Obama: History Warns Us

 

People understood perfectly well that a new governing class had arisen determined to overturn democratic norms and our self-governing republic and to replace them with domination by self-serving “experts” and a globalized elite.

— Peter W. Wood, author of Wrath: America Enraged

Barack Obama has dominated U.S. politics since 2008, first as president to 2017, then as Democrats’ de facto leader. We are living through Obama’s third term. He directs U.S. policy via puppet Biden and current White House staffers, while adding occasional direct messages.

Obama control requires a coalition of color, white elitists, unmarried women, and young people. They stick together no matter how poorly government performs, determined to maintain progressive power under the Wokeism banner.

Where’s Obama leading us? For an answer, let’s reach back, recalling simple explanations work best.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-97), age 49 in 1958, delivered his inaugural lecture at Oxford entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty.” CBS News’ Dick Meyer, writing in 2006, called Berlin’s paper “one of the most influential essays in political philosophy written in English in the 20th century.”

With World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War as backdrop, Berlin explained his times by reducing politics to two concepts of liberty.

Negative liberty is freedom "from" things; positive liberty is freedom "to do" certain things. Negative liberty means one is free from interference by the state and others, living within a zone of freedom where there can be no interference as long as one respects the liberty of others.

Positive liberty argues life is meaningless unless a person has positive freedom — the power to transform. Why be left alone if you are unable to take positive action — get an education, earn a fair wage, live in a just society.

Negative liberty means classic liberalism. Negative liberty’s essence is, "I know what's best for me, leave me alone."

Positive liberty is idealistic, associated with grand political dreams. The positive libertarian wants people to do things that come from great minds, from Hegel, Rousseau, Marx. Positive liberty says: "I know what’s best for you."

That impulse in history and in personality is elitist and at its worst totalitarian. It is the impulse that allows Marxists, Communists, theocrats and nationalists to limit negative liberties and slaughter people – all in the name of their own best interests.

Berlin’s brilliance included seeing good in both approaches. Though he leaned toward negative liberty out of fear of positive liberty’s “I know better than you,” he admired Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and strongly supported the British Welfare State.

Today’s conservatives believe in inalienable rights that come from God, rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights (negative liberty). Progressives seek to reshape an imperfect world along their “arc bending toward justice” (positive liberty).

Besides Berlin, Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the twentieth century’s most iconic thinkers. A book about the duo’s disagreements on politics, history and philosophy, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, just came out. In spite of shared lives and experiences as brilliant Jewish intellectuals who fled Communism for England (Berlin) and Hitler for America (Arendt), Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying she represented “everything that I detest most.” Arendt responded by mostly ignoring Berlin.

Arendt argued human affairs take place in three distinct spheres: the public, the private, and the social. Private life consists in those exclusive attachments that form between individuals as unique persons, such as love, friendship, and family. Public life is the realm of political equality, with votes granting the power to vote and to rule. Arendt saw social life as a modern phenomenon, combining public and private.

To Arendt, life outside the home and the public sphere — work, leisure, anything self-segregated as likes and interests — meant the social sphere, where free association and differentiation overrode political equality. We should reject the Woke claim that every organization is public, subject to equal treatment. Protect social as modern life’s third realm; make politics keep hands off.

“Equity” perverts the social and political spheres. To Arendt, equity’s not anti-racist enough. Equality lifting up some brings others down, blocking solidarity. Achieve equality not by leveling to a lowest common denominator, but by elevating—along with accepted differences—to the political noblest and best. Arendt believed doing so requires reclaiming public institutions as public and insisting upon political life done well.

Arendt was more sensitive than was Berlin to assimilation’s destroying Jewish and other subcultures. Inside Berlin’s zone of negative liberty, she would draw an extra social protective ring around those threatened by the state. Nevertheless, both Arendt and Berlin jointly feared the positive liberty that attracts Obama and his Wokeism, empowering an elite tending toward Totalitarianism’s complete subservience to the state.