Indeed.
Hegel has been enormously influential in the post-Enlightenment period. It seems to me he has two major lines of intellectual descent, the Nietzchean and the Marxian, and both are, to my mind, pernicious to the health of a decent, well-ordered society committed to the preservation of liberty under a rule of law of equal justice for all. To put it mildly.
The line of descent through Friederich Nietzche led to anarchism as further developed by such notable anarchists as Mikhail Bukhanin and Antonio Gramsci. The line of descent via Karl Marx led to communism, and to such notables as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al., and in contemporary times to Saul Alinsky.
Since I still don't know the first thing about BHO from his own mouth (and any inferences I might draw from his past radical associations are Verboten (unless you want to be labeled a racist), I cannot say whether he's read "the masters" on the above little list. But somehow I feel assured that his handlers, such as David Axelrod, are intimately familiar with the anarchist/socialist/communist literature.
Salamander, I just LOVE your tag line!!! LOLOL!
Though by no means comprehensive, the line of descent is from Lenin, Derzhinsky (?sp), and Lucacs (inventers of the bogus Marxist thinktank, the Frankfurt School) to Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (invited to the USA by progressive John Dewey), to Alinsky, to BHO.
As Pascal put it:
“It is in vain, O men, that you seek within
yourselves the cure for your miseries. Your
principal maladies are pride, which cuts you
off from God, and sensuality which binds you
to the earth. Either you imagine you are gods
yourselves, or, if you grasp the vanity of such
a pretension, you are cast into the other abyss,
and suppose yourselves to be like the beasts
of the field and seek your good in carnality.”
So without God, we were left with a choice of
megalomania or erotomania; the clenched fist
or the phallus; Nietzsche or Sade; Hitler or D.
H. Lawrence.
——Malcom Muggeridge