“G*d d*mn America!” was the first and only serious crisis of Barack Obama’s ascension to the Democrats’ presidential nomination in 2008. Obama’s longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, said those words repeatedly in an infamous videotaped sermon. In an earlier age, a presidential contender sitting still and keeping his mouth shut during years of sermons like Wright’s would have torpedoed Obama’s presidential ambitions.
Anyone from the early GenX cohort and older thought there was a non-zero chance Obama might be toast. Anyone younger — largely denied the Civics classes prior generations were raised on and spoonfed “America is bad, mmkay?” lessons — knew better.
Obama performed his usual handwavium in a speech titled “A More Perfect Union” about how Wright’s words were “not only wrong but divisive… at a time when we need unity.” I guess we didn’t need unity when Obama was sitting there as Wright was speaking his divisive words. Still, we did need unity as soon as Obama found it politically necessary to denounce his longtime pastor.
I would say, “That was a real profile in courage there, Barry,” but that would just be me being snide. If I were to be more serious, I’d remind you that Obama was steeped in Marx and Engels’ grievance theory.
I’ve written about this on more than one occasion, so let me give you the condensed version.
To understand 21st-century Democrats, we have to cut to the philosophical roots of modern leftism, and we’ll find that in the 19th-century works of Engels and Marx.
The most pernicious of E&M’s many foul ideas was “false consciousness.” The dictionary definition is that it is “a way of thinking that prevents a person from perceiving the true nature of their social or economic situation.” What that means is that a working-class person who doesn’t feel oppressed (and desire a Marxist solution) isn’t a real working-class person. A woman who doesn’t rail against the patriarchy isn’t a real woman. A black man who isn’t a leftist isn’t genuinely black. And so on.
Jeremiah Wright ran a successful church selling similar division, and Obama lapped it up — then repackaged it and sold it as fresh on his way to the White House. The following years of worsening race relations, after decades of sometimes frustratingly slow but genuine improvement, were one of the prices this country paid for prizing Obama’s surface glamor instead of condemning his patently Marxian path to power.
You can draw a straight line from E&M’s 19th-century theory to the 20th-century practice of putting Jews in gas chambers and starving Ukrainian and Russian kulaks to death by the millions. A kulak isn’t a real peasant; A Jew isn’t a real German — traitors, all of them. I’d add that while the hate often begins with Jews — they’ve been an easy-to-scapegoat minority for two millennia — it never ends with them.
You can also draw a straight line from Obama and Wright to the Muslims of Dearborn, Mich., chanting, “Death to America.”
They’ve been emboldened by the anti-American hate and division that have been sold to this country for more than two decades as love and unity.
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