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Someone finally answers the question: Is Obama a Socialist?

The impression I'm getting from a book review by Ronald Radosh in National Review is that the answer is 'yes.' The book in question is called Radical in Chief by Stanley Kurtz. The article can't be gotten at NR unless you're a subscriber, but the text of it can be found at The Hudson Institute.

Kurtz presents evidence, apparently a mountain of it, of a very long and consistent socialist pedigree in Obama's background, and not a molehill of same that he has parted company with it. Says Radosh:

Readers of Kurtz’s book will see example after example of how Obama’s otherwise inexplicable actions — such as pushing health care ahead of jobs in a time of economic downturn — make perfect sense if he is acting according to the theories and programs of the mentors he took along with him when he moved into the political arena. By keeping his real views hidden — the chosen policy of the descendants of Saul Alinsky who argue for masking socialist convictions — the political organizers can push the country in a direction it may not want.

Radosh concludes:

Stanley Kurtz succeeds, then, in showing the “consistency of [Obama’s] convictions.” Beginning in his college days, and possibly even in late high school, Obama gravitated towards socialism as the answer for America. His entire political advance depended upon the backing, support, and work of the Chicago socialist community. It was a stealth-socialist circle, carefully hidden from the public, but now unearthed brilliantly by Kurtz. With a “thoroughgoing pattern of deception,” he misled the American people into believing that he was a post-ideological pragmatist. “Obama has made concerted efforts to hide his socialist convictions from the voters who put him in office,” in a “systematic deception” that “corrodes democracy itself.”

For these reasons, Stanley Kurtz has written what I believe is the most important political book in years. I would go so far as to say that had he or someone else done this work during the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama would not have been elected president — because it would have been clear that Obama is simply not who he claimed to be.

I thought this might be of interest to some readers, since I don't expect the book to be widely publicized in the media.

Comments (27)

I don't think there can be much question of Obama's absolute commitment to his ideology and to radically changing America. That is evident on multiple levels, including his recent denial regarding the election. Whether the new Congress will muster the will to fight him toe to toe is a harder question. I only hope that they do.

Obama's agenda and approach are sufficiently bare-knuckled and alien and hostile to America that it is only the race factor that will guarantee his reelection. I do believe that he will be reelected, but Bill Clinton had to triangulate a bit in order to do so, and Obama will not have to.

that it is only the race factor that will guarantee his reelection. I do believe that he will be reelected, but Bill Clinton had to triangulate a bit in order to do so, and Obama will not have to.

Third world immigration, immigration, immigration. It has to end...and reverse to some extent.

Lydia,
I doubt he'll get re-elected. The only reason he's not out now is because he wasn't up. Had he been, he'd be toast. One poll actually had him less popular than GWB.

BO is no triangulator.

But, at this point, only God knows what will happen in 2012, and He hasn't told anyone, or at least not me.

All,

I know this is a bit OT, and it's long, but I thought of this recent Mencius post when I read about Obama's socialism:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/11/democracy-cis-and-trans-maines-law.html

As they say, read the whole thing, there is a lot of good stuff in there!

Readers of Kurtz’s book will see example after example of how Obama’s otherwise inexplicable actions — such as pushing health care ahead of jobs in a time of economic downturn — make perfect sense if he is acting according to the theories and programs of the mentors he took along with him when he moved into the political arena. By keeping his real views hidden — the chosen policy of the descendants of Saul Alinsky who argue for masking socialist convictions — the political organizers can push the country in a direction it may not want.

Now, think for a moment what it would mean for Obama to be "pushing" jobs. Keep in mind which faction is vociferously opposed to the federal government's attempts at economic stimulus, either directly or indirectly. Is this supposed to make sense, that Obama is blamed for not devoting enough attention to jobs while also being blamed for trying to "interfere" with the pixie dust wonderfulness of free markets?

The kicker is that Obama basically rejected Alinsky's tactics, even while he hyped his own history as an organizer for political gain. Never let a few facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.
http://www.tnr.com/article/creation-myth

Now, think for a moment what it would mean for Obama to be "pushing" jobs.

