“Mr. Obama, are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying member of any avowedly socialist or far-left political party?”
The president’s campaign continues to deny that Barack Obama was ever a member of any far-left political party. However, beyond the president’s dissembling and the obviously coded leftist message of his Marxist campaign slogan “Forward,” there is clear evidence to belie his campaign’s denials. The smoking gun can be found in the updated records of Illinois ACORN housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which reveal that when he was running for the Illinois Senate back in 1996, President Obama did, in fact, formally join the far-leftist New Party and sign its candidate contract, the stated purpose of which was unambiguously to move America toward a European-style social-democracy, i.e., socialism.
In the words of National Review author Stanley Kurtz, who broke the story back in 2008, the New Party “was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism.”
So, there is now no doubt that Barack Obama was a “card-carrying socialist” in his early political career. But the GOP’s gleeful use of this revelation against Mr. Obama in the presidential campaign hides in plain sight a much bigger problem: Most politicians in America today, including virtually all Republican “leaders” like Mitt Romney, are socialist fellow travelers. Fellow-traveling Republicans have been an open secret since Richard Nixon admitted “We are all Keynesians now,” by which he meant that what Keynes called “New Liberalism” had won the day.
John Maynard Keynes was the quintessential socialist fellow traveler who almost single handedly transformed the economics profession into an intellectual front for central planning and collectivist government intervention in the name of rectifying what he asserted were inherent flaws and instabilities in free markets.
In a recent keynote address delivered to the Seventh Annual Moral Foundations of Capitalism Conference at Clemson University, Dr. Richard M. Ebeling (professor of Economics at Northwood University), highlighted Keynesian fellow traveling. Ebeling pointed out, for example that in Keynes’s magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes was forthright and unapologetic in his belief that Soviet Russia had an advantage over the West due to its “almost religious revolutionary fervor, its romanticism of the common working man, and its condemnation of money-making. Indeed, the Soviet attempt to stamp out the ‘money-making mentality’ was, in Keynes’s mind, ‘a tremendous innovation.’”
Ebeling went on:
“What Keynes considered Soviet Russia’s superiority over capitalist society, therefore, was its moral high ground in opposition to capitalist individualism. And he also believed that ‘any piece of useful economic technique’ developed in Soviet Russia could easily be grafted onto a Western economy following his model of a New Liberalism ‘with equal or greater success’ than in the Soviet Union.”
In the Foreword of the 1936 German Edition of The General Theory, directed to the National Socialists then in charge under Adolf Hitler, Keynes had this to say about the close association between his theory and totalitarianism:
“The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.”
And of course, Keynes really spilled the beans in the English version of the book when he stated, “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.”
Fellow travelers, all aboard the collectivist express.
As Ebeling observed, Keynes believed the “assisted suicide” of the interest-earning and capitalist groups would not require any revolutionary upheaval. According to Keynes, “the necessary measures of socialization can be introduced gradually and without a break in the general traditions of the society.” So while Republican partisans and Tea Party activists hyperventilate about a card-carrying socialist occupying the White House, American voters should understand the full implications of replacing him with an unreconstructed socialist fellow traveler. Not only are specific polices and the overall directly of the country unlikely to change very much if at all in their essence, the entire conservative movement, now animated by the partisan imperative to stand by their man who slew the evil card-carrying socialist, will be supporting these destructive policies rather than opposing them. That’s the way fellow traveling works in a democracy.
John Maynard Keynes portrayed himself as a defender of free markets but he revealed himself to be a collectivist fellow traveler in virtually every particular; an agent of socialization in the name of saving markets from themselves. Modern-day Republican fellow travelers are no different.
Neither the card-carrying socialist Barack Obama nor the fellow traveler Mitt Romney are willing to disassemble the American welfare state or repeal the dynamo of democratic collectivism—the income tax. Neither candidate is prepared to dismantle the Federal Reserve and replace fiat currency with a commodity-backed dollar. Both candidates are steeped in socialist theology, which maintains the regulatory state is absolutely necessary to maintain stability and the Nanny State to protect our health and safety. Both men are warmongers determined to spread American empire around the globe in the name of national security. Both the card-carrying socialist and the socialist fellow traveler support the continued expansion of the police state at home and the continued militarization of policing within the confines of the United States—and on, and on and on down the road to collectivist perdition.
Therefore, the real danger is that replacing card-carrying socialists in office with socialist fellow travelers actually reduces the likelihood that people will come to their senses and repudiate social democracy and the welfare state since they think they already have done so by electing fellow travelers to office. People are then deluded and deceived about what their leaders really believe and where their leaders are actually leading them. People hoot and holler “USA, USA” in the aftermath of elections thinking they have won the battle because the Fellow Traveling Party won an election. But it doesn’t change the country’s course; it only replaces forthright collectivists with deceptive ones. When people waste their time and energy on fellow travelers, they simply become useful idiots.
This article is available online at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/06/10/republicans-bash-obama-for-his-socialism-while-hiding-their-own/
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