What Obama might have learned from Karl Marx
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
President Obama is famous for his ad hominem attacks. He does not bother to counter arguments but goes straight after the individual that dares to have an opposing opinion. Latest example: the way he denigrated Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) for putting forward a serious and thoughtful plan to reform Medicare.
Perhaps this comes naturally to Obama. Or perhaps he learned it from Karl Marx. One of the uncontested masters of the mudslinging technique was Marx as well as his close friend, co-thinker and sponsor Friedrich Engels. Read the following excerpt from Ludwig von Mises book “Socialism”, written in 1922:
The enemy is not refuted: enough to unmask him as a bourgeois. Marxism criticizes the achievements of all those who think otherwise by representing them as the venal servants of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person. Few have been able to withstand such tactics. Few indeed have been courageous enough to oppose Socialism with that remorseless criticism which it is the duty of the scientific thinker to apply to every subject of inquiry.
Luckily, Paul Ryan will be able to withstand such tactics. Luckily, he is courageous enough to oppose Democrats’ liberal ideas with remorseless criticism. Luckily, he is smart enough to apply scientific thought to his subject of inquiry.
We need more like him in order to turn things around. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there weren’t enough Paul Ryans to prevent Socialism from evolving into the domineering current of political thought. The disastrous consequences are well known.
We need a coherent and relentless analysis of Obama’s liberal schemes in order to convince Americans not to re-elect him. Marx’s vicious personal attacks paid off – Obama must not be allowed to get away so lightly. Otherwise chances are that he will win a second term.
Von Mises continues:
A clear exposition of the nature of socialist society might have damped the enthusiasm of the masses, who sought in Socialism salvation from all earthly ills. The successful suppression of these dangerous inquiries, which had brought about the downfall of all earlier socialistic theories, was one of Marx’s most skillful tactical moves. Only because people were not allowed to talk or to think about the nature of the socialist community was Socialism able to become the dominant political movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Let’s make sure that these “dangerous inquiries” a la Paul Ryan will bring about the undoing of Barack Obama. Since Obama’s liberal ideas are intellectually unserious and lightweight it is our own failure if we prove unable to shatter them in a way convincing to a majority of Americans.