were no problems we could not solve.  No challenges we could not meet almost without effort.

Flash forward a decade.  Actually it is necessary to move the calender only eight years.  The euphoria of mania was gone.  Instead of the high of confidence, certainty, the sense of being divinely protected, divinely motivated, We the People now wallowed in the slough of despair.  We were beaten, defeated, and broke.

The bubble of economic confidence had shattered into even more pieces than had the housing bubble.  Net worth plummeted for many.  An unconscionable number were unemployed, many having become so discouraged by prospects that they had surrendered the task of seeking employment, leaving the jobless job market completely.  Two long wars had come to nothing.  There was no sense of victory as there had been no reality of success in either Iraq or Afghanistan.  At the same time, the institutional reaction to the very real threats of Islamic terrorism had created a permanent empire of fear.

A trip to the airport had become for many a visit to hell's anteroom.  Security warnings, the loudly announced arrests of yet another wannabe Muslim martyr, the periodic successes of those who shout "Allahu akbar" as they pulled the trigger or pushed the clicker, the pervasive awareness of terror's dark shadow blocked the sunny nature of American society to a significant extent.

Then there was our domestic elite.  You know the legions of our self-appointed best and brightest, the shining lights of politics, the media, academia.  The constant refrain from all these fine folks--including the president of the United States, a academic and political elitist of the first water--was that We the People and our country were in decline, a deserved decline.  We were told by both word and deed that if there was such a thing as "American exceptionalism" it was only negative.

Our "betters" of the hoi olligoi assured us that other cultures were every bit as good and meritorious as our own.  We were told that Islam--a religion where there was authority for the stoning of women, the murder of homosexuals, the existence of a permanent state of war with all infidels, the use of lies to mislead those who were not Muslim--was every bit as moral as all other belief systems.  Against the evidence of the senses and logic, our "betters" hectored us to the effect that those Muslims who bombed, who stoned, who flew jet airliners into buildings, who used eight year olds as bomb mules, were not really, really Islamic but rather "misunderstanders" or 'hijackers" of the faith.

The economy was in the tank.  The combination of outsourcing, of moving manufacturing offshore to, primus inter pares, China, very poorly conceived and executed government programs and policies, and, not least, the inability or unwillingness of many within We the People to answer creatively a single question, "how much is enough?" put the domestic economy down for the count.

Years of practicing the very politics of self-destruction, governments of both parties had competed in bribing the polity with federal give aways subsidies, and tax cuts.  The combination was, as had been predicted by not only practitioners of the dismal science--economics--but all those of relatively clear vision, fatal to the federal budget and provided the killing deficit.  Financial collapse bred economic collapse which in turn made the deficit crunch lurch to the very verge of terminal collapse.

And still the wars lingered on.  By the end of the decade which started on 9/11/01 the US was by and large out of Iraq--although this June has been the most deadly for our forces in over two years.  We know that the sacrifices of irreplaceable lives and hundreds of billions of (hopefully) recoverable dollars has bought nothing worth the price.  Iraq is caught in ever increasing sectarian violence with Shiites killing Sunnis in wholesale lots in Anbar province.  Bombs and snipers compete for attention in Baghdad.  The government is caught in stasis, a stasis of sectarianism and personal rivalry.  The only point where the majority agree is that Americans are bad and Iranians are good.

In Afghanistan the strategic morass had resolved itself sufficiently to show that the combination of nocturnal raids and constant pressure was working on the military level to progressively reduce the will and ability of Taliban and the Haqqani network to wage war.  At the same time all of the nation-building efforts have proven a failure.  The government and its security forces remain inept, corrupt, and monuments to inefficiency and illegitimacy.  What Taliban and the rest are losing on the battlefield, they are recouping with interest on the governmental level.

The totality of the Afghanistan GDP less three percent is provided by American and other foreign origin military and economic aid.  The vast tsunami of money coupled with a lack of financial oversight has given the endemic culture of corruption a massive boost.  This, in turn, has reduced the appeal of both the central government and its foreign sponsors to the average Afghan--particularly if he has not been able to grasp a handful of the goodies as they flowed by.

Last week President Obama delivered the most sickening speech ever heard or read by the Geek.  His we-have-been-bested in Afghanistan remarks were a potpourri of lies and half truths which beggar description and surpass imagination.  Even though he has committed the US to withdrawing its forces prematurely, this was not enough for others within his elite company.  Nancy Pelosi, a not inconsiderable presence even after last November's election, has demanded an even faster schedule of pull out.  In this she has been joined by a number of deficit hawk Republicans.

