Barack Obama: The Quintessential Liberal
Fascist
By Kyle-Anne Shiver from www.americanthinker.com
“They fear that the development and building of People’s (community)
Organizations is the building of a vast power group which may fall prey 
to
a fascistic demagogue who will seize leadership and control and turn an organization
into a Frankenstein’s monster against democracy.” - Saul Alinsky responding
to his critics, Reveille for Radicals;
p. 199.
When
Saul Alinsky began building his community-organization movement in 1930s Chicago,
observers were watching Alinsky with one eye, while with the other eye observing
the building of communist and fascist movements in Europe. It wasn’t hard then to see in Alinsky’s programs
at home, elements of the people’s revolution from Russia, as well as some
of the same ‘in your face’ tactics being employed by Hitler’s Brownshirts.
While
most modern Americans remember well Hitler’s Holocaust and the Cold War waged
by a solid U.S.S.R., many of these same Americans have swallowed some false
history regarding the movements that spawned such widespread, horrendous
results. In what may be regarded as the
most triumphant propaganda victory of our time, fascism has been scrubbed of
all its Marxist roots, while communism has been scrubbed of its millions of
callous murders.
This
post-WWII propaganda coup undeniably set the stage for the early Alinsky
critics’ most feared eventuality, that the massive organizations could be
shrewdly adopted by a fascist demagogue, someone who could ‘seize leadership
and control’ and turn them into a ‘Frankenstein’s monster against democracy.’
But
perhaps the most cunning propaganda feat in history has been undertaken for the
past eight years. As Jonah Goldberg
expertly expounds in his book, Liberal
Fascism, American left-wing ideologues have managed to dissociate
themselves from all the horrors of fascism with a ‘brilliant rhetorical
maneuver.’ They’ve done it by ‘claiming
that their opponents are the fascists.’
Alinsky
himself employed this method, quite deviously.
Alinsky biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using
precisely this diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt’s Let Them Call Me Rebel:
“...in
the spring of 1972, at Tulane University...students asked Alinsky to help plan
a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative
to the United Nations - a speech likely to include a defense of the Nixon administration’s
Vietnam War policies. The students told
Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined, not
very creative - and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of
school. He told them, instead, to go to
hear the speech dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said
something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards
reading, ‘The KKK supports Bush.’ And
that is what they did, with very successful, attention-getting results.”
In
what may eventually prove to be a devious rhetorical feat of monstrous
proportions, while the left has been indulging and fostering the ‘Bush Is
Hitler’ meme, they may have just put a genuine ideological fascist heir in the
White House.
There is inherent danger in making scurrilous comparisons (as were
perpetrated unceasingly against George W. Bush), but there seem to be 
some
very worrisome signs in the rise of Barack Obama that we Americans would be
foolish to ignore.
Obama,
the Closer
As
I put forth last year in Obama, the
Closer, Barack Obama, did not start his movement; Alinsky did.
Nor
did Obama amass the organizations that propelled him. As detailed by Heidi J. Swarts, in her book, Organizing Urban America, the movement
begun by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s has morphed into thousands of secular and
faith-based leftist political organizations.
ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has
perhaps the highest public profile, is most reputed for radicalism, and is the
organization with which Barack Obama was first aligned. But ACORN is the mere tip of a veritable
iceberg of Alinsky-styled community organizations that sweep across the entire
United States and make up the backbone of faith-based progressive movements as
well.
These
euphemistically called “community organizations” have next to nothing to do
with improving the communities and everything to do with politics, primarily
strong-arming government money to advance their political aims. Prior to Reagan’s election, these groups
worked independently for the most part, each seeking to effect local change
towards leftist ends.
But
with Reagan’s victory, ACORN founding member Wade Rathke sent out a memo
(published by Swarts; Organizing Urban
America; p. 29) that would reverberate all the way to Barack Obama’s
moment. ACORN had been behaving as a
sort of ‘Lone Ranger of the Left’ for too long, wrote Rathke. Ronald Reagan had formed a coalition among
the middle-class that threatened to bring greater prosperity without left-wing
Statists calling the shots. Rathke put
out the call to the ACORN troops to stop antagonizing those who would be
allies, especially unions and church organizations, once shunned by ACORN as
too placid for the real fight for power.
