Following Obama’s Lead, Collectivists Are Coming Out of the Closet

Image courtesy of Bosch Fawstin.

collectivism:

Any of several types of social organization that ascribe central importance to the groups to which individuals belong (e.g., state, nation, ethnic group, or social class). It may be contrasted with individualism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first modern philosopher to discuss it (1762). Karl Marx was its most forceful proponent in the 19th century.Communism, fascism, and socialism may all be termed collectivist systems.

See also communitarianism.

Yes. Do see also communitarianism. Key Obama flunky, Van Jones, (now a commentator at CNN), recently described his former boss as a “communitarian.”

Later, when asked (off tape) to define “communitarian,” Jones was unable to answer or to point toward any source for a definition. He said there wasn’t really a way to look up “communitarianism.”

He did reiterate, however, that he saw communitarianism as a counterbalance to libertarianism, which he equated to “individualism.”

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Flashback to July 31, 2012: Obama’s Secret Collectivist Plan For His Second Term.

Last summer, when there was still hope that our country would avoid voting for its own demise, I read a poll that found that Americans were  unenthusiastic about Obama campaign priorities.

“Unenthusiastic?” I thought. ” They should be more than “unenthusiastic”.  Obama’s goals should he win a second term should have middle class Americans hyperventilating in terror.”

I had just read Ron Radosh’s PJ Media review of Stanley Kurtz’s Spreading the Wealth:

What Stanley Kurtz has accomplished in his new book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, to be published on August 2, is nothing less than the complete exposure of President Barack Obama’s secret plans for his second term in office — plans that in reality amount to an assault on the values, well-being ,and quality of life of the very middle-class voters he claims to represent.

The unfortunate title — not an attention-grabber in bookstores —does not covey the breadth of his research, the scholarly yet readable and comprehensive analysis of where the president is coming from, and the nature of the social policy Obama will put into practice if he wins a second term. They amount to an entire gamut of initiatives, some well underway, to redistribute wealth not from the fabled 1% — who really do not have enough to save us from fiscal Armageddon even if the government took 80% of their profits — but from the average, middle-class, hardworking citizens who sought better lives and realized the American dream by moving to the suburbs, where the air is cleaner, the schools are decent, and life is peaceful and integrated.

These citizens are the very swing voters Obama is now courting; his many TV commercials about helping the middle class target them. What Kurtz reveals in chilling detail is that the group of radicals surrounding the president — names most of us (including me) are not familiar with — are nevertheless as dangerous and extreme in their goals as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. While those three are persona non grata in the White House, these unknown radicals are just as important, and they are planning social policy with Obama’s approval.

If Obama were honest, Kurtz wrote, he would say the following to the American people:

My fellow Americans, to be honest, I have some serious reservations about the way this country is structured. In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. … But individual actions, individual dreams are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations. Locally those collective actions… have got to be pushed at the regional level in such a way as to unite small towns and suburbs with nearby cities.The whole federalist system, as the founders created it, is too geared toward John Wayne-style individualism. You pick up and move to a suburb in search of your American dream. But this leaves less well-off folks behind, so classic federalism extracts a price this country can no longer afford to pay. The only way to make certain this nation’s wealth gets more equally divided among all Americans is to run our country more centrally. That way no one can pick up and take his tax money to another town, suburb, or state without sharing it with someone less fortunate. That’s why I plan to do everything in my power to advance federal and regional control of America’s tax money and especially of America’s system of education, so as to eliminate the  local differences upon which our long but troubled tradition of John Wayne-style individualism rests.

Obama, Kurtz shows, is running an active Alinskyite program in the present, not simply in the 1980s. It is a radicalism of a hidden, regionalist agenda, carefully kept below the radar, something that its exponents actually brag about. The programs waiting to be implemented actually are “nothing less,” Kurtz writes, “than a direct attack on large sections of his own middle-class supporters.”

Here’s a great example of Obama’s vision  – in this case – West Philly: Stories of Government: 30 Blocks of Squalor:

About one year ago, a construction project began on the existing parking lot at 35th and Girard Avenue. I had no idea what they were building and why. Before long it became evident they were building a big ass parking garage. I was stumped. The zoo had multiple existing parking lots that were NEVER filled.

As the months went on I realized they were building the Shangri La of parking garages with a majestic glass tower in front.

It all began to make sense when they installed the enormous signage naming this parking garage the CENTENNIAL INTERMODAL TRANSPORTATION CENTER. Orwell must be so proud. Liberal Democratic politicians now give grand flowing names to parking garages.

Now that I had a name for this unnecessary albatross I was able to do a google search to find out how much this 683 space, union constructed parking palace amidst squalor actually cost. I was flabbergasted to find out it cost $24 million. You can be sure it could have been built for $16 million if it had been built non-union. For some perspective, IKEA builds 300,000 square foot retail stores for $18 million. Now for the best part. YOU paid for 30% of this porkulus project. Your Federal tax dollars funded a major portion of this project.

