We Are Not Worthy: And Just Why Would That Be, Exactly?
We should all feel so ashamed. We are letting down Obama. We’re not pulling our weight. He thinks we’re “great”, but we’ve gotten “soft” and lost our “competitive edge.” He gives himself high grades, except for his failure to communicate just how wonderful he and his administration have been for the country, but he has an explanation for that: he’s been so darned focused on his Herculean labors that he’s forgotten to let us know just how heroic they are. As for the rest of us, we need to pick our game, toughen up, stop whining, and get with it. We need to live up to his lofty standards, and his lofty expectations for us.
Truth be told, there is some justice in his remarks. But they beg the crucial question: just why has this softening, this loss of competitive edge, occurred? Do you think an entitlement state, and entitlement mindset, anchored in a therapeutic worldview that enshrines victimhood, could have anything to do with it? Ever noticed how hostile progressivism is to the very idea of competition, and how this hostility has permeated public education in particular? Isn’t the entire thrust of the progressive agenda–which Obama proudly advocates and advances–to use the power of the state to soften people’s lives, to provide them with security and protection from the slings and arrows of life? Is it even possible that the success of that agenda would not affect personal attitudes and beliefs–and yes character? Indeed, isn’t that the entire point?
Paternalistic statism relentlessly encourages personal infantilization. So Obama is shocked!, shocked! that the agenda he fervently embraces has transformed broad swathes of the American public? His comments are a ringing (but surely unintentional) endorsement of the individualist critique of post-New Deal public life and civil society in the US: Ayn Rand would no doubt wholeheartedly agree.
But Obama appears oblivious to the complete disconnect between his diagnosis of our personal failings and his own intensely-held political beliefs. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
