Saturday, October 12, 2013

Cultivating opposition

Daniel Greenfield knows

Obama, who had bent over backward to negotiate with Russia and Iran, refused to negotiate with the Republicans, and began a policy of punitively closing open air memorials to veterans, evicting people from private cottages on federal lands and even attempting to barricade the ocean.

The Obama myth is that he is a reasonable man being blocked by unreasonable Republicans at every turn. There are plenty of things wrong with that myth, but the biggest one is that Obama isn’t being handicapped by Republican obstructionism. He seeks out and cultivates Republican opposition.

The ideas of the left don’t just fail because they’re bad. They also fail because the left is more energized by hostilities than by any of the progressive programs that its leaders claim to be passionate about.

Obama isn’t a reluctant warrior. He’s a happy warrior. He cares far more about fighting Republicans than about winning amnesty for illegal aliens, gay marriage or ObamaCare—all things that he introduced haphazardly to win elections.

The Soviet Union did not really care about building Communism, a 93% successful harvest or universal literacy. Its bosses put it on a wartime footing as soon as they could and kept it that way until it bankrupted them. The one thing they really cared about was power. And once they had power over their own people, they quickly grew bored and began plotting to conquer and subdue other countries.

The left runs on conflict. It excels at propaganda because that is a vehicle for conflict. You can ask it to organize a committee to denounce American foreign policy, but don’t ask it to change a tire or bring in the crops or run a health care system. It may talk about how important it is to drive out the capitalist pigs so it can do those things, but it doesn’t actually care about doing them.

Like them, he isn’t interested in helping people, not even in the misguided way that some liberals are. His politics and his passion are those of conflict. He doesn’t care if ObamaCare succeeds or fails. All that he cares about is using it as a weapon against the Republican Party.

That’s what he’s doing now.

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