Organizing for America | Global Development Blog: Obama and ideology

Obama and ideology

By Edward Mokurai Cherlin - Nov 9th, 2008 at 2:20 pm EST

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From a story about Obama's days at Harvard Law from Politico.com:
...
> In the end, though, Obama's time on the Review mirrored other aspects of his
> life. Even in the staunchly liberal milieus in which he has spent his entire
> adult life, Obama has managed to lead without leaving a clear ideological
> stamp, and to respect--and even, at times, to embrace--opposing views. To
> his critics, that's a sign of a lack of core beliefs. To his admirers, it's
> the root of his appeal.
>
> "To understand what someone else is trying to say isn't just an editorial
> skill," said McConnell. "It's a life skill.²

The whole point is that Obama's politics, indeed his whole life, is
about respect for people and ideas. It isn't about ideology. Being
able to understand what someone else is trying to say is more than a
life skill. It is what distinguishes genuine leaders such as Gandhi,
King, and Mandela from politicians and demagogues.

This immediately causes trouble from those who believe that their own
ideology trumps thinking, facts, anybody else's ideology, or anything
else, whether on the Loony Left or the Religious/Rapacious Right,
terrorists, former revolutionaries still clinging to power, or
whatever.

The force of ideologies comes from a combination of genuine grievances
or desires and genuine fears with a plausible but fundamentally insane
program for dealing with them. As H. L. Mencken said, "For every
problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong." The
movement's followers can think, "If he's right about the problem, he's
probably right about the solution," a clear fallacy but a case where
logic is easily trumped by emotion.

Karl Marx was spot on about the problems of workers under Scroogian
Social Darwinism. His Communist economic and political theories are
supported only by the outrage about those problems, not by anything
else. This says nothing about the merits of European Social Democratic
policies, which have essentially nothing to do with Communism other
than a concern for humanity.

The Religious Right is correct that abortion is usually, in their
terminology, the sin of murder. However, their proposed solutions only
make the matter worse, just like the Inquisition before them.

Most of the rich are under a compulsion (explained by Thorstein Veblen
in The Theory of the Leisure Class) to demonstrate that they are
richer than others. These leads to the notion that the proper purpose
of politics and economics is to make the rich even richer, and keep
everybody else down. "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people,
seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the
masters of mankind."--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

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