Why Are We Still Pretending We Don’t Know President Obama’s Ideology?

The tide has clearly turned against President Obama in the commentariat – at least for the moment. It’s not uncommon to see nowadays, even from his part of the spectrum, a complaint that such-and-such bad policy/act (the Solyndra loan, the ‘big’ jobs speech), is evidence that Team Obama is incompetent, stupid, tone-deaf, dense, or even depressed. But I sense a strange blind spot in this sort of criticism and I want to make sure it doesn’t go unnoticed.

Maybe Barack Obama isn’t any of those things. Maybe he’s just a socialist.

Take the Solyndra loan. You can call it ‘stupid’ or ‘incompetent’ but the reality is that he gave this loan for purely ideological reasons, and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t do it again. So maybe he simply wasn’t operating from a point of view that it was important that the loan be paid back. In that case it’s not ‘stupid’ or ‘incompetent’ that it wasn’t. It’s just socialist; this loan was Good For The People in his view and so he gave it. Taxpayer money belongs to him as the agent of The People and so he can do whatever he wants with it. Socialist.

Another example others have caught onto is energy policy. The price of gasoline has risen and remained high under Barack Obama’s Presidency. One interpretation is that he has ‘messed up’ and has a ‘bad policy’ or even ‘doesn’t know what he’s doing’. But another interpretation – a far more plausible one – is that high gasoline prices are his policy aim. Because Barack Obama knows, in his centralized socialist wisdom, that other forms of energy should be promoted and therefore gasoline users should be squeezed. Made to feel pain until they switch to using the Correct sort of energy.

Every day or three there’s a new story about how Obamacare was so poorly written and hastily rushed through that it makes no sense on its face. But notice the punchline is usually that it’s going to cost far more than advertised, far more people will be trapped in its net than advertised, and perhaps single-payer will be its only feasible end-state. So you tell me: bug, or feature?

Finally there’s the matter of jobs. Unemployment is high and there aren’t enough jobs. President Obama must be doing a bad job! But this assumes that he wants people to have jobs, to be prosperous, to be content. Why would we assume this? As a socialist, there are all sorts of reasons why Barack Obama would find high unemployment and discontent convenient. Crises can be very useful, as someone once said. Perhaps he can shove through extreme legislation. He can parrot week after week the need to raise taxes on ‘the rich’ and maybe someday get one past the goalie there. So many opportunities for socialist ratcheting in a bad economy. As long as he thinks he can Hope/Change his way through a second campaign, why on earth would Barack Obama want a lower unemployment rate or more capitalist jobs and prosperity?

I recognize that he gave a speech about how badly he wants there to be more jobs. But in it, and afterwards, you will notice that he has proposed a bunch of bullcrap that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with advancing the economy or increasing employment significantly. Some of the reactions to this have accused him of incompetence, political idiocy, or general stupidity; this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Maybe he’s not incompetent, or stupid, he’s just socialist. He doesn’t want to promote any prosperity if it means strengthening capitalist tendencies – what use is that, if it makes a bunch of people happy with less socialism? Instead he only ‘wants’ to promote jobs via socialist-fantasy methods. Those methods have no chance of working but that’s okay because actually creating jobs isn’t their main goal, their main goal is making him look like he cares and thus (perhaps) keeping him in power four more years to socialize the economy, and meanwhile (to the extent they’re passed) ratcheting up the socialism again.

Most commentary about all this has this blind spot for this man’s ideology. Why is it so hard to admit that he is a true-blue believer in socialism and what that means? This basically gives him a pass because at some point the ‘incompetence’ articles will stop and the ‘he’s learned from his mistakes/comeback kid’ articles will start. But his ideology does not change and has never changed.

Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by socialist malice.