ETHOS

By Eric Augenbraun

“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” -Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” -Barack Obama at a San Fransisco fundraiser, April 6, 2008

Can’t you see the resemblance?

By now, you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard the media backlash over Obama’s recent comments at a San Fransisco fundraising rally in which he ascribed the embrace of religion, guns, and bigotry among small town whites to their “bitterness” over being screwed by American capitalism over the last 25 years. While the media, HRC, and Old Man McCain have blasted him for being ‘elitist’ and ‘condescending’, as a self described Marxist I was more struck by the eery similarity between Obama’s statements and Karl Marx’s now (in)famous materialist analysis of religion. Of course, Obama added the nuance that people turn to guns, too, out of bitterness – though I can think of reasons other than bitterness that people might own guns.

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