Bridge Out

If we could number the reasons why Barack Obama is in The White House, we'd have a fair picture of a society's normative mistakes, wishful thinking and reality's revenge. List the reasons for yourself - Celebrity-ism, the dubious "upside" of racialism, affirmative-action's moral bewilderment, the charm of youth and elite education, glamor, the cult of the expert, solutionism, civilization and its discontents; that kind of stuff. All insubstantial, with a life-span limited by the stony path of history, hard times and incredulity. Liberalism itself is a bridge between reality and fantasy; Obama imagines himself, and his fans do too, as a bridge between reality and the inconceivable.

Obama as President is a symptom of geriatric liberalism's softening of the mind, even, to some degree, the Conservative mind. For fifty years, a screwball version of utopianism has leaked into the foundations of American's aspirations, and flooded them with fantasies of abolishing social problems with charismatic leaders, public money, coercion, education, utilitarian economics, technology and freedom unrestrained by ethics. Now the real world and angry Americans are scratching and snarling outside their door and the Progs are plugging their ears.

They think you're just pissed off, and your friendship can be bought. You could argue that this reaction and liberalism's text are products of a decadent form of Enlightenment thinking. If every observable problem has a practical solution, consideration of the unseen is ridiculous, even though you have to pretend that it matters. You formally pursue the possible and ignore the good because "the good" is overly complex and relative. No one knows what it is, anyway. Man is only an animated blob of matter. Materialism advanced by benevolent Big Government is the only means to secure human well being. First of all, this isn't proven, and second, it's a conclusion and not an argument. In this case it simply assumes that anger is material discontent, The multi-purpose Poverty Principle.

I don't think Obama can grasp this problem. Hardly anyone believes him anymore. His election was a last-chance swoon by a disgusted and resentful America. He's not bright enough to see it, nor are his court, his advisors, the leftish Beltway hacks, or the ideological tramps who were seated in Act III of the dreary production staged by the New Left from the 1960's on. They're about to be clobbered by the curtain before bleating some idiot line from the distant past.

Obama's only skill, or handlers' skill, is to rhetorically shape a kind of sticky romanticism that excites young and old liberals, and which briefly encouraged worried moderates that the liberal rot in America could be arrested by a smart, clever, objective problem-solver. What they got was a clueless, incompetent-to-the-bone idealogue ,backed by a compliant clot of nutcases and for-sale pols in The Capitol.

That's old news now. The current regime is bad enough on its own, but only a sideshow to the collapse of the liberal model for mankind. If Obama was really smart, he'd ride the horse in the direction it's already going. But he isn't, and won't. They aren't and won't. I was around to witness the collapse of one social order and its political superstructure. It's happening again, and I couldn't be happier.