Bill Kristol has observed that Obama’s shares Marx’s assumption that religion is the opiate of the masses. More broadly, he assumes with Marx that economic factors determine cultural ones, which are mere superstructure. Pennsylvania voters feel frustrated economically, Obama thinks, so they adopt certain cultural attitudes as a displacement of their real concerns.
Sharing Marx’s assumption, of course, doesn’t make one a Marxist, something Joe Lieberman is careful to note:
NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?
LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question.… I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.
I think Donald Sensing puts his finger on a key issue that is more central to the socialist tradition and leads it into its worst excesses, the Rousseau-Marx thesis that social conditions change human nature. Unjust societies corrupt human nature; a just society would allow it to flourish uncorrupted:
But what I find especially disturbing in Obama’s remarks, that I have not seen in Mrs. Clinton’s ever, is the ideal of the “perfectibility of man.” This is the hoariest socialist doctrine of all, explicit in Marxism and later, Marxism-Leninism. This is an idea so utterly vacuous and foolish that not even the Euro socialist governments cleave to it, if they ever did, except in Eastern Europe, and then only when they were communist. Clearly implicit on Obama’s remarks is the idea that since racism, religion et. al., arise from the lack of government regulation, they can be expunged by more of it.
You see, we can all become virtuous if only the government controlled our lives.
[...] Gov. Palin calls Joe Biden a “latent Marxist”. [...]