Ever since Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to the presidency began, Americans have been asking themselves that question. The answer, it turns out, solves the riddle of Obama’s political convictions. Community organizing is a largely socialist profession. Particularly at the highest levels, America’s community organizers have adopted a deliberately stealthy posture—hiding their socialism behind a “populist” front. These organizers strive to push America toward socialism in unobtrusive, incremental steps, calling themselves “pragmatic problem-solvers” all the while. Barack Obama’s colleagues and mentors were some of the smartest and most influential stealth-socialist community organizers in the country. Their strategies of political realignment and social transformation guide the Obama administration to this day.
Although contemporary community organizers deliberately hide their socialism, with a bit of digging, their secrets can be revealed. In neglected archives and long-forgotten issues of obscure journals, the untold story of modern American socialism lives. As the revolutionary hopes of sixties radicals banged up against the hard reality of a popular Reagan presidency, America’s socialists turned to a combination of community organizing and local politics to move the country steadily leftward by degrees. These were the socialists who schooled Obama. Their story is his story.
The socialist community organizers who inspired and trained Obama openly embraced American democracy. Although they admired Marx, Lenin, and Mao—along with Obama’s idol, Saul Alinsky—in the medium term, at least, these organizers surrendered their revolutionary hopes and abandoned authoritarian ways. Some retained a soft spot for Third World Communist regimes in Cuba and Latin America. And surely the program favored by Obama’s organizing mentors could be seen as a subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—assault on traditional American freedoms.
Yet this new stealth socialism, which Obama studied and absorbed as a community organizer in Chicago, became more sophisticated and transformed itself into the policies he is now enacting as president. Over the long term, Obama’s plans are designed to ensnare the country in a new socialism, a stealth socialism that masquerades as a traditional American sense of fair play, a soft but pernicious socialism similar to that currently strangling the economies of Europe.
This is Barack Obama’s secret. The president has systematically disguised the truth about his socialist convictions, sometimes by directly misrepresenting his past and sometimes by omitting or parceling out damaging information to disguise its real importance. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORN—all of Obama’s well-known radical ties are entry points into the much larger and still unknown socialist world where Obama’s career was nurtured. That is why the president has disguised and withheld the truth about these political partnerships.
The time has come to lift the veil and reveal the untold story of America’s Radical-in-Chief and his socialist political world.