THE MARXISM STUDIED BY BARACK OBAMA

when he was seeking out Marxist and hard left professors at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard was a different sort of Marxism than the "scientific socialism" learned by his father, the economist Barack Obama, Sr.  Rather than a Marxism of the economic system, it was the kind of cultural critique developed by "Western Marxism", the Frankfurt School, the Deconstructionists, and the "critical legal studies" movement (so fashionable at Harvard Law during the time Obama studied there).  This sort of Marxism was aimed at the "unmasking" of false consciousness in the traditional God-fearing, free-market, classically liberal West.  The idea here is to "unmask" the sources of "false ideologies", causes which leave communities wedded to  false, corrupt, and debilitating gods like traditional morality, Christianity, middle-class commercial ethics, and the whole constellation of Western legal and economic institutions.  We can understand why Obama got good grades taking these classes when you look at the skill Obama displayed in San Francisco on Friday in is his "unmasking" of the "false consciousness" of the good people of the small towns in Pennsylvania. 

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

(The "false consciousness"of the small town people  = their belief in religion, their bigotry, their gun-loving, and their believe in protectionism.  The "source" of the false consciousness of the small town people  = the failure of past Presidential administrations to bring promised economic revival to the small towns.)

Despite the outrage of the political punditry class, most of us know that exactly this sort of analysis dressed up with painful academic jargon and the latest politically correct cant would get you an easy "A" in tens of thousands of college classes taught at Universities around the country.  And don't kid yourself.  Demographic analysis by Michael Barone suggests that it is exactly those Americans who were taken in by this sort of stuff at college (a good many of whom now teach versions of left wing "cultural critique" themselves) who make up one of the most prominent constituency of the Obama for President bandwagon.

UPDATE:  Powerline notes that Obama's talking points come straight out of a left-wing text, and also this:

So Barack thinks that people would stop "seeking refuge in" and "clinging to" religion, if only they had a government they could "count on." That's what Karl Marx said, too. No wonder Obama can't figure out why it's controversial!

AND FILE this one under "I told you so".  Forty-six percent of "liberal" Americans agree with Barack Obama's statement that people in small towns "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

ALSO -- Barack Obama sends Bill Kristol back to his tattered 1980's era copy of The Marx-Engles Reader.