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Go Home Another Crazy Obama Theory

THE PLANK DECEMBER 27, 2009

Another Crazy Obama Theory

BY ISAAC CHOTINER

On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Ronald Reagan asked of the Allied forces who had given their lives, "Where do we find such men?" A good question. Alas, it is also a question that tends to recur when observing a very different caliber of man. Take, for instance, National Review blogger Victor Davis Hanson. Where do we find such a man? Here he is, yesterday:

It works like this: The ghetto resident, the denizen of the barrio, the abandoned and divorced waitress with three young children, can all chart their poverty and unhappiness not to accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality or drug use, or simple tragedy, but rather exclusively to a system that is rigged to ensure oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender—often insidious and unfathomable except to the sensitive and gifted academic or community organizer.

So Obama combines the age-old belief that the state is there to level the playing field (rather than protect the rights of the individual and secure the safety of the people from foreign threats), with the postmodern notion that government must recompensate those by fiat on the basis on their race or class or gender. Remember all that, and everything from the Professor Gates incident, to the dutiful attendance at the foot of Rev. Wright to Van Jones become logical rather than aberrant. Michelle Obama could make $300,000 and she will always be more a victim than the Appalachian coal miner who earns $30,000, by virtue of her race and gender.

This--one of Hanson's riper outpourings--appeared in Pajamas Media, not National Review (does the magazine know that it only gets Hanson's more cursory efforts?). Anyway, it is refreshing that Hanson is so willing to give the world a window into the deepest recesses of his mind.

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13 comments

Something Something Something Victor David Hanson. Something something something Dark Side. Why not give the link to the Pajamasmedia article? http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/where-did-these-guys-come-from/

- malahat

December 27, 2009 at 12:59pm

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Real news please. This guy makes a door handle look interesting and intelligent. Who cares what he has to say?

- WandreyCer

December 27, 2009 at 1:19pm

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I am so tired of the notion that any attempt to expand government services beyond the construction of interstate highways and the defense of the realm represents a postmodern offense against the ideology of the founders. According to this construction, the New Deal was post-modern, which would have come as a shock to FDR, as the term didn't exist yet. Hell, Hoover's farm board and Refinance Corporation are postmodern according to Hanson. Boring. Stupid. Also, what kind of decent person would consign a person to poverty because of "fate" or "back luck" or "simple tragedy"? That strikes me as pre-modern. But maybe Hanson sees that as the virtue of his position.

- propositionjoe

December 27, 2009 at 1:47pm

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Well, I'm willing to make exceptions for fate and tragedy. If you stabbed your eyes out because you were doomed from birth to kill your father and marry your mother, you'd better have private insurance. I'm not subsidizing any ocular transplants for people cursed by the Gods.

- ratnerstar

December 27, 2009 at 1:52pm

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I have a rule: any article or blog or vomitous bile that has the word "postmodern" in anything other than ironic, satiric, cynical or just definitional sense, deserves to be trashed, and the writer consigned to reading Derida for the rest for of his time. Ratty gets the comment of the day. And Wand: please stop insulting doorhandles by inappropriate anologies. This oik resembles goat droppings at his most sentient.

- icarusr

December 27, 2009 at 2:23pm

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Won't anyone stick up for Oedipus? He meant well! Surely, these are hard times. Not to harp, but I'm pretty sure that the House and Senate bills are blind to race and gender, leaving class as the sole category for redistribution. Don't opponents of affirmative action often say that they would approve of that program if it excluded race and was entirely class-based? Well, here comes Obamacare. It's race and gender blind. Where are the zippity-do-dahs? If you want an abortion or if you are illegal, then I guess you have your gripes, but that shouldn't be a problem for Hanson et al.

- propositionjoe

December 27, 2009 at 2:50pm

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Anyone actually read Hanson's article? Hanson seems to have been using the atrocious adjective "postmodern" pejoratively. The preceding paragraph to the except is: "...But there is another element to Barack Obama besides progressive statism. A number of contemporary –isms and –ologies (multiculturalism, moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, post-modernism) also help to explain Obamism, especially in cultural terms. Our universities subscribe to race/class/gender theory of exploitation, in which much of the unhappiness of today’s women, of today’s nonwhite, and of today’s poor originates with the privileges of the white Christian Western male that are predicated on oppression.

- malahat

December 27, 2009 at 3:12pm

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Good God, we know he's using it pejoratively. What other way would he be using it? The sun has not yet risen on the day a member of the cultural right uses "postmodern" as anything other than a catchall for everything bad in the world.

- ratnerstar

December 27, 2009 at 3:27pm

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ratner, I think the use of "postmodern" should be restricted to architects' conferences, and then only if the venue is in Antarctica.

- malahat

December 27, 2009 at 3:40pm

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But propjoe, conservatives were against both the establishment of the Department of Defense and the federal construction of the interstate highways at the time both were proposed and passed into law. In both cases, conservatives of the VDH stripe warned Americans that these measures made a mockery of the Constitution, the Founders, American liberty and independence generally, exposed us to the ridicule or worse of our enemies, and would inevitably usher in an era of socialist dependancy and rent-seeking.

- rhubarbs

December 27, 2009 at 5:29pm

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Hanson reminds me of my now-deceased mom. In later years she formed all her opinions based on what she read, saw on TV, or gleaned as hearsay from other biddies in her ladies' home. In other words she failed to EXPERIENCE reality. Empiricism died within her twenty years before her organism gave out. We had folks over for several days for Christmas, including my wife's eighty-something dad, who when not visiting his kids spread out all over the West is pursuing his latest career--wildlife photography--and trying to cook at home the dishes he and his (much younger) wife sample at any of the restaurants they're spending his kids' inheritances on. He is determined to experience life--surgically inserted morphine pump notwithstanding. Empiricism is very much in the mix in his worldview. More power to him. I pity Hanson, whose writings reveal such an abject lack of first-hand experience that I know his world must be quite small indeed, as small as that of a Narragansett baby straitjacketed within a papoose, or else his worldview wouldn't fit.

- williamyard

December 28, 2009 at 6:33pm

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Heard on TV tonight that the DOJ professional who recommended --unsuccessfully--that the "black panthers" (or whatever they call themselves) who were patrolling a Philadelphia polling station with clubs in their hands be prosecuted has been "exiled" to the US Attorney's office in SC. This from the same political party that made a huge howl about the Bush administration pushing US attorneys to bring voting fraud cases, presumably against Democrats. Wake up folks! Most of you have seen film of those Philadelphia thugs. Would you have liked to have them poised outside your voting precinct? I'll throw you a bone. If you didn't like the conservative crowd that threw their weight around in Miami-Dade in 2000, did you find this bunch more attractive? Once again I note that the activist bases are running things, at least since 2000. If you think the bullies on "your side" are protecting civil rights, but the bullies on the "other side" are crushing them, admit where you are at. Your distaste for the opposition trumps your assessment of the need for civility. You don't like Hanson? You think Chotiner is a quantum improvement? They are both activists scratching out survival in a journalistic environment that is declining by the moment. Belief is wonderful; survival is necessary. Listen to whom you prefer, but try to prefer your gag reflex.

- lsernoff

December 29, 2009 at 7:44pm

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lsernoff: "Your distaste for the opposition trumps your assessment of the need for civility." Just speaking entirely for myself, that is so true.

- ironyroad

January 2, 2010 at 11:18am

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