Ayers displayed his characteristic mischievous smirk. “Just tell them I was a guy in the neighborhood.” Then he turned and opened the front door to a stream of prospective Obama donors.
As it turned out, it was the opening of a door that would one day lead right to the White House.
♦
Looking back, as improbable as it may seem, the same system that Obama would later claim was rigged had actually worked out quite well for him. A man who grew up in a fractured home had ended up attending the greatest academic institutions in the world and was now on the cusp of a meteoric rise in Illinois politics, an ideal place to cut one’s teeth and build a progressive power base.
In the middle of it all were these radicals-turned-educators who had once led the Weathermen, an organization that was responsible for twenty-five bombings on American soil, including attacks at the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and New York Police Department headquarters. The group had murdered at least seven people, including three police officers, and they didn’t seem to have a whole lot of sympathy. “In a revolution,” Ayers once told a Weathermen colleague who’d become an FBI informant, “some people have to die.”
And now this group of aging revolutionaries had found an ambitious young man with a zeal for politics and a strong progressive streak right in their own backyard.
He was the messenger they had been searching for.
THE MAKING OF A PROGRESSIVE
* * *
There have been all kinds of wild attacks leveled against Barack Obama: that he’s a Third World sympathizer, a secret Islamic Manchurian candidate, a devotee of Saul Alinsky (OK, maybe this one is true), an undocumented Kenyan illegal immigrant, an avowed socialist, and so on. I’m wary of conspiracy theories like these because they assume a certain amount of forethought and malice. We cannot look into Obama’s heart and know what he truly feels.
But we can certainly judge him by his words and actions.
Obama calls himself a progressive. He has spent his entire life proving his devotion to this cause; sacrificing Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress; lying to, alienating, and dividing millions of Americans; and endangering the nation by empowering its worst enemies to advance his agenda.
By background, association, words, and actions, President Obama’s progressivism has pervaded almost every aspect of the man’s life. His ability to seamlessly combine leftist ideology with community-organizing tactics designed to win over a nation demanding “change” in a time of crisis has helped to usher in a new wave of progressivism. In its short time, this wave has already eroded the limited government victories of the Reagan Revolution and of the moderates under Bill Clinton who’d seemingly accepted the new reality of smaller, more effective federal government. Obama has returned the Democratic Party to the unapologetically liberal, government-expanding tradition of FDR and LBJ—and this wave may just be getting started.
Obama came from a progressive family in a progressive state. But unlike that of those who preceded him, elites such as the Roosevelts or even many of the leading leftist agitators of the ’60s, Obama’s broken background betrayed the fact that he was destined for prominence. He was born with no silver spoon in his mouth, no bourgeois upbringing to rebel against. He was a living product of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, the son of a black Kenyan man who left him and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas who later married an Indonesian.
Young Barack’s early years were spent in exotic locales—Honolulu with his mother and Jakarta with his stepfather’s family. For long stretches during his childhood, Dunham left young Barack to be taken care of by her parents.
A Norman Rockwell painting this was not.
The near-total absence of his biological father, combined with his mother’s transience, could not have been easy on Barack. Yet Dunham proved to be a strong, if unconventional, influence. According to a profile by Tim Jones in Obama’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune:
[T]he parental traits that would mold him [Obama]—a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature—were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley—after himself.
Politically, Dunham ran in leftist intellectual circles that questioned the capitalist system. Even as a student she was known to ask her teacher, “What’s wrong with communism?” The church her family attended while she was growing up in Washington State was dubbed “The Little Red Church on the Hill” because of its radical ties.
Obama later described his mother as a “lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” Dunham’s political leanings are relevant here because Obama himself says they are. “The values she taught me,” he said, “continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.”
Obama’s father seemed to share a similar ideology to that of Dunham. One white paper drafted by Obama Sr. indicates that he felt there was nothing theoretically wrong with a one hundred percent tax rate and that nationalizing industries and economic redistribution were chief aims of government.
Young Obama’s time in college further reflects the influences of those with whom he spent his youth. As he later wrote about his college years:
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my [college] friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. . . . At night in the dorms we discussed neocolonialism . . . [Franz] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy . . . we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.
