The Obaman counter-revolution
By Bruce Walker
web posted April 6, 2009
Barack Obama and his Democrats are not attempting a revolution in American government or politics: what Obama is attempting instead is a counter-revolution. What has been the establishment in America? Anyone who seriously believes that champions of liberty, opponents of big government, and foes of totalitarianism have been running our institutions over the last fifty years is crazy. The radicals of the 1960s were not rebelling about what their professors told them: they were, instead, advancing the collectivist elitism of their professors. I endured these dull dons of the classroom decades ago. They held no new thoughts. They had no fresh ideas. They were, instead, mean priests of an old intolerant religion which we call the "Left." Barack Obama learned his catechism under these narrow-minded champions of the Old Regime.
Which instrument of political power does the Left seek to employ? The Democrat Party, a party whose power has historically come from the racist populism of the South and the corrupt big city machines of the industrial North. This is the same political party which controlled the House of Representatives for sixty-eight years and which controlled the Senate sixty-two years of the last seventy-two years. This is the Old Regime. It has dictated what happens in American government. Barack Obama chose the party of the Ku Klux Klan and the party of the big city machine as a way to bring change? No, he chose the Democrat Party because he feared change.
The Left has dominated the entertainment industry for almost seventy years. Although Hollywood once produced true rebels like Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan, there are only a few very conspicuous free thinking actors in the film industry today. Ben Stein, Sylvester Stallone, and Kelsey Grammar not have much in common, except that they are part of the tiny few who reject the orthodox, predictable doctrines of establishment entertainment. Barack Obama cleaves tightly to the Hollywood set, whose careers depend upon predetermined thought and sentiment.
The Leftist domination of the media is thorough. Polls in the last election cycle showed that even most Democrats believed that the mainstream media was trying to elect Obama. Moreover, the theoretically "competing" parts of the Leftist media never criticizes its notional rivals. CNN does not take on MSNBC for being absurdly pro-Obama; Newsweek never publishes exposes of the "news" stories in the New York Times. The groupthink of the establishment media is simply mind-numbing. Yet this is the tool that Obama uses to converse with us.
Pampered academia, the old and corrupt Democrat Party, the venal and mindless entertainment industry, and the paid flacks of the mainstream media are not – indeed, they could not be – the sources of any type of revolution or change. What the victory of Obama represented was not the triumphant of revolution but rather the triumphant of reaction. Obama is leading a vast counter-revolution.
A counter-revolution against what? A counter-revolution against the revolution of Ronald Reagan. A counter-revolution against the House Republicans who, in one single day, enacted a series of institutional reforms which the overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House also supported – true revolutionaries, in a few short hours, did more than the Democrat overlords of Congress had been able to do in forty-six years. A counter-revolution against Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levine, and the whole flourishing underground of non-Leftists on radio and on the internet, who with little more than the power of their words have been able to incite millions of Americans to cast off the chains of Leftism and to breathe the air of free thought.
Barack Obama is not trying to create anything new. He is trying to preserve the existing power structure in America. He is trying to return us to the bad old days when Leftist professors and instructors indoctrinated our minds, when ward heelers and labor leaders ran our government, when empty-headed film stars guided our moral compass, and when functionaries of giant Leftist corporations filtered our speech and information. When we Barack Obama speak in lofty terms about "change" and "hope," what we are really seeing is "same" and "nope." Obama and the Democrats are not attempting any sort of revolution. They are seeking, instead, a seedy replay of what has failed already. They dream not of a new, free America. They fight a savage campaign for the Obaman Counter-Revolution. 
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.