SNOB-ama? (Let Me Know What You Think On This!)

The more I think about Barack Obama's statements and the more I hear from other people what they think about it, the more it seems to me that Barack Obama has revealed something very deep, very important about himself. He has said and done things before that sounded questionable--we'll remember his "punished with a baby" gaffe, his politically radical mentor Jeremiah Wright, his "typical white person" misstep--but I think that that this comment is the most revealing of his real beliefs.

Anyone who has spent much time on a college campus will tell you that if you ask the average college liberal, student or professor, what's wrong with America, they'll gladly tell you: Religious people. People with guns. People who dislike illegal immigration--racists, as far as they're concerned. Obama's implication was that the real problem is economic--people don't have enough money, enough medical care, enough food, enough housing--and that people are seeking false comfort in God, guns, and people like themselves. The average college liberal, if you asked him, would probably agree that that is what's going on. It's never been a wonder to me that Barack Obama enjoys such immense popularity on college campuses.

But the problem is that this attitude, this belief, is revealing of certain seriously negative traits. It smacks of elitism; after all, elite values in the United States tend to center around the importance of money and comfort, whereas middle- and lower-class values tend to focus on religion, individual rights, and the rule of law. In Marxist terms, it would be an imposition of upper class ideology onto the lower classes. As such, it also reveals a deep arrogance--an arrogance widely shared by college students. Ultimately, what Barack Obama said was that he knows better than you what is wrong, and that he is the only one who can fix it. And that's precisely what typical college students of all political stripes believe; they ARE the college students, after all. Doesn't that make them more qualified to make political decisions? (Emphatically, no. Experience, personal experience, seems to me the most important thing in forming political beliefs. I don't think it's a mistake that people tend to become more conservative as they grow older, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the saying goes, "If you're a conservative when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're a liberal when you're 40, you have no brain.")

This arrogance leads them to a stunningly heavy-handed paternalism. Unsurprisingly, Obama's solution is a government that can espouse the values you aren't smart enough to embrace. It isn't too much of a stretch from there to see that Americans just aren't intelligent enough to govern themselves; instead, they need a body of wise, intelligent, educated people to take care of them, to make society go. To make the trains run on time, if you will. And that's the danger: it's philosophically near to Fascism--real Fascism, the kind Mussolini wrote about and Hitler spoke about, the government as a religion of state.

Don't get me wrong here; I don't think Obama is about to start putting people in concentration camps. (That's not what Fascism was centrally about; it was just a natural result of the Nazis' Darwinian beliefs.) I think he's a pleasant and honest person. Way too honest about what he really thinks of America, and what he really wants to do with it.