Obama's Campaign Against Individualism
I am becoming convinced that the frequent discussion of "diversity" among the leftish elite is really a mask for the fact that true diversity is in fact what they want to avoid. By defining diversity along the least meaningful lines - e.g. skin color and type of genitalia - they mask the fact that what leftish technocrats hate the most is variation in thought. After all, why have we been spending all that money on government schools all these years if it wasn't to generate such conformity?
Michael Young sees Obama's recent anti-flyover-country snobbery in the same light:
While Obama is indeed engaging in spin, there is a far more
disturbing aspect to his interpretation. He misses the essential nature
of modern culture. People don't end up focusing on issues like the
right to bear arms, gay marriage, faith-based and family-based issues,
and the like, because of bitterness against Washington or a sense that
they can't effect change there. People focus on these issues because
modern American political culture is, effectively, about subcultures,
variety, pursuing parochial aims, and shaping one's identity and
personal agendas independently of the state.What Obama
implicitly regards (in both his statements) as signs of disintegration,
as reflections of popular frustration, are in fact examples of a
thriving culture. Exceptions to this, of course, are anti-immigration
sentiment and bigoted protectionism, both of which Obama conveniently
dropped in his Indiana comments. Yet Obama's approach betrays a very
suffocating vision of the state as the be-all and end-all of
political-cultural behavior. Outside the confines of the state there is
no salvation, only resentment. This is nonsense, but it also partly
explains why Obama is so admired among educated liberals, who still
view the state as the main medium of American providence.
