By Daniel Greenfield ——Bio and Archives--October 22, 2009
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He is in fact an agent of transformation. He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians, and this makes him seem elusive to the conventional press and the traditional politicians. His instinct for the moment and the times is orders of magnitude more powerful than the experience claimed by others. Experience in the old ways is irrelevant experience. In an age of great transformation, experience of the past is worthless because it is a barrier to the breakthrough gesture...The past is worthless, so the transformative figure need not have any actual qualifications. Experience is irrelevant because it is rooted in the past that is going to be demolished anyway. Who needs to know how many states there are or when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In the brave new America, there will be no states and Columbus Day will be the new Nakba. The idea of the transformative figure plays a key role for radicals, who often have tossed aside even liberal theology in favor of radicalism. Religion to them is social change, their saints were martyred while protesting for the oppressed, and their messiah is the avatar of social change, a man who shatters the links to the old ways, ushering in a new society and new ways of thinking. Chris Matthews was not being obsequious when he proclaimed, "This is the New Testament". He was literally having a socialist religious experience. One that many others in the media have experienced as well. When your religion is social change, the man who embodies that change is the messiah. His words are a New Testament, setting aside the old, in favor of the new. A new world order. Hope, and most of all change. I have spoken mostly about Europe, but American radicalism also has a long history of creating such artificial manmade supernatural religions right down to the modern New Age movement. Spiritualism, promoted by liberal theologians in liberal Churches, once played a major role in America, tying in even the 19th century George Bush, one of the country's most famous ministers, and the great, great granduncle of George W. Bush. In the 19th century radical Quakers like Isaac Post, promoted the predecessors of Oprah, namely the Fox sisters or Ascha Sprague, who traveled around the country, appearing on stages and claiming to communicate with the spirit world. In the process they also promoted everything from evolution to feminism and abolitionism while picking the pockets of gullible audiences. Their publications boasted names such as Banner of Light and The People's World. While it is easy to dismiss Spiritualism as silly superstition today, in the 19th century they were known as Christian Rationalists, because they had essentially reduced religion to a science. And while that science was a collection of lunatic nonsense inspired by a man suffering from delusions, its premise denied the unknowable, replacing conventional theology, with one based on animism, spiritual transformation and social change-- elements heavily present in the Oprah crowd today.
"We're all here to come together – to appreciate our uniqueness and to treasure our diversity, and we're here to evolve to a higher plane . . . The reason I love Barack Obama is because he is an evolved leader who can bring evolved leadership to our country." Oprah WinfreyThe rhetoric is virtually the same, backed by the old Spiritualist notions that we are here to move on to a higher plane and a time of social transportation is here. Combined of course with socialism's driving force, the evolved leader who can embody that social change. The New Age movement was not a radical break with the past, no more than Oprah's rebranded Tolle material is, both are successors of Spiritualism's radical past. The original version of the Spiritualist's Communion of Saints, in which the dead would return to uplift the living, has faded away. Along with the Fox Sisters knuckle rapping messages from the other side. But in its place has come environmentalism, which like Spiritualism fuses animism with radical politics, and is fed by the New Age movement. The Spiritualists believed that the dead had returned with a message for mankind to cease its selfish ways and ascend to a new level. Environmentalists preach that the earth is alive and in peril, and calls on us to cease our selfish ways and ascend to a new way of living. Both mask supernatural dogma with a veneer of science. As absurd as Arthur Conan Doyle's search for fairies might seem today, he believed that he was applying strict scientific methodology to an important issue, no more and no less so than any environmentalist today. The common element is transformation. The theology of socialism is one that promises transformation through collective action. Change is its religious experience. And those who teach the masses to Hope for Change, for the great evolutionary revolution, are its saints and messiahs.
Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh... Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence Ezra Klein, The American ProspectIt is doubtful that any spiritualist could have better expressed this same set of ideas. The idea of Obama as a force that elevates, that causes you to experience yourself as an agent of historical change and that finally teaches us to transcend by envisioning an ideal America as a socialist kingdom of heaven on earth, where no one is hungry or sick or discriminated against... and the government led by him takes care of us all. Not the word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh. Flesh is weak. Needy, greedy and selfish. Socialism is doctrine triumphing over humanity, Orwell's boot on the face of humanity, keeping us down for our own good. And if any of us have the gall to feel bad about it, that is where the preachers of the Socialist Word come in, to "inspire" and "elevate" us to be better cogs in the collectivist machine. To be agents of revolutionary social change. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Hope and Change. Some must sacrifice for the good of all.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.