Politicians Are Not Dumb, Worldview Makes a Difference

[HKHaugan]

They may be ignorant about aspects of personal and relational living (most of us are) but they are not dumb when it comes to manipulating the public for power. Politics is a studied science of manipulation. Once we understand that principle we can begin to analyze political behavior. There are any number of clues to the deviousness of political maneuvering. It’s not the politician alone you see on TV and read about in the paper that is necessarily at fault. It’s the shadow political cadre, the ‘hidden persuaders’ behind him, the ones who shape his campaign, that are reading the public mentality through polls, psychological and sociological studies, ethnic behavior, watching the viewer ratings of shows on TV, what people watch and how they react, then advising him to take a certain course of action based on their findings. He reads them and then makes his choices. Politics is a collaborative effort to achieve seat and voice in the assemblies of government. Why? Power! For good or bad it is the power to be in charge of accomplishing change as the advisers set his strategy.

Public image and private tactics, public presentation and hidden pressure, public display and private systems are built around a cause. The cause is the propelling feature of the persona, the image, the face the public sees. If we can determine the cause we can spot the agenda. Heretofore, we have known basically the mindset, the worldview, that has been behind either the Democrat or Republican. But there is something new in the air, something that is radically different and we need to be aware of what it is and the agenda that springs from it.

First, we need to keep before us the fact that politicians are basically unknown entities. Very few of us know any of them personally. For the most part, they are managed ‘personas’ manufactured to manipulate based on a carefully constructed image they need to maintain office. I guess, in a way, that makes us all politicians to some degree. But what we are talking about here are those kinds of politicians that represent and govern large groups of people. So the political leadership holding our future needs careful observation especially in these very unsettling times.

Second, the political images we have known in the past come out of our own American landscape. They are the balancing factors between what is best for the moment and what is best for the long run. They characterize their policies under one agreement, the American dream, the individual who has the freedom to be in pursuit of a better life for his family and himself. It is the recognition of the individual, his desire to work hard, build a business or be part of a growing business. It has a built-in set of personal, interpersonal and communal ethics seeded by a Judeo-Christian lifestyle that has blossomed into a gigantic capitalistic, industrial, scientific, socially and religiously successful experiment leading the world in developing human potential. All in all it is the most advanced atmosphere in the world for creativity on every level of human activity.

Third, we are a nation and culture in the throes of a fumbling leadership that lost a sense of the heritage we were blessed with. We seem to have lost that prior self-confidence that says we are Americans and proud of our heritage. We are a message to the rest of the world that what we have here can be had in any nation anywhere. America is a watershed, a fountain and an example. Of course we know people are not perfect but the foundation that recognizes that can turn to the One who is perfect and without imposing but exposing the positive values America has people anywhere can have what we have. America is the most exposed nation in the world. Everyone can see both its positive and negative behavior. That’s good it keeps us honest. But we work in spite of the negative and we keep the high historic values before us and hold those values demanding that they be maintained. Its adherence to those historic values that gives us the freedom to achieve, accomplish and advance.

In this particular moment in history we are on a precipice, a precipice where we either fish or cut bait. And each individual who has any sense of the substance of our American history has to understand the consequences. We are a mix of many cultures, tribal and national backgrounds. In that sense we are multicultural but the cultures out of which our families came were left behind to become something that was promised.

The present concept of multiculturalism is different. It’s dangerous. We are not a people maintaining a bunch of distinct foreign cultures, mores, principles, religious domination and political leadership. We are a people who have left all that. We are a people having put our past aside looking for a future which is always unfolding. The one thing we share with the past that is ongoing is our spiritual heritage. Even for unbelievers it is a cover to guarantee their right to a future that they can discover. Our Judeo Christian heritage is the foundation to guarantee that all people who commit to a future and not a past can find their future regardless of their past. When we say we are Americans we are not building a culture on which we pour the concrete of royalty, dictatorship, class consciousness and limited individual achievement. No, we are always looking ahead. All we need from the past is what not to do, the lessons of history, so that we don’t repeat the rigid demands of past history that have stratified people into despair, resignation and a slave to ‘the way things have always been.’

Pluralism also has become a strident cause to blur our moral values. Based more on emotion than reality it pushes every button in the area of questionable human behavior. Homosexuality and abortion are touted as necessary to civil rights when in fact they are destructive to our created internal and external nature. Their practice may be the choice of individuals but the consequences are deadly both to the internal and external health of humanity. Isn’t it interesting that the possibility of being arrested for writing these things is possible because they may be ‘hate speech?’

Having said all this we need to look at the presidential campaign. What exactly is driving the machine and the person, Mr. Obama and his political army, now ‘in power?’ This is really the most important political question we can ask at this moment. As one college president observed, ‘We don’t know who this man is.” How true! We knew all of our other president’s background, friends, associates, ideologies but not this one. Where is he coming from? What is his philosophy? What are his goals? We know little of his past, no one steps forward to reveal relational experiences with him or what his American mother believed or that he was heavily influenced by a foreign father whose ideology was shaped by his hostility toward the colonial powers surrounding him (see video by President of Kings College, Dr.Dinesh D’Souza and Dreams of My Father, by Barak Obama).
From what I can surmise in how he presents himself on TV, in the press and in his book, it seems he sees America as a colonial power like Britain used to be, a colonial power negatively capitalistic therefore exploitive, colonial in its military and acting too superior in foreign policy.