Step2, I thought that very question. But there is more than one way to "push" jobs. One way might be to go FDR's route and create a ton of low-level jobs out of thin air, paid by fiat (or borrowed) dollars. Another way would be to declare war on gov regulatory obstructions to industry and new businesses. Another would be to re-arrange fiscal policy so as to free up money and promote lending for investment in new business activity. I am not, by the way, saying that he should have done one of these. Or all of them. Or three others. I suspect that there are conservatives AND liberals that would oppose each of the options. I am just saying that there are ways of thinking about "pushing" jobs that does not automatically imply a stronger gov role in the private sector.

As Christopher Caldwell has noted, socialism has only ever "worked" in smaller homogenous countries. The more ethnically diverse a country is, the more unpopular socialism becomes. Such socialism presupposes not only ethnic homogeneity but also nationalism and economic isolationism -- all things Obama detests.

Through and through, in my estimation, Obama is a globalist and a crony capitalist.

I don't think the race thing helps him much this time around, at least not outside his cult followers. The first time, it was a new and "cool" thing, the hip thing to do. The second time, it's a been there, done that, lost my T-shirt sort of thing, so the novelty is gone.

Feb 7th Newsweek, "We Are All Socialists Now".
I know, they didn't mean it, a figure of speech, a headline attention grabber, and in any case they didn't mean Obama or show their hand, or jump the gun.
Government creates jobs in about the same manner as ornate coaches are made from pumpkins, that is in fairy tales. One does not appropriate capital, displace it, use it at whim and create jobs. Come to think of it you can't even save jobs that way, though one would think that numerous National Job Saving Surveys have been taken by garages,& deli's & have proven Joe Biden's point. Maybe someone here has seen, even filled out such a survey.

What precisely is socialism if not power centralized, regardless of timing or the path taken. The O has done as much as he can, formed his troika with Pelosi & Reid and accomplished what he could. To the extent possible, given the god-awful incompetence of these circus clowns, he has practiced, acted out his urges, they are hardly thoughts, of and towards the above, power centralized. If not full socialism this is not due to doubts in his febrile brain but institutional, cultural, and political factors, of which he and his rabble cohorts were incapable of weighing.


Obama is the sort of man who upon opening an envelope soliciting money for the destitute would respond by mailing his favorite recipes to the poor.

No, wait; that would be Dubya.

Anyways, Bambi is worse than Dubya and I did not think that was possible.

In this context, of course, socialism simply means "Not Republican". How else, for example, can certain people claim a mostly market based health care reform bill is absolute proof of socialism while many (granted not all) of those very same people not a few years before voted for a single payer health system for Seniors also known as Medicare Part D?

"Obama is pushing us in that direction: out-of-control deficits, unsustainable entitlements, high taxes, and a sluggish economy."

Forget it Boonton, anyone who could write the above is delusional. As for his readers, conservatives seem to need this sort of thing. Reading the review sent me into deja vu. I hopped into the way-back machine and lo and behold this appeared.

From the preface:

"The direction of our study was set by a Harvard trained economist, the late Professor Olin Glenn Saxon, who spent many years teaching at Yale University. For years he kept warning the American public that economic teachings promulgated as “Keynesianism” in universities were a focal point of infection spreading the leftist virus into the blood stream of the entire nation."

"Possessing the advantage of a twenty-five year background in leftist studies, and with Professor Saxon’s constant cooperation, I spent two years assembling proof of an interlarded melange that forms the socialistic underworld. Carefully checked evidence disclosed an operating pattern hatched in socialist nerve centers which was then directed into colleges, government bureaus and publishing outlets. Over a period of years this seeding process pervasively indoctrinated the general news media. This confluence of socializing currents shaped most of the debilitating social convulsions of our time. Bedrock evidence proved Professor Saxon’s thesis to be correct. What was particularly shocking was the depth of the infiltration by the Keynesian-Fabian intriguers. This massive overlapping of deceit and duplicity was carefully shielded by a spurious defense mechanism bearing the label of “academic freedom.”

