In this article in the OCR, Steyn riffs on the notion of President Obama as being so enraptured of the Golden Future, that present necessity quite escapes his notice. It's smashingly witty, as all Steyn's stuff is, but it put me in mind of this old Belmont Club post by Richard Fernandez, under his old nom de blogue Wretchard. It seemed to me amazingly perceptive at the time, and still does, and so I once again offer these extracts:
[The Internationale] set the theme which was to endure for more than a hundred years: that the familiar world is not worth fighting for. Only the unseen tomorrow gives life any meaning. ... From its earliest inception, the Left cried that the world was not good enough. It held that any attempts to find happiness in the present were not only doomed, but immoral. ... What they forgot to add was that the world would never be good enough. That not a single Marxist state ever managed to provide either the food or electricity in adequate quantities remained beside the point. Shortages were always in the present and the present was unimportant anyway. When capitalism provided wealth in quantities that Lenin could only dream of, then food and electricity themselves became hated in turn, the way starvation once was. ...
Lenin's future was attractive only for so long as it didn't exist and was legitimate only when its promises were not provided by capitalism. John Buchan could tell his son, when he wrote "Memory Hold The Door", which described friends who died in the Great War, that "they held up the world for you". But a true Leftist could only ever dream of boasting to his progeny that 'I tore down the world for you'. ...