Look only at his railing against the capitalists on Wall Street yet quietly encouraging and receiving their millions of dollars in support (this is how foreign nations feed off our trough). Take notice in his literally bowing to foreign potentates, saying America is not exceptional, apologizing for our incredible progress as a leading nation, denying the Judeo-Christian influence in our country’s beginning, carefully choosing which countries should be sent military support and not others, appeasing Muslim nations by saying that Muslims had a part in our founding as a nation, apologizing for our American past in foreign countries, talking about our mistakes instead of our worldwide efforts to promote democracy, peace and balance, never accounting for the fact that America has been the greatest anti-poverty machine in history.

To add a note here, he has worked tirelessly to appease worldwide Islamic interests which he refuses to see as a politically driven religion that would replace everything we consider the free exercise of faith. His refusal to have a national prayer day (part of that foreign influence) stands out. Add on the lack of recognition of Christian ministries all over the world seeking only the betterment of every human being’s life and destiny by eliminating poverty, challenging corrupt governments and bringing the latest in medical advancement. Is he still influenced by the Jeremiah Wrights (who want the damning of America) hiding in the cellar of his psyche? And what about the ethnic anti-white bias from his early life (as his book tells)---did it not and does it not play a significant part in his foreign worldview? Inadvertently his wife revealed her own bias when she acknowledged her belief that it was not until the election of her husband that she could be proud of her native USA. Really?

One has only to read the pages of his writings to see a subtle and vastly different ideology at work, different than any former president, different in form and structure from the founding documents, our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. The very idea of his having been a ‘community organizer’ means he had a hands-on sharpening of a denial of our founding principles (not the idea of organizing but the reason behind organizing, to tear away at the very economic and social system that has given him a home). A roughly similar dynamic can be found in the guerilla movements in South America, Africa and modern Europe that have sold out to the pot of socialism’s porridge of false promises.

Can we not see in the proposed government health program the seeds of failure so evident in the decades of British experience? Destroy the economic base through excessive spending as in the industrial bailout programs, justify them, even when they fail, seed the government with ‘rebel’ leadership like Van Jones, inventing new positions of authority (czars) with incompetent leaders in our central agencies like finance and security, play up the civil rights movement and their leaders, use the justice system to change legal principles, begin a series of law suits against those who would close our borders to illegal immigration, encourage more and more division among those who oppose him, put religion on trial and play one group against another. Keep people away from the economic issues by drumming up another distracting situation like the contraceptive issue with the Roman Catholic Church. When border guards are illegally imprisoned, law enforcement handcuffed, no concern for the integrity of our borders, reduce our military, support groups like the NEA that water down our educational system, keep unions and management at each other, drum up the Hollywood crowd to teel us how superior they are to the people who buy tickets to see them, wow, sounds echoing right out of Karl Marx.

Play the Black card, the Hispanic card, the medical card, the regional card, the state card, the immigration card, the class card, the gender card, the gender marriage card, the LGBT card, the poor card and pretty soon you have a deck of cards that do nothing but create division, hostility and get everyone so conscious of their differences that everyone is divided by sight, get everyone upset then appear on the scene as a political messiah to save everyone. It’s a giant foreign political poker game in which everyone loses in the end. Castro and his regime, where is it now? All of this to me summarizes the influence of a non-American, his father, a foreign anticolonial philosophy, so well stated by the (mentioned before) Kings College President, Dr. Dinesh D’Souza 9, look him up on YouTube). This is why we don’t really know who he is.

If this is his mindset it is foreign to every value we hold dear. It reveals another kind of foreign premise. It is a mindset borne out of a foreign experience attempting to change the core philosophy of our historic American conceptual base. It is a mindset foreign to the Judeo Christian base that has given us the freedom to found an economic, social and religious movement that is not institutional but personal interpersonal. I am convinced this is the dynamic behind the ‘birther’ movement. It is a subtle attempt to accuse of us of something we are not and use it as a means to get us to doubt who and what we are. Once that doubt is planted in our most vulnerable institutions like schools and universities and promoted in our media, city councils and state governments and then exercised by leadership there we become like every other nation, enslaved to our past and not open to our future.

Then to top it off he believes we are evolving as persons. The idea itself is ludicrous and totally uninformed violating the very truth of human nature. It is the Judeo Christian format that keeps us honest through our legal and judicial system, our representative government and the individual freedom to be individuals who begin with nothing, who by being creative, grow through trial and error in a non-restrictive sense of freedom guaranteed by our spiritual heritage. More can and will be said but here is a start.

One more question:
Is this mindset, this worldview, advertent or inadvertent? Only time and your vote will tell.