Good call. Maybe the One attended their meetings at the University of Chicago? On a Soros or Bill Ayers scholarship, of course.
I would tend to doubt Obama believes in the Great Chain of Being. The positivism, postmodernism, and Critical Legal Studies he was presented with at Columbia and Harvard wouldn't allow that. There might be other ways to interpret Obama's ideology and with different schools of political philosophy. There were a couple threads a while back relating Obama to Joachim of Fiore and someone suggested The New Science of Politics there as one possibility. Maybe someone remembers that discussion, with the One positioning himself at the head of another "Third Age" of the spirit. Molnar's Utopia: The Perennial Heresy was also mentioned. When Obama made the elitist comments about people in small towns being "bitter" and "clinging to religion" it seemed like there might be more to what he was thinking there which could have come from Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style. Maybe he imprinted with that at Columbia?
This part was pretty good: "Niccolo Machiavelli and Italian rollercoasters of the 16th Century through the lens of radical Marxist theory and Critical Theory to deconstruct the foundations of hegemonic Modernism"
I think they are having a similar Lacanian seminar at Yale. But isn't liberalism of the 1960s American and Obama variety just another form of "hegemonic Modernism" (according to such theorists)?
But isn't liberalism of the 1960s American and Obama variety just another form of "hegemonic Modernism" (according to such theorists)? No doubt. There is little to suggest otherwise. The battle of the books has been decisively won by the moderns. Egalitarianism has prevailed: for example, there is no distinction between Michael Jackson dying at 50 from pill addiction and Glenn Gould dying at 50 from pill addiction. Michael will get more press but he ended no better off for his life in pop music than Gould for his life in classical music. The highs and lows balance out in death. None can escape it (though some post moderns believe that through language – Language is the House of Being, according to Heidegger – they can lock the door on death, lock it out of reality or their mental constructs, redefine it away, conquer it somehow with discourse, if discourse is all there is.) Modernism with its powerful science is also trying to conquer death. With no high or low cultures to guide us we look to the health of the body. Another tragic example is Allan Bloom, who believed in a high musical culture and thought that rock music was decadent: it corrupted the youth that should have been corrupted by some Socratic teacher figure, like himself. And like Socrates in the Republic, whose real antagonist was Homer, Bloom had to wage a battle for the hearts and souls of his students and listeners. He had to singlehandly wrestle Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger to the ground, thus championing the traditional benefits esteemed by liberal education and classical music. He was the street fighter, par excellence, for high culture. Ironically, IMHO, Bloom died from overdosing on Opera. Saul Bellow’s book "Ravelstein" exposed his addiction. Death from Opera? Yes, Bloom was taking the equivalent of a bucket of Opera pills daily and the adverse side effects were inflamed passions and irrationally. In this case you can’t pump the stomach. With love’s passion dominating his soul, induced by the erotic strains in Opera played at a high volume at all hours of the day, Bloom failed to take common sense precautions... and died of AIDS. So, in effect, high or low cultures don’t mean that much in the end. The real problem is death.
Now Bloom once met Michael Jackson in Paris. Jackson also worked a bit with Paul McCartney who, at the time of being a Beatle in 1964, was hated by Glenn Gould for "bad voice leading." Modernism is like a vicious circle, like the Ouroboros chewing on its own tail, falling back on itself, forming a Zero and an Obama; whereas the Ancients preferred the Chain of Being to form a hierarchy, a heavenly triangle that aspired upwards. Plato’s Republic is also a triangle shape and is suppose to mirror the soul. But Modernism can’t acknowledge a soul, only the body... and death.