Obama Arriving Too Early?

According to a book by one of Obama’s staffers, after his chosen successor had lost the presidency to Donald Trump, Obama mused  that perhaps he had gone too far and had been ten or twenty years too early in his actions and policies.  While there is no way to know if the story is accurate,  the remark is typical  of the man – pompous, arrogant,  and self-congratulatory. 

It would be more accurate to say that Obama was about a hundred years too late. In the first years of the 20^th Century, while the political and economic theories of the collectivists had been fully rebutted and refuted by philosophers and economists, there was no recent or contemporary evidence of their results in practice.  It was more understandable for some people  to believe collectivism would work when  there was no place it  was being tried to any great degree. (Even  Bismarck’s Germany, probably  the most  “progressive” of the major nations,  was not far down the road with it.)

That  changed with World War I. In the aftermath of  the war, Marxists  and fascists gained control Russia, Italy, Germany,  and Spain,  and socialist or right wing authoritarian parties acquired power or influence in much of the rest of Europe.  After World War II socialists took over governments in Britain, India,  and many of the former  European colonies in Asia and Africa while Marxists took control in China, half of Korea, and parts of Africa.  

The results are well known. The Communists in Russia created a brutal tyranny which lasted over seventy years, murdered  (probably at least fifteen and perhaps far more) millions of people, and left the country poor and dispirited.  In only twelve years of their tyranny,  the Nazis started the most destructive war in European history,  murdered six million European Jews and several million others, and left Germany a smoldering wreck.  Mussolini’s fascists led Italy into defeat and ruin. After a brutal civil war, Spain stagnated for many years  under an oppressive fascist government.   The countries of eastern Europe suffered decades of oppression, brutality, and poverty under rule by Soviet-selected  Communists.  Socialists gained power in Britain after World War II and transformed the country into something of a modern Sick Man of Europe which did not return to prosperity until a move away from their ideas  under Margaret Thatcher.  India and much of what was called the Third World adopted  socialism in various degrees with bad and often disastrous results. The Chinese Communists murdered many million Chinese and created an economic and cultural disaster that abated only when officials decided to retain  communism  in name only.   Communists and other collectivists turned  Cuba, the former Rhodesia, and Venezuela into what are commonly and fairly called hellholes.  During the postwar years,  relatively free West Germany prospered while communist East Germany did not. The difference was even more striking with the two Koreas. Other examples abound.

Obama is clearly a collectivist of one sort or another. (My guess would be that he is at heart  a Marxist, though one  who for pragmatic reasons would  favor or accept  a society retaining nominally  private businesses, institutions,  associations, and ways of life but with decisive and, when useful, arbitrary power over everything in the hands of the state.) He would have been as wrong in 1918 as he is today, but  more nearly excusably so.  In that sense his  best time would have been not now or in ten or twenty years  but well in the past.