For the next 25 years, the community organization network built,
proliferated and formed a solid, nation-wide base of political strength, purely
according to Alinsky’s original vision, and all just waiting for the right
candidate to tap into it and lead it.
When
folks from all corners of
Neither
did Barack Obama invent the political ‘ideology of change,’ nor design its
carefully crafted propaganda. While
media folks talked of the tingles up their legs and the brilliant rhetoric of
Barack Obama, they were heralding the speaker only, not the creator of the
movement and its slogans. That would
have been Saul Alinsky, the man who took fascism and cunningly made it appear
to casual observers every bit as American as apple pie.
Barack
Obama is merely the movement’s closer, the quintessential liberal fascist with
a teleprompter.
Alinsky’s
Ideology of Change: The Third Way
Goldberg
fastidiously notes the comparison between Alinsky’s ‘in your face’ rules for
radicals, studied and perfected by Barack Obama, and shows them to have
profoundly fascist roots:
“...there’s
no disputing that vast swaths of his (Alinsky’s) writings are indistinguishable
from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s...His worldview is distinctly
fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of
will. Moreover, Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore
a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of
the movement, which he regards as the source of life’s meaning...But what comes
through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is good in its own
right for Alinsky. Ours ‘is a world not of angels but of angles,’ he
proclaims in Rules for Radicals, ‘where
men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.’”
Saul
Alinsky was the man who transformed politics in America into all-out war mode.
Alinsky’s tenth rule of the ethics of means: “You do what you can with
what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” All’s fair in love and
war, and politics, to Alinsky, was war.
“A People’s (community) Organization is not a philanthropic plaything
or a social service’s ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard-driving
force,
striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people.
It thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups.
A People’s Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. A war
is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are
no rules of fair play.” - Saul Alinsky; Reveille for Radicals; p. 133.
Alinsky
includes an entire section in Rules for
Radicals on “The Ideology of Change.” The watchword of the Obama
campaign was “change.” Just as Hitler mobilized the masses with a
calculatingly undefined demand for “change,” so did Alinsky disciple, Barack
Obama.
“Everything
must be different!” or “Alles muss anders sein!,” Hitler’s own campaign slogan,
morphed into “Unite for Change,” and the Obama transition team’s change.gov. Even the idea of a vast “movement” was
borrowed from Hitler. As Goldberg states, Hitler used the phrase, “the
Movement,” more than 200 times in Mein
Kampf.
The
word ‘movement’ itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress, doesn’t
imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that any change is
better. (Goldberg; Liberal Fascism;
p. 176).
Perhaps
the most intoxicating allure to the fascist demagogue and his movement for
undefined change is its misleadingly conciliatory flavor. Barack Obama continually, throughout his
campaign and even now, portrays himself as the Third Way between the
cantankerous factions that have polarized America for the past 80 years, since
liberal fascism took root as the Progressive Movement.
Obama
claimed that Bush was too much the ideologue, that his policies were driven by
the Christian right, involved “false choices” between all-out war on the one
hand and diplomacy on the other, between the welfare state and cold-hearted,
do-nothing conservatism, between absolute sovereignty and cowardly submission
to the global community, between doing all and doing nothing. And if any
of this gibberish were a true reflection of our political disagreements, Obama
would be somewhat correct. But as any sentient person knows, this radical
presentation of Obama’s is absolutely false. That gets lost, though, in
the leader’s conciliatory tone.
What
must not get lost, however, is the very real fact that this Third Way movement
for change is as fascist as anything we have ever seen in the USA. As
Alinsky described his own “Ideology of Change,” the lure is in the claim that
the leader has no ideology that would confine his outlook to hard choices
between what is moral or immoral, that there are no boundaries set by either
religion or politics, that everything can change and the only thing that
matters is one’s end intention to do something good.
As
Hitler, before Alinsky, proclaimed, “Our program is to govern,” not delve into
theory and dogma. This is in itself very appealing, especially to an
electorate sick of the contentiousness of the past decade. This undefined
“ideology of change” for the sake of change, for some action that will break
through the roadblocks of polarization, has tremendous allure.