There is no doubt that the majority of We the People want out of Afghanistan ASAP!  The absence of success, even the absence of a plausible reason for our continued presence could have no other effect.  The Obama administration like its predecessor has never articulated a plausible, rational, understandable set of reasons for our continued efforts in Afghanistan.  Often proclaimed the "good war" or the "necessary war," the US and its allies have never stated a clear goal for our operations, instead producing loads of fine sounding but vapid mood music about democracy, good government, stability, and human rights.

The mood music about Afghanistan as was the case with the identical sounds regarding Iraq have never been believable to or believed by many, even most, of We the People.  Without saying so in a direct, blunt way, it is clear that We  the People have not and do not trust the so-called elite to be honest with us concerning intentions and results in these wars.  The distrust felt by so many of us came forth regarding a military commitment in Libya.  We may have been quite sympathetic with the rebels and their goal of ridding their country of the noxious Gaddafi family, but there was no way we would put our people in harm's way on the behalf of the rebels.

Had Obama or his predecessor been true leaders, they would have put forth believable reasons for our efforts in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Libya.  The failure of each to undertake this basic presidential task successfully joined with the shocks of economic collapse and the reality of the never ending threat of terror to erode the manic mood of decade's beginning.

There is one more reason for the awesome mood shift of the past ten years.  The result of the years of indoctrination in the American educational system from pre-school to grad school.  The blame-America-first generation which emerged from the Sixties has controlled the public educational system for two decades and more now.  The repeated message, built into curricula and handbooks of instructions is and has been profoundly anti-American in its orientation.  The end result is a large and growing segment of We the People is predisposed to think the worst about their country, their government, and the actions of both, past and present alike.

Millions of minds have been conditioned by twelve and more years of education to believe the US had much to apologize for.  The same minds believe the US is not capable of doing good for itself or others in the world.  At the same time they have been oriented to reject the notions of national or cultural exceptionalism--or even superiority.  The US is simply one country among many, no better than any--and worse, much worse than most.  In a real and basic sense there are millions in our midst who have been raised to believe that we deserve nothing but failure and defeat as redress for our earlier sins, our previous arrogance, our long standing exploitation of others.

The synergy between elite and the common folk is perfect.  The elite, a product of the same blame-America-first orientation as their slightly younger non-elite fellow citizens has preached and lectured, exhorted and hectored on the subject of American wrong doing, American unexceptionalism, American exploitation, the beauties of the multicultural and multilateral, the evils of going it alone, of acting to protect and advance national interest.  The success achieved over the past years is attributable not to the persuasiveness or inherent truth of the message but rather to the propensity of the auditors, the children of the past thirty or forty years to believe what they hear and read.

The US and We the People have faced threats and challenges equaling or surpassing those today.  In the past we have not surrendered to either.  We have not succumbed to depression before.  It is different today simply because the "kids" of the Sixties particularly those who were activists of one sort or another became successful beyond their wildest dreams when they took over the educational system of the US over the course of twenty years.  Because of this success, the victory of the blame-America-first ideology, We the People now have lost confidence not only in our institutions and actions but in our very selves.  We no longer trust ourselves and our ability to handle life's challenges and threats.

When looking at the palpable decline of the US, at the national nadir of depression, the old saying of Pogo is more true than ever before--"We have met the enemy and he is us."

To Lose Faith Is To Lose Everything

Senator John McCain implored President Obama to use his engaging personal narrative as a mechanism in a coherent international effort to bring about peaceful regime change in Iran. There is no chance that the Nice Young Man From Chicago will do so. More important is the reason why he will remain on the sidelines.

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.

The US: Last, Best Hope Of Mankind?

For a very long time, generations at least, Americans held as an article of shared faith that their nation and state represented "the last, best hope of mankind." It was the most commonly held sense of "American exceptionalism." Even when confronted with the myriad warts on the face of Uncle Sam, Americans maintained that their experiment as the only country created on a set of shared ideas and aspirations remained the beacon to the rest of the world.

Now that long-standing, widely held self-understanding is crumbling. The tattering of the tapestry of shared myth is shown in a recent Rasmussen survey. The numbers show that barely half of We the People currently hold this positive view of our collective endeavor. When examined closely, vast gulfs on the basis of age and political inclination exist within our social and political body.

