Four years ago during an October 30, 2008 campaign speech at Missouri University, then U.S. Senator Barack Obama told a crowd of about 40,000 students, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Understandably, many conservatives scrutinized this comment because the idea of fundamentally transforming the United States of America is upsetting to anyone who cherishes basic American values.
Obama’s comment, however, shined a light on the more extreme feelings that were embedded deep within the left-leaning members of the Democratic Party, stemming from a radical leftist platform that started brewing in the 1960s. It is a platform that has now come to fruition out in the open in the form of the "New Democratic Party" and its leader is Barack Obama.
The New Democratic Party heralds a view often popularized by the Soviet Union that the United States is an imperialistic superpower using its war machine to exploit the resources and people of Third World countries — that capitalism is evil and America is the world bully.
Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign made it acceptable for far-leaning leftists who once masked themselves as “liberals” to finally, openly declare that they believe capitalism is evil. Instead of mainstream Democratic leaders resisting this platform they embraced it after they realized that it energized their base.
Democrats decided that in order to regain credibility around the world we should apologize for U.S. global hegemony, that we should also apologize for America being America, and to do that we would have to send a clear signal to other countries that we were willing to change.
In Barack Obama the Left found a leader who truly harbored the fundamental principles they had championed ever since the 1960s. Because his leftist views came from the heart, Obama was able to effectively convince millions of Americans that it was cachet to criticize their own country as a way of endearing themselves to the rest of the world.
Senator Marco Rubio crystallized Obama’s views in his speech at the Republican National Convention. He said that Obama promotes “ideas that people come to America to get away from … ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of the rest of the world becoming more like America.”
To break it down in actual political terms, President Obama does not believe in the fundamental American view of freedom, which is based on individual rights. He believes in the contradictory notion of collective rights, which is how freedom was defined in the Soviet Union.
Simply put, American freedom is the freedom to do things. Soviet "freedom" was defined by the false notion that freedom was freedom from things like hardship and poverty by guaranteeing health care, employment and rent-free housing — basic "rights" found in the 1936 Soviet Constitution.
With the rise of Barack Obama, more and more Americans are admitting that they would prefer to trade in their individual freedom for collective security, and they don’t mind the fact that the president plans to achieve his goals the same way the Soviet Union did.
In 1998, Barack Obama admitted, “I actually believe in wealth redistribution,” and in 2001 he complained to a Chicago radio station that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.”
Like his 2008 comment in which he said he wanted to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” the wealth redistribution comments alarmed conservatives, and with good reason.
Some of the president’s supporters have argued that the United States has always redistributed wealth through taxes. There may be a sliver of truth to that, but overall, taxes are used to pay for federal infrastructure. Wealth redistribution is primarily designed so that money is taken from one class and paid to another.
What the president’s supporters fail to recognize is that there is something suspect about the president refraining from using the capitalist word "taxes" and instead using the touchstone socialism phrase "wealth redistribution." For instance, a pro-life person never uses the word "fetus" — they use the phrase "unborn child" and vice-versa. Advocates of the free enterprise system use the word taxes. Socialists use the phrase wealth redistribution.
It isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.
Contrary to the Leftists who have taken over the Democratic Party, old-school liberals never wanted to fundamentally transform the United States of America. There is a radical difference between wanting to improve upon something and wanting to fundamentally change its basic, underlying values.
What Obama really wants is to fundamentally transform the United States of America into the Soviet States of America — a system that replaces individual rights with collective rights.
Although some on the Left think that could never happen in the United States, it has happened in other democratic countries, and it can happen here. It happens when people start to become so lazy, and so trusting of one political party or its leader that they are willing to sacrifice their individual rights for collective rights. They compromise their freedom for security.
In Senator Rubio’s convention speech he pointed out that this election is “a choice about what country we want America to be.” He could not have been more accurate in his choice of words.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington, D.C. prosecutor who served on U.S. Senator John F. Kerry’s presidential election legal team and interned for President Bill Clinton.