American Liberal Considers that Obama will be a Strong President

The following was written prior to Obama’s election as president.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Sweetness, you bring up many points and allow me to deal with some of them. First, let us assume you are right that on the issue of Obama saying ‘present’ at Congress sessions was strategy not indecision. But what about his savvy political decision to have Hillary as Vice President that was vetoed by Michelle who hated her and Obama caving before his wife’s decision? You will say this is rumour. But let us see if this rumour can be verified by some facts. The worse mummy’s boy is the one without a mother. Obama was abandoned by both his parents when he was a little boy and was brought up by his grandparents. All his life he was searching for his lost father whom he finally found in his pastor Jeremiah, and more importantly, for his runaway mother whom he found when he married strong Michelle. (And that is probably the reason why he never abandoned her, like so many other African-Americans do with their wives.) It is Michelle that is wearing both pair of pants: Her own and her husband’s.

Secondly, on the war, his decision to oppose the war was not based on wisdom but on ignorance and anti-war populism.  Ignorant of the content of the briefings as a junior Senator that other Democrat Senators more senior became aware of and for that reason supported the impending war. On the issue of the Surge and Woodward’s assessment, the Surge was part of a new strategy under General Petraeus linked to the ‘groundbreaking new covert techniques…’ that were primary in defeating the insurgency, according to Woodward. And the Surge may have facilitated these new techniques to achieve their goal. Further Obama only six months ago had pledged to the American people that he would withdraw the troops from Iraq. And he would do this while the bravery and professionalism of the US army were winning the war in Iraq. Thus depriving the soldiers their glorious victory and, most dangerous of all, conceding to their enemies that the U.S. was defeated in the war in Iraq, as that would be the logical conclusion of Obama’s withdrawal. Surely, as a reasonable person, you would not consider these decisions of Obama arising from his strength of character.

Thirdly, what I meant to say was that Obama by ‘cutting his sails to the winds of populism’ went along with the uninformed masses who had made their decision on the issue of the war not by the power of their brain but by the beats of their heart, and it was on those “beats” that Obama also positioned himself on the same issue. Unlike McCain who supported the Surge at the peak of the unpopularity of the war. This shows clearly which of the two leaders is endowed with a strong character.

American Liberal Turns into a Nihilist

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It is the cackling of the nihilistic geese, like Kervick’s, embittered by the fact that their loquacious gaggle is persuading no one other than the mentally ‘scleroid’ and unimaginative, that makes them spit their bile over the great political, economic, and scientific achievements made in the image of unflappable rugged individual action of capitalist America imbued by the ethos of captain Ahab—who would strike the sun if it insulted him–and Atlas Shrugged. It is the complete and total failure of Kervick and his ilk to approach, and least of all to reach, the mountain tops of this ethos of unsurpassable individual success that turns them into irredeemable nihilists and whose cynicism attempts to belittle and blemish America, the best of all possible worlds.

Is it conceivable to Kervick, the student of David Hume, that cosmopolitan America would have accomplished all these great achievements in the field of politics, economics, and science, and having the greatest number of Nobel Laureates in its midst, if it was populated by “cretins?” (It is interesting that he uses Lenin’s word which reveals on whose lap he was sitting as a junior learning his politics.) It is clear that Vergil’s apophthegm Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito, is not Kervick’s motto.

The above piece emitted the following replies in The Washington Note

Kervick says,

On the topic of contemporary optimism and pessimism:

…Anyway, the scientific preeminence may not last long. The most intellectually backward elements of our society were once kept culturally marginalized  by an elite committed to the enlightened values that were transplanted from Europe to America in the American Revolution. But increasingly, Republicans have loosed the troglodytes from their enclaves and encouraged them to take over the leadership of our society. They now help write the textbooks and enact the reactionary educational requirements that will help consign their progeny to years of intellectual failure and increasing backwardness. America’s cultural shots are called by the good people of states that consistently rank at or near the bottom in every measure of intellectual and educational attainment. And liberals haven’t helped much either with their decadent postmodern ideas about the nature and purpose of education.

The great blindness of contemporary American political thought, on both the left and right, is its crude and debased understanding of freedom. This understanding teaches that civilizations don’t have to be built. They just happen. They “emerge” almost magically through the mere liberation of the avaricious impulses of free enterprise, and from the disorganized and incoherent pursuit of individual happiness. But simply allowing each man the freedom to follow his own wayward, blinkered path or to dominate his subordinates, without interference or regulation from a government with an organized commitment to a vision of the public good and a virtuous social order, does not build civilization. Over time it degrades it.

