Jonah Goldberg addresses in a serious essay the commonly heard debate on whether terms like Marxist and Socialist may be accurately applied to Barack Obama.

[I]s it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? That depends on what one means by socialism. The term has so many associations and has been used to describe so many divergent political and economic approaches that the only meaning sure to garner consensus is an assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector. One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when democracy proves inconvenient.1 With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly, Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense. The Obama administration may not have planned on seizing the means of automobile production or asserting managerial control over Wall Street. But when faced with the choice, it did both. Obama did explicitly plan on imposing a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the U.S. economy through the use of state fiat—and he is beginning to do precisely that.

Obama has, on numerous occasions, placed himself within the progressive intellectual and political tradition going back to Theodore Roosevelt and running through Franklin Roosevelt. With a few exceptions, the progressive political agenda has always been to argue for piecemeal reforms, not instant transformative change—but reforms that always expand the size, scope, and authority of the state. This approach has numerous benefits. For starters, it’s more realistic tactically. By concentrating on the notion of reform rather than revolution, progressives can work to attract both ideologues of the Left and moderates at the same time. This allows moderates to be seduced by their own rhetoric about the virtues of a specific reform as an end in itself. Meanwhile, more sophisticated ideologues understand that they are supporting a camel’s-nose strategy. In an unguarded moment during the health-care debate in 2009, Representative Barney Frank confessed that he saw the “public option,” the supposedly limited program that would have given the federal government a direct role as an insurer in competition with private insurers, as merely a way station to a single-payer system in which the government is the sole provider of health care. In his September 2009 joint-session address to Congress on health care, President Obama insisted that “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” Six months later, when he got the health-care bill he wanted, he insisted that it was only a critical “first step” to overhauling the system. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was one of the relatively few self-described moderates who both understood the tactic and supported it. “There seems no inherent obstacle,” Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Goldberg places Obama decidedly outside the Revolutionary Marxist “hot socialism” tradition and firmly in the Fabian tradition of incremental, gradual, “first step” subversion of liberty. Obama adroitly dismisses accuses of his being a socialist as evidence of his opponents’ ideological blindness. He is merely a pragmatist, committed to “solving problems.”

But whether one identifies Obama as a social-ist instead of a socialist, a neosocialist, or merely a progressive, there can be no doubt that Barack Obama’s political agenda is as thoroughly committed to expanding the regulatory authority and share of the economy controlled by government as the Romanovs were to the gathering of the Russian lands.

Denying that you are an ideologue is not the same thing as proving the point. And certainly Obama’s insistence that ideology is something only his critics suffer from is no defense when stacked against the evidence of his actions. The “pragmatic” Obama is only interested in “what works” as long as “what works” involves a significantly expanded role for government. In this sense, Obama is a practitioner of the Third Way, the governing approach most successfully trumpeted by Blair, who claimed to have found a “third way” that rejected the false premises of both Left and Right and thereby located a “smarter” approach to expanding government. The powerful appeal of this idea lies in the fact that it sounds as if its adherents have rejected ideological dogmatism and gone beyond those “false choices.” Thus, a leader can both provide health care to 32 million people and save money, or, as Obama likes to say, “bend the cost curve down.” But in not choosing, Obama is choosing. He is choosing the path of government control, which is what the Third Way inevitably does and is intended to do.

Still, the question remains, What do we call Obama’s “social-ism”? John Judis’s formulation—“liberal socialism”—is perfectly serviceable, and so is “social democracy” or, for that matter, simply “progressivism.” My own, perhaps too playful, suggestion would be neosocialism. …

In many respects, Barack Obama’s neo-socialism is neoconservatism’s mirror image. Openly committed to ending the Reagan era, Obama is a firm believer in the power of government to extend its scope and grasp far deeper into society. In much the same way that neoconservatives accepted a realistic and limited role for the government, Obama tolerates a limited and realistic role for the market: its wealth is necessary for the continuation and expansion of the welfare state and social justice. While neoconservatism erred on the side of trusting the nongovernmental sphere—mediating institutions like markets, civil society, and the family—neosocialism gives the benefit of the doubt to government. Whereas neoconservatism was inherently skeptical of the ability of social planners to repeal the law of unintended consequences, Obama’s ideal is to leave social policy in their hands and to bemoan the interference of the merely political.

