By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I was convinced that the liberal critics were going to jump all over Steve Forbes for his January 18 editorial in Forbes magazine. So far, I haven’t come across that criticism. Maybe it has taken place and I missed it. Maybe it is yet to come.
I thought that the critics were going to go at Forbes hammer and tong for describing President Obama’s worldview as one in which the “U.S. has been a force of evil in the world,” and in which the “smaller our role, the better. Most anything bad happening has at its source American and European colonialism.” Forbes contends this view has created in Obama a “mental construct increasingly at odds with murderous reality,” one which plays “down the awful behavior of Islamic barbarians and other notorious actors, such as Vladimir Putin.”
Strong words. Forbes is saying that our president is intentionally conducting American foreign policy to dramatically weaken the power and influence of the United States in the world. He is describing Obama’s position as one that is far different from those on the right, such as Patrick Buchanan, who call for less U.S. intervention in the wars between the forces in the Middle East. Buchanan sees the United States as a country that has behaved admirably and with good intentions in the world arena in the struggle against Nazism and Communism, but that it is not in our national interests — and not worth the loss of billions of dollars and the lives of our fighting men and women — to seek to impose our will in the Middle East at the present time.
Obama, on the other hand, writes Forbes, sees the United States as an “evil force in the world,” a country that ought not exert itself in the Middle East because we have no moral right to shape the politics of that part of the world — because we are not worthy to do so.
You can see why I expected Forbes to get some heat from the liberals in government and the media; why I thought terms such as “McCarthyite” and “right-wing extremist” would be hurled his way. That, I repeat, yet may happen.
If it does, there is no reason for Forbes to back down. The people whom Obama tells us in his autobiography that he gravitated toward while a college student — “hipsters and Third World radicals” — saw the world exactly the way Forbes characterizes Obama’s views.
The intellectual gurus of the campus radicals of that era were New Left Marxists such as Staughton Lynd, I.F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, and William Appleman Williams.
Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist writer who mentored Obama as a teenager in Hawaii, was not as well-known as these trendy leftists of the era. But he parroted their views, and taught them to Obama. Obama describes him as “Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self,” in his autobiographical book Dreams From My Father. These are Obama’s intellectual roots. If not, Obama did not do his assigned reading.
The New Leftists of that era agreed that capitalism and the free-market system in the United States led to a drive to conquer and exploit native peoples, first on the continent of North America, then overseas in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. It also led us to intervene against socialist governments in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba.
The goal was always the same, argued the New Left Marxists. Our military might was used to secure sources of raw materials and markets for our privately owned corporations. Appleman Williams called this the “safety valve,” the theory that “democracy and prosperity pointed toward the necessity of finding a new frontier.”
In this depiction of American history, corporate leaders used their influence to convince our political leaders that the growing population of the United States would eventually “radicalize” and turn to socialism to redistribute America’s wealth away from the American upper class — unless economic opportunities were created for the lower classes to generate new wealth through the acquisition of new lands.
This view of history depicts the United States as a perennial villain, as the enemy of Native Americans, the people of the Caribbean, Filipinos — and also the Muslim people of the Middle East. It sees the United States support of Israel as an effort to maintain a permanent presence in the Middle East for the purpose of guaranteeing our access to the oil riches in that part of the world, and as nothing to do with building democracies and securing human rights for the people of those societies.
The bottom line: This understanding of the world is what leads Obama to see America as a “force for evil,” in Forbes’ words, as a country that deserves to be knocked off its high horse. It is a view that sees countries that cooperate with the United States as deserving to be overthrown, such as Hosni Mubarak’s government in Egypt and Muammar Qadhafi’s in Libya. And sees the forces that despise us and wish us ill as forces to be encouraged, such as Iran and the Islamic radicals who led the “Arab spring.”
Is it fair to assume that the New Left theories that Obama associated himself with as a college student still shape his thinking? Well, he has never renounced them. And he could easily have done so. When he entered public life as a community organizer and Illinois politician, he could have said something as simple as, “When I was a young man my idealism led me to support some radical ideas. I have since learned that was a mistake.”
Rather than do that, he joined Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where the radical left’s analysis of America’s role in the world was preached regularly from the pulpit. Wright officiated at Barack’s and Michelle’s wedding and baptized his two daughters. Obama and his family stayed members of Wright’s church until tapes of Wright’s sermons proved embarrassing during his 2008 run for the presidency.
Forbes has nothing to apologize for. Quite the contrary. It would be of great value to the average American, if Forbes devoted one of his Saturday Forbes on Fox television shows to a detailed analysis of how it ever came about that a man who sees his country as a “force for evil” was elected our president.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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