President Obama’s recent broadside against individualism is pure Marxist rhetoric. The republicans and most talking heads have missed his purpose entirely. Ayn Rand is probably turning in her grave, unsettled by the obvious misdirection and the Republicans’ inability to address it squarely or call it for what it is.

 No man is an island, true, but one man’s success is not equally distributed among all men as the president says. His tactics are appealing: If you own a business, you didn’t build that business on your own, he argues, the people who built the highways and bridges leading to your front door are part of your success, as are the people who truck supplies to your business and educate your children. It’s an appealing theme, one used by Elizabeth Warren in her senatorial bid in Massachusetts as well.

 The list is endless. Even the grocery store is part of your success when it supplies you with food to feed yourself and your family. Everyone is a part of your success and you would not be who you are without each one of them standing by your side, helping you along the way. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In Obama’s world the individual is important, but he or she is nothing more than a mere cog in the larger wheel that forms the collectivist line that supplies our goods and services, pioneers medical research, builds skyscrapers, advances new and imaginative technologies – and on and on.

 His point should not be missed. Indeed, we miss it at our own peril. It is this cancerous philosophy that is at the heart of Marxist socialist ideology and is the basis for all collectivist calls to redistribute the wealth of those who have to those who have less.  In Obama’s world, as in the world view of all Marxists, it is the fair thing to do, which is why his speeches are underpinned with repeated calls for “fairness”. To the Occupy crowd, progressives and disenfranchised who don’t know any better, his words are compelling.

 The fact is only a Marxist actually views the world of collectivist redistribution as fair. Everyone else who has even a cursory knowledge of history knows that it is uninformed agitation such as this that has fueled countless violent revolutions around the world.  Obama is building an army that demands “fairness” and wants its fair share – or else. The less they know the better. His purpose is not theirs, and never has been. Just ask the citizens of all those nations that have weltered under a collectivist socialist system.

 Obama will never say this outright, of course, because the public still is smarter than he is. Still, there are a growing number of people who feel cheated or disenfranchised, or who are collectivists at heart, and to these useful idiots the demands for fairness are intoxicating drugs and are the combustible element necessary to ignite the revolution they crave but will ultimately regret.  

 When Obama said he wanted to use the presidency to fundamentally alter American society; he knew exactly what he was offering; the public, however, did not. That the republicans are apparently at a loss to address the dangerous path the president and his Party have lain out is truly troubling.

 The president and his allies in the Democrat Party have made their choice: class envy and redistribution of wealth based on “fairness” as they see it, drive every debate in Washington now because the democrats truly believe the republicans are too timid to point out to the American public the ideology that has become the underpinning of the new Democratic party: Marxism.

 Marxism spells the end of democracy. It spells the end of free enterprise. It spells the end of innovation. It spells the end of incentives to succeed and invent and produce. It spells the end of all the medical and technological advances out nation has made throughout the centuries. It spells the end of social peace and unity and portends the beginning of a new revolution fed by envy, anger and resentment.  

 Of course, all this is pure nonsense if you believe, as Obama does, that our past is not just flawed, but hardly worth preserving. He says it all the time. I suspect if he said it another way, however, we might better understand what he was getting at:  “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

That the president is a fool is obvious; the question is: are we any smarter?