“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next,” the saying goes. Barack Obama may now be just beginning to learn this, as even he called today’s new “woke” liberals “buzzkills” in a recent interview.
Ironically, though, the ex-president is campaigning for the very cancel-cultist Democrats he’s complaining about and saying, essentially, “Take it from ‘moderate’ me — vote for these radicals.”
The Daily Mail reports on the story:
Obama took some shots at his fellow Democrats, calling them “buzzkills” and says their rhetoric forces people to “walk on eggshells.”
Obama, speaking to four of his former employees on the Pod Save America podcast, said that some people within his party need to cool down the temperature and understand that everyone makes mistakes.
He said: “Sometimes Democrats are [buzzkills]. Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes.”
…Pod Save America is hosted by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor.
The former president will spend the last few weeks leading into the midterms stumping for some of those Democrats, including Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, as well as Mandela Barnes and Tony Evers in Wisconsin.
Obama makes his first stop in Atlanta, where Stacey Abrams is taking on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on November 8. She lost a close race to him in 2018.
Obama is, of course, right about life being “messy” and everyone making “mistakes.” The problem is that actions speak louder than words and that he has never stood against those aiming to make life even messier.
From his time at Occidental College, when he reportedly was a Marxist-Leninist, Obama has always been a radical. A 2008 National Journal analysis found that he was in 2007, the year before he won the presidency, our country’s most liberal senator. He’d expressed support for same-sex “marriage” back in the mid-’90s already, almost a generation before his 2012 announcement to that effect. Even more to the point here, it’s one thing to say, in passing and in principle, that today’s leftists need to take a chill pill as you characterize a mouth-muzzling tyranny with a warm, fuzzy colloquialism.
It’s quite another to raise an actual objection when the cancel cultists rear their ugly heads and, to quote Bill Buckley, stand “athwart history, yelling Stop!”
When did Obama ever warn that censoring voices in the middle of a pandemic, involving a “novel” virus about which we knew little, is un-American and dangerous? When did he ever rally to the defense of people being canceled — such as Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling — merely for uttering the simple truth that a man can’t become a woman just by willing it? Did he ever even say something so tepid as that mutilating minors in “transgenderism’s” name “may not be a good idea”?
There are other examples, too. But the reality is that Obama, with his 132 million Twitter followers and name recognition, could wield staggering influence with a button’s touch. Yet unlike liberal comedian/commentator Bill Maher, who has boldly criticized many Democrat extremes recently, Obama says nothing. He either agrees with the radicalism, is concerned about his reputation, or wants Democrats to have power at all costs — or some combination of these things.
What’s more, in campaigning for Senator Warnock, Obama is promoting a man who has voted with the radical Biden administration 96 percent of the time. Stacey Abrams, who was an “election denier” before the term was fashionable (2018), is also a radical leftist.
This said, if Obama finds today’s “wokeness” iteration of leftism unappealing, it’s no surprise. What we call “liberalism” is not really an ideology as much as it is a process — the process of ever trying to change the status quo. This is why leftists “never have enough” and always, after some social victory, return and propose even more change. As G.K. Chesterton put it, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes.”
Corresponding to this, conservatism also is mainly a process, that of trying to preserve the status quo; as Chesterton put it, “The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” But the bottom line is that when liberals overthrow a status quo and conservatives capitulate to the changes, as they usually will, these leftist social engineers become the authors of a new status quo. Yet what happens when their ideological children then rebel against their status quo and begin to change it?
Answer: They can become a Bill Maher, a guardian of the existing order. And while these guardians may still call themselves “liberal,” this explains why the new radicals will call them “conservative”: Within the context of the latter’s extremist perspective (and perspectives are all they have), the world’s Obamas are conservative.
This also helps explain, mind you, the #WalkAway movement, where Democrats such as Elon Musk announce they’re now supporting Republicans. With the political spectrum’s continual movement left, all they need do is remain ideologically stationary to end up right-of-center on it.
It’s the inevitable result of being rooted to nothing permanent. For the only way to not marry the spirit of the age and be left a widower is to wed the ageless — the Truth. It’s always faithful, never dies, and never initiates divorce.
