Postmodern Obama-Style Progressivism Permeates Free Markets and Our Daily Lives

PART I

June 15, 2010

By Jim Deeds

Truth for Obama: “Perception is reality.”

Reading Charles Kesler’s recent article in Imprimis is instructive. He explains Obama’s revolutionary (and completely flawed) new view of “his” America in relation to what you and I once knew. Unfortunately, it’s not just instructive, it’s scary. In summarizing Kesler’s excellent analysis, we can say:

Obama and his camp followers say that truth is what you make it, adjusted day-by-day to better accomplish their longer-term progressive goals and aspirations. There is no God, no American Constitution as written; there are no rules. “Narrative” replaces any former truth or rules as a propagandized “leadership tool” to reach their goal of an “everyone is equal” socialized America.

Kesler says:

“Post modernists speak of narrative – one of those words one hears a lot of these days in politics – rather than truth. Narrative means something like this: Even if we can’t find meaning in any kind of objective reality out there, we can still create meaning by telling each other stories, by constructing our own narratives – and the more inclusive and emphatic the narratives, the better!”

George Will, writing of our new Obama-world from a completely different perspective, relates a similar conclusion in his recent editorial, “Jobs report is a nightmare for Obama progressivism.” (6/13/10)

Will says that Obama propagandized and distorted the May job report, where he loudly promoted a monthly rise of 41,000 “new jobs” above last month’s level. He conveniently overlooked that 411,000 “temporary and low-wage government jobs” were added during May for “census workers,” which statistically altered an otherwise giant job-force decline in America. Under Obama, a significant replacement in our private-free enterprise workforce has been accomplished through the hiring of 564,000 new temporary census takers. George Will quips that if only Obama could rewrite the Constitution on the census so that it was an annual affair, Obama would fulfill his promise to create long-term, substantive, productive American employment.

When new taxes on working Americans or creative new “quantitative easing” deficits are used to pay tens of thousands of new government “workers,” no long-term productive good comes to our country.

George Will ended his editorial with what we’ve all seen from the Obama Administration so far:

“Progressives generally, and Obama especially, encourage (narrative) expectations as large as the 1,428 page (Cap and Trade), 1,566 page (financial reform) and 2,409 page (health care) bills they churn out as ‘comprehensive’ solutions to this and that. For a proper progressive, anything short of a ‘comprehensive’ solution to, say, the problem of illegal immigration is unworthy of consideration.

“For today’s progressive president, the prospect of a jobless recovery is a comprehensive nightmare.”

Are we cynics?

Maybe not. In USA Today’s Forum (6/15/10), Jonathan Turley, an apparently liberal law professor at George Washington University, picks up on our theme with an article titled: “Do laws even matter today?”

“One set of rules for bankers, another for consumers, one for oil companies, another for Joe Citizen. Illegal immigrants? Only until they aren’t.”

A final practical question might be asked about the Obama regime: How do we know when truth is overlooked in an Obama-teleprompter-aided speech? Answer: Whenever he opens his mouth.

An obvious theme for the completion of this article might be:

Are all the world’s financial and monetary markets now totally rigged? Are they a massive effort to “narrate” America’s remaining savers and investors into complacency or confusion in an effort to hide the real truth?

For the answer, see Part II.