Reason’s Michael Young makes an excellent point about what exactly is wrong with Obama’s statements about small-town Pennsylvanians:
[Obama] misses the essential nature of modern culture. People don’t end up focusing on issues like the right to bear arms, gay marriage, faith-based and family-based issues, and the like, because of bitterness against Washington or a sense that they can’t effect change there. People focus on these issues because modern American political culture is, effectively, about subcultures, variety, pursuing parochial aims, and shaping one’s identity and personal agendas independently of the state.
What Obama implicitly regards (in both his statements) as signs of disintegration, as reflections of popular frustration, are in fact examples of a thriving culture. Exceptions to this, of course, are anti-immigration sentiment and bigoted protectionism, both of which Obama conveniently dropped in his Indiana comments. Yet Obama’s approach betrays a very suffocating vision of the state as the be-all and end-all of political-cultural behavior. Outside the confines of the state there is no salvation, only resentment. This is nonsense, but it also partly explains why Obama is so admired among educated liberals, who still view the state as the main medium of American providence.
Which isn’t surprising because the implicit message of the Obama campaign seems to have become the idea that the only avenues for “hope” and “change” are the government, when, in reality, the state is the biggest impediment to progress in existence.