"The first edition of Keynes at Harvard actually represented many years of intensive probing. Over fifty former communist and socialist leaders were consulted. More than 100,000 published and written items were read. Such accumulated evidence gained from investigating, studying and writing on left-wing matters was necessary to identify the serpentine paths within the collectivist maze. Over-simplified monomanias and “one enemy” solutions were found to be misleadingly harmful. Most such short cut panaceas suffer from a built-in police state collectivism. Such movements could also be included in the aphorism, “scratch a Liberal and find a Fascist.”

"Intellectual booby-traps and deceptive masks to fool the unwary are standard equipment in the leftist arsenal. In spite of skillful concealment, time and again careful analysis uncovered past communist and socialist activists under the Keynesian label. Keynes at Harvard is actually an introduction to the over-all Fabian socialist process. It is our hope to stimulate others to pursue this cabal in all of its many interlocking manifestations."

"Great credit is due to Sister M. Margaret Patricia McCarran for her monumental studies on Fabian socialist permeations in Britain and the United States. Organized attempts to hinder her work by leftists within Catholic circles is a disgraceful example of Fabian leftist pressures to keep vital information from reaching the public. Sister McCarran is a true pioneer in exposing the hidden hand of Fabianism."

This, of course, is from "Keynes at Harvard", a product of the late 1950s fever swamps, written by a former Trotskyist (surprise, surprise!!!) and a classic of the genre. The whole work may be accessed here,

http://www.keynesatharvard.org/index.html

(As some who follow and read will actually take it seriously, posting the link makes me feel much as I imagine I would were I to leave a keg near a school yard but..)

Discerning folks will ask, "would a president aspiring to socializing the US of A place Tim Geithner and Larry Summers at the head of his economic team, buy into the TP line by creating a deficit commission, head that commission with Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and make Rahm Emmanuel his COS"?

P.S. These right wing efforts at "scholarship" are quick to adapt to the changing needs of the masses. Note part of the "Explanatory Note" from the 1969 edition when the threat of the "gay agenda" was, Putin-like, rearing its head,

"The Lytton Strachey—J.M. Keynes correspondence disclosed mass practice of homosexuality accompanied by aberrations of the most revolting kind. In dealing with it this writer struggled to keep the presentation within the bounds of good taste so as not to offend those who are currently fighting the obscenitarian tidal wave. The facts had to be brought out because it is vital to recognize that major architects of our prevailing social ideas were motivated not only by socialistic aims but were additionally intent on making their moral depravities the accepted norm for all of society."

I don't think that Obama is a socialist,let alone a Marxist or communist at all.And ironically,the real left in America,of which I'm absolutely no part,doesn't even think much of him because he's much too conservative for them!
But America on the whole has gone so far right that any one who is even slightly to the left of Archie Bunker is automatically labeled a socialst,Marxist and communist.
And many conservatives today make Archie look positively liberal!
It's ridiculous how paranoid the right in Americ ais today about communism coming to America under Obama.But there's about as much chance of this happening under him or any other liberal President as Osama Bin Laden converting to Judaism and sttling in Israel.Let's face it;communism is as dead as a fish on the beach,and fortunately it's not very likely to make a comeback.

al, of course, anybody who appoints Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers etc, couldn't possibly be a socialist, they wouldn't let him, proof positive, case closed.{ I had to laugh at your bringing up the thug Emanuel, like he has principles of any kind.]
Don't be afraid al to come out of the closet, a label is fair when applicable and why defend so weakly what and who you support so much. It is a non sequitur to assert Obama's beliefs based on what someone else may believe, you see al, they are different persons, think hard. More over they don't order Obama what to think or do, rather it is the reverse.
As to delusions; Boontoon listed four things, are you denying all four? Deficits are not out of control? OK, they're under control, at $1.3 tril and going forward, The economy isn't sluggish? Are you drunk?
Higher taxes, the wish was there big time, including a VAT, but we did have an election, sorry, and we still don't know the full details of the Debt Commission, 'Unsustainable entitlements", the health care bill, a heavily subsidized mortgage market, which continues to sink, 43 million people on food stamps, billions to states to buttress their civil service work force, they vote you see. etc & so on.
"delusional"? right al.
Come on, admit you set no boundries on government, that you think we need it to smack us into line, set things right, solve all the problems.
Don't be ashamed al, you are what you are. And so is Obama.
And please, no pointless excerpts from bygone days.

