Steering Obama's Drive to Socialism

Is America being herded, or led, into socialism? Or is this no more sinister than an updated New Deal? So, what’s Barack Obama’s real role?

First, what’s happening to the United States today is nothing like what President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “brains trust” had in mind in 1933.

Yes, there were socialists involved in his administration, even a few consciously or unconsciously under Communist Party discipline emanating from Moscow.

But Roosevelt never set out to orchestrate a Marxist revolution and replace capitalism with a socialist state that owns the nation’s financial mechanism and its means of production. By trial-and-error government intervention, FDR intended for his New Deal to modify America’s free-market, capitalist economy only enough to pull the nation out of the Great Depression.

It came as a bitter surprise to him that this wasn’t working. He grew less concerned about dangers from populist fascists or disloyal Marxists at home than he was alarmed about perils arising in Europe and in the Pacific.

Whichever way things might have gone domestically, it was rendered irrelevant by World War II, which saved FDR’s bacon. War enabled the latent, awesome power of American democratic capitalism to rescue this country and the rest of the Free World from the awaiting abyss of either fascism or communism.

Well, then, are President Obama and the increasingly leftist Democratic Party merely tinkering harmlessly with the greatest free economy and democratic republic the world has ever known? No. They’re not nibbling around the edges.

This is a frontal assault on the very economic, political, judicial and social foundations America has built upon since its inception. Under Obama, this beloved country is headed pell-mell into outright socialism — government nationalization of the institutions of finance, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, communications, trade, housing, health, and education.

And all of that while the military defense of the people of the United States is amateurishly entrusted to wobbly allies and the good will of Islamic terrorists.

Obama may appear as well-meaning, but he’s lurching toward the cliff of socialist revolution. He’s crafty, but that’s no substitute for smarts. It’s highly unlikely he alone is wise enough and experienced enough to carry off an actual revolution. For that, he needs help. And where’s that coming from?

The political managers who crafted his theme-based election campaign don’t have what it takes to deliver a whole nation into socialist serfdom. Some key people he’s brought into top echelons of his administration have demonstrated already that they’re ill-equipped to run a government, much less a revolution.

Shrewd operators — which veteran radicals are — don’t make the goofs Obama and his most-visible minions have committed. Ironically, so long as blunders make matters worse, they can actually serve the revolution. A Marxist tenet is that before things can get better (socialism triumphs) they first must get worse.

Things are now getting worse by the day. Obama is pushing upon Congress an avalanche of anti-capitalist measures, so many, so far-reaching, so fast that no one has time to cry, “Stop! At least give us a chance to debate them.”

Rather than go the European route of socialist gradualism, he opted to go for broke (no pun). Yet, he lacks the smarts to conceive or implement that strategy.

So, the question is, Are there those with superior intellect, stern discipline, and seasoned skill who are stage-managing Obama, engineering this metastasizing socialist revolution for him to sell to the American people? He’s slick at that.

Whoever those Marxist revolutionaries are, they know what they’re doing, and they’re brilliant; brilliant enough to leave the limelight to Obama.

Previous presidents with leftist inclinations flopped miserably because they lacked a crucial ally that Barack Obama enjoys — a near-monopoly of mass communications that is dedicated to helping him turn America socialist.

If worse is better, then this confederacy of conspirators is achieving, brilliantly.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.