By William Sullivan
“He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me,” Rudy Giuliani says of President Barack Obama. “He wasn’t brought up the way that you were brought up and I was brought up – to love this country.”
In clarifying his comments, Giuliani refused to backpedal on his driving point, despite offering the obligatory “I’m not a racist” declaration. “I don’t (see) this president as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that,” he said. “The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old.”
For his outrageous comments about Obama’s lack of patriotism and ideological cultivation as a communist, Giuliani has absorbed huge amounts of flak from the media, and even death threats from certain individuals. But make no mistake – the only thing shocking about Giuliani’s commentary is the fact that it shocks anyone at all.
Count this among those moments when we, as observant Americans, must sit back and lament the ignorance of huge swaths of our countrymen. Yes, Obama is clearly a communist. Yes, that is a dangerous thing. And yes, if you choose to deny that fact, you are ignorant and, willfully or not, complicit in its ramifications.
Marxism, socialism and communism
“There is no economic difference between socialism and communism. Both terms, socialism and communism, denote the same system of society’s economic organization, i.e., public control of all the means of production as distinct from private control of the means of production, namely capitalism. The two terms, socialism and communism, are synonyms. The document which all Marxian socialists consider as the unshakable foundation of their creed is called the Communist Manifesto.”
– Ludwig von Mises, “The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality”
Ironically, the person who might be shocked least by suggestions that he grew up absorbing communist ideology is Barack Obama. Of course, he would fight tooth and nail against any suggestion in the public light today, however headlong as he is in implementing policies of which any Marxist might be proud. He stated clearly that he sought the tutelage of Marxists in his autobiographical “Dreams From My Father.” “I chose my friends carefully,” he writes. “The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
However intended to be a self-glorifying portrait of a revelatory open-mindedness or a remembrance of his difficulties in racial identification, Obama’s desire to embrace these elements was explicitly pursued. These were not unique, but common pursuits of many aspiring hipsters and college academics, and his decision to gravitate toward leftist radicals is all the less miraculous of an ideological leap given his pedigree as the offspring of deeply anti-American socialists, and perhaps most incriminating, young Barry Soetoro’s mentor-protégé relationship with card-carrying Communist Party agitator Frank Marshall Davis.
The simple fact is that many people went to college with Obama’s exact ambition, and left college having gleaned the appropriate lessons. His ideological “journey” is not unique, and the destination he reached is not ambiguous. He sought the wisdom of Marxists. He embraced and identified with that wisdom, and thereafter endeavored to bring his ideas forward into the future.
He is therefore a socialist and a communist, as there is no meaningful difference between the two identifications.
Obama as FDR incarnate
Despite Obama’s very apparent, yet very mildly publicized, background as a student of socialist political philosophy, charges levying the label of “socialist” against him were deflected as a symptom of national racism. “Socialist” became the latest racist code-word during his 2008 election campaign, allegedly employed by the political right only to deny the political ascendancy of a black man.
In truth, “socialist” had been an identifiable political and economic position long before any black man had ever run for office in the Western world. And Obama was thus labeled for no other reason than his precisely fitting the template.
What Barack Obama promised was the expansion of government benevolence and redistribution for the general welfare via a middle road between individual enterprise and government coercion. He proclaimed his political moderation while peppering messages about “spreading the wealth” and, to take just health care as an example, an ambition to seize regulatory power over the health-care industry, which represented roughly one-sixth of the national economy. He touted long after his election that you could “keep your doctor,” you could “keep your plan.” He soothed potential concerns among the independents, assuring them that the government would be there to intervene in the transactions between you and your insurer, between you and your doctor, to make sure you get a fair shake out of the deal.
What actually occurred has been a totalitarian pursuit of federal power in efforts to increase governmental control over commerce in the health-care marketplace. As millions of Americans now know, you can’t keep your plan or doctor if your plan doesn’t conform to the federal government’s mandate. And if you don’t buy health insurance, you’ll be punished by the federal government.
What can we make of Obama’s “middle road” rhetoric leading to decisive power grabs by the government?
Ludwig von Mises continues:
There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism. …
When Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto advocated definite interventionist measures, they did not mean to recommend a compromise between socialism and capitalism. They considered these measures – incidentally, the same measures which are today the essence of the New Deal and Fair Deal policies – as first steps on the way toward the establishment of full communism. They themselves described these measures as “economically insufficient and untenable,” and they asked for them only because they “in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of revolutionizing the mode of production.”
Was Obama absent when his professors taught this tidbit from the Communist Manifesto? Or is his having been present during these lessons the reason that he vocally advocates the merits of the FDR’s New Deal and brazenly engages in interventionist activity in the marketplace (Obamacare) and seizes increasingly more political authority (executive amnesty!) as no president has done before?
Are we to believe that any of this is the result of a mistaken understanding about who our president is? Or do we accept the far more plausible answer – that Obama is a communist, and that his presidency is right out of the playbook of his chosen ideology?
Von Mises concludes, very fittingly:
“Thus the social and economic philosophy of the progressives is a plea for socialism and communism.”
Indeed.
William Sullivan is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. He also blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.
