THE TELEGRAPH
by Janet Daley
November 8, 2014
On Wednesday morning, after his party had suffered spectacular losses in the US mid-term elections, Barack Obama told his country what all defeated political leaders must: “I hear you.” The trouble was that what he had heard was somewhat different from what the electorate had said.
As his press conference progressed, it became apparent that what Mr Obama believed that voters across the country were telling him was that they were fed up with the whole of the federal governing class in Washington for its failure “to get things done”. In other words, it was the obstructionism of the Republican Congress as much as his White House that was the object of national frustration and anger. Which might cause you to wonder why people did not simply stay at home to express their disgust rather than vote so overwhelmingly for Republican candidates.
But we must see the Obama interpretation of events not as outraged vanity (well, not entirely): in fact, it is remarkably consistent with the world view of Left-liberal politicians in other places. Indeed, the difficulties of Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership have some striking parallels with the Obama delusion. The nub of it was captured neatly by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky who rode home to victory on the Republican wave and is now most likely to become Senate Majority Leader. He diagnosed the collapse of the Democrats’ popularity as being caused by “…a government too busy imposing its views on those who don’t share them”. The Left has always been comfortable with “imposing its views” on populations, large proportions of which do not share them, because it genuinely believes that those views represent the only possible social good: they are not simply one side of an argument in which your opponents can be seen as conscientious and well-meaning (even if mistaken).
Left-liberal ideology is based on the notion that its programme is the inexorable face of the future: the force of enlightenment engaged in a fight to the death with the benighted past. Those ordinary people who cannot see the light, because they have been deceived by the wicked and self-serving (“class enemies” in the original Marxist formulation) who exploit their ignorance and trick them into voting or agitating against their own true interests, must have this righteous vision imposed upon them for their own good……
ArchitectGuy on Israel 