Crowding Obama
The mindless throngs assembled to worship their savior, Senator Obama, bring to mind José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.
Street mobs and mass demonstrations are a product of socialism, beginning with the Parisian mobs who assaulted the Bastille on July 14, 1789, then dragged government ministers from their homes and hanged them from the lamp posts.
Everything about these mass demonstrations is anathema to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which was intended to protect individual political liberties from the power of the mob. Today, liberal-progressive Federal judges justify abrogation of individual liberties, particularly property rights, by reference to mob sentiment.
A fundamental part of Senator Obama’s campaign rests upon confiscating people’s wealth and redistributing it to the lower income elements of the mob.
In The Masses Today, I noted:
Writing in 1929, José Ortega y Gasset described the new phenomenon emerging in post-World War I Europe. The masses had come to believe themselves entitled to the technological benefits of civilization without understanding or preserving the cultural underpinning of that civilization.
That, unfortunately, is applicable to the United States in the post-1960s student anarchist upheavals. Senator Obama and his supporters are dead sure that everyone is entitled to whatever he wants, at government expense, and moreover, that we can afford it. This without understanding the economic realities that have produced what we have already.
Along the same lines, Fouad Ajami writes in the Wall Street Journal:
The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.
For more observations regarding José Ortega y Gasset’s analysis of the 20th century’s masses, see The Sordidness of Liberal-Progressivism.
Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
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