The usually better Spengler writes:
"Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds", was the title of Dunham's doctoral dissertation. Dunham's sympathy for the traditional life of Indonesians fighting against the encroachment of the global economy evidently left a huge impression on young Obama, for he thought their lives better than those of poor people in the United States. As he (or Bill Ayers) wrote in Dreams of My Father:
"And yet for all that poverty [in the Indonesian marketplace], there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like [the Chicago housing projects] so desperate."
That paragraph is a precis of his mother's doctoral dissertation, and may be the most the most important point of self-revelation in Obama's collective utterances. The words may have come from Bill Ayers, but the sentiment is doubtless Obama's. In mature adulthood, Obama continued to identify with the leftist sentiments of his mother.
The above is an example of why I've abandoned the left-right Eurasia-Oceania pole game. Sympathy for traditional life is leftist!? The Indonesian marketplace Obama describes is an essentially conservative institution. The Chicago housing project, and African-American culture in general, is such a mess precisely because too little has been conserved. Africans were stripped of their traditional culture by slaveowners. A consistent conservative should support efforts by all peoples to resist the malicious effects of "the encroachment of the global economy." Yet the bizarre situation has arisen in which to support third world traditionalism is leftist, while to support first world traditionalism is rightist. The rightist must be pro-American tradition while calling for the erosion of all other traditions through the global marketplace. The leftist must be anti-American tradition while calling for the preservation of all other traditions through multiculturalist ideology. Then there are the far-righters who believe all traditionalists should unite - to eliminate the Jewish or Muslim tradition. Three cheers for Indonesia-loving conservatives, America-loving leftists, philo-Semitic fascists and everyone else who throws a wrench in Spengler's neat-fit ideological world.
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