I think this describes some of my misgivings and as I have said in some other threads here refelcts the philosophical differences between libs/dems and rep/cons...one sees thing in a political light other seem them as cultural ...the term empty vessel keeps coming to mind....


Obama in Leftland
Don't know much about history...
by David Gelernter



Barack Obama is America's first major party presidential candidate to have come of age after the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and '70s. Americans who reached adulthood before or during the Cultural Revolution often differ over the big events of recent history. Americans who came of age afterward, on the other hand, don't necessarily know any recent history. And what they do know is often wrong. Every candidate makes mistakes on the stump, and voters allow for the gigantic g-forces exerted by the presidential campaign as it whirls candidates around the nation at terrific speed. But we have an obligation to ponder Obama's views of American reality in the context of his membership in the first generation fully shaped after the Cultural Revolution. Let's call it gen-CR. (The same applies to Sarah Palin, but she hasn't said the sort of crazy things Obama has.)


We know what to expect of gen-CR. Unless they have grown up in regions or families with an unusually strong grasp of tradition, patriotism, and reality, gen-CR'ers tend to have a fuzzy view of history, an unconditional belief in tolerance and diplomacy, and contempt for the military and war-making. Their patriotism (such as it is) tends to focus on the "global community" or "the planet" or some other large, meaningless object. (Beyond a certain point, patriotic devotion spread too thin simply evaporates-which is a good way to get rid of it if you are, say, an English intellectual trusting to the European Union to eradicate this primitive emotion.)


Before considering what sets Obama apart, consider what he has in common with the former candidate he resembles most, George McGovern-both affable, well-spoken gentlemen of the Democratic left with fanatic youthful supporters, who picked the wrong running mates. (McGovern was forced to call the bullpen and send in Shriver for Eagleton partway through the campaign.) McGovern was a wartime candidate, like Obama; both planned on widespread opposition to the war and dislike of the incumbent (aka "a need for change") to power them to victory. Of course Bush is no Nixon; nor is he up for reelection. In any case, McGovern got plastered. True, Obama passes for mainstream more effectively than McGovern ever did; on the other hand, thanks to a dramatic change of commanders and strategies, the United States is now winning its faraway war against terrorist armies and murderous ideologues underwritten by foreign powers, leaving Obama stuck for a foreign policy message.


Yet all those things applied to Vietnam in 1972 just as they do to Iraq today. Thanks to the substitution of Abrams for Westmoreland in May 1968, the war was slowly and surely being won. But the final outcome was a catastrophic defeat for the United States and (even worse) for all Vietnamese who had ever counted on us. Washington politicians collaborated in that defeat. If Obama is elected, the danger is real. America had better try to understand whether he thinks for himself or is a true-blue member of gen-CR, who has been taught that losing wars is character-building and that serious Americans find their own history embarrassing (and the less you know about it, the better). Consider three Obama pronouncements.

Last July he listed crises America has faced, including "the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor." He spoke of "constantly evolving danger," not of "enemies"; he said that we had "adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world," not beaten our enemies. Gen-CR recoils from the idea of enemies. As for "the bomb," Obama was presumably conflating Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.

However that may be, the statement is a prime specimen of gen-CR thinking.
Obama has proposed a "civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded [as the military]." Later he seemed to say (maybe) that this organization would support the military in noncombat duties. But in that case, why does it have to be so powerful? Whatever he had in mind, he was obviously not bothered by the ugly historical overtones of muscular national police forces or parallel armies. History is full of such organizations, from the Committee of Public Safety wreaking bloody havoc in revolutionary Paris to the immense terror-force of the Stalinist NKVD to Mao's murderous Red Guards. Because Obama (evidently) does not listen to history, he seems to have no sense of its hints and warnings.

His announcement that he would meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions shows exactly why a president must not merely know history but have a decently nuanced view. It was wrong for Chamberlain to meet Hitler and foolish for JFK to meet Khrushchev, but right for Begin to meet Sadat and for Churchill to make repeated long, dangerous

journeys to meet Stalin. It's obvious to all sorts of Americans-as it was obvious to Hillary Clinton at the time-that Obama's offer was dangerous and wrong, but the reasons are not easily reduced to a formula. "World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don't end up being used," was the way Joe Biden, then an Obama opponent, put it. "Don't invest American prestige in a high-risk meeting where you are likely to take a bath" is another way to put it; "don't invest American prestige where it tends to legitimize an international outlaw, unless urgent American interests stand in the balance" is still another. Either way, you have to understand "American prestige"-which is not a gen-CR-type concept.