Younger Americans overwhelmingly reject the contention that our country represents a hope for the human race. Only thirty-seven percent see matters this way. Fifty-one percent of those of us under thirty reject the proposition categorically. In the wheezing geezer category the percentages run in the opposite direction with sixty-two out of a hundred holding the positive view.

Not surprisingly the conservatives overwhelmingly agree with the positive sentiment while those identifying themselves as liberals are not so certain--forty-three percent hold thumbs down and twenty-nine percent give the US the thumbs up. Another interesting dichotomy comes in comparing the "political class" (as defined by Rasmussen's methodology which seems superficially at least to be sound) and the "mainstream" public. While fifty-eight percent of the "mainstream" are positive, only thirty-one percent of the "political class" agree.

An examination of the Rasmussen method for defining the "political class"--based on three questions plumbing the attitude of the respondent regarding the role of government versus that of the individual--indicates the existence of a large and completely predictable overlap between self-identified liberals and members of the "political class."

Both groups, for example, see the government as being more important than the individual in determining the quality of an individual's life.

Both also agree on the proposition that government has an affirmative obligation to interfere in economic and social matters in order to assure equal and just outcomes.

In addition both groups see the government as playing the key role in protecting people from the consequences of poor personal decision making.

In a companion poll Rasmussen found out that both the liberals and the "political class" hold the UN in higher esteem than they do the US in addressing global issues including those of war and peace than do conservatives and the "mainstream." Seventy-nine percent of the "mainstream" respondents saw the US as a more "positive" force in the world than the UN. Among the "political class" the percentage was much smaller--just forty-five percent. The numbers are similar when comparing conservatives and liberals.

(It deserves mention that ninety-seven percent of the "political class" see the UN in the most favorable light. In sharp contrast sixty-three percent of the "mainstream" view the UN unfavorably.)

Unfortunately the survey on attitudes concerning the UN did not provide an age serrated breakdown. If it had, the Geek is willing to bet hair, the dichotomy between youth and senescence would have duplicated that exhibited in the "last, best hope of mankind" report.

The negative view held by the under-thirty demographic segment is no shock to anyone who has either participated in or closely observed the degeneration in the teaching of American history at all levels from the primary grades to the rarefied air of grad school. The constant theme of deprecation which pervades the entirety of American education at least as regards the history of We the People and the state we have created could have no other result.

The never-ending reiteration of a monomaniacal focus of the American people and the US as a corporate entity as victimizer, exploiter, and imperialistic monger of war is not only historically invalid, a travesty, a sin of both commission and omission. It is also a disservice to the future the magnitude of which is impossible to overestimate.

The primary obligation of the historian--or the teacher of history--is to convey the past as it actually was unpolluted by political or personal agenda or propensity. This means it is equally wrong to hold the US as being "exceptional" in its purity of motive and effort as to interpret the past only in the blackest hues.

Back in the deepest depths of the Cold War both teachers and writers of history were expected to portray the American past as being a smooth, unbroken record of ever greater freedom, equality, and angelic accomplishment. Under the gimlet eyes of the anticommunist crusaders it was as much as a person's job was worth to mention any of the multitude of ills and evils which constituted milestones on our collective drunkards walk to the present. Tenure was the only--and often frail--protector of the academic or public school teacher who adumbrated any negative in our collective experience.

The justification offered was the tired refrain, "It would harm our security and open us to subversion if the facts were known or the truth told."

Since the triumph of the Sixties vintage blame-America-First folks in higher education thirty plus years ago, the tide shifted radically. Since the late Seventies it has been increasingly politically unfashionable not to say dangerous to one's career to see the past (and often, the present as well) in terms which are at all laudable. The textbooks and lectures alike have shifted so as to emphasize every deficiency--real or imagined--which can possibly be impugned to Americans generally and their government, businesses, churches, and leaders more particularly.

The Americans and the institutions of their making have been (mis)characterized as having been unrelievedly racist, sexist, exploitative, imperialistic and generally repressive, oppressive, suppressive, and depressive. We and our institutions have been portrayed as existing only to benefit rich white guys at the expense of all the rest of us. We have been accused and convicted of dominating the world for the most base and selfish of reasons. Of looking for countries to invade. Of despoiling not only our territory but as much of the world's surface as our clutching greedy hands could grasp.

