Obama's Neocon Turn Makes A Peace Movement Possible Again

The article: Is a Peace Movement Finally Awakening? by Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation

We know what the New Right is all about: corporate socialism. They call it Big Government Conservatism, and it consists of corporate welfare at home, imperial expansion abroad, and a national security state powered by religious fanaticism worthy of Al-Qaeda. The liberal Left, however, was all but defanged by the election of a black president who talked the liberal talk. But now we know that he walks the neocon walk. Liberals are actually starting to come out of their closets and protest again.

Guess what this means? Now that the Great Black Hope has proved to be just another tyrannical Great White Father, a left-wing peace movement has become possible once again. We antiwar libertarians are starting to believe we won't be so lonely for long.

Where liberals and libertarians part, of course, is in their opinion of government. Liberals, descending from the social democrats of the 19th and 20th centuries, believe that government can be used as a force for good, a weapon against the oppression of the masses. Libertarians are far more cynical: expansion of government welfare leads inevitably to the supreme corporate welfare of war and empire, or the other way around if the empire wants to buy the masses' loyalty. The supreme statement of the libertarian position comes from early 20th century libertarian Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the state."

But now Obama has shown his true colors. He is indeed bent on destroying America — but on behalf of his real owners: the banksters who lead the New Right and fund the TEA Party. He sold us a bill of goods, you see. The liberals are now a constituency without representation. Some of them are beginning to complain. As the war between the US and Wikileaks escalates, and as an increasingly frustrated US government threatens to abolish freedom of speech and unleash Soviet-style secret police tactics in order to defend the empire and its war policy, they may actually start to realize they may have to take to the streets again, perhaps all the way to the barricades.

But until then, antiwar libertarians and socialists will remain the proverbial prophets crying out in the wilderness...