If the presidency is no place for on-the-job training, it is no place for remedial education either. The problem with Obama is not so much that he lacks experience but that he talks-like so many others of his generation-as if he had a child's view of modern history and (hence) of modern American reality. Obama's candidacy also poses a more subtle and sinister problem. He didn't create it, and it's not his fault; but it's frightening nonetheless. Start with a given: An Obama administration might still bring about defeat in Iraq; speeded-up troop with-drawals might weaken this new democracy and bring on its collapse like a burnt-out log into a blaze of terrorist violence. But if it did-if the left's policies proved tragically mistaken-Obama's supporters would never know it. What would the collapse of America's noble project in Iraq look like in the funhouse mirrors of the New York Times, NBC, Time and Newsweek and NPR and the rest of the establishment media? "In the end, Bush policy plunged Iraq into chaos, but Obama was smart enough to pull out before more American lives were lost." And that's what Democrats would "know" about Iraq.

In broader terms, Obama is a warning: The CR generation is now in full flood and coming on strong. Those who think that the '60s revolution has run its course, that Americans are about ready to come home and live on friendly terms with their own history and traditions, should think again. Of course Joe Biden has reassured us that you don't have to come from gen-CR to talk nonsense. (Biden last week recalled how President Roosevelt appeared on TV to calm Americans after the stock market crash of '29.) Yet Biden may well have forgotten more history than Obama ever knew.


Nothing is more traditional than change. For every "morning in America" campaign there are ten New Deals, Fair Deals, New Frontiers, Great Societies, and Kinder, Gentler Americas on offer. Youth wants change by definition. The fervor of young Bob Dylan telling us in 1963 that "the times they are a-changin'  '' is still sad and touching. Obama is the quintessential child of the Cultural Revolution, who grew up in a society that was up to its neck in change. Those were the big change years (Obama is small change by comparison), and some of the changes were marvelous. The near-eradication of race prejudice within a single generation is an achievement that Americans will always (or should always) be proud of. But in most other respects the Cultural Revolution was a disaster-one which is still unfolding. Obama is the herald of Phase 2, in which self-conscious leftism is replaced by unconscious leftism, and culture-leaders who misinterpret history by a new generation that barely knows any history to misinterpret.

Members of the CR generation who had mainstream, establishment educations have been trained like pet poodles to understand where romping is allowed and where it is forbidden. The permissible range of thought on such topics as protected minorities, protected species, protected psychosexual deviations, et al. is clearly spelled out from kindergarten onward. Young teachers in the 1970s proudly acknowledged their political biases: They were the New Left in action, on a long march through the institutions. But many of today's young teachers-in consequence of the long march's brilliant success-don't even realize that they are left-wing ideologues. As far as they know, their ideas are innocuous and mainstream-just like the New York Times!
To understand this generational shift in the making, consider the resignation of Harvard president Lawrence Summers in 2006, under attack for having said that, just possibly, the far greater number of male than of female scientists might have to do with innate differences between men and women-something that a large majority of working scientists (male and female) almost certainly take for granted (whether or not they are willing to say so). But Summers had expressed a forbidden thought, and (despite his abject confessions and apologies at the Harvard show trials) was duly banished. In the gen-CR age now approaching, such embarrassing accidents will no longer happen.

Forbidden ideas simply won't occur to the Harvard presidents of the future.
Obama is the perfect model for a modern Harvard president. He might look back at his nation's history and see only a blur. But it's hard to imagine him ever thinking (much less saying) the sort of erroneous thought that doomed Summers. America's future has been intellectually housebroken. That's progress.

Obama in Leftland

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

Interesting that the author recognizes the '60s and '70s as a "cultural revolution." One doesn't often find cultural counter-revolutionaries (which this guy clearly is) willing to do that.

As always with Awakening eras, the period from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s changed the nation's values in a way that may (hopefully) allow us to navigate the civic crisis to follow some 40 years later, which we're in the early stages of now. Perhaps the most important cultural change to occur was exactly what Gelernter is decrying: the dampening of nationalism. The problems we face today - global economic meltdown, global terrorism, and global environmental and resource dangers - are beyond the ability of any one nation to solve, and so nationalism is a hindrance to solving them, not a help.

