Rick Moran at PJM:
I suppose I got caught up in the emotion of the night due almost exclusively to the genuine and copious tears of black Americans. The ones I spoke to and interviewed were nearly speechless with joy. With a start, I realized something that had escaped me all these long months of writing and thinking about this race. For many African-Americans, this election was a spiritual event, something that transcended the corporeal and brought to mind ancestral yearnings and desires for freedom.
For perhaps many blacks, Obama is the word made flesh — the redemption of the promise in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” The small sample of blacks I interviewed all spoke of the shattering of barriers, the hope that an Obama presidency would translate into a more just society, and the belief that for them personally, their lives would never be the same.
It struck me then and now that the world has turned upside down. When I was a boy, a black man could not get a sandwich at a lunch counter in much of the country. Now a black man has been elected president of the United States, receiving more votes from whites than his predecessor of 2004.
Commenter “portia9” cautions poignantly:
Where I come from, no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you work you are extremely unlikely to ever achieve the kind of success that is available to citizens of the U.S. If by some unbelievable stroke of fortune you do achieve it, you will be taxed very heavily, penalized really, for your efforts. There is no can-do spirit. There is nothing like the “American Dream” because that dream exists nowhere but here.
Everything that I have learned about President Elect Obama leads me to believe that he does not cherish the American Dream. He does not believe in it, although, ironically, he is a prime beneficiary of it. He would rather remake this country in the image of those his friends and allies like William Ayers cherish. Socialist countries. Communist countries.
In the decade I have lived here, I have come to realize just how precious the much maligned “American Dream” really is. I was taught as a university student in Canada that it is a fiction, but I have learned through living here that it is real. Socialism is not the answer for this country. America has made a devastating choice this election. I only hope that he will not be able to change this country so much that it will be unrecognizable in four years.
I hope that Obama’s actual performance in office won’t merit these fears, but I fear portia9’s concerns are well-founded.
One more news item before I launch into my series:
Courtesy of Instapundit: Czech Republic President Václav Klaus delivered a remarkable address at a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Reykjavik last week. As a U.S. citizen of partly Czech ancestry who holds liberty dear, I can’t help but feel a special affinity for the spirit of his stirring words.
Beginning with an exploration of the appeal that socialist thinking holds for intellectuals, and tracing his theme through to the development of socialism’s contemporary derivative ideologies in Western Europe, Klaus ends up painting a clearer picture of the broad differences in thinking between Western European nations and their post-communist Eastern brethren than I think I have yet seen expressed.
There’s an audio (.mp3) recording in the “Attachments” section following the Brussels Journal article, and a full transcript of Klaus’ speech (which he abbreviated significantly in some places as he went). This is, without a doubt, one of those “read the whole thing” gems — so much so that choosing a brief passage to quote is difficult.
Fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become — under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft — the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.
…
Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or “isms”, which have — at least formally and nominally — nothing in common with the old-styled, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions.
I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based — as de Jasay precisely argues — on not distinguishing rights and rightism), ideology of “civic society” (or communitarism), which is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence, a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.
All of them represent substitute ideologies for socialism. All of them give intellectuals new possibilities, new space for their activities, new niches in the market of ideas.
(Klaus’ inclusion of “feminism” in this last passage is a bit surprising to me. — Is the dominant form of feminism in Europe an illiberal one?)
Interestingly, Virginia Postrel asserts that Klaus has finally come around to seeing it her way, years after repudiating her assertion that socialism in its traditional form is no longer cause for significant concern.
