Obama scorns founders’ vision of freedom
Examiner Columnist | 8/25/08 1:56 PM When Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination later this week, he will portray himself as a shining example of the Great American Dream. With his impressive rhetorical skill, he will speak of embracing America’s common ideals and securing them for future generations and continuing on that glorious path established by our founding fathers, yada, yada. And he won’t mean a word of it.
To the contrary, Obama largely rejects the principles of individual liberty on which this nation was founded. His thinking is more closely aligned with Karl Marx’s than John Locke’s.
“In America,” Obama frequently scoffs, “we have this strong bias toward individual action. 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.”
Or as Marx put it, “Don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.”
Personal liberty and responsibility are dangerous, according to Marx, because they allow an individual to be “regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself,” rather than one whose responsibility is to the larger society.
Echoing that sentiment, Obama regularly sneers that the right wing “keeps appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. … And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.
“Now we have to take this same language — these same values that are encouraged within our families — of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other — and apply them to a larger society. Let’s talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values.%u