Nonstop Appeasement

"..........This systematic pusillanimity is not a new phenomenon. Other examples: the refusal by the Obama administration to criticize the Iranian regime when it put down the “Green Revolution” in 2009; the administration’s eagerness to “reset” relations with an increasingly hostile Russia; its secret negotiations with the Taliban even as the group continued its attacks on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; the refusal to meet with any Egyptian opposition groups other than the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama is hardly the first president to seek rapprochement with our adversaries and reconciliation with our enemies, of course. But his determination to make nice—even in the face of clear and repeated rejection from the other side—is unparalleled. For Obama and his team, diplomacy with rogue regimes is an end in itself, and any deal, however one-sided, is a win, especially one that the White House communications mavens think that friendly media will call a “breakthrough” or “historic.”

In that sense, Obama is America’s first postmodern president. If his predecessors tended to see the world in terms of good and evil, Obama sees the world in terms of victims and victimizers—with the United States often in the role of victimizer. In that view, long favored by the academic left that shaped a young Barack Obama, American foreign policy is one long train of abuses, marked by casual aggression and eager imperiousness.

So when a leftist leader like Mujica condemns the United States for the “heinous kidnapping” of al Qaeda operatives, Obama says nothing in protest. His silence is assent. And it’s a disgrace.

"....It is possible to be a socialist, and radical in one's agendas, and yet moderate in the means one regards as practical to achieve them. To change the world, it is first necessary to acquire cultural and political power. And these transitional goals may often be accomplished by indirection and deception even more effectively than by frontal assault. Political stratagems that appear moderate and compromised to radical factions of the left may present an even greater threat from the perspective of the other side. In 1917, Lenin's political slogan wasn't "Socialist Dictatorship! Firing Squads and Gulags!" It was "Bread, Land and Peace."....

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them......

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal—"social justice"—is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

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