“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed,” he told CBS’s Katie Couric. “But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”

Whereas Ronald Reagan saw the answers to our problems in the private sphere (“in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”), Obama seeks to expand confidence in, and reliance on, government wherever and whenever he can, albeit within the confines of a generally Center-Right nation and the “unfortunate” demands of democracy.

As with Webb’s Fabian socialism, one will never be able to say of Obama’s developing doctrine, “now socialism has arrived.” On the night the House of Representatives passed the health-care bill, Obama said, “This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction.” Then, speaking specifically of another vote to be taken in the Senate but also cleverly to those not yet satisfied with what had been achieved, he added, “Now, as momentous as this day is, it’s not the end of this journey.”

Under Obama’s neosocialism, that journey will be endless, and no matter how far down the road toward socialism we go, he will always be there to tell the increasingly beleaguered marchers that we have only taken a “critical first step.”

Read the whole thing.

1:38 video

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

These kinds of partisan displays of particularist chauvinism always offend enlightened people.

FoxNews points out a not-even-Freudian lapse in Barack Obama’s recent remarks.

To a member in good standing of the community of fashion, like the current president, internalization of a galaxy of liberal perspectives embracing Pacifism, World Government, and Equality, and viewing with distaste anything to do with the military or the use of force, competition, conflict, and above all else any presumption to superiority on the part of the United States is de riguer.

In a little-noticed remark at the close of the two-day nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C., this week, President Obama suggested the United States is somehow burdened by its military might — a comment that drew a stern rebuke from his former rival in the presidential campaign.

Obama was responding to a question Tuesday about how the summit would play into peace-making efforts in the Middle East when he addressed the downsides of — by virtue of America’s world stature — being obligated to intervene in international conflicts.

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them,” Obama said. “And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

In Barack Obama’s ideal mental world, the United States would simply be one more docile and obedient member state of the United Nations, or the Federation, which long ago renounced sovereignty and the use of force and which transferred all its armaments to the Central World Authority. Any particular disagreement with Iran, China, or some minor Pacific atoll would be gravely adjudicated by the wise and disinterested Supreme High Council, a compromise imposed, and universal peace perpetually preserved.

What a pity it is that as enlightened a being as the Chosen One is obliged to conduct a competitive foreign policy based on military force representing a technologically advanced, but morally backward, predominantly Christian and European power that continually asserts its own preeminence in world affairs, in a manner inevitably offending other nations. Naturally, Barack Obama would rather apologize and disarm.

Can it be accidental that Obama persists in bowing to foreign leaders like China’s President Hu Jintao?

Victor Davis Hanson can see no rational direction to Barack Obama’s foreign policy and bitterly complains that “Obama has no idea of what he is doing, and wings his way from one embarrassment to another.”

But Michael Ledeen thinks Hanson has overlooked the obvious explanation of what Obama means to do.

[W]hat if Obama does know what he’s doing? What if Victor has it right when he says that we are being transformed into a much larger version of the E.U.? (Actually, it’s a somewhat smaller version, but no matter.) …

He is not an admirer of America. He believes that America’s past behavior is the root cause of the world’s problems, and he wants to bring America under control by making it just another European country: impotent in world affairs (except for spreading the wealth) and stripped of its traditional exceptionalism at home.

That’s what his latest initiatives are all about, the new nuclear policy and the removal of clarity from our national-security doctrine by banning words like “jihad” and “Islam.” Since he considers us the problem, he imposes a nuclear doctrine that reins in America — the root cause of evil in the world. And since he wants to turn America into a weak country that will accept the political correctness of the feckless “international community,” he adjusts our language to bring it into line with the U.N.’s version of Newspeak.

