The New Sons and Daughters of Liberty
On recent campaign stops (under the guise of promoting his so called Jobs Bill), President Obama exhorted donors with the phrase, “...we need an America where everybody gets a fair shake and everybody does their fair share.” The president used the same phrase twice in his “Jobs Speech” to a joint session of Congress on September 9, 2011. There he said, “These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share.” Later in the speech he intoned, “We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and where everybody pays their fair share.” An emerging theme? Yes, but one that has permeated Obamathink from the beginning. If this phrase has a familiar ring to it, it should–it is only a turn of phrase and reversal of clauses different than the original.
According to Wikipedia, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.[cite] The phrase summarizes the principles that, in a communist society, every person should contribute to society to the best of his or her ability and consume from society in proportion to his or her needs. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.”
The context of Obama’s barely disguised phraseology demonstrates both his carefully concealed personal political philosophy and the narrowed options he has for his re-election campaign strategy. We all know who the audience was in his nationally televised Jobs Speech, and according to the day after polls, it was a flop. What he said to 450 donors in Orlando, Florida in early October was a bit more focused and revealing: “We can either go back to ideas that were tried and failed in the last decade, where corporations write their own rules, the well-connected get tax breaks slipped into the tax code and ordinary folks struggle, or we can build the America we talked about in 2008 and that we’ve been fighting for ever since, an America where everybody gets a fair shake and everybody does their fair share, an America where we’re all in it together and we’re looking out for one another.” The class warfare predicate is important.
In his 2008 primary and general election campaign, Obama relied heavily on milk and honey post-partisan rhetoric to gain the nomination and win the presidency. He presented himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” It was brilliant and seductive, if not original political theater and for this presidential candidate, the height of intellectual chicanery. Now, with three years of the most bitter ideological warfare in the history of the country behind him, Obama has no choice but to come out of his ideological closet and make his case for the omniscient omnipotent role of government dictated by his collectivist political philosophy. What the American voter will be hearing over the next year from the president and his fellow travelers will consist of two primary themes.
The first theme is the collectivists philosophy of, “From each according to their ability/fair share, to each according to their need/fair shake.” The “fairness principle will be pitched in terms of “social and economic justice” and “...we’re all in it together and we all have to look out for one another.” The second theme will be the promotion of class warfare, pure and simple. As he did in Orlando, Obama will blame corporations, the rich, millionaires, greed, privilege, and the well-connected for every malady afflicting the nation including, among other things, unemployment, home foreclosures, inflation, the deficits, factory closures, crime, global warming, decaying infrastructure and declining educational achievement. Obama’s rhetoric is designed to incite victimology, envy, anger and scapegoat anyone and everyone who disagrees with his radical egalitarian agenda. Like Amadinajad with Israel, Obama will use class warfare to deflect attention from the mass rejection of his ideological agenda on to every individual and institution that opposes his collectivist goals.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, whether they know it or not, are the progressives’ pawns playing the role of the vanguard of the proletariat in the promotion of Obama’s collectivist agenda and class warfare campaign tactics. The question for the American people is, who is going to define the meaning of “fair share” and “fair shake” in Obama’s America? Will it be his unaccountable Czars, whose tentacles now reach into every nook and cranny of the lives of the citizens of the United States? Will it be bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. with even more invasive reach and the police power of the State backing them up? Will it be Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the AFofL/CIO and Teamsters Union bosses who hold sway over our lives? Or will it be back slapping, baby kissing, cigar smoking politicians; local, state and federal who dictate to the rest of us the meaning of “fair share” and “fair shake?” It bears repeating: “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.”.
Regardless of how you dress up collectivist movements–in Mao jackets, fatigues, pajamas or Obama’s coat and tie and winsome smile, the results have always been the same. The collectivist history of the 20th Century, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to Cuba and Cambodia, is unassailable proof of the tyranny and despotism that is their final destination. Before condemning ourselves to such a fate, the American people should remember the challenge laid down to us in the Federalist Papers:
“...it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”
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