Keep reading. It gets worse. How many criminally moronic and wasteful projects like this one are happening in cities across the nation, I wonder.

Flashback to  March 30, 2o12, The Collectivist Makes His Case: “You’re On Your Own” Economics Doesn’t Work:

Via RCP, here’s Obama speaking at a fund-raiser at one of his favorite types of venues; a college in Vermont:

“You know, each of us is only here because somebody somewhere felt responsibility, yes to their families, but also to their fellow citizens. Also to our country’s future. That’s the American story. The American story is not just about what we do on our own. Yes, we’re rugged individualists, we expect personally responsibility and everybody out there has got to work hard and carry their weight,” President Obama said at a fundraiser with college students at the University of Vermont.

“We also have always understood that we wouldn’t win the race for new jobs and businesses, and middle class security if we were just applying some ‘you’re on your own economics,’” Obama said.

“It’s been tried in our history and it hasn’t worked,” Obama said. “It didn’t work when we tried it in the decade before the Great Depression. It didn’t work when we tried it in the last decade. We just tried this. What they’re peddling has been tried — it did not work!”

Flashback to March 2008:

Back in 2008, I directed attention to this December 1995 Chicago Reader interview of then candidate for IL State Senate, Barack Obama. I found his attack on individualism  to be quite alarming. Sadly, when you read his words from 1995 and compare them to what he is saying, today, you find that his collectivist philosophy has remained remarkably consistent over the years.

“In America,” Obama says, “we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”

Out of appreciation for the fact the most Americans have this “bias” for rugged individualism, Obama still pays  lip service to it, today,  to even left-wing college crowds. But the song remains the same – individual actions are not sufficient.

“You didn’t build that.”

Fast forward to April 2013: Melissa Harris Perry speaking for Obama’s  PR outlet, MSNBC: 

Narrating a new MSNBC “Lean Forward” spot, the Tulane professor laments that we in America  “haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children.” “[W]e have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities,” Harris-Perry argued.

“Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.” By “investments,” of course, Harris-Perry means things like spending “as much in public education as we should have.”

And doubling down on her position in another MSNBC  spot: 

“This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”

And here’s a related story featuring a kindred spirit teaching 4th graders in Florida…..

Report: Florida Teacher Forced Students To Write, “I Am Willing To Give Up Some Of My Constitutional Rights…”

The Blaze broke this latest example of a left-wing teacher trying to indoctrinate children after an attorney had come to the Jacksonville elementary school to teach the students about the Bill of Rights.

The words are written in crayon, in the haphazard bumpiness of a child’s scrawl.

“I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.”

They’re the words that Florida father Aaron Harvey was stunned to find his fourth-grade son had written, after a lesson in school about the Constitution.

I’m still waiting for mainstream America to wake up and connect some dots.

Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher sees what’s going on. In his excellent piece at TPNN, he cut loose:

,,,the President, along with Democrats in Congress and collectivists in the media has let the closet door creak open.

Any discerning citizen can see for themselves that this is a three-legged stool of oppression whose goals are to “fundamentally transform” this nation from one of liberty and individual freedom to one dominated by The State. You and your ilk, Mr. Biden, have become emboldened. When the light comes on, the cockroaches are no longer scrambling into the cracks – they’re looking right into the camera and spewing Marxist doctrine, railing against Capitalism and convincing large swaths of ignorant voters that conservatism is a disease in need of a cure.

You heard it the other day – loud and clear by way of NBC: “Your kids don’t belong to you. They belong to the community…:” My God, it’s like a bad movie, yet it’s happening.

I was thinking virtually the same thing last week, as I reported on the Army’s recent attacks on religion. Seriously…What’s it going to take to wake people up???

For a palette cleanser, here’s AlfonZo Rachel unleashing a blistering attack on Harris-Perry.

Melissa Harris Perry, like the president, sees success as creating mind-numbed drones who no longer have the ability to think or care for themselves. They’re told what to think and how to feel and what to do. If they’re told they’re supposed to be upset about Kermit Gosnell. They’ll get upset about Kermit Gosnell. But if no one tells them it’s a problem – that a woman’s right to choose trumps all other human rights – they’re fine with it. ‘What do our collectivist thought leaders want us to think?’ The drones ask. ‘We’re conflicted. It seems like it might be bad, but abortion is a basic human right found in the Constitution. Slaughtering fully formed newborn babies  by the thousands – we’re not sure if we’re supposed to have a moral problem with this, or not’, they stew.

Memo to you “Collectivists”, “Communitarians”, “Statists”, “Communists”, “Socialists”, “Marxists”, “Progressives” — whatever the hell you want to call yourselves…

Hands off my children.