Barack Obama and America's 1997

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:44:04 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Sean Gabb at The Libertarian Enterprise - Mr. Gabb welcomes Amerika to the New Labour club. [tle]

Mr Obama cannot be more stupid in his actions or more embarrassing in his utterances than Mr Bush has been. But his essential function as President will be to shield the new ruling class of America while it carries through a total transformation of American life. I do not know exactly how America will change. But I can predict that, come 2016, most Americans will no longer recognise their country. It will be less free. It will be less prosperous. It will be less American. What has happened in England, and what is happening in Australia, will now happen in America.

All this is to be regretted. I think increasingly, however, that if those who are transforming the English world are to be blamed, those who are being transformed are no less to be despised. In 1917, power was seized in Russia by men who were prepared to murder anyone who so much as raised an eyebrow at them. Whether they murdered thirty million or sixty million people is important in the obvious sense. Where ensuring absolute docility of the ruled is concerned, it is the first million who matter. No one can blame the Russian people for grovelling before Stalin. But none of the almost equally radical governments that have taken over in the English world has killed any of its own citizens, or is proposing to kill any. We have been enslaved by a small minority of intellectuals whose most potent weapon is words. Any people who can be so enslaved deserves to be enslaved.

But I am about to digress. I will only say for now that the American people deserve Barack Obama. To some extent, he is their punishment for tolerating, if not welcoming, eight years of George W. Bush. More generally, they are about to lose nothing more than they have long since abdicated their right to possess.

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