I've spent the last few weeks reading Noah Chomsky. After listening to the President at West Point, you need to listen to Professor Chomsky in order to understand the policy implications of the President's speech.
The two major features of the Left is its narcissism and its pessimism. It embodies the weakenesses of Malthus and Hobbes. The Left relies upon a cosmology that embraces contrariness as an indicator of the Left's special place of origin for important ideas. Common sense and long practise may be rejected out of hand as the problems that face us in our daily lives seem to remain those problems that were faced a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago; a world of nation-states at war, poverty and hunger and a need to provide for ones own self and family.
It is obvious to the Left that the necessary prescription for ending war, poverty, hunger and the individuals' responsibility to provide for himself is to take from the wealthy. That America is wealthy is evidence, not of its inherent goodness, but of its inherent evil.
We, as Americans, says the Left, cannot continue on a path of cowboy politics. We, as Americans, cannot be trusted in this world, since the values that we hold dear result in other countries' wealth being diminished through the comparison of who and what they are, to what we are.
The only solution is to diminish what we are, here in America, in order to achieve a world-view goal of social justice among all nations. Anything less is selfish. And evidence of an arrogant imperial world-view.
Listen to Professor Chomsky carefully. He is talking about the now and our future.