This decadence and rot of American popular life, and its hideous, crass ugliness, are now on display for the whole world to see through our mass media. People everywhere can see the idiot sound and fury that comprise our political discourse, the infantile self-delusions self-aggrandizement of our “reality” programming, and the stupefying shallowness of the narcissistic individual greed that has taken hold of most of the places where civic virtues, social vision and ennobling values used to live.

You can’t refute this by pointing to GDP figures.

Posted by Don Bacon, Jul 29 2010, 11:46AM – Link

Kervick: “. . .regulation from a government with an organized commitment to a vision of the public good and a virtuous social order”

There you go again, dissing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The US government was established to safeguard our basic human rights, not to have a vision of the public good. The government should work for us, not the opposite. Your faith in government and your lack of faith in the citizenry is un-American,

“We’re just cretins: bitter and hate-filled paranoids and obsessives, driven by rage and our multifarious addictions and grasping dependencies to defend and spread a way of life we actually hate and resent in our bones. In other words, we’re crazy people.”

Bullshit. You need to get out more.

 You started this discussion off by saying that American citizens are “cretins: bitter and hate-filled paranoids and obsessives, driven by rage and our multifarious addictions and grasping dependencies to defend and spread a way of life we actually hate and resent in our bones. In other words, we’re crazy people” and so we need “interference or regulation from a government with an organized commitment to a vision of the public good” which I claimed was un-American.

And now you flip-flop and say citizens have “the right to work together to build the kinds of communities they want.” Make up your mind, or is it impossible because of craziness.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Jul 29 2010, 9:35PM – Link

“And now you flip-flop and say citizens have “the right to work together to build the kinds of communities they want.”

Don’t cretins have the right to try to improve their lives? Even the Jersey Shore kids are entitled to work together to organize public investment in a better life for their children. And I would strongly recommend that Glenn Beck, John Hagee and Sarah Palin get on board with activist government as well – not that they would be disposed to listen to me.

Posted by kotzabasis, Jul 29 2010, 11:52PM – Link

Kervick adventitiously and foolishly with his “unconstitutional” governmental dirigisme, which Don Bacon correctly characterized as fascistic, has opened a pit of venomous snakes biting him.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Jul 30 2010, 1:34AM – Link

Kotzabasis,

You often sound like you are writing captions or fortune cookies, rather than making arguments.

I have never proposed a single policy that is unconstitutional. All of the activist policies I defend have been practiced in the past in the United States, in one form or another, have been brought before the Supreme Court, and have passed constitutional muster. Americans have broad constitutionally unimpeachable freedoms to build roads, canals and airports; appropriate and set aside public lands; regulate commerce; levy taxes on themselves and their fellow citizens; and to undertake whatever projects they desire in pursuit of the general welfare or common good as they see it, so long as those projects don’t run afoul of the fundamental liberties protected by the constitution.

It surely must be a sign of radical right individualistic decadence that the mere pursuit of the common good or public good, one of the central concepts in the western legal and political tradition, now strikes them as some sort of frightening communistic notion.

The founders, even the Madisonians and Jeffersonians, were classical republicans, and took it for granted that pursuit of the common good was one of the very purposes of government. And even more obviously, they took it for granted that pursuing the common good was at least a virtuous and good thing.

Kotzabasis says,

Kervick

No your policies, with one exception applying to this argument, are not unconstitutional, but your arguments in supporting them are intellectually unhinged and laughably incongruous and contradictory. In the present case, in your eagerness as ‘Sun King’, l’état c’est moi, to create the Versailles of the public good, you infuse rights into the American Constitution which does not have, as Don Bacon correctly pointed out. Under the constitution free men can dispose their own time, within a LEGAL FRAMEWORK, in pursuit of their aims and desires that in their opinion and subjective values will be beneficial to their material and spiritual well being. No one tells them what these pursuits should be. It is precisely this unfettered freedom of action, by which individuals achieve a better life and contribute toward, and enhance, the common good, since they live in the same community that the Constitution safeguards for the people. If your predilection is to read Plato, Hobbes, Hume, Russel…in your pursuit of spiritual happiness no government official, in a free society, compels you to read Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or Milton Friedman that might discomfit your intellectual calmness and put an abrupt end to your spiritual happiness.

Yet in your proposal this is exactly what you suggest, i.e., the replacement of individual value judgments by the value judgments of an ‘Enlightened’ government, a social experiment that has already been buried under the debris of the Berlin Wall. You say, because we are “crazy people” we need “interference or regulation from a government with an organized commitment to a vision of the public good,” which Don Bacon sharply rebukes you for being “un-American, if not fascistoid.

