Of course Obama and his fellow travelers in his administration are not Marxists (in the classical sense of the word, I believe however that you can still label him as one in order to point a blinking arrow to where his ideological leanings stem from. They are not from Edmund Burke, Charles de Montisqueu or John Locke, but from Karl Marx himself.
NOTE: Obama is heretical to classical socialism, as Hitler was heretical to Marxist Communism. But one thing that they ”all have in common” (joke intended), they’re statists. I also think that Barry gets the word ”conservative” wrong, forgetting that the word has gone through a genesis of its own over the centuries as well.
Barry Rubin:
A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.
Via Vlad and H/T EDL Buck
Barack Obama Is A Dangerous Leftist of a New Kind, not a Communist, Muslim, Marxist, or Socialist
Barack Obama is not a Communist, a fascist, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Progressive (in the pre-1920s’ meaning of that word), or even a socialist. Obama and those who control much of America’s academia, mass media, and entertainment industry—plus a number of trade unions and hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and front groups—are believers in a new, very American form of leftism. It is very statist, very dangerous for freedom, and economically destructive. But we first have to identify what “it” is. Our difficulty in doing so has been a huge reason why we have not persuaded more people–though goodness knows a lot of people have woken up that there is a huge problem here.
Yet calling Obama those various names doesn’t persuade a large portion of the American population because they sense that these definitions aren’t accurate and can come up valid counter-arguments or be fed by schools and media with phony ones. And all of those who rage in the talk-back columns of websites aren’t persuading anyone anything except, perhaps, that Obama’s opponents are delusional. You may not like hearing that but it’s the truth.
We are in a totally new era. The nineteenth and early twentieth century debates and categories no longer hold. Indeed, when the New Leftists climbed out of the wreckage of the 1960s-early 1970s they realized this and successfully built something very new. (If you are looking for a “prehistoric” founding document in terms of some important themes, albeit very much altered, read the original Weatherman Manifesto and then delete all the hysterical parts. Dress it up in a suit and tie and seat is behind the desk of a professor, foundation director, reporter, or politician. I don’t have the space here to explain this point in detail.)
