Reading from the UK: Are Brown, Obama "Quite Mad"?

I really enjoy reading the work of converts -- people who were formerly on the left but through some epiphany became conservatives. They have the most keen insights into what animates leftist thought, and they also understand the tactics that the left uses to advance their causes. David Horowitz, who edited Ramparts in his youth, is probably the best known.

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph is another such voice. She has a wonderful column this morning that wraps up the Obama administration's response to the economic crisis, and pairs it with Gordon Brown's leadership.

She notes that while Obama may not meet the textbook definition of a doctrinaire socialist, he meets her own practical definition, one with which Great Britain, particularly in the 15 years before Margaret Thatcher, became all too familiar:

You may quibble at my use of the word "socialist" to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.

Like Krauthammer last week, she calls Obama on the odd, revisionist story he told during his speech to Congress, a statist vision of the causes of economic upheaval:

...he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America's failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming ("we made the wrong choices"), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country's economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

No, not "quite mad," just clever, in a ham-handed way.

I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.

We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?

On the lighter side, another UK voice worth reading is James Delingpole, whose book, Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work!, is a real hoot. Delingpole is no convert, but he understands the Obama attraction well, and has good fun comparing it to the Blair years to let us know what's ahead in the former colonies. It'll make all but most humorless Obama acolytes laugh, too. Among other things, he chronicles the left's campaign to ban fox hunting, "the only sport," he notes,  "FACT - where alcohol actually improves your performance."