That Pesky Birth Certificate

Two days ago, Matt Drudge linked to a new book by Dr. Jerome Corsi, unflinchingly titled Where’s the Birth Certificate? The book immediately rocketed to number one on Amazon.com, where it has remained ever since. 
The media has shown its usual incredulity at the indisputable stupidity of the American people.  How could so many people question President Obama’s birthplace?  How could they wonder about his origins?  Are they all simply racist?

The answer, of course, is that Americans are desperately seeking an answer to a simple question: why does President Obama appear to be so un-American?  The term un-American here is not synonymous with anti-American (though Obama has been that on occasion); instead, it merely signifies that President Obama is unconcerned with typical American principles and traditions.  He sees capitalism as selfish and evil, religion as dangerous and oppressive; he sees the Constitution as antiquated and entrepreneurialism as exploitative.  He is the representative of the Fareed Zakaria ideology at work, celebrating the post-American world.

When America elects a president like this, many Americans begin wondering how it happened.  There are always two answers to such difficult questions: the first is optimistically externally-oriented, while the second is realistically reflexive.  It is far easier to believe that the problem of un-Americanism lies outside our borders, that within we are unified.  Hence the oddly persistent belief that politics stops at the water’s edge, that our politicians unify around foreign policy.  But that belief has been obsolete since the 1960s; hence the persistent outrage when certain politicians (see Pelosi, Nancy) travel abroad and then criticize their fellow American officeholders (see Bush, George W.).  We like to think that if we hang together, we will not hang separately.

Thus the stubborn belief that President Obama is born outside the United States.  If he was, the unspoken logic goes, we can understand where he picked up his un-American philosophy.  He is not one of us – he is rather a member of the same global community that despises America and tolerates Islamism, that slams American consumerism and praises Chinese communism, that rips evangelical Christianity while ignoring Muslim-imposed clitorectomy.  We need not worry about our domestic institutions, goes the line of thought – instead, we must focus on protecting ourselves from foreign infiltration.

More realistically, however, President Obama is the culmination of a century of foreign infiltration already in place.  The turning of America’s institutions of higher education took place decades ago; it is too little too late to focus on such infiltration now.  Beginning in the early 20^th century, America’s colleges and universities were infiltrated by German thought, then thought to be the most sophisticated in the world.  That school of thought, a merger of Hegelian utopianism and Marxist classism, quickly infected America’s halls of power.  Theodore Roosevelt, always trendy, bought into the new “progressivism” with alacrity, jettisoning the Constitution and capitalism in the process.  Bringing this perverse ideology to American shores, Teddy announced, “We of to-day who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired.”  This was the philosophy of incipient dictatorship.  It was brought to its near-term apex under a college professor, Woodrow Wilson, who thought that the Constitution itself needed to be stripped away.

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