[StBernard] Obama's Assault on Our Unum

[Westley Annis]

Obama's Assault on Our Unum
What "fundamental change" is all about.

By Andrew C. McCarthy


'Out of one, many." That was how Al Gore famously botched "E Pluribus Unum,"
the motto chiseled on the great seal of the United States. 

Barack Obama's Latin may not be any better than Gore's - he did have to
admit being an English-only kinda guy this summer . after complaining that
Americans embarrass him with their lack of language proficiency. Understand
this, though: If we hear the Democrats' standard-bearer saying, "Out of one,
many," it won't be a mistranslation. It will be a succinct statement of his
ideology. It's the "fundamental change" he has in mind for America.

Obama professes a love for this country. One needn't doubt his sincerity to
grasp that what he loves is a vision of America, not America as she is. The
object of his affection is not our Unum, the glorious inheritance we Many
cherish through generations past, present, and (one prays) future. For The
One, that One earns only disdain. Eroding it has been his life's work. 

Move through Obama's career as a community organizer, his embrace of ACORN,
his radical associations: the common denominator is a purpose to break down
the Unum at its foundations, what he calls the "grass-roots." For America,
he plans an atom bomb. Or, to be precise, an atoms bomb: countless
communities in cities and towns across the land, organized along the Marxist
principles of Saul Alinsky into socialist enclaves. Each atom smothers the
individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character,
replacing them with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the
rabble-rousers. 

To be sure, there is an Unum that Obama sees. It is in his mind's eye -
clearer on the horizon now than when he began his project 23 years ago. It
will arrive when the atoms reach critical mass and finally devour the
hollowing carcass of our present society. 

For Obama, that society is an ineradicably racist "white world." He is more
opaque than mentors like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, who mince no words
in portraying America as an apartheid state. Still, as Hank De Zutter wrote
in a fawning 1995 profile, Obama learned to see "integration was a one-way
street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never
gave ground." One hears the echoes of Obama's wife, Michelle, whose
Princeton thesis decried the thought of "further integration and/or
assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow
me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full
participant."

THE STRATEGY
What to do if one is convinced, against the weight of his Ivy League
opportunities and spectacular success, that he is destined to be on the
outside looking in? If you are Obama, you adopt a two-prong strategy. First,
you build small, alternative realities that reject the Unum's core values.
Then, as those alternative realities - the communities you've organized -
grow in number and sophistication, you coerce the unwilling to accept and
live within the new reality, just as you believe the Unum has marginalized
you.

For Obama and his allies, capitalist democracy is an abject failure,
habituated to racism, relentless in its materialism. It is an ironic
critique: The senator and his fellow travelers are driven by nothing if not
a crass materialism: They see themselves entitled to society's benefits
without the burden of its toils. They are, moreover, such prisoners of their
own racism - have you ever heard anyone else describe his own grandmother as
"a typical white person"? - that race has become their unified field theory
for all of life's disparities. It is a stubborn theory, heedless of the fact
that, in our free society, members of all races, ethnicities, and economic
classes move up and down the ladder of opportunity by the yardstick of
merit. 

Obama will tolerate no such yardstick. He derides the very core of what
makes American society exceptional: individual liberty. Freedom. "We have
this strong bias toward individual action," Obama ruefully told De Zutter -
and note the crafty shift: his choice of the amorphous action instead of the
value-laden freedom, lest the listener realize just what is at stake. "You
know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with
both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not
sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective
institutions and organizations."

Of course, we already have collective institutions and organizations. They
are the branches of a limited government, designed by our Constitution
precisely to promote individual liberty and national security. They are the
churches, synagogues, PTAs, neighborhood clubs, and other social
organizations by which each citizen may freely set the balance between his
personal fulfillment and his interaction with fellow citizens. They are the
arts, the sports arenas, the charities, the congeries of fulfillment for
those who know the personal is not the political. That is American
democracy, our Unum.

So if not American democracy then . what? DeZutter, who interviewed his
subject at length, explained that Obama's strategy called "for organizing
ordinary citizens into bottom-up democracies that create their own
strategies, programs, and campaigns and that forge alliances with other
disaffected Americans." (Emphasis added.) 

Like much of Obama's vaporous rhetoric, it sounds harmless enough - even
admirable. Until you look closely. It turns out that these "bottom-up
democracies" are phony. They are not democracies at all. They are enclaves
of the alienated, where the mob strangles the achiever. Indeed, when Ayers,
Obama's long-time "education-reform" ally, conjures his ideal "participatory
democracy" - fueled by what he euphemistically calls "popular empowerment"
and what Obama calls "participatory politics" - the "beacon to the world" he
points to is Chavez's socialist thugocracy in Venezuela.

