by Dr. Miklós K. Radványi
Politics, with its ambition for boundless expansion into the lives of individuals and societies, is a human activity that overwhelmingly attracts narcissists of all types from the most intelligent to the completely idiotic. The difference between these two opposites resides in their mentality and modus operandi. While the intelligent politician strives to build support for his ideas through rational persuasion, the idiot relies on the coercive apparatus of the state to enforce his or her policies that in the greatest number of cases are unrealistic and even destructive. In reality, the idiot is a person with an exclusive and thus extremely narrow-minded ideology that prevents him or her from seeing reality. Thus, when reality threatens ideology, such a person is predisposed to destroy reality, because it poses a mortal danger to his or her ideology. In this manner, the idiot condemns himself or herself to live in a vacuum of lies that, in turn, keeps him or her from acting rationally.
The roots of this destructive idiocy in American politics were planted after 1929, when a long line of disgruntled pseudo-intellectuals with intense hatred toward political and economic freedoms, but armed with unshakeable faith in the utopian negativism of the Soviet Union’s dictatorial “social justice” rhetoric, begun to shift the focus of politics from safeguarding individual liberties to designating the government as the trustee of ubiquitous economic and social equality. With the political triumph of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism in Europe, the protracted worldwide economic and financial devastations of the Great Depression, World War II, the collapse of the colonial system, the Cold War, and the sudden disappearance of the Soviet Union, the history of the 20th century was marked by tempestuous changes across all continents. Many nations were discontented. Peoples from all over the world were seething amidst their hopeless misery. These cummulative tensions had errupted in senseless anarchy in the first decade of the new century. In almost every country, a small group of semi-intellectuals rediscovered terrorism, proclaiming a new revolution to the people – a revolution that would destroy the West with its political and economic freedoms, and would regenerate the failed utopias of Marxism and the religious tyrannies of Mecca and Medina.
From 2008 on, the United States and the rest of the world had been passing through multiple crises. In the United States faith in the government’s ability to restore peace and stability at home and abroad had declined precipitously. Citizens from all walks of life had less and less respect for the movers and shakers of the economy. The traditional political inertia and apathy of the voters had been transformed into an open rebellion against the status quo. Amidst this extremely complex and complicated situation, an inexperienced, untried and fundamentally clueless junior senator from Illinois offered an enticingly easy solution. His views during the 2008 presidential campaign were, however, too narrow and confined. Yet, capitalizing on his biracial background and preaching social harmony, and simultaneously attacking everyone and everything – the sitting president, Congress, the financial sector, industry, the military – as vile conspirators against the victimized people, he succeeded to project an image of an honest unifyer, who has an in-depth understanding of both domestic and foreign matters. In reality, neither his political views nor his simplistic solutions were profound or sincere. His political views centered around the thoroughly discredited theory of class struggle, while his main solution was a strangely lugubrious utopia that addressed the mostly uneducated or poorly educated minorities. His scurrilous appeal to the passions of the less-fortunate, foreshadowed the great danger of more fragmentation in a country already torn between its heritage and its uncertain future. Into the sixth year of his presidency the extent of his incompetence is staggering. Adding insult to injury, Barack Obama had been a slave of his hatred and revenge against the very foundations of the nation and the majority of its citizens.
Presently, domestic disorder and international anarchy threaten the foundations of Western societies and the relative stability of the rest of the world. Domestically, Barack Obama and his enablers are locked within a vicious circle of their own creation, and are busy to add poisonous fuel to the flames of racial turbulence and economic discontent. Indeed, his campaign slogan of “fundamental transformation” was a battle cry for seizing the reins of powers from the majority by unconstitutional means. Yet, his efforts to destroy the constitution, to wreck the economy, to divide the country, and to fatally weaken the United States internationally, had never coalesced into a coherent strategy. His ideological idiocy had left everybody, including his prefered minorities, abandoned and devoid of any moral foundation. Thus domestically, by pretending to be what he is not, Barack Obama’s presidency is doomed to failure, because it is based on a permanent deception.
This deception had informed his anti-American foreign policy too. Defining himself as the “anti-Bush”, he had caused serious damage to the United States’ traditional alliances. In spite of his well-publicized Muslim heritage, he had rendered the United States irrelevant in the Middle East and North Africa by downplaying the violent malady of Islam out of sheer stupidity and for the sake of political correctness. In Iraq, he had allowed a civil war to rage unchecked. In Afghanistan, he had stood by while a mentally and emotionally unstable president was attempting to unleash the Taliban against his opposition, in order to cement his own powers. In Syria, he had failed to understand that Bashar Assad followed to the letter his father’s strategy of “divide and rule”. By letting the Alawite government to build-up the most radical group ISIS, Barack Obama had assisted at the birth of a regional and global Muslim terrorist organization. In Iran, he had followed a feckless course, in which he had vacillated between appeasement and unconvincing sanctions. In his megalomaniac delusion, he entertained the idea, that with his anti-American rhetoric, he could entice Russia and its autocrat to cooperate with him in weakening the United States’ positions globally. In Asia, while rhetorically enunciating a new policy initiative, he had managed to let China to intimidate the United States and its allies with impunity.
Today, in the United States, morally justified hatred guides the Obama Administration’s policies. What those who allied themselves with this politics of hatred fail to understand is that, while hatred could occasionally emanate from moral reasons, morality could never be based on hatred. Such a vile hatred is fundamentally the absolute negation of morality. At its core, the politics of hatred fosters intellectual relativism that almost always leads to self-destructive extremism. Extremism, in turn, excludes both critical thinking and criticism. More importantly, extreme political hatred is prone to employing violence in its quest to seize power. For this reason, it is impatient and aggressive to the highest degree. On the other hand, the politics of hatred is also shamelessly opportunistic. Indeed, in the United States, the Obama Administration had accomplished the impossible – it eliminated logic and rendered the principle of contradiction non-existent. Words uttered by the President or members of his Administration lose their meaning at their very inception. In this context, verbal and written communications manifest utter lack of conviction. The morality and the politics of hatred metamorphose into irresponsibility. Such is the logic of the idiocy of American politics. If it is not stopped, it will end in chaos and anarchy.
As long as both the people and the politicians in the United States refuse to recognize that their country is a part of a larger reality, they will not impose on themselves the required political discipline to lead the rest of the world toward a better future. And as long as they are unable to create a more perfect society at home, they will have to fight all kinds of evil, be it states with global ambitions or non-state organizations with destructive agendas.