Realizing the weakness of your argument and your error that such government intervention would be incongruous to the spirit and letter of the constitution, as Don Bacon indicates, instead of correcting your mistake you unconsciously further enfeeble your argument by comically saying, “don’t cretins have a right to improve their lives?” Indeed they do! But by doing so they will get the politicians they deserve and in the annals of history will be recorded the establishment of the first Republic of Cretins. And Don Bacon again is asking you to make up your mind as to whether mad people can elect a sane government.

The fact is that under the American Constitution, imbued and replete with liberal principles, men in a realm of freedom can pursue their various individualistic interests and achieve their well being and happiness according to their own propensities, by working during the day, fishing in the evening, and writing and ‘practising’ poetry during the night, to paraphrase Karl Marx.

Sorry for the unkind cut. But you have inflicted it yourself.

Posted by Dan Kervick, Jul 30 2010, 10:53AM – Link

“Yet in your proposal this is exactly what you suggest, i.e., the replacement of individual value judgments by the value judgments of an ‘Enlightened’ government, a social experiment that has already been buried under the debris of the Berlin Wall. You say, because we are “crazy people” we need “interference or regulation from a government with an organized commitment to a vision of the public good,” which Don Bacon sharply rebukes you for being “un-American, if not fascistoid.”

Kotz, I am very perplexed sometimes by the strange reading contemporary hard-right libertarian conservatives give to the word “government.” They seem use it in a way that is far removed from the founding traditions of American political thought.

When conservatives use the phrase “the government” these days, they seem to use it to refer to some kind of alien entity or foreign power, something separate and apart from the American people that lords it over them.

When I use the phrase, “the government”, I use it in a traditional American sense to refer to *us* – we the people. We the people have constituted a government as our instrument for organizing our own lives and advancing the common good. This conception of government is fully enshrined in the preamble to the US constitution. Government isn’t some external *thing*. It is what the citizens in a republic *do*.

The American conception of freedom is not at all limited to the idea that individuals have the right to live their private lives as they see fit: to read what they want, fish where they want, etc. It also embraces the notion that groups of people have the right to work together, in a cooperative fashion, to advance the common good or common weal. In fact, because they all agreed people had this inherent right, and that the very nature purpose of government was a cooperative compact to pursue the common good, the founders also agreed that the the people had the right to abolish their current system of government when they found it no longer suited their needs, and replace that system with something else.

And obviously, the right invoked in this case isn’t an individual right, but some kind of group or collective right. No one thought that Don Bacon had the right to abolish the government, or that Dan Kervick had the right to abolish government. But the whole people in the body politic had that right.

Posted by kotzabasis, Jul 30 2010, 11:40PM – Link

Kervick

You continue to be stuck to your intellectually rusty grooves. No reasonable person would be against “the ideal of the common good.” But the common good cannot be ENACTED, by government legislation as your argument suggests. It arises from the free and rational actions of people in a laissez faire economy that allows and gives the opportunity to everyone according to his ability, diligence, and mental and physical effort to better his human condition. The government’s function is to safeguard and protect this unfettered freedom of human action from which originates the common good.

America’s Power Decline a Pseudo-Reality

“The U.S. Matters” vs. “No It Doesn’t”

Washington Note, April 28, 2008

A reply to an American Liberal

By Con George-Kotzabasis

While Dan Kervick’s perception of power as relative is “deep” his non-application of this concept of power to the U.S. is strange and makes his argument about the “decline” of the latter shallow and misleading. In his second post he uses ironically by a mental lapse the misconception of “absolute power” to demonstrate the decline of U.S. power. But the U.S. post the Cold-War is still “six inches” taller than all the other countries of the world and therefore according to his reasoning still remains, in relative terms, the dominant power. Unless he can show that any other nation or group of nations have grown “taller” or are very close to becoming so than the U.S., the “decline” of the latter in terms of power is a pseudo-reality. Moreover, to refer to the indisputable fact of the economic development and strength of countries in Europe and in Asia as a demonstration that America is becoming in terms of geopolitical power weak contradicts the also obvious fact that economic power is not automatically translated into military power, as both Germany and Japan illustrate.

David Hume’s “habit of obedience” is natural in a state when other countries are threatened by another strong power as it was during the Cold-War, but it becomes unnatural in an “anarchic” competitive world when that threat is no longer there. And, indeed, Kervick argues in those terms during the confrontation with the Soviet Union. However, the habit of obedience in relation to the sole superpower has not disappeared but is in a state of hibernation. With the looming real threat of IslamoFascism it will come out of its dormant state and move once again to its natural state, as presently, among all the nations of the world, only America can decisively defeat this menacing mortal enemy of Western civilization.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now