President Obama’s foreign and domestic policies often seem incoherent and contradictory to many people in America and around the world. Much of what he does is for political expediency or to reward supporters and punish foes, lending to the false impression of incoherence. Nevertheless, Obama’s national and international agendas are actually well-defined and congruent, and those related agendas spring directly from Obama’s worldview in general, and his view of America, in particular.
America = Malaysia
Just two weeks ago, many people were surprised at President Obama’s moral equivalence between Malaysia and the United States. Speaking in Malaysia, Obama declared, “I think the prime minister is the first to acknowledge that Malaysia’s still got some work to do [on human rights] – just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do – on these issues. Human Rights Watch probably has a list of things they think we should be doing as a government.”[1]
Malaysia, remember, is guilty of horrendous human rights violations, yet Obama thinks we have “some work to do” on those issues. Issues like, “obstacles preventing opposition parties from competing on equal terms with the ruling coalition; restrictions on freedoms of speech, assembly, association, and religion; and restrictions on freedom of the press, including media bias, book banning, censorship, and the denial of printing permits.”[2]
The State Department’s 2013 Human Rights Report on Malaysia adds, “Other human rights problems included deaths during police apprehension and while in police custody; the persistence of laws that allow detention without trial; caning as a form of punishment imposed by criminal and sharia courts; bans on religious groups; restrictions on proselytizing and on the freedom to change one’s religion; official corruption; violence and discrimination against women; discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons; and restrictions on the rights of migrants, including migrant workers, refugees, and victims of human trafficking.”
America is like Malaysia? Really? (This is a clue to those who are clueless as to Obama’s view of the United States.)
American Unexceptionalism
While in Berlin, Germany, during his first presidential campaign, Senator Obama prefigured his presidential modus operandi, saying, “I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not always lived up to our best intentions.” As President, Obama launched his worldwide apology tour,[3] which, seemingly, has yet to end.
At a 2009 NATO Summit, Obama revealed, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”[4] What a shocker! We all remember his wife’s astonishing revelation, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”[5]
Why was the soon-to-be First Lady proud of America? Because America would soon be pursuing the change that her husband envisioned. Just two weeks earlier, Sen. Obama had declared, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”[6] (“We” are our own Messiah?)
Hope and change! Days before his first presidential victory, Obama promised, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”[7] Few understood what that transformation entailed and how Obama would seek to achieve it. What has since become clear is that Obama has replaced the vision of the Founding Fathers with that of his own.
In contrast to Obama, author and columnist Norman Podhoretz wrote,
“By remaining faithful in principle – and to a considerable extent in practice – to the ideas by which the Founders hoped to accomplish these ends, we and our forebears have fashioned a country in which more liberty and more prosperity are more widely shared than among any other people in human history.”[8]
Podhoretz concluded,
“With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and that have made it possible – to say yet again what cannot be said too often – for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows that what liberals – who concentrate their attention on the relatively little that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it – seek to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending.”
America is Not a Christian Nation?
Many rightly contend that America’s Judeo-Christian heritage deeply informed its political and cultural institutions, indeed, the very fabric of the American way of life. The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, definitively affirmed our Christian heritage.
Vidal v. Girard’s Executors (1844): “Christianity is not to be maliciously and openly reviled and blasphemed against, to the annoyance of believers or the injury of the public. … Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”
Holy Trinity v. United States (1892): “There is no dissonance in these [historical] declarations. There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation. … This is a Christian nation.”[9]
United States v. Macintosh (1931): “We are a Christian people … according to one another the equal right of religious freedom, and acknowledging with the reverence the duty of obedience to God.”
But according to the President, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.”[10] Says who? Despite a decline in the number of people who regard themselves as religious,[11] fully 78% of the population regards itself as Christian.[12]
Still, Obama gets it wrong. In June 2007, he said, “Whatever we once were, we’re no longer a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”[13]
Obama’s vision of America drastically differs from that of most Americans.
Fundamental Transformation
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote, “Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty [is] a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course.”[14]
His relativistic, multicultural perspective radically rejects the absolutist values upon which America was built and which were enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Those fundamental, foundational ideas and ideals created the America so many of us love and the America to which millions of people turn to every year. The Founders’ America, not Obama’s.
Obama’s counter-cultural perspective and globalist worldview informs the fundamental transformation of America to which he has devoted his presidency, perhaps even his entire life.
Remember, Obama promised to fundamentally transform America and he has, indeed, kept that particular promise, though not in the way most people anticipated.
Obama sees America as fundamentally flawed and an exploiter of the world, not as “the last great hope of mankind.”[15] It is Obama’s worldview – not America – that is fundamentally flawed.
[Future essays will address the domestic and foreign ramifications of Obama’s fundamentally flawed vision of America: Obamanomics and the Obama Doctrine.]
Endnotes:
[1] President Obama, 4/27/14, see http://therightscoop.com/breaking-on-human-rights-obama-says-malaysias-got-some-work-to-do-just-like-the-united-states/.
[2] See the U.S. State Department’s 2013 Human Rights Report on Malaysia at http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2013/eap/220209.htm.
[3] Regarding President Obama’s infamous apology tour, see http://spectator.org/blog/20288/conservatve-leaders-speak-out-against-obamas-apology-tour.
[5] Michelle Obama, 2/18/08, see http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=17884.
[6] Barack Obama, 2/5/08, see “A Chorus of Millions,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsrgYvx7KJE.
[7] Barack Obama, 10/30/08, see http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359967/obama-transforming-america-victor-davis-hanson.
[8] Norman Podhoretz, “Is America Exceptional?” Imprimis, Hillsdale College, October 2012.
[9] See http://vftonline.org/EndTheWall/TrinityHistory.htm.
[10] President Obama, 4/6/09, see http://www.redstate.com/diary/warner_todd_huston/2009/04/08/what-are-we-if-not-a-christian-nation/.
[11] See http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.
[12] See http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-christians/.
[13] Brad O’Leary, The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values, WND Books, 2008, pg. 8.
[14] Larry P. Arnn, “Time to Give Up or Time to Fight On?” Imprimis, Hillsdale College, December 2012.
[15] See http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm.
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