But
Goldberg bursts that bubble: “The ‘middle way’ sounds moderate and
un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and
freethinking. But philosophically the Third Way is not mere difference
splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes
manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs.
The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices – ‘I refuse to accept that
X should come at the expense of Y.’ The Third Way holds that we can have
capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist
movements are implicitly utopian because they - like communist and heretical
Christian movements -- assume that with just the right arrangement of policies,
all contradictions can be rectified.” (Goldberg; Liberal Fascism; p. 130)
Of
course, thinking people -- when they are indeed thinking -- know this is an
utterly false promise. Life will never be made perfect because all human
beings are imperfect.
Unity,
the Diabolical Lure
What
of this longed-for unity then? Barack Obama proclaimed he was leading a
movement of people “united for change.” What is the appeal of
unity?
The
modern liberal fascist seeks that state between mother and child which exists
early on before the child seeks his own independence, before mother must set
herself at odds with him. It is the perfectly secure state of childhood
where all is lovely and peaceful and nurturing, but cannot continue
indefinitely if the child is to be prepared to face a world of difficulty and
hard choices. Nevertheless, the yearning continues. It is this
primordial yearning which sets itself in the crosshairs of the fascist
demagogue.
But
in adult life, this type of unity is anything but desirable, anything but
virtuous. As Goldberg states, however, “elevation of unity as the highest
social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies.”
The
allure of this mystical unity is so great that its demand to sacrifice reason
and thought on the false altar of infantile security is seemingly lost to
many. But as Goldberg also reminds us, “unity is, at best, morally
neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink.”
Rampaging
mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent
on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have
disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism
is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always
anti-liberal.
Liberalism
rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For
fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective
enterprises - of class, nation, or race - and the state is there to enforce
that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate. (Goldberg; Liberal Fascism; p. 172)
Just
as the healthy relationship between parent and developing child demands
friction, so does the healthy relationship between truly liberal citizens.
Unity is the siren song of tyranny, not the call to genuine progress.
Fascism:
The Two Birds with One Stone Approach
I
think of Obama’s liberal fascism as a cancer that attempts to kill the two
birds of American exceptionalism with one stone. It is a
deviously appealing Third Way that in the end, if allowed to triumph
completely, kills both individual liberty and Judeo/Christian religion with its
single stone.
And, indeed this was the precise goal of Adolph Hitler. Unlike
the outspoken hatred of private property and religion espoused by communists
under Lenin and Stalin, Hitler preferred the more moderate-seeming incremental
takeover of private enterprise in the interest of the “common 
good,”
and the slow-death of Judeo/Christian religion by chipping away at it and
replacing the people’s dependence upon God gradually with reliance on the
state (Hitler).
[Note:
Hitler’s Holocaust was based on the Progressive Eugenics principles set forth
by Social Darwinist scientists and social engineers of the 1920s, widely
accepted both in Europe and in the United States. Religion was not at the
core of the Holocaust; race was. However, Hitler’s other chief aim was to
destroy the Judeo/Christian religions, which he believed had ruined the
Germanic race’s world predominance.]
Of
course, as the German people were duped into giving Hitler totalitarian powers
to work his magic “change,” he took off the kid gloves and accelerated the
program.
In
the end, however slow the process, however seemingly benign the growth of the
state may seem, liberal fascism has the same result of all tyrannies before
it: hell on earth for most and a self-indulgent feast for the Statists in
power.
As
Barack Obama speaks, thinking Americans ought to hear the echoes of past
fascist demagogues and remember. Remember.
When
Barack Obama promises “collective redemption” through his profligate spending
programs and vast overtures to a new world order built on love for our fellow
man, we ought to shudder not swoon. We
ought to remember that healthy global relationships are built upon respect, not
all-encompassing love, and that redemption for one’s soul is a commodity the
state is not empowered to offer. As Pope Benedict XVI has so presciently
warned: “Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too
much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but
demonic.”
Be
not fooled, America. The movement, which appears most benign is instead
the most malignant growth ever seen on our soil. It’s a cancer that
will kill, and however slowly it grows or however nice it may look on the
surface, doesn’t change a thing.
