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Jonah Goldberg has a great article this morning..here are some of the highlights...
"This is the great irony of Obama and his defenders. He is a progressive ideologue and a passionate believer in “social justice,” and that’s a large reason why his fans love him so. But if you ever say that he is what he is — if you take his words seriously — they ridicule you for believing he’s anything other than a pragmatist and a moderate.
Meanwhile, what many conservatives don’t appreciate is that Obama is not some otherworldly radical, importing foreign ideas, but that he in fact fits within an old American intellectual tradition. Indeed, you might even call him a reactionary progressive; he seeks to restore the assumptions and priorities of the Progressive Era.
Herbert Croly, the godfather of American progressivism, spoke for a generation of progressive intellectuals when he wrote that the “individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” For the progressives, society and government were almost interchangeable terms. John Dewey, the seminal progressive philosopher, believed that “organized social control” via a “socialized economy” was the only means to create “free” individuals. For the progressives, freedom wasn’t the absence of government coercion, it was a pile of gifts from the state.
Progressive minister Walter Rauschenbusch famously declared that only the “God that answereth by low food prices” should be God. You might say that under the Obamacare vision, only the God that answereth with free birth control should be God.
In the slideshow “The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign celebrates a progressive vision of citizenship where all of a hypothetical young woman’s accomplishments are co-produced by the state: “Under President Obama, Julia decides to have a child.”
It’s all of a piece with Obama’s conviction that “a problem facing any American is a problem facing all Americans.”
The problem facing Obama is that there’s a reason the American people never fully embraced the progressive vision. The idea driving America is the individual pursuit of happiness. Just because the word “individual” appears in there doesn’t make it a selfish ideal; it means it’s a vision of liberty. We each find our happiness where we seek it. For some that’s in business, for others the arts, or religion or family or a mix of them all. And very often our happiness depends upon the satisfaction we feel at having conquered problems on our own.
Under President Obama, that sense of happiness is a mirage, because everything is a co-production of the state."
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