Our President likes to accuse the "other side" of putting politics above national interest. Implied is the purity of his own motives and actions. The President's moral posturing is politics, too, of course. What should worry us is that he might actually believe what he says.
At a root level, he does. The Progressive world view requires a villain. What is the moral basis for pursuing economic or social justice except purging injustice? Unless remedying previous exploitation, Obama's desire to "spread the wealth around" resembles Lincoln's description of tyranny/slavery: "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it."
Villains also personify the rationale for increasing government control over our lives. If we could individually, or collectively through voluntary associations (church, charity, mutual-aid society, club), look after ourselves, what need for government to assert and insert itself?
Today's villains are millionaires and billionaires, Tea Partiers, racists, sexists, homophobes and climate-change deniers, the contours of these categories conveniently expanding to comprise people making $200,000 or more, as well as virtually anyone who disagrees with the Progressive agenda. It is not enough that such people be mistaken, since that would create a moral obligation for Progressives to persuade through argument; as villains, opponents can be ignored or crushed.
Is such a worldview that much different from other systems where officials have gathered ever more wealth and power to themselves while ostensibly defending the exploited and weak from bourgeois capitalism, international Jewry, heretics or infidels?
For any world view based on envy and control, it takes a villain.
This is written so clear and concise, but you are preaching to the choir here.
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