As anyone who follows the Corner and cares about such things knows, I have never been a McCain fan. I worry a great deal about McCain reaching across the aisle for the next four years “to get things done” (which I imagine, to detour for a moment on the judicial-appointees issue Ramesh and Peter debated yesterday, would involve throwing congressional Dems a lot of judicial slots on the lower courts, and — as Ramesh and I have discussed before – I am not as confident as some that McCain’s Supreme Court picks would be very satisfying). I also fret about Republicans in Congress rolling over for McCain when they’d be inclined to fight Obama. For a long time, I struggled with the question whether it would be better — especially on the matter of conservative reform discussed here yesterday — if we just resigned ourselves to rebuilding and becoming a coherent opposition to an Obama administration.
I abandoned that idea because, while I disagree with McCain on many things, I am frightened by Obama. He would try to change the United States in very fundamental ways. He may be exceedingly bright, but my litmus test is not whether he can discuss Reinhold Niebuhr’s philosophy on a dime. Many very smart, well-educated people are enamored of monstrous ideas, and a lot of them make terrible (indeed, dangerous) leaders. Obama’s moorings are in the radical Left. That’s what we know about him. I don’t think we can afford to hope his intellect grows him out of it from the White House.
At the end of my article yesterday on Michael Klonsky, yet another of the communists in Obama’s circle, I tried to tackle the intellectuals’ case for Obama (and, equally, against McCain/Palin), which is popping up on the Right as well as the Left:
Of course, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” John Stuart Mill called conservatives “the stupid party.” For countless American intellectuals, including many eventual giants of the Right, disdain for bourgeois values led to a ruinous infatuation with the Soviet Union — the audacity of their hope for perfecting mankind blinding them to the unremitting misery wrought by communist ideology.
In 1951, the legendary liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas insisted that, though communism might be a threat abroad, the movement in this country was a mere “bogeyman” that had been “thoroughly exposed” and “crippled as a political force.” We now know that even as he wrote those words, communists had covertly infiltrated the U.S. government at high levels and that, as a political force, the movement was just getting started. The Klonskys and Ayers were still on the horizon.
Now today’s elites, including some prominent conservative intellectuals, thumb their noses once again at the stupid party. They look longingly at the putatively cerebral Obama, a fit more to their liking even if his politics are, they hope, just a tad wayward. But the Leftist revolutionaries are under no such illusions. In Obama, they see the fulfillment of their dreams to remake America. As Klonsky has explained, “My own support for Obama is … a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”
So get ready for Klonsky’s “social justice.” It’s what Barack Obama calls “change.”