It’s worse than you thought, Victor. It’s not confusion at all. It’s a campaign to cut America down to size.

Daniel Foster, at the Corner, supplies a list of the likely Obama choices to succeed Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens who has announced his retirement at age 90.

[B]eginning, roughly, with the center-most candidate and moving left, that list likely includes:

Merrick Garland – a former federal prosecutor and current D.C. Circuit appeals judge. A Clinton appointee, Garland is well-liked by Democrats and even some Republicans in the Senate.

Elena Kagan – The first-female Solicitor General and probably first-runner-up for the Sotomayor seat, Kagan has a record of the kind of cagey jurisprudence that is ideal for a tough confirmation battle. She is well-respected by just about everybody on both sides, but lacks the paper trail that would reveal just how far to the left she’d sit.

Diane Wood – Another Clinton appointee, considered the heaviest liberal counterweight to the conservative Chicago Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dominated by Richard A. Posner. Wood was a colleague of President Obama at the University of Chicago Law School.

Pamela Karlan – A professor at Stanford Law School, Karlan is a longshot once was described by the New York Times as a “snarky. . . Antonin Scalia for the left.” Karlan is openly gay, and an outspoken liberal.

“Would I like to be on the Supreme Court?” Ms. Karlan asked once asked during a Stanford graduation address. “You bet I would. But not enough to have trimmed my sails for half a lifetime.”

A longer list would include some Obama DOJ officials / liberal legal intellectuals like Harold Koh and Cass Sunstein. And the administration reportedly vetted a number of politicians for the Sotomayor spot that could be reconsidered here, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (“the system worked”), Sens. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) and Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm (D.)

My two cents: It’s Kagan or somebody nobody is even talking about.

I suspect Obama is going to go farther leftward than most people expect.

The American public’s lack of enthusiasm for the health care bill is clearly getting to the Obamination. At a question session following a speech by the President in Charlotte, when a woman referred to being overtaxed, the Chosen One lost it and responded with a tortuous rambling diatribe.

WaPo:

Even by President Obama’s loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.

“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

Liberals are fond of dismissing Rasmussen Poll results and relying on more wholly sympathetic sources. This time even Gallup is no help.

By 50%-46%, those surveyed say Obama doesn’t deserve re-election.

Interestingly, more Americans still like Obama than believe he has earned re-election.

Shelby Steele reflects on the irony inherent in Barack Obama’s need to pursue his personal star by ramming socialism down a center right nation’s throat.

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and “the good”—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom. And ideas of “the good” are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson’s Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink.

There has always been a narcissistic charge around Mr. Obama, the sense that in embracing him one was embracing something special in oneself—and possibly even a larger idea of human perfectibility. Every politician wants this capacity to attract identification. But it is also a trap. What happens when people are embarrassed for having seen themselves in you?

The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him.

Mr. Obama’s success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us.

“You Picked a Fine Time to Lead Us, Barack”

3:16 video

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“Banking Queen” – a song tribute to Barney Frank by Paul Shanklin.

3:16 video

Charles Krauthammer explains the inevitable, long desired by socialists, consequences of the health care bill.

We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion-plus “doctor fix,” the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only six years of outflows) — is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.

It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare preempts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “health-care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost.” But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody’s is warning that the Treasury’s AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.

Hence his deficit-reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.

What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.

But this won’t be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs — which are locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.

That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude — if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).

It’s the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.

American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.

43 Previous Presidents

Michael J. Boskin, a professor of Economics at Stanford, identifies what Barack Obama has managed to accomplish in under two years. He certainly has racked up one very startling statistic.

Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R – 11MI) responds to the socialists’ victory in this 3:45 video. Sound sentiments.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.