Thursday 27 May 2010

Post-Modern post mortem

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the death of Post-Modernism and provides a fairly accurate assessment of Mr Barack Hussein Obama's goals,
The new world order as envisioned by Obama in January 2009 was, I think, supposed to look something like the following: A social-democratic America would come to emulate the successful welfare states in the European Union. These twin Western communitarian powers would together usher in a new world order in which no one nation was to be seen as preeminent. All the old nasty ideas of the 20th century -- military alliances, sovereign borders, independent international finance, nuclear arms, religious and cultural chauvinism -- would fall by the wayside, as the West was reinvented as part of the solution rather the problem it had been in its days of colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation. A new green transnationalism would assume the place of that bad old order, a transnationalism run by elite, highly educated, and socially conscious technocrats -- albeit themselves Western -- supported by a progressive press more interested in effecting social change than in merely reporting the tawdry news.
I agree with most of this assessment, except that I believe that Mr Obama is far more hazy on the details and most of those are more negative than positive–rather like a lefty sophomore student who's read too much cod Marxism and starts sneering about the "Bourgeoisie" without the faintest notion of who they are or what he'd replace them with. I'd say that Mr Obama comes closest to G K Chesteron's definition of bigotry:
In real life, the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no conviction at all.
Mr Obama believes passionately in something. He just isn't sure what it is.



Update: Like most Socialists, he's pretty good at mimicking the Ancien Regime.

2 comments:

Sergej said...

I like Prof. Hanson's articles. His characterization of Hussein Husseinovich as running the country like a university department, made a lot of observations fall into place for me. I guess a deep knowledge of the Classical past, and enough intellectual independence to reject the fashionable interpretations, gives one a better perspective on the present.

Chris Lopes said...

"the successful welfare states in the European Union."

I wonder which ones those were supposed to be?