And ironically,the real left in America,of which I'm absolutely no part,doesn't even think much of him because he's much too conservative for them!
But America on the whole has gone so far right that any one who is even slightly to the left of Archie Bunker is automatically labeled a socialst,Marxist and communist.

I'm pretty dense today - this is parody, yes?

Nope. Not parody. That's why it's not worth responding to.

Wall Street, Big Pharma and the HMO's put their money on Obama and his party, so if he is a socialist, major elements of capitalism are fine with it. Maybe our political lexicon needs either, more nuance or a serious overhaul.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/The-numbers-are-in-As-of-Oct-1-Dems-outrai

43 million people on food stamps, 43,000,000/310693000 x 100% = 13.84%. That is frightening.

The Chicken

No, Tony it isn't. I would somewhat qualify the first sentence and likewise with the "on the whole" of the second (if that is correct, we are truly lost) but, by today's Movement standards, Goldwater and Reagan arguably wouldn't pass muster. If you are unaware of this, you would do well to widen your sources of information.

"It is a non sequitur to assert Obama's beliefs based on what someone else may believe, you see al, they are different persons, think hard. More over they don't order Obama what to think or do, rather it is the reverse."

Johnt, you are asserting that the Cossacks work for the Czar which would be a perfectly valid argument had I made a different claim. What those claiming that Obama desires a radical, socialist, whatever agenda and disagreeing with my point have to explain is why the Czar, desiring x, would appoint Cossacks who don't believe in x, have never believed in x and, once in their appointed stations, pursued not-x.

I would add to my list reappointing Bernanke, a conservative Republican, as Fed chairman, and failing to fill vacancies on the Fed Board in a timely manner.

"Deficits are not out of control? OK, they're under control, at $1.3 tril and going forward,"

Given the drop in revenues due to the recession, we would have had large deficits regardless of who was president. Most of the present deficit is due to this drop off, the Bush tax cuts, bringing two previously unfunded wars on budget, and Medicare part D. That is the present administration had nothing to do with bulk of the present deficit.

"The economy isn't sluggish? Are you drunk?"

The economy blew up in 2008 before Obama was in office. The sluggishness is arguably due to Republican tactics designed to regain power (which worked).

"Higher taxes, the wish was there big time, including a VAT, but we did have an election, sorry, and we still don't know the full details of the Debt Commission,"

This is simply incoherent. Whatever your wishes about his wishes, the reality is that most folks had a tax cut under Obama and the Dems. We knew all we needed to know about the Debt Commission when Alan Simpson was appointed co-chair. The work released this week seems to favor tax cuts for the wealthy and higher taxes for everyone else.

"'Unsustainable entitlements'" - I believe the last major unsustainable entitlement was Medicare part D which was a conservative Republican project.

"the health care bill" is currently paid for.

"a heavily subsidized mortgage market, which continues to sink" And you have an alternative for the short term?

"43 million people on food stamps" which has nothing to do with Obama being or not being a "socialist".

"billions to states to buttress their civil service work force" which is what you want to in a recession as laid off folks then go on to collect unemployment and compete with folks already out of work from the private sector.

"etc & so on." Making a laundry list of discontents doesn't make a case for socialism or anything other than that one is mad as hell and isn't inclined to take it anymore. Conservatives have always had a tendency to define anything with which they disagree as being of their current bogyman.

Ezra Klein has an interesting post this morning which explains why the use of the term "socialist" is absurd and which the history-challenged should find informative.