THE ORGANIZER'S BOTTOM-UP COMMUNITIES
To begin with, Obama's bottom-up democracies don't serve the demos. They
serve the tribe at the expense of the demos. Obama's post-racial,
post-partisanship is a pose. Back when he was more honest, when the brass
ring was not thisclose, he made no bones about the fact that he was driven
by a determination to "organize black folks." His preoccupation was "black
America." He anguished over a "moral agenda" for "the African-American
community," one that harnessed the "energy" and "moral fervor of black
folks" - stoked in pulpits of black separatists like Wright - into a
"concrete program for change."

And Obama's actions spoke even louder than his words. He chose to knit
himself into the fabric of Wright's church, drinking deep its Marxist Black
Liberation Theology and its stated mission to sustain "an African people,
and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of
civilization." It was a bleak world, a defiant bottom-up community choosing
to separate itself from the Unum. As Wright's role model, James Hal Cone,
put it: "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a
murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill
Gods who do not belong to the black community.... Black theology will accept
only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white
enemy."



How much of this claptrap did Obama buy? Well, he stayed at Trinity for 20
years - until political expedience tore him reluctantly away. But has he
really left the fold? While he is usually careful, Delphic, with his words,
he has not shrunk over the years from decrying, as De Zutter reported, "the
unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation - which helps a few
upwardly mobile blacks to 'move up, get rich, and move out.'" (One hears
again the echoes of Michelle, who had written that a racial "separationist"
would have a better understanding of American blacks than "an integrationist
who is ignorant to their plight.")

Obama was front and center at the "Million Man March" convened by Wright's
intimate, notorious Louis Farrakan. There, Obama recalled, he basked in the
"powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to
come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the
society," to share their "profound sense that African-American men were
ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and
lives."

And as a state senator, Obama railed at the fracturing of the "Illinois
Black Caucus" when black legislators sided with their diverse constituencies
rather than closing ranks to force the placement of a lucrative riverboat
casino in a black neighborhood. He seethed that these "lone agents" had
voted their conscience, that the tribe had not effectively "enforced" unity
"for the common good of the African-American community." 

DIRECT ACTION
The politics of "bottom-up democracies," furthermore, are not the politics
of the Unum. Our politics are premised on the rule of law - the standards of
a civilized society. Obama's politics, to the contrary, are premised on a
form of mob-based extortion that travels under the name of "direct action."
The Obamedia hasn't covered it, but The One used to be remarkably open, if
characteristically coy, about his methods. "[G]rass-roots community
organizing," he explained in 1988, "builds on indigenous leadership and
direct action."

And do you know where he wrote that? In a little noticed chapter he
contributed to a compendium called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in
Illinois. Alinsky, who died in 1972, was the committed socialist who
systematized community organizing in such books as Rules for Radicals. Obama
was not only trained in his ideology, he mastered it to the degree that he
eventually taught "organizing." Indeed, Obama's rise to national prominence
is a direct result of his stature in Alinsky's movement.

Alinsky's worldview is captured in Malcolm X's clarion call: "By any means
necessary." For Alinsky, as for Obama, the point of organization is "action"
which takes aim at "America's white middle class. That is where the power
is." Organizers, Alinsky instructed, are "rebels" who

have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle
class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois,
degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are
right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for
change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.

The organizer's goal is to use the system against the system: to infiltrate
and alter it. What Obama calls "fundamental change." And to carry out that
mission, the organizer's tool is lawlessness or "direct action."

As Obama wrote in his chapter, "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the
Inner City":

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their
lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to
Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has
raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and
militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines
between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most
successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these
seemingly divergent approaches. [Emphasis added.]

Breathtaking. Observe that the organizer does not reject separatism,
menacing, and civil disobedience. They are iterations of the hard power he
"bridges" with soft power, the exploitation of the system's regular
politics. And in a society that venerates dissent and free association,
there is much to exploit in the blurry line between critiquing our society
and advocating its destruction.

The bottom line, however, is that the community organizer and his adherents
refuse to be judged, or to conform themselves, to bourgeois rules and
values. Alinsky again: "[T]he practical revolutionary will understand ...
[that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is
consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind."
No, the practical revolutionary will invoke Goethe's maxim that "Conscience
is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action." The organizer is an
agent of action, and he has but one value: "Victory." The rest is just
details.

ENTER ACORN
That explains the marriage of Obama and ACORN. Most Americans now know the
Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now for its serial
voter-registration frauds, which seriously jeopardize the integrity of our
democratic election process. The McCain campaign has failed to highlight for
voters that electoral fraud is merely an ACORN sideline.

As Sol Stern documented in this essential 2003 City Journal essay, the
organization, with single-minded vigor, pursues a "1960s-bred agenda of
anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to
the poor." Its stock in trade is direct action. Obama represented ACORN as a
lawyer, teamed with ACORN as an organizer, schooled ACORN radicals as a
lecturer, funded ACORN while sitting on the boards of Leftist cash cows,
capitalized on ACORN support as a 2004 Senate candidate, proposed ACORN
friendly legislation, and now shovels $800,000 from his campaign war chest
for ACORN boots-on-the-ground - disclosure of which had to be amended
because it was falsely reported the first go-round.

