Obama's Gotta Wonder--Is Anybody Listening?

For a long time now whenever an American president has spoken, the world has listened. The global (and domestic) audience might not have liked what they heard, but ears were attentive, brains were engaged. As recently as last year the American president was both heard and heeded on matters both great and small. If nothing else people were ready and willing to hope that the new voice meant substantial and positive change in affairs ranging from health care at home to a globe ranging recession and the very nasty little war in a very faraway place.

In recent months, weeks, even days, the situation has reversed course with an abruptness which startles the observer. Bluntly put, a new dynamic exists, a new dynamic which bloomed with stunning rapidity, a new dynamic in which no one really cares what the American president might say--other than to dismiss the words as not having been worthy of hearing.

There are two excellent indicators of this new dynamic. One comes from the domestic front in the familiar form of a poll. The other comes from the nations comprising the G-20 nations, in the quite unfamiliar form of flat rejection.

The most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted between 17 and 21 June shows that Mr Obama and his progressive agenda have been rejected by very significant pluralities of We The People. The numbers, particularly the sixty-two percent who believe "the country is headed down the wrong path," are those one would expect from, say, a Rasmussen, or even a Republican Party sponsored "push poll" not one from the WSJ/NBC News folks.

There are, of course, many inputs to this new domestic perspective. These include the nature and extent of the Great Transformational Agenda so beloved by the Progressive Caucus and the Man in the Oval but which violates the American propensity for modest changes achieved slowly. There are other, equally or more important factors involved. The administration's response to the BP oil blowout is one. The failure of the economic stimulus packages is another. Even the evident erosion of American influence around the world plays a role.

There is no little probability that the president's action of yesterday--firing McChrystal and replacing him with a man who is a highly regarded political general but no warfighter--will add more suspicion and distrust to the mix in the weeks to come, particularly if General Petraeus alters the McChrystal strategy and operational plans. The net effect of appeasement, getting tough with Israel, bowing to a Saudi king, appearing far less than resolute when faced by an act of war by North Korea, kicking the British in the crotch, encouraging the Russians to behave more and more like the Soviets of bygone days, has been to lessen America in the eyes of the world and the American president in the esteem of We the People.

The more head snapping demonstration of the new dynamic comes from the G-20, more specifically the European members of the assemblage of the largest economies. You recall that Mr Obama sent a letter to the heads of government of all G-20 states which, in essence, begged one and all not to become deficit hawks but rather to continue along with the US on the path of stimulus spending.

Apparently, the political advisers who line the walls of the Oval like vultures around the slaughter house came to realize that the Social Democrat propelled states of Europe had reversed course with the blinding rapidity more characteristic of a school of tropical fish than a cluster of European parliamentarians. In a femtosecond or less, the several European states had gone from their traditional stance of cradle-to-grave benefits provided by other people's money to a posture of austerity severe enough to bring a smile to the face of Messrs Calvin and Knox.

At the same time, the US continued to cruise along fueled by money which is not our own in pursuit of the Great Transformational Agenda. The Sages of Politics feared that this lonely position might impose a political cost on the Democratic Party and the incumbent president. So, the begging letter emerged.

It was written. It was signed. It was delivered. It was ignored. With greater or lesser degrees of courtesy, the American president's plea for unity was blown off. Blown off by one and all. The Eurocrats had come to the conclusion that there were times when the US should be quite unilateral.

The irony in this is as tasty as a triple chocolate cake. The American president in common with many of the American hoi oligoi sees Western Europe with its economic and political philosophy of democratic socialism, its post-modernist languor, its cultural relativism, to be the most seductive of Edens, the most attractive of Paradises, the capstone of ten and more cycles of centuries of human "progress."

"If only we could be more like them," came the lovelorn sigh of thousands of Americans, members in good standing of the self-appointed elites of politics, media, and academe.

Just as the new American president seemed to be leading his people successfully out of the wasteland of America-past and into the Promised Land of Europe-West, a not-so-funny thing happed over in the Continent of Dreams. The place morphed overnight it seemed from the Repository of All Things Great to a a remake of the Old USA.

Benefits beyond count, vacations which never ended, being held harmless against all perils foreign and domestic, became suddenly, shockingly, totally yesterday. In a flash, the good life, the "third life," la dolce vita, was cast aside, to be replaced with the pain and suffering, the sackcloth and ashes of austerity.

Say it ain't so, Joe! Say it ain't so, Barack! Nancy! Somebody! Anybody?

But, it is so. And, the US is alone. Swimming upstream. Headed by a leader to whom no one will listen. Urged on by a voice unheard in the world and increasingly unheeded or unbelieved by those of us who are members of We the People but not card carrying adherents of the domestic elite.

Once, not that many months ago, a conveniently unnamed aid to the Man in the Oval (in)famously remarked, "We were elected to preside over the graceful decline of the United States." Now it appears that We the People unwittingly elected a man destined to preside over, not the decline, but the defeat of the US.

We elected the man for a number of reasons. Some of us practiced identity politics--placing the subgroup of ethnic, racial, religious, economic, or ideological affiliation above the primary loyalty to the US. Some of us voted from a basis of frustration and alienation, terminally fried off by the hypocrisy and duplicity of the Bush/Cheney years. Still others of us were taken in by the false flag campaign of Mr Obama. (Of course that latter is no excuse as all political campaigns are to some extent of the false flag sort and experience should have made us too hip to have been taken in by the "hope and change" slogans coming from the TelePrompter propelled mouth over the palpably empty suit.)

In any event We the People still have some faint chance of forestalling our looming defeat in the world. If nothing else we can take a clue from the Europeans. That's right, boyo, the Europeans.

The European hoi polloi have shouted "enough is enough!" The common men and women of West Europe have had it up to their dandruff with cultural relativism, multi-culturalism, the surrendering of painfully won defining institutions and values to the new barbarians, the hordes of arrivals from the primitive regions of the Islamic world.

We can do no less. And, no more. Tolerance, forbearance, and diversity are valuable values, but none mean we must abandon the unique features and attributes which have served so well for so long to make us a self-conscious entity.

Now European politicians are demanding of their people (and in the case of the new British government, themselves) that individuals no longer ask, "what's in it for me?" but rather ask, "how will this benefit us all?" European politicians are seeking to force a powerful and painful change upon their societies and polities, a change from indulgence to sacrifice, a shift from give-it-to-me-now! to delay-for-a-better-future. They are asking the nearly impossible--to surrender an overly pleasurable today for the prospect of an OK tomorrow.

We can do no less. Since so few of our political figures are willing or able to emulate their European counterparts, We the People must demand that they do so. This is to ask of ourselves something even more strenuous, more arduous than the European politicians have asked of their publics.

Yeah, that's where it is at--demand that our politicians demand of us both austerity and the accompanying sacrifice of our version of la dolce vita.

It may be an impossible task for us to undertake. However, the alternative, the defeat of the US, makes the task not only important but central--if we are to have a tomorrow.

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.