With such an unchanging picture of base evil, of astounding horror as the leitmotif of history it is small wonder that recent graduates (or "through-put products") of the American educational system would hold such a negative view of their country. More surprising is that more than a third of the under-thirties accept as true the contention that the US is the "last, best hope of mankind."

As a scholar and teacher of history the Geek has always believed it was both an ethical obligation and a requirement of intellectual integrity to see the past as it actually was rather than as he personally would have preferred it to have been. It is only by understanding the causal chains as well as the evolving context that one can appreciate the nature and direction of historical trajectories. More, it is only by understanding the trajectories which have brought the present into being that one can accurately appreciate what is happening today--and why it is happening.

There is a point to this exercise. Only by understanding the trajectories and the present which they have created can one hope to both predict the future--and, most importantly, exercise some influence, no matter how small, on the future. An accurate understanding of the past not only makes the present more readily and comprehensively understood; it empowers the individual in undertaking actions intended to influence the future course of events.

The blame-America-first bunch and their fellow travelers of the cultural relativism crowd hope to influence the future in line with their individual agendas by means of indoctrination. These scholars and teachers seek to propagandize not educate, to bend pliant minds to a preformed idea, not encourage independent, critical thinking. They hope to manufacture a future by having manufactured a uniquely distorted historical past.

In the short term they have succeeded in their ambitions as indicated by the Rasmussen reports alluded to. Whether they will succeed equally well in the longer term is less certain.

It is to be hoped that they fail. The historical record shows clearly that while the American experiment has had any number of very negative impacts, overall there is more truth than falsehood in the proposition that the US is "the last, best hope of mankind."

The "New Left" Has Finally Won--Big Time

One of the enduring myths of the Sixties, of the Vietnam War in particular, is that of the anti-war and other "New Left" activists having successfully toppled two presidents (LBJ and RMN) as well as having forced an end to the American efforts in Southeast Asia. The contemporary documents, particularly those which were originally classified drop a flag on that particular play.

Now as the always pompous and pretentious Paul Harvey used to say in his patented portentous tones, "For the rest of the story."

While the "New Left" failed to heave out presidents or end a war, it did ultimately succeed at something far more important. The final testament to the dedication and effectiveness of the aging survivors of the demos and barricades, of Days of Rage and "Bring the War Home," is the current anti-American convictions of so many members of the American hoi oligoi.

As many of the constituent parts of the "Movement" left the streets, the protests, the rallies, the teach-ins, the sit-ins, the communes, they found comfortable and highly influential positions in the groves of academe. It was as if they took the hoary Jesuit mantra, "give me the child and I will have the man," very much to heart as they took to the lectern.

As the Geek observed repeatedly during his years in the academy, the vast majority of those teaching in departments of English, history, sociology, philosophy belonged to a strain of thinking (the term is used generically only) which can be best entitled, "Blame America First." In the eyes, mouths, and computers of these folk the US was and always had been the prime fountainhead of evil on the planet's surface. There was not the smallest doubt in the minds of any of these professors (the Geek will not degrade the honorable term, "teacher," by applying it in this case) that the American republic and people stood in the dock not only accused but prima face, convicted of racism, sexism, imperialism, a nation and a state awash in greed, exploitation, repression, and related manifestations of the most base of human actions.

Students in the tens of thousands trooped into the indoctrination centers run by these militant exponents of all-sin-is-made-in-America. Year after year the kids born in the Sixties and following decades sat and took in the "wisdom" of these paragons of academic virtue. The message of America-is-the-bane-of-humanity was repeated with the remorseless repetition of a Chinese Communist self-criticism session. And, with the same result.

The result?

The message was accepted. Believed. Taken to heart. Reified. Even deified.

At the same time other aging veterans of the Sixties streets were rising to prominence in politics, the media, the law. Sharing the same intellectual heritage, the same zeitgeist as their cohorts in academia, they spoke the same Blame America First theme reinforcing the indoctrination of the classroom.

The normal processes of aging assured that finally products of the ever reinforced message would place their hands on the levers of power in our country. One such product is the current occupant of the Oval, Barack Obama.

