Post by Daniel on Nov 18, 2016 20:44:34 GMT -5
Its Arrogance and Condescension Finally Catches Up with the Left
by Rich Lowry November 18, 2016
Harping on the “right side of history” puts progressives on the wrong side of everyone else.
President Barack Obama won’t explicitly say that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely he believes it.
The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital “H.” In 2008, he declared John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility that McCain might get right with History at some future date).
Obama has returned to this phrase and argument obsessively. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind — and indirectly contributed to the Left’s catastrophic defeat on November 8.
The notion that History takes sides is a distant cousin to the Marxoid idea that we are on an inevitable path to socialism, and borrows heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists and civil-rights movement. Obama likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr. for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is considered on “the wrong side of history” by the Left is always loosely associated with the opprobrium of slavery and Jim Crow.
This means that progressives wield History as a weapon, and make it an occasion for constant self-congratulation. But there is a downside in the accompanying sense of smug inevitability that is off-putting at best and blinkered and self-deluding at worst.
Read more at: www.nationalreview.com/article/442299/barack-obama-progressive-arrogance-leads-backlash
by Rich Lowry November 18, 2016
Harping on the “right side of history” puts progressives on the wrong side of everyone else.
President Barack Obama won’t explicitly say that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely he believes it.
The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital “H.” In 2008, he declared John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility that McCain might get right with History at some future date).
Obama has returned to this phrase and argument obsessively. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind — and indirectly contributed to the Left’s catastrophic defeat on November 8.
The notion that History takes sides is a distant cousin to the Marxoid idea that we are on an inevitable path to socialism, and borrows heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists and civil-rights movement. Obama likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr. for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is considered on “the wrong side of history” by the Left is always loosely associated with the opprobrium of slavery and Jim Crow.
This means that progressives wield History as a weapon, and make it an occasion for constant self-congratulation. But there is a downside in the accompanying sense of smug inevitability that is off-putting at best and blinkered and self-deluding at worst.
Read more at: www.nationalreview.com/article/442299/barack-obama-progressive-arrogance-leads-backlash
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