Britannia Radio

Free Life Commentary, A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 176
8th November 2008

 
Barack Obama and America's 1997:
Welcome to the Club!
by Sean Gabb

I have been asked by several of my American readers to comment on their
presidential election. I did think to ignore these requests. Having spent
very little time there, I cannot be regarded as an expert on America. Nor
am I particularly fond of the place. I think its war of independence was
brought on less by the Stamp Act than by Lord Mansfield's judgement on
the illegality of slavery at common law. I also think its war between the
states was won by the wrong side. It would have been better for humanity
had the Union been broken up and its member states made into British
satellites. Sadly, the United States survived, and was able to grow into
the mercantilist oligarchy that took the most significant - because
ultimately the most successful - place in the triumvirate of Soviet
communism and European national socialism that ended the hegemony of
English liberalism.

Having considered the request, though, I do have something to say. The
range of opinion about Mr Obama's election seems to be marked at its
limits by the BBC and by organisations like Vdare and American
Renaissance. The former believes he is a fusion of Nelson Mandela and
Martin Luther King, and has turned its news broadcasts into a hymn of
secular joy. The latter believes that he is indeed Messrs Mandela and
Luther King - the real ones, that is, not the constructs of the
politically correct classes - and that he will surround himself with
Black Panther bodyguards and declare Ebonics the official language of
America.

I think both opinions are wrong. The first is not worth commenting on.
The second is wrong because so many American conservatives are still in
shock at the thought of having a black man to rule over them. Mr Obama
got his campaign funds in the usual way - from business interests that
will now want their reward. He will need to operate within a system that
remains dominated by whites. Within a year or so, the non-whites who are
still celebrating his victory will have noticed that nothing much has
changed as it affects their lives, and will be denouncing him as a white
man with a black face.

This is not to say, however, that nothing important has happened.
Something has happened, and it is both important and dreadful for the
American people. America has just had its equivalent of our 1997
revolution. Looking at the eighty four years until then, power in England
had become both more oppressive and less accountable. But the main
features of our Constitution remained in place, and conservatives had
been able to retain sufficient institutional power to slow down the drift
into tyranny. The election of New Labour allowed the wholesale
remodelling of the Constitution, so that little now remains around which
conservatives can unite. I now live in a country where power is less
restrained than at any time since the sixteenth century - where formal
sovereignty has been passed to various foreign agencies, where the media
is controlled, where civil liberties have been casually squashed, where
the armed forces have been made into instruments of an imperial
aggression that brings neither glory to their nation nor better
government  to their victims.

So it is now in America. The American Constitution and Bill of Rights
have always been a fraud. From slavery to civil asset forfeiture, they
have never restrained any abuse of power on which the American ruling
class has been determined. But the country is very large, and there has
usually been strong local suspicion of Washington. Given a ruling class
interested mainly in dividing up the profits of commercial privilege, and
prepared to indulge any right that did not get seriously in the way of
this, the American people were left with the appearance, and often the
reality, of much freedom.

The new presidency is no more about having a black man in charge than New
Labour was about having all those Scotch voices in government. It is
about a change in the ruling class. This is the election in which those
whose minds were captured in the 1960s and 1970s by the neo-Marxists have
taken over from their parents. The Clinton presidency was largely a
failure because the new ruling class was still too young, and because the
old ruling class had not grown too old to cling to power - and because
the Clintons were too easy to hate and despise. All is different now. The
new ruling class has no political opposition but a group of
neo-conservatives who disgraced themselves during the Bush presidency,
and who are probably less interested in opposition than in a few
compromises on foreign policy. And it has a figurehead that cannot be
mocked or even criticised without risk of the most horrid accusations.

Mr Obama cannot be more stupid in his actions or more embarrassing in his
utterances than Mr Bush has been. But his essential function as President
will be to shield the new ruling class of America while it carries
through a total transformation of American life. I do not know exactly
how America will change. But I can predict that, come 2016, most
Americans will no longer recognise their country. It will be less free.
It will be less prosperous. It will be less American. What has happened
in England, and what is happening in Australia, will now happen in America.

All this is to be regretted. I think increasingly, however, that if those
who are transforming the English world are to be blamed, those who are
being transformed are no less to be despised. In 1917, power was seized
in Russia by men who were prepared to murder anyone who so much as raised
an eyebrow at them. Whether they murdered thirty million or sixty million
people is important in the obvious sense. Where ensuring absolute
docility of the ruled is concerned, it is the first million who matter.
No one can blame the Russian people for grovelling before Stalin. But
none of the almost equally radical governments that have taken over in
the English world has killed any of its own citizens, or is proposing to
kill any. We have been enslaved by a small minority of intellectuals
whose most potent weapon is words. Any people who can be so enslaved
deserves to be enslaved.

But I am about to digress. I will only say for now that the American
people deserve Barack Obama. To some extent, he is their punishment for
tolerating, if not welcoming, eight years of George W. Bush. More
generally, they are about to lose nothing more than they have long since
abdicated their right to possess.

So, welcome, America - welcome to the New Labour Club.

NB-Sean Gabb's book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives
Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from
http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3 Any American who wants to understand the nature
of the Obama Revolution should buy a ocpy.

--
Sean Gabb (away from home computer)
Director, The Libertarian Alliance
sean@libertarian.co.uk
Tel: 07956 472 199
Skype Username: seangabb

http://www.libertarian.co.uk
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