What does ACORN push? "Living wage" laws that kill jobs and raise taxes. The
very predatory borrowing practices that ignited the credit crisis and our
consequent economic meltdown. An end to welfare reform and subsidization of
the dependence-culture that breeds crime, broken families, and a swelling
underclass. Government control of the economy. And the trapping of citizens
and businesses in the organizers' "bottom-up democracies" - so they can't,
as Obama put it, 'move up, get rich, and move out" when their liberty has
been strangled. 

For example, like Obama, ACORN advocates proscriptions against school
vouchers that would allow parents to shield their children from the public
schools that ACORN, Ayers and Obama have helped turn into laboratories of
political indoctrination rather than traditional education. An ACORN
activist told Stern that vouchers were "a hoax to destroy the public
schools," a pretext for promoting the dominant "race and class," and
"capitalism at its worst," which is to say, a "life raft for a few people to
get out." Welcome to the Hotel Bottom-up Democracy, where you can check out
anytime you like, but you can never leave. 

And rest assured that Obama-trained ACORN has plans to make sure you don't
leave - plans aptly describe by Stern as "undisguised authoritarian
socialism." Like the imposition of an "exit visa" requirement against large
companies that attempt to flee the "community" (i.e., the mini-workers'
paradise the "organizer" has forged). Exit visas would extort a prohibitive
payment "for losses due to relocation." How long, Stern sensibly asks,
"before ACORN calls for exit visas for wealthy or middle-class individuals
before they can leave a city?" 

Similarly, ACORN advocates freedom killing measures that masquerade, in
Obama's best Orwellian patois, as "sustainable development" and "regional
government" regulations. The goals? To coerce the transfer of wealth from
the suburbs to these bottom-up democracies so permanently starved for cash
because their economic model cannot support their welfare state
entitlements. To impose strictures on the suburbs' freedom to grow - until
they are no longer viable alternatives to the organizer's statist
communities.

Who would go for such a system? No one sensible, no one reared in the values
of our Unum. So it must be achieved by "direct action." ACORN steals
elections by fraud. It lies about its platform. It foments ruckuses that
disrupt public hearings, shouting down its stunned, staid opposition. It
organizes intimidating job actions. It storms legislative sessions, damages
property and, by its sheer numbers, overwhelms police who attempt to restore
order. And, as Stern and Stanley Kurtz recount, it proudly brays that
"direct action," legal or illegal, is used because it works: the targets
cave in and ACORN's recruiting swells - naturally so: as Osama bin Laden
attests in rationalizing terror, people prefer the strong horse to the weak
horse. (How surprised should we be that Obama says Hamas and Hezbollah have
"legitimate claims"? That their murderous direct actions are better
understood as tactical misjudgments than barbarous disqualifiers?)

SHARE THE WEALTH
A month ago, National Review's Jim Geraghty reports, Obama urged a throng of
supporters to "go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I
want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are
Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." (Emphasis
added.) His longtime supporters will get the point: Alinsky literally wrote
the book on getting in your face, Obama imbibed the lesson, and he passed it
along to ACORN, which has perfected it.

Now famously, Obama was confronted a few days ago by Joe Wurzelbacher, the
Ohio plumber who is our Unum's everyman. Aren't you going to tax me more,
asked Joe the Plumber? Aren't you going to take from the sweat of my brow,
from the effort I expend to better the lives of myself and my family? Aren't
you going to redistribute it as you see fit, to reward your expanding
legions of something-for-nothing dependents?

"It's not that I want to punish your success," replied the One. "I want to
make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for
success, too.. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the
bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the
wealth around, it's good for everybody." (Emphasis added.)

It was an answer right out of ACORN's "People's Platform": "We are the
majority, forged from all the minorities[.]. We will continue our fight . .
. until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom.. We have
nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor." (Emphasis
added.) These are astounding words, Stern observes, from an outfit hell-bent
on destroying the individual work ethic precisely by taxing labor and
rewarding sloth.

Obama will "spread the wealth" among these "bottom up" democracies. He will
encourage their alienation from the Unum's culture of freedom - what Obama
has elsewhere condemned as "that old individualistic bootstrap myth: Get a
job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods,
that's what has always happened. Our goal must be to help people get a sense
of building something larger."

We've already built something larger, Senator. E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many,
One. It is the greatest engine of security, wealth, and dignity in human
history. It does more for humankind than any nation in the world, ever. Our
Unum doesn't need "fundamental change." It needs a determined defense
against those who would destroy it from within.

 - National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness:
A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books 2008).

National Review Online - 
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