A Bundle of Contradictions

Charles Kesler takes to the pages of National Review to look at Barack Obama's view of the Founders and their principles (this essay is adapted from his book, which is must buy).  Dr. Kesler finds that in Obama's political thought as expressed in the pages of his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, lie many contradictions and shows his uncomfortable blend of modern liberalism, Jeremiah Wright-inpsired teachings, and postmodernism.  

Here is Kesler on Obama's misreading of the Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration of Independence “may have been,” he writes artfully, a transformative moment in world history, a great breakthrough for freedom, but “that spirit of liberty didn’t extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.” As a result, the Constitution “provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle,” to those who were not “deemed members of America’s political community”: “the Native American whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.” Obama doesn’t argue, as Lincoln did, that the Supreme Court majority was in error, that Dred Scott was wrongly and unjustly returned to slavery, and that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s dictum — that in the Founders’ view the black man had no rights that the white man was bound to respect — was a profound mistake. On the contrary, Obama accepts Dred Scott as rightly decided according to the standards of the time. He agrees, in effect, with Taney’s reading of the Declaration and the Constitution, and with Stephen Douglas’s as well. Despite his well-advertised admiration for Lincoln, Obama sides with Lincoln’s opponents in their pro-slavery interpretation of Jefferson and the Declaration.

Contrary to the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the man with whom Obama constantly links himself to politically, Obama believes in Chief Justice Taney's view of the Founding, an odd move considering Obama's respect for Frederick Douglass, who held the same views as Lincoln did on the question ( Harry Jaffa has shown as a young lawyer in 1819 Taney himself expressed views in line with Lincoln and Douglass).

Obama's rejection of the Declaration also mirrors the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, which taught of the inherent racism of the American Founding and it's principles:

In truth, Obama’s repudiation of Wright’s statements was extremely equivocal. He calls the reverend’s charges “not only wrong but divisive” – that is, untimely –because the American people are “hungry” for a “message of unity” right now. Wright expressed “a profoundly distorted view of this country,” Obama says, “a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” What that means becomes clearer a little later, when Obama declares, “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is . . . that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.” Yet Obama’s own candidacy confirms “that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” In blunt terms, Wright wasn’t wrong that America was, and was intended to be, a racist or unjust nation; he was wrong, however, to speak as though the country were as racist or unjust as it used to be. “America can change” not in the sense of living up to its first principles but in the opposite sense, of moving away from them. Except, that is, from the deepest principle of all, which expresses “the true genius of this nation”–our belief in change itself, or in the deliberative process that produces such change. Only the “narrative” of America, the movement away from its founding principles as originally understood, deserves liberals’ allegiance.

Even more stark though is Obama's seemingly rejection of "absolute truth":

To quote from The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit . . . in the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

There is no absolute truth — and that’s the absolute truth, he argues. Such feeble, self-contradictory reasoning is at the heart of Obama’s very private and yet very public struggle with himself to determine whether there is anything anywhere that can truly be known, or even that it is rational to have faith in. Anyone who believes, really believes, in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere. 

Although it’s certainly a good thing that America avoided religious and political tyranny, no previous president has ever credited this achievement to the Founders’ rejection of absolute truth, previously known as “truth.” Is the idea that human freedom is right, and slavery wrong, thus to be rejected lest we embrace an “absolute truth”? What becomes of the “universal truths” Obama himself celebrates on occasion? Surely the problem is not with the degree of belief, but with the falseness of the causes for which the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, and the jihad stood. A fervent belief in religious liberty is not equivalent to a fervent belief in religious tyranny, any more than a passionate belief in democracy is equivalent to a passionate longing for dictatorship.

But later, Kesler notes that Obama "admits that 'I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty — for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.'"

In reading this piece, and in reading The Audacity of Hope, I am further convinced that Americans are not born, they are made.