At Occidental College, Obama was known to hang out with the “kids most concerned with issues of social justice.” John C. Drew, an Occidental classmate, has indicated that based on conversations with Obama during their college days, the future president was a “doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps—for the first time—considering conventional politics as a more practical road to socialism.”
THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY
In May 1966, two Columbia sociologists named Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven took to the pages of the iconic leftist magazine The Nation to pen an important essay titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”
The idea was astoundingly simple—and sinister: overload the public welfare system at the state and local levels to precipitate a debt crisis that would plunge America even further into poverty. Washington, D.C., would then have no choice but to act and implement a federally guaranteed minimum income level for every American.
“The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some,” they wrote. “Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”
The Cloward-Piven strategy would overcome those pesky American ideas of individual and economic mobility through a sudden, cataclysmic economic collapse in which millions of people would be forced to become wards of the state, dependent on government for food stamps and basic income. A massive economic crisis would necessitate radical change.
Piven pitched a voter-registration strategy to “radicalize the Democratic Party and polarize the country along class lines,” which would be accomplished through collaboration with community-organizing ally the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Project Vote, and others over the next two decades.
Cloward-Piven was a resounding success. Beginning with LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” the number of welfare recipients grew from 4.3 million to 10.8 million in the nine years from 1965 to 1974. Another 100 million Americans now collect some form of check from the government, totaling $1
trillion annually.
The Cloward-Piven strategy succeeded with the urban poor beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. It’s been accelerated with Obamacare and the addition of tens of millions of Americans to federally subsidized health-care programs that Americans can’t afford. The next front very likely involves the country’s southern border.
We wonder why progressive politicians have no objections to open borders and millions of illegals flooding the welfare rolls and driving up our debt. But we shouldn’t wonder, because the answer was given to us by Cloward and Piven long ago. After all, an unsustainable federal government is only a bad thing if you believe in the current system.
After transferring to Columbia University, Obama says, he attended “socialist conferences.” Author Stanley Kurtz places him at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference that celebrated the centenary of Karl Marx’s death. Delivering the opening remarks at that conference was City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, a famed leftist sociologist and advocate of the Cloward-Piven strategy to crater the American economy and replace it with a socialist system.
Activists, slam poets, artists, ivory tower professors, amateur philosophers, social justice advocates—these were the people Obama had known for years. These were the people he felt most comfortable around. He loved the to-and-fro of debate in college seminars. He loved the adrenaline that came from knocking on doors, urging complete strangers to vote for causes. He was a proud activist.
In 1992, Obama directed Project Vote’s Chicago voter-registration drive, helping to elect the socialist-linked Carol Mosely Braun to the U.S. Senate. While at Columbia, he published an editorial in the Columbia Sundial in favor of disarmament, with the goal of a nuclear-free world. This position would later reappear in 2009, when, as president, Obama vowed that “the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.”
Obama’s community organizing in Chicago further reflected, and also likely reinforced, his progressive principles. “Community organizing” was what socialists had done for decades in an effort to hide their true socialist beliefs behind a facade of “populism.” The idea was to push the country toward socialism gradually, under the guise of pragmatic “problem-solving.”
Three of Obama’s mentors studied at the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization founded by Saul Alinsky that advocates a variety of leftist policies. Alinsky himself sought a socialist “future where the means of production will be owned by all the people instead of just a comparative handful.” To achieve this end, he developed organizing strategies and tactics (most notably in his book Rules for Radicals) that provided the foundational playbook for Obama’s political rise.
While it may have been self-serving, what Alinsky’s own son wrote of Obama in a 2008 Boston Globe editorial is telling:
Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change. . . . Obama learned his lesson well.
Obama would continue to support these causes as a civil rights attorney when he practiced at Miner Barnhill & Galland, representing, among others, community organizers such as ACORN.
The friends and advisors Obama has surrounded himself with shared a similar progressive vision to his own. Consider, for example, that the man who had the greatest influence on Obama’s faith, baptizing the future president and officiating at his wedding ceremony, was Reverend Jeremiah Wright. You’ll recall that Wright yelled things like “God damn America,” blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy, and accused whites of being endemically racist. But Wright also provided Obama with a first-class education in black liberation theology, a school of thought that added a religious tinge to the progressivism Obama had imbibed.
Obama would later speak of the need for fellow progressives to understand and internalize faith, both as a political imperative and because the values provided by faith would help make a progressive vision a reality.