To say that Obama doesn't know much about history on the grounds that he doesn't agree with Gelernter's slant on it is presumptuous on Gelernter's part. I certainly do know a lot about history, including the history of that period, myself, and I find myself generally in agreement with Obama, not with Gelernter. For example, when he says that "Thanks to the substitution of Abrams for Westmoreland in May 1968, the [Vietnam] war was slowly and surely being won," he is making a VERY dubious claim indeed. When he says that "it was wrong for Chamberlain to meet Hitler," he goes beyond the dubious to the absurd. Nor was it "foolish for JFK to meet Kruschev." It's arguable that Chamberlain's diplomatic dealings with Hitler, or Kennedy's with Kruschev, were unsuccessful (actually it's hard to argue to the contrary), but it doesn't follow from this that they shouldn't even have tried.

It's true that someone who was born after a major upheaval, whether cultural or civic, can't have the same understanding of it as someone who lived through it. For the same reason, I can't have the same grasp of World War II or the Great Depression as my parents' generation. But what Gelernter is really complaining about is not that, but the fact that Obama seems to have the world view of the winning side in the cultural revolution, rather than the side Gelernter wishes had won. Obama is a sign that the revolution succeeded, and Gelernter would prefer it had not. This is not unlike someone of my parents' generation lamenting that I support the reforms of the New Deal, rather than considering them an abomination that should be rolled back.

David Gerlernter may be a very good computer scientist, but he is no historian. What he presents here is little more than partisan BS. If a cultural revolution occurred during the 1960s, it was rooted in the highest American values. It is not "un-American" to care what happens to other human beings, to be concerned about the environment, or to insist that the dignity of persons is an inviolable principle. In fact, such ideas can be traced much farther back, to Englishmen like John Locke (and later John Stuart Mill), to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, and to our nation's own founding fathers, Jefferson and Madison notably among them.

If there is conflict in working out the details of what the America of tomorrow will look like, that is healthy, because we want every facet to be thoroughly examined. If our nation were not amenable to change, we would still be holding a race of people in bondage, women would be treated as property and denied the right to participate in business or politics, and monopolists would control factories where children labored up to eighty hours each week under inhuman conditions. But we have changed--and we will continue to change whether David Gerlernter likes the idea or not. Our nation's history is one of PROGRESS toward the fulfillment of the ideals and aspirations of its founders, not one of intractable resistance to the improvement of our society.

Incidentally, I know a bit about history--enough to hold an endowed chair in that discipline at a major university. Gerlernter is, in my opinion, probably a fine computer scientist. But here he is out of his field.

If it wasn't as long as a dictionary, I'd comment a little more, but this really stood out:

A. The Cultural Revolution is already almost universally accepted as an event in modern Chinese political history. It is pointless at best and disengenuous at worst to use it in terms of US history.
B. The Presidency is most definitely a place for on-the-job training. Among many others in similar positions to BHO's, R. Reagan comes immediately to mind.

Gelernter has a very ironic name for someone who himself appears to know precious little history but plenty of partisan 3 Card Monte.

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All things serve The Beam

So the author's point is that the CR-generation are better than everybody else and are the only one's with the background, understanding, and moral backbone to hold the office of POTUS?

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Gelernter is of the CR-generation.

If members of the CR generation are the only ones fit to be president, what are we going to do in 20 years when they're all dead or in nursing homes?


And WTF!!!?? I thought my grandparents were part of the "greatest" generation...

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Congratulations President-Elect Obama

That was most definitely NOT the author's point.

It was an interesting piece, but I'd like to see something backing it up. Some well written jabs at the younger generations are all very well, but where is the proof that the CR generation doesn't, for instance know any history?

I didn't get the feeling that he was using the term deliberately to provoke a comparison with the Chinese event, but in fact "cultural revolution" is exactly the right term for the '60s-'70s. Besides the universality of unthinking nationalism, here's a short list of the cultural characteristics that could describe America in the early 1960s, but not in the late 1980s:

Our country was overtly racist for the most part, with the use of blood from blacks for white patients in transfusions, the integration of the military, and the idea of racial equality being highly controversial.

