Change We Can Believe In
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Posted: 06/16/08
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Change We Can Believe In
By Thomas E. Brewton
You'd better believe it. Senator Obama and his supporters dislike
traditional Americanism, preferring the Darwinian doctrine of
evolutionary change expressed in moral relativism.
Senator Obama's army of followers are energized by inexperienced and
immature students and by Baby Boomer anarchists eager to relive their
activist days of the 1960s and 70s. They stand opposed to the
historical traditions of the United States. Theirs is a world in
which change is equated with sensual self-indulgence.
Underlying this vision of change is Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis,
applied to politics and social interaction by John Dewey in the early
20th century. Dewey taught Columbia University students that
Darwin's idea of evolution applied to morality as well as biology.
This meant, said Dewey, that there can be no such thing as timeless
principles of morality. Rules of social conduct are continually
undergoing evolutionary change. All that matters is action that gets
you what you want.
This is moral relativism, the rationalization for Senator Obama and
his followers arrogating to themselves the right to change society's
standards of acceptable behavior. "Bringing us together" in Senator
Obama's terms means that traditionalists must conform to the ever-
changing social standards of left-wing liberal-progressives.
Senator Obama's social change amounts to Hollywood's and mainstream
media's beloved drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity,
rampant divorce rates, fathering and abandoning children to single-
parent upbringing, murder by abortion to facilitate sexual
promiscuity, and same-sex marriage, all undermining the traditional
family as the basic unit of society.
In this view, breakdown of traditional morality is liberation of the
individual. It stands in contrast to the nation's founding Judeo-
Christian understanding that such conduct is sinful defiance of God's
Word and that sin is bondage and death.
In classic socialistic doctrine, we must abandon traditional
loyalties and find our life's meaning in the collectivist society.
We must become Lenin's New Soviet Man, taking only what we need and
contributing whatever we have to the political state. In that
tradition, Senator Obama stands firmly behind affirmative action,
confiscatory taxes, and expansion of the welfare state to restructure
society in conformity with the liberal-progressive-socialist vision
of social justice.
Senator Obama's foreign policy rests upon an abstract intellectual
concept called the community of nations. The Senator and his
followers are eager to change our Constitution and to replace it with
a one-world government under the UN, or some other subsidiary of the
Socialist International. Hence the rejection of military power to
protect our national interests and the naive vision of a changed
world in which property and wealth are redistributed equally, a world
in which everyone magically will thereafter have the same attitudes
and aims, and a world in which Senator Obama's oratory will persuade
lions to lie down in peace with lambs.
Those views descend from the 1960s Baby Boomers of Tom Hayden's
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the bomb-throwing bank
robbers and murderers of the Weatherman underground, led in the 1970s
by Senator Obama's friends and political backers Bill Ayers and
Bernadine Dohrn. His fascination with those models led to the
Senator's initial foray into politics as an SDS type of community
organizer, working with Saul Alinsky to foment demands by welfare
"clients" for increased handouts from taxpayers.
The bedrock of SDS and Weatherman belief was that ills of the world
result from the twin evils of Judeo-Christian morality and economic
laissez-faire. This paradigm derived from the 18th century French
Revolutionary doctrine that saw private property rights,
Christianity, and aristocratic privilege as the only things standing
in the way of earthly social perfection.
French revolutionaries gave us the Reign of Terror: murder of more
than 70,000 French citizens in the name of the Revolution. In the
1960s and 1970s, Baby Boomers took to the streets and college
campuses, as Weatherman put it, to bring the Vietnam War home, ice a
few pigs, kill their parents, and destroy Amerika. To that end they
resorted to bank robberies, bombings, and murders of co-workers and
innocent bystanders.
Liberal-progressive-socialists rationalized this violent
destructiveness on a cold-blooded theoretical plane, as they had
Stalin's mass murders in the 1930s. The perpetrators, they said,
were driven to it by the criminal nature of traditional American
society. Violence to combat the evils of spiritual religion, moral
codes, and capitalist individualism was justified.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 issued the "Port
Huron Statement," its version of the "Communist Manifesto." In
language that would fit neatly into Senator Obama's standard stump
speech, Tom Hayden, Hanoi Jane Fonda's first husband, wrote:
"...can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change
society, how would we do it?..."
"The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining
features of social life today..."
"We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or
circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness,
reason, and creativity...
"In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in
several root principles: that decision-making of basic social
consequence be carried on by public groupings;
"that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively
creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
"The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
"...that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the
individual must share in its full determination;
"that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major
resources and means of production should be open to democratic
participation and subject to democratic social regulation...
"3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the
postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of
younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
"4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for
their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms
in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a
political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their
differences and look for political synthesis.
"5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national
policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university
is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on
communities beyond...
"The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine
cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new
left of young people and an awakening community of allies..."
Never lose sight of the historical fact, however, that this lovey-
dovey world of SDS and Senator Obama, called participatory democracy
by socialists, necessitates the subordination of individual rights to
the collective good. And the collective good is always defined by
liberal-progressive-socialist leaders. It is the sort of democracy
in which the Soviet Politburo could be regarded as speaking for the
democratic will of the people.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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