Anyone who has been to college in the United States has met one of these people; the smug, got-it-all-figured-out, 20 year old, self-professed Marxist "progressive", waving his copy of the Communist Manifesto an/or Mao's little red book at everyone. In other words, an insufferable punk. You give him a wide birth and you move on, hoping his collision with post-college reality won't be too traumatic, or come to think of it, you do. Mark Steyn has the type nailed in this article at NRO. He doesn't call the president a Marxist but his description of the mentality at work as a sort of "radical grandiose narcissm" reminds me very much of the kind of person I'm talking about. Read the whole thing of course (Come on, it's Steyn. Why wouldn't you?) but here's a taste:
Obama’s postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It’s true that he hadn’t seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn’t seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he’s passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.
And:
Thus, Barack Obama: He declared himself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability. But, if it works for the EU, why not America? Like many of his background here and there, Obama is engaged mostly by abstractions and generalities. Indeed, he is the very model of a modern major generalist.
Finally, the best line of all:
As someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” When you’ve spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it’s bound to be a disappointment.
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