The New New Deal By Charles R. Kesler
Adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on February 1, 2010, during a four-day conference on “The New Deal,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.
EXCERPT Unlike most Americans, President Obama still bristles at any suggestion that our nation is better or even luckier than other nations. To be blunt, he despises the notion that Americans consider themselves special among the peoples of the world. This strikes him as the worst sort of ignorance and ethnocentrism, which is why it was so difficult for him to decide to wear an American flag lapel pin when he started running for president, even though he knew it was political suicide to refuse wearing it.
As President Obama hinted in his Berlin speech during the campaign, he really thinks of himself as a multiculturalist, as a citizen of the world, first, and only incidentally as an American. To put it differently, he regards patriotism as morally and intellectually inferior to cosmopolitanism.
And, of course, he is never so much a citizen of the world as when defending the world’s environment against mankind’s depredations, and perhaps especially America’s depredations.
In general, the emotionalist defense of the earth—think of Al Gore—is now a vital part of the liberalism of our day. It’s a kind of substitute for earlier liberals’ belief in progress.
Although his own election—and secondarily liberalism’s achievements over the past century or so—help to redeem America in his view, Obama remains, in many ways, profoundly disconnected from his own land.
REST HERE http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
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