Obama’s Permanent Revolution

Ever since Barack Obama’s election, the very same conservative movement that had been castigating him for months as a harbinger of sharia socialism has spent an awful lot of time crowing about weird nonsense concepts like Obama’s cabinet coming from the “center-right” of the Democratic Party. It’s a bit annoying, I miss the classics. Fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson is willing to kick it old-school and explain that in 2008 “50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized.”

Trotsky! I like it. I wonder which kind of Friedman-style, free market thinking Hanson thinks was prevalent back in 1958. As I recall it, the 50s were a time of high taxes, high levels of unionization, and strict regulation in the economic sphere with conservatism generally prevailing on matters related to sex and gender relations.