Barack Hussein Obama: Profile of a Doctrinaire Ideologue

Relatively few recognize that Obama's politics is the product of years of reflection and, as such, possesses a self-consciousness that invests it with a rigor conspicuously absent from the political mental cast of most of his fellow Democrats.

Analyses of Barack Obama continue to proliferate, but from what I have been able to canvass, it appears our current President remains something of a mystery to left- and right-leaning commentators alike.  Each person's life is a text, I believe, a work of art, and not unlike any other specimen of art, potentially susceptible to a multiplicity of mutually distinct yet comparably legitimate interpretations.  Thus, any person's life, whether one's own or that of another, possesses to some extent an inescapable degree of ambiguity.  Yet it is both unfortunate and inexcusable that the pundits have had such a difficult time deciphering the political cast of mind of Obama, for it is significantly more legible than their commentary would lead one to believe.

Before piecing together what Obama is, however, we need to be clear as to what he is not.

First, Obama is most decidedly not a conservative. On this score it is doubtful that we will hear much argument to the contrary, but it shouldn't be forgotten that right up until the election, there were some on the Right who tried to convince themselves and the rest of us that, if not a full fledged conservative, the Democrat contender was at a minimum more conservative than his more outspoken detractors credited him with being.  That this proposition has by now been exposed for the utter nonsense that it is would be enough to give me hope that the delirium from which it arose has finally been abated — if only I didn't know better.

Second, nor is Obama a "moderate."  Those on the Right who had high hopes that Obama would govern as a "centrist" were only slightly less delusional than those who argued for his "conservative" bona fides.

Third, contrary to the opinion expressed by many of his critics, Obama is not a "classic," "conventional," or "standard" liberal Democrat.  Many a left-wing politician inhabit the United States (sadly), but almost always their politics strike the observer as being a hybrid creature, the descendant of habit and emotion, on the one hand, and a lust for power, on the other.  Given its mixed parentage, as well as it unsystematic character, it recognizes the need to accommodate the exigencies of time and place: that is, it is open to compromise. 

Obama's politics, in contrast, is of a fundamentally different breed.

It is this fact that his critics have singularly failed to grasp.

That Obama is a leftist is a statement to which few will take exception. Nor are there many willing to deny the radical nature of his leftist politics. But it appears that relatively few recognize that Obama's politics is the product of years of reflection and, as such, possesses a self-consciousness that invests it with a rigor conspicuously absent from the political mental cast of most of his fellow Democrats.

Far from being disposed to hear the call of compromise, Obama's politics is determined to silence its voice altogether.  This, of course, is not to suggest that Obama is or would be unwilling to make temporary concessions — but any such concessions are permissible if and only if they are deemed to stand a greater chance than not of advancing the ultimate ends of his robust and unabashedly leftist political vision.  In other words, whereas the average left-wing Democrat is mostly concerned with achieving short-term strategic victories, Obama wouldn't consider taking his eye off the prize of winning the war.

There is another way to characterize the distinction between Obama's politics and the politics of his Democratic brethren.  While the latter's identity is sufficiently discernible, it is nevertheless a sort of ramshackle construction, a clumsy composition of disparate ideas, many of which lie obscured by the positions on policy issues within which they are buried; just a little digging readily exposes expected incoherences. The former, in stark contrast, is animated by a robust and grandiose philosophical vision that pervades and unites each of its parts.

There is ample evidence to substantiate my description of Obama, the strongest of which is to be found within his first memoir, Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  It is here that he admits to having immersed himself, as a college student, in the avant-garde literature that is the standard diet required by humanities and liberal arts departments in the contemporary university. Such Marxian and neo-Marxian variations as feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism are among the leftist studies in which Obama engaged.  It was during this time that he familiarized himself with the radicalism of Marxist "anti-colonialist" Frantz Fanon, and found himself indelibly impacted by The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

That a person attends an American college or university, whether just for undergraduate studies or graduate and postgraduate studies as well, does not by itself insure that he or she will embrace the leftist radicalism to which college students are invariably, regularly, and thoroughly exposed. I, for example, have a doctoral degree in philosophy, a branch of the liberal arts.  Liberal arts departments, unlike their natural science and engineering counterparts, are a bastion for precisely the sort of doctrinaire radicalism to which I refer, and yet I managed to resist its encroachments (in fact, I went so far as to write a master's thesis and a doctoral dissertation defending conservatism).  Unfortunately, however, it is a relatively rare thing for a student to achieve this immunization.    

Obama certainly didn't; nor did he even try. Rather, our 44^th president all too eagerly devoured the anti-Western fare that he was fed. And while his thinking may very well have undergone some modifications since he stopped teaching law at the University of Chicago, his twenty-plus year membership in Jeremiah Wright's church — saturated as it is with "Liberation Theology" — in addition to his relationships with other radicals of various sorts and, finally, the economic policies that he is now promoting, establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama's commitment to a Marxian ideology of a kind remains as steady as ever.

This, of course, is not to say that Obama subscribes to every, or even most, of the prescriptions that Karl Marx specified in The Communist Manifesto. Much less is it intended to suggest that Obama endorses Marx's metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of history.  In fact, I am not so sure that Obama ever read much of Marx's (and Engels') own work, for the Marxist flavor which Obama has never been able to purge from his mouth derives, at least primarily, from the literature of Marxists — feminists who substitute gender and "anti-colonialists" and "critical race theorists" who substitute race for Marx's focus on "class."

Doubtless, Obama is interested in amassing power, but this isn't because he is primarily interested in his own self-aggrandizement.  Obama is genuinely committed to the ideological vision that he holds, and it is for the sake of promoting and implementing this vision that he desires the enormous quantum of power that he so fervently pursues: a vast apparatus of power is necessary for grandiose wealth redistributive schemes.

No, Obama is not your typical crass Democratic politician; he is a leftist ideologue, a true believer.