"As an addendum to the previous post, it's worth thinking about partisanship and health-care reform not in terms of President Obama, but in terms of presidential efforts over the last century or so. And that story has gone something like this: Democrats moved right every time they failed. And Republicans moved further right every time Democrats tried."

"The original idea, of course, was a national health service run by the government. Harry Truman proposed it and fell short. Lyndon Johnson got it for seniors and some groups of the very poor. But Republicans said that was too much government, and it was unacceptable for the whole country. They proposed, through President Richard Nixon, an employer-based, pay-or-play system in which the government would set rules and private insurers would compete for business."

"That didn't go anywhere, because Democrats, led by Sen. Ted Kennedy, weren't ready to give up on a national health service. By the 1990s, they were. President Bill Clinton proposed an employer-based, pay-or-play system in which the government would set rules and private insurers would compete for business. Republicans killed it. Government shouldn't be telling businesses what to do, they said, and it shouldn't be restructuring the whole health-care market. Better to center policy around personal responsibility and use an individual mandate combined with subsidies and rules making sure insurers couldn't turn people away. That way, the parts of the system that were working would remain intact, and the government would only really involve itself in the parts that weren't working."

"That was what Sen. John Chafee -- and Bob Bennett, Kit Bond, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar -- proposed in 1994. It's what Mitt Romney passed in Massachusetts. And so it was what Democrats proposed in 2010. The Republican answer? 'Hell no, you can't!'"

"By this point, there were no more universal health-care approaches for Republicans to hold out as alternatives. So they just turned against the idea entirely. Cato's Michael Cannon organized "the anti-universal coverage club." John Boehner released a bill that the CBO said would cover 8 percent as many people as the Democrats' plan."

"So over the last 80 years or so, Democrats have responded to Republican opposition by moving to the right, and Republicans have responded by moving even further to the right. In other words, Democrats have been willing to adopt Republican ideas if doing so meant covering everybody (or nearly everybody), while Republicans were willing to abandon Republican ideas if sticking by them meant compromising with the Democrats. But because Democrats were insistent on getting something that would help the uninsured, they've ended up looking like the partisans, as they keep pushing bills Republicans refuse to sign onto."

This also may be of interest,

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/11/obamas_moderate_health-care_la.html

I guess this means you're not going to read Kurtz's book, al?

It's called opportunity cost, William. There are still people writing books about the flatness of the earth, geocentrism, various far-left theories on all sorts of things, etc. As I indicated in an earlier comment, the approach that Kurtz uses has a long history on the right. It is intellectually dishonest and gives bogus results. The question I have, as we have but a short time on this coil, is why anyone would choose to take the time, time that could be spent reading real books, enjoying friends and family, etc. and read dreck like that?

I will make a deal with you. Give us a satisfactory explanation as to how a health care plan that is full of what until recently were conservative ideas is somehow socialistic. Tell us how Ezra is wrong.

(N.B. I am asking you to go beyond mere disagreement and explain how the elements of the plan are specifically socialistic (socialistic being used in a historically coherent manner), not just something you don't like.)

Kurtz has a pretty good reputation as a researcher of things. Why don't you give it a chance? I've never heard him called dishonest before, or his results bogus. It's possible, I suppose.

re healthcare, a man could be socialist and still have to live with results that fall short of his expectations.

I will make a deal with you. You never said what the deal is.

William, you wrote this,

"Kurtz presents evidence, apparently a mountain of it, of a very long and consistent socialist pedigree in Obama's background, and not a molehill of same that he has parted company with it",

based on this from the review,

"Readers of Kurtz’s book will see example after example of how Obama’s otherwise inexplicable actions — such as pushing health care ahead of jobs in a time of economic downturn — make perfect sense if he is acting according to the theories and programs of the mentors he took along with him when he moved into the political arena. By keeping his real views hidden — the chosen policy of the descendants of Saul Alinsky who argue for masking socialist convictions — the political organizers can push the country in a direction it may not want."