It is not surprising that his profound expressions of Blame America First are so much a daily part of his rhetoric and policy alike. More than those of the "older generation," the now grey and wrinkled "kids" of the "New Left," such as Ms Clinton or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Ms Pelosi, and Mr Reid, the President, and others of his age both spout and act upon the America-is-evil theme. This is to be expected, the elders merely lived through the time, those younger were heavily and repeatedly indoctrinated, intellectually marinated as it were in the bitter and poisonous wine trampled out by the "New Lefties."

There is little if any reason to doubt that Mr Obama sincerely believes that the world, the human race, would be the better if the US were humbled, less powerful, less able to lead--and be followed. Certainly his policies both foreign and domestic seem to predicated on that sort of view.

Todd Gitlin a distinguished member of the "Movement" some years ago bemoaned the fact that while the Right, those horrid, icky-poo Republicans had taken the White House, the Left had captured the English department. Dr Gitlin must have rethought his gloomy view during the administration of George W. Bush as the opposition refought the battles of the Sixties.

Except for receding hairlines and expanding abdomens the "antis" of the W. Bush years were reprising their glory days of forty years earlier. Often they were cheered on by media types of similar vintage, background, and worldview. They were supported by politicians who were likewise bonded by age and experience.

The new feature of the Bush period was the support provided to the "antis" by the younger generation, the folks who had successfully passed through the indoctrination programs run by the Blame America Firsters of academe. If anything the younger component outdid their progenitors in both volume and vitriol.

High on the list of the younger generation of "antis" was an Illinois state senator and later, US senator from the Land of Lincoln, the Nice Young Man From Chicago, Barack Obama. He may have known nothing of foreign relations, military policy, diplomacy or war but he knew one thing very, very well. He knew America was inherently evil and needed to be changed not only in and for itself but for the good future of humanity.

He knew these things because his professors had told him so--again and again. He knew it because it had been told him by the age cohort of his professors, those in media, those in community organizing, those in assorted help-the-people organizations. He had heard it, read it so often, so convincingly, that it must be true.

His view of "hope and change" was simply that the "hope" of the world would be found in a basic "change" in the US. The change would necessitate a diminishment of US status, influence, and, yes, power in the world.

The results of the Obama version of "change" is all too evident in the foreign policy of the US as well as its conduct. Whether kicking old allies in the shin (the UK) or the groin (Israel) or cozying up to hostile states or ducking, bobbing, weaving in practice while talking tougher than a South Side gangsta, it has become apparent to any not under the influence of the Blame America First ideology that the US is acting weak, trying desperately to resign its status as a Great Power.

This is not to imply that past American foreign policy is above reproach. The Geek has enjoyed pulling the wings off the American foreign relations butterfly for decades. We have made mistakes aplenty in the past. We have allowed ourselves to become blind to the requirements of realpolitik. We have pursued threats which did not exist, chased after illusions, sought unachievable goals. All of these, and, lots of times.

The Obama administration reflecting the views of the now elderly "New Left" has gone far beyond mere miscalculations, simple blunders, quotidian stupidity, expectable ideological blindness. As a direct consequence of believing deeply in the America-the-sinful school of history, politics, and economics, the president and what he proudly calls, "his team" have sought to lower the role and responsibility of the US in global affairs while doing everything possible to remove any traces of "American exceptionalism" at home.

Fortunately the fallout of the Sixties "New Left" is not universal. More importantly not everyone exposed to the indoctrination centers swallowed the approved line. Very few of us in the American hoi polloi agree with the (not atypically) anonymous administration official who said, "We were elected to preside over a graceful American decline."

Mr Obama's vision of "change" involves the historically unprecedented voluntary rejection of Great Power status by the US and We the People. Considering that we Americans have never been comfortable with being citizens of a Great Power, of shouldering the unwelcome burdens which can come with that status, the hope of this sort of change is not preposterous.

The other side of the coin is that the US as Great Power has been, on balance, good for the world generally. The US has been the "last best hope" on all too many occasions over the past seventy years. Despite our errors, regardless of our blunders, the US has done more than any other state to promote stability, reduce threats to peace, provide assistance to people in great need of such, and, far from least, serve as an example of possibility, of liberation, of genuine change for the better.

Insofar as there exists a genuine "human potential movement" it is resident in the US. We have been and remain what John Winthrop called us over four hundred years ago, the city on a hill holding the beacon of authentic hope, genuine change on high.

Not what the Blame America First crowd wants to admit. Or the president it manufactured either. But, that is the way it is and will continue to be--if We the People want it to.