I am kind of curious whether people like Stanley Kurtz actually believe what they write or if they are fully in on their own con. There is a fairly significant contingent in what passes for the right’s intelligentsia that is obsessed with Saul Alinsky and thinks that everything the president does is derived from his playbook. Their proof of this really amounts to little more than that the president is from Chicago, used to be a community organizer, and is familiar with Alinsky’s work. Largely left unexplained is why Alinsky should be so feared.
Kurtz believes, or purports to believe, that Obama’s persona is largely an act, and that his stated agenda masks his true, hidden agenda. What is his true agenda?
American politics just keeps getting more polarized. Be assured that Obama wants it that way. I argue in Radical-in-Chief that Obama’s long-term hope is to divide America along class lines (roughly speaking, tax payers versus tax beneficiaries)…
…Like his socialist organizing mentors, Obama believes that a country polarized along class lines will eventually realign American politics sharply to the left.
Kurtz sees Obama as playing a good cop while he lets leftist organizations (including his own Organizing for America) play the bad cop by demonstrating in the streets and committing acts of intimidation. In other words, the protests in Wisconsin are all part of Obama’s grand plan.
Moreover, Kurtz sees this as part of an epic struggle for the heart and soul of our country.
We are destined for still more polarization. Neither side can pull back, because the financial crunch is going to have to be resolved one way or another. We either scale back government and the power of public employee unions, or we move toward a structurally higher tax burden and a permanently enlarged welfare state. The very nature of the American system is now at stake. The emerging populist movements on both the right and left recognize this, and so cannot turn back from further confrontation.
Now, again, it’s hard for me to gauge Kurtz’s sincerity, but assuming he really believes what he is saying, he is most definitely engaged in what the field of psychology calls “projection.”
After all, the protests in Wisconsin are really the first manifestation we’ve seen of any kind of leftist populism during the Obama era. The most obvious populist movement over the past two years has been a rightist populist movement that has been growing under the Tea Party banner. While Kurtz accuses Obama of playing the moderate while he secretly “funnel(s) foundation money to his Alinskyite pals,” it is really the Republicans who have been saying “Who, me?” about all the Birthers and extremists in the Tea Parties as they semi-secretly funnel money their way.
I am fairly connected to the activist-left network, and none of us had a clue that protests were going to break out in Wisconsin. We didn’t plan for it, and now we’re scrambling to see how we can help. Kurtz may not believe me, or he may pretend not to believe me. Who can say?
What I can say is that the populist uprising in Wisconsin is a reaction to the governor and the Republican Party going after the “tax beneficiaries” who teach our kids, and staff the state government. They want to destroy public service unions. The left didn’t have much of an agenda on public service unions prior to this assault. If we fight back it isn’t because we want to engage is some war over the size of government. I don’t think many on the left think that public service unions really have any relationship to the size of government.
Kurtz thinks (or pretends to think) the president is intentionally polarizing the country, but probably the most common and sustained criticism I hear about the president from the left is that he is not confrontational enough, that he leads with a compromise rather than negotiating from strength, and that he doesn’t call the Republicans out enough on their dishonesty. We call it his “post-partisanship” and, for most, it’s not a compliment. People on the left would like to see more polarization in the sense of more combat.
But, to all appearances, that is not the kind of president that we elected and we are not going to get more combat. At least, he won’t be the one initiating it. By any historical measure, the president’s agenda is not radical. His health-care plan closely mirrors Mitt Romney’s and the plan proposed as an alternative to HillaryCare by the right-wing Heritage Foundation back in the 1990’s. His cap-and-trade proposal was part of McCain and Palin’s platform just three years ago. Republicans have funneled money to organizations that hype the president’s agenda as “socialist” and “radical” but that doesn’t make those allegations true. The assault we’re seeing on how America works isn’t from Obama. He’s tinkering around the edges as he tries to save an edifice rotted-out by years of neglect and mismanagement. What’s radical is trying to eradicate birthright citizenship, abolish public service unions, redefine rape, legalize the murder of abortion doctors, deny women contraceptive coverage, ban Sharia Law, create a special currency for South Carolina, write Thomas Jefferson out of our children’s textbooks, and pass laws about birth certificates. All of these things have been proposed by Republicans since the president was elected. Most of them were not considered at all by Bush and his congresses when they were in control. This is a new form of radicalism that is becoming mainstream in the Republican Party.
The Democrats have not done, or even attempted to do, anything far outside of their long-held agenda. But Kurtz is right about one thing. We’re in a battle for the soul and character of our country, and the outcome is uncertain. The best thing about these crazy Republican governors is that it has finally aroused the left and gotten them to focus on the real enemy. And the real enemy is not Rahm Emanuel.