Yet we have a health care bill that preserves insurance companies, a conservative Republican as Fed Chair, neo-liberals at the top of the economic team, banks "stress-tested" instead of seized, continuation of the Bush Administration terrorism policies, etc. It isn't enough to claim that he hasn't "parted company" you have to establish it from evidence. you haven't.

You quote Radosh quoting Kurtz.

"With a 'thoroughgoing pattern of deception,' he misled the American people into believing that he was a post-ideological pragmatist."

Yeah, except that the simplest explanation for the administration's actions is that they actually took the post-ideological stuff seriously.

Also consider Axelrod's statement over the weekend as to "taking the world as we find it" and contrast it with this from the Republican Congressional leadership,

“If the goal of the majority is to govern, what is the purpose of the minority?” one slide asked.

“The purpose of the minority,” came the answer, “is to become the majority.”

"The presentation was the product of a strategy session held 11 days before Mr. Obama’s inauguration, when top Republican leaders in the House of Representatives began devising an early blueprint for what they would accomplish in Tuesday’s election: their comeback."

Unless one has observed both closely, one cannot appreciate that the left is obsessed with process and the right with power. This is likely a function of the "ideologicalness" of a given entity as the ideological left tends (more accurately from a historical perspective, tended) to have the same lust for power.

If one is oblivious to this difference, one is going to likely misinterpret what one sees. Hence a creature of the right is going to look at the left and see conspiracy where there is merely toleration and a creature of the left will look at the right and confuse delusion with determination.

Recall Mark Schmitt's article referenced above as to what had to be Republican reaction to the 2008 election and compare it with Axelrod's reaction to the 2010 election.

There is currently a relevant discussion on various left and center left blogs on the political and policy failings of the Obama administration. A little surfing woulf be rewarding.

Also I found this on Hewitt's blog,

“SK: Right, and the novelty of it, Hugh, really just comes from acknowledging the novelty of American socialism itself since the 1960s. One of the reasons that I, as an academic, who had even taught Marx in a great books program at a university, I resisted the socialism argument, because I had a very traditional definition of socialism in mind, full nationalization of the means of production by the government. But what happened in the 80s, as Obama was coming into the movement, was a de-emphasis on nationalization, understandable because Ronald Reagan was president at the time, and instead a turn to local organizing and grass roots strategies for getting a hold of the economy. So socialism itself changed, and de-emphasized nationalization, and came up with all sorts of other strategies. And these are the sorts of things I lay out in the book. And as soon as you understand this much more recent and novel world of socialism, all the connections to the Obama administration play and start emerging."

http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/3ae20bfd-919b-48bc-9d23-ce8d2075a215

The above quote shows what I suspected which is that "socialism" is the name conservatives use to signal disapproval. It no longer has any coherent meaning as "no one" really believes in nationalization and five year plans any more.

My deal was to read the book if you could make a case for the HCR being socialistic (I was interrupted by a marauding deer herd, hence the omission, sorry). As you seem to agree it isn't and as the Kurtz quote from HH's blog renders "socialism" meaningless in any analytically serious sense the issue seems resolved.

You have to consider the source when the word "socialist" or "socialism" is used on the Right. Unfortunately some throw it around just as loosely as some on the Left throw the word "fascist" around.

Still, while I wouldn't call Obama a full-on socialist in the historical sense, he undoubtedly has socialist/Marxist leanings. Thing is, new-style socialists and neo-Marxists (what Paul Gottfried calls post-Marxists) have concluded that they don't need economic nationalization to accomplish their goals; they can do it just as handily with a combination of state/corporate centralization and cultural "soft" totalitarianism.

There is currently a relevant discussion on various left and center left blogs on the political and policy failings of the Obama administration.

Relevant to whom? Those who study social pathologies?

Another god who failed. It won't stop the credulous acolytes from looking for a new divinity, or returning to pray to this one should his mystical powers to calm the seas and heal the earth reappear.

Days of zealous devotion and ecstatic worship followed by paralyzing doubt and dark nights of the soul await those who subscribe to political religions.


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