Another close Obama friend was Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi is an acolyte of Arabist and anti-Israel professor Edward Said, whose famous book Orientalism paints the West as the racist, imperialist, colonialist oppressor of the Islamic world. Israel is cast in this progressive dialectic as the “powerful” or “victimizer,” against the “powerless” or “victim” Arabs. The small, formerly socialist Jewish nation surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies had morphed from David to Goliath in the Left’s historical reading.
Khalidi has been an Obama ally since the 1990s, hosting him for social functions and organizing a fund-raiser during Obama’s unsuccessful 2000 congressional bid. It also happens that Khalidi is a close friend of Ayers. He, like Ayers and Obama, lived in Hyde Park while teaching at the University of Chicago during the 1990s.
Why so much attention to Obama’s friends? Simple. “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future” is not just a popular saying, it’s a fact. We’ve seen the president’s friends . . . and now we’re starting to see our own future.
THE MARKETING OF A PROGRESSIVE
* * *
Obama’s background and associations were a toxic brew of progressivism that made him an easy political target, not just for conservatives but also for moderate Democrats who rejected the excesses of the 1960s leftists. Obama knew this, which is why—like most shrewd progressives who aspired to the highest elected office in the land, from Wilson to FDR to LBJ—Obama hid his more radical views under the cloak of “liberalism.”
Obama’s public rhetoric on many issues appears to be moderate and within the liberal mainstream. It is the kernels of progressivism embedded within his words and the broader narrative he crafts that reflect a symmetry between his life’s work and associations and the beliefs to which he adheres. This tactical calculation is consistent with what he learned as a community organizer.
Here’s how this works in practice. While a nonpolitician progressive (such as influential historian Howard Zinn, for example) will say that America’s experiment has been immoral, Obama will rephrase that to say that the mistreatment of Native Americans and our original sin of slavery indicate that we have not always lived up to our values and that we must still be better.
Obama may not overtly attack the rich, but he will argue that they ought to pay their “fair share” and that at some point people have earned “enough.”
He will not exhibit blatant hostility toward private business, but he will admit that he sides with labor and that regulations can help strengthen the economy while protecting the environment.
He will not claim that America is a racist nation, but he will say that there are issues of race that still have not been overcome and that minorities continue to have legitimate grievances.
He will not explicitly say that his framework is dialectical—that is, based on the Marxian vision of looking at the world through a prism of competing races, classes, and sexes, such as the oppressors versus the oppressed, the victimizer versus the victim—but he will admit to standing with the “powerless.”
In Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, almost every argument is presented as follows: Conservatives believe X. Liberals believe Y. While both sides have legitimate concerns, and we should respect conservatives for their beliefs, I stand with liberals.
While Obama is quick to praise the free market, such praise is almost always followed with a “but.” During a 2005 address, he said that “our greatness as a nation has depended . . . on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together.”
“But.” There’s that word, when there really shouldn’t be one. I love our constitution, but . . .
As he would later argue during a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the spot at which Te
ddy Roosevelt had delivered his famous “New Nationalism” address a century earlier, “We simply cannot return to this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.”
Noting that Roosevelt’s critics had called him a “socialist” and “even a communist” for his views, Obama said that “we are a richer nation and a strong democracy” for having fought for progressive goals such as “an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women . . . insurance for the unemployed . . . political reform and a progressive income tax.” Progressivism trumps the caricature of free market economics.
While Obama purports to believe in individualism, he also argues that America can only be strong when it acts collectively. During his heralded keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he said that “alongside our famous individualism . . . is that fundamental belief [that] I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work.” In Obama’s thinking, the nation is one big family with all of the responsibilities that entails. What he does not make explicit, however, is that this belief revolves around government coercion rather than voluntary action. Families look out for one another because they want to. Taxes, on the other hand, are involuntary.
Obama delivered a commencement address in 2005 at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, arguing that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.” For him, government is seen as a positive force that provides opportunity, rather than as the impediment to liberty that it really is. Government plays the central role in wealth creation, while labor unions play a central role in making sure that such wealth is distributed “fairly.” And remember that inequality of outcomes is the great progressive scourge. Obama has called it “the defining challenge of our time,” one that can only be solved, of course, by government intervention.