Who, whom
To the Editors:
I very much enjoyed reading The New Criterion‘s symposium on statism (“The New Statism,” The New Criterion, January 2010): Roger Kimball, Mark Steyn, Andrew C. McCarthy, Jeremy Black, Lionel Shriver—a veritable Valhalla of some of my favorite thinkers and writers. I write this more in the spirit of an addition to their thoughts than as an attempted correction of them. If the writers assembled for this endeavor share a flaw, it is an excessive generosity of spirit toward the American people, which has led the authors into a serious and fundamental error: reversing the arrow of causality—if you prefer, the vector of blame—in the relationship between the Obama administration and the American people. The American people have not been duped by the Obama administration, nor have they been seduced or misled by it. They have only been disappointed by its inability to enact the infantilizing socialism they demand on the reality-defying terms they command.
If President Obama is a Marxist, then we are all Marxists now, and have been for some time. If he is a radical, then we need a new word to describe radicals as I understand them. His proposals to socialize, nationalize, and put under political discipline various sectors of the economy—health care, famously, or energy, or the pay of financial executives—are of a piece with social initiatives that have been carried out in the United States for generations, under the auspices of both political parties and, notably,