One of the most challenging things about researching and writing my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, was keeping the project largely secret. Given what had happened to me during campaign 2008, a low profile seemed the best way to minimize the possibility of interference with my work. Fortunately, I had the help and advice along the way of a few thoughtful friends and public intellectuals. Now, blogging at the Chronicle of Higher Education, one of them, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has something to say about the lack of interest by scholars and journalists in the archival documents I was able to dig up on Obama’s past, and on the pasts of his socialist colleagues and mentors.
It’s up to readers to judge how successful I was, but as Wood notes, I make every effort in the book to separate the evidence I turn up from my conclusions. Readers are invited to make sense of that evidence differently than I do. While it seems to me that the clearest and most straightforward reading of the record is that Obama shares the stealth-socialist convictions of his community organizer colleagues, some might disagree. What you make of it all is up to you, but in Radical-in-Chief you’ll find a wealth of new material on Obama’s past that no-one had previously thought to look for.
Meanwhile, Katherine Kersten’s recent piece on Radical-in-Chief, “Obama has been hiding his real agenda,” picks up on the theme of stealth socialism. One of the most remarkable things I stumbled onto in my research was clear evidence that Alinskyite community organizers consciously hide their socialism. In fact, not only did Obama’s colleagues and mentors intentionally hide their socialism, they had elaborate theories about how to keep their socialism secret, and why it made good political sense to do so. If I hadn’t found it in the archives, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. But as you’ll see in Radical-in-Chief, stealth socialism is no conservative fantasy, but a very real and deadly serious phenomenon.
What happened to Stanley during the 2008 campaign?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCan't wait for "Radical In Chief" to be made into a movie, release date: Summer 2012.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy should it be a surprise that socialists don't want to be known as socialists?
What, exactly, differentiates a socialist from a "liberal" and from a "progressive"? Why do liberals now shun the term "liberalism"?
Isn't it obvious that, as socialism fell into disrepute, the simple solution was to "evolve" into "liberalism" and, when liberal became a similar pejorative term, evolve that into the wondrously misleading "progressive"?
You have to give these people credit. They have no qualms with dumping terminology that is found wanting by the populace. They also have no ethical qualms about misleading people either but, hey, when its all about power and nothing about principle what more do you need?
It should be interesting to see where they go once "progressive" is revealed as liberalism/socialism.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI once was acquainted with a grad student from Europe who was in California. He was obstensibly getting a phd in computer science, but his real passion was community organizing.
He worked for a weird offshoot group called the Western Service Workers Union. And he was a community organizer. He didn't seem to understand that I was a conservative (who would have dreamed a grad student was conservative), so he explained his job. He would go around giving history and economics lessons to poor, urban people--hispanic or black communities mainly. His lessons were stories like how evil Mr. Ford was--never giving his people a living wage, but always encouraging them to buy cars. He would say "when they said to him "but I can't buy a new car, I can't pay for the doctor", Mr. Ford invented the cash back plan--buy a car on financing and we'll give you cash to pay that doctor bill."" He had many such anecdotes, and the message for each one was how workers were exploited, how the govt was controlled by capitalists who encouraged exploitation, and how the free market was a way to keep these people poor.
The anecdotes were always compelling. He never used the word capitalist, and he never called himself a member of the Left to the people he gave these lessons to. He had been taught how to do this by a master community organizer before him. When I asked why here was doing this in the US, he said "because the world follows what the US does. Capitalism can always survive if the US keeps it alive. We must win this war here."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStanley Kurtz hurts his own credibility by not researching and revealing Obama's radical tendencies back in 2006. What happened to investigative journalism?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI had numerous encounters with socialist community organizers in Massachusetts and New Jersey during 1969-1978, and this book clarifies key details of their methods and goals that used to puzzle me. The earlier organizers blatantly opposed working within the electoral system, while the later ones, having learned the lessons of failure, participated effectively in that system.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI've nearly completed Stanley Kurtz' new book. The network of secretive socialists is indeed troubling and our president is smack in the middle of it.
One of President Obama's favorite expressions during the 2008 campaign was that the republicans had "hoodwinked and bamboozled" the American people. Not surprisingly, this was the line used by the character played by Denzel Washington in the 2007 movie, American Gangster (without attribution).
Well, it turns out that then candidate Obama was the one who did the hoodwinking and bamboozling on the American people when neither he nor the obliging media failed to reveal the real Obama.
Read the book. It is well researched and carefully presented by Mr. Kurtz.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have the book and have yet to read it, but will start in on it over the weekend. That being said, I am not surprised by Mr. Kurtz's outcome about stealth socialism. The plan of the progressives of the past was to begin implementing socialism by stealth (which was touched upon in Jonah Goldberg's delightful book, "Liberal Fascism). I have been saying for months that "incremental socialism is still socialism" and that is now what we have. Public education, Social Security, unemployment insurance, assistance programs, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, tax credits to buy socially acceptable things, the federal government owning huge swaths of land to prevent development, complex and intrusive regulations that control everything from the proper water flow of a faucet to complex banking transactions, the list goes on. It is a surprise that many conservatives want to argue with progressives on the proper level of government, but the progressives are more than happy to keep you on arguing the proper level of government as long as you don't suggest rolling back what they've implemented.
If Obamcare is not repealed prior to 2014, this country is lost.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have always found the terms "liberal" and "progressive" to be proof positive that socialists desire to hide their true intentions. No two words could be more inapt to describe left wing policies. They don't promote liberty, and progress certainly isn't achieved by encouraging more top-down institutional decision-making over our lives.
From the beginning of time, man has lorded over man, in a centralized system of a few making decisions for the whole. This is the aim of socialism, and it is quite REGRESSIVE to be promulgating this societal construct circa A.D. 2010.
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