Posted on 10/28/2010 1:31:10 AM PDT by paudio
But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.
Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Brilliant.
Yes, he is right about that bad faith in America as virtuous. I was a student at UC Berkeley in th early sixties and I remember that that mind set was very common. I was somewhat guilty of it myself although I didn’t fall for it as much as some did. Steele is quite correct in this analysis. He must have been there too. But most of us outgrew that naivte. Sadly those leftists never did.
We should have kept the kent state thing going. Problem solved.
LLS
Read on Rush ping.
BUMP
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