We were also overtly sexist. Women were shut out of most professions and occupations. A few jobs, such as teaching (below college level), nursing, and secretarial work, were culturally defined as "women's work," but for the most part women were expected to be homemakers and mothers and that's all.

Environmentalism was a controversial idea. I don't mean the way cutting-edge environmentalist ideas are controversial now, I mean the idea that we ought to protect the environment at all was controversial.

Sexually, the country was very puritan, at least on the surface. Abstinence until marriage, condemnation of homosexuality, and the idea that a woman who was open about her sexuality was some kind of slut, were part of the nation's consensus morality.

Now consider what our culture is like today. Wouldn't you agree that that amount of change, in such a short time, can be called revolutionary?

Unfortunately, that's true. The fact is, there's no other job that can prepare a person for the presidency. One learns on the job because there's no other choice.

I don't get the sense that he's partisan. I get the sense that he's a frustrated anti-Awakening Boomer who thinks the cultural changes listed above, or some of them, are the end of civilization.

lbs.....its half satirical in nature.....

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

well if you have not read it in entirety I cannot really takes your jibes seriously so...what can I say.

Yes Grracchus got it, hes using that as name for our what? Uhm- hippie turn on tune out drop out 60’s movement… ? Yea that’s about right…

It takes about 5 minutes to reads if that.....yes, hes is partisan, where in did he ever claim otherwise?

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

Gracchus, I have something off a parallel to draw... I would think by your name you have at least a rudimentary understanding of roman history, from different angels so here goes- a quick analogy- …I put Gelernter frame of reference ala CR at approx. 110 AD….no one takes much seriously anymore except their own grievances, or asks, gee if we beat every institution into the ground that got us to the point where in we have this much to expend, what will happen when we don’t have that engine and outlook that got us here? I mean who cares, we are drunk on peace, we own the world…..I got my sneakers my big screen etc etc,…

we have no equals, the big wars are, over Rome is unchallenged so to speak, morals slip, traditions erode no one gives shit about the punic wars which laid the groundwork for the empires riches and supremacy, which is being followed buy the afore mentioned, a profligate lifestyle and expense of treasure, which is basically fueled by a mindset that we have so much who cares if it the borders are being overrun, they are still so far away, who cares if the senate is basically a buyer and sellers market…bread and circus’…...or if you please- Ipods and happy meals….you do know gracchus, that you never really know it’s the end, till the end….…

The point is the post CR folks don’t have any idea of the struggle that went on before them nor are they really interested, just as a roman born in 90-100 AD is not connected to, other than very tenuously, to the struggles centuries ago and on top of that, hes part of a “disaffected” class…like a manumitted slave for instance …….…if you have children this might have struck you sooner, as I do and have listened to them seen their syllabus’ and text books…..time moves so quickly now, ww2/Korea might as well be the 3rd Punic war…and those brought up in my generation yes I am 48, well if you didn’t have a disaffection to hunker down with you would have one made or created for you….and it blinds you.

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

I can't really feel anything but pity and contempt for this guy if he actually believes that the cultural changes that came about during the 60's and 70's weren't overwhelmingly positive. The world has moved on and left people like that behind. The way he talks about tradition as if it's something inherently good and everyone should just take for granted that it's good is indicative of an extremely shallow, superficial worldview.

Dammit. You left me no choice but to actually read the article.... and what a waste of time!

The author is apparenly pretty bitter enough to enter a widespread attack on liberalism using generational bias and trying to pin it all on Obama.


I see this as a realization/concession by the author that Obama is likely to win. As a result, he claims that the sky is going to fall as if he's relating prophecy of the end times. I didn't see as much satire as I saw cynicism in the article.

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Congratulations President-Elect Obama

that’s not quite what hes saying either LBS...as to not having read the article before making the original comment, well, I don't see how you can expect anyone to take you seriously then if that the basis for exchanges here in threads etc...

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

I think this snippet works for you-

Young teachers in the 1970s proudly acknowledged their political biases: They were the New Left in action, on a long march through the institutions. But many of today's young teachers-in consequence of the long march's brilliant success-don't even realize that they are left-wing ideologues. As far as they know, their ideas are innocuous and mainstream-just like the New York Times!


bingo....

__________________
No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor