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Socialist Longing

Democratic Party presidential contenders debate, 7/30/19.

The morning after last night’s Democratic Party debate I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s story (National Review, 7/29/19) about the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Britain.  It brought to mind an inextinguishable need in the enthusiasts of socialism, whether openly declared or as quiet fellow travelers (much of the Democratic presidential field), to constantly point to a non-existent, never-realized form of it.  It’s a phantom only possible in the mind’s eye of the true believer and nowhere else.  Bernie exhibits it in great bounty, and so does an increasing portion of the party’s activist base, the party’s stable of presidential candidates, and its giddy zealots in Congress (the dimwit Squad for instance).  In addition to Stalin’s Socialist Realism in art, we must add Socialist Longing – the longing for a future and purer socialism that somehow will get it right – to the doctrines of the Church of Socialism.

Bernie sounds like he was mentally put into a cryogenic state during his glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s.  Mentally, he’s still honeymooning in the Soviet Union.  Khodorkovsky mentioned the everywhere-stated party slogan: “The Party solemnly promises that this generation of the Soviet people will live under Communism.”  Bernie is stuck there as well.  For Bernie, the promise is always in the future, or in a northern European country that, in reality, shed much of its experiment in socialism.  Bernie’s socialism is the Sweden of 1970, for example, not the Sweden of today.

Does he know that Sweden isn’t far behind the US in Heritage’s economic freedom rankings? (The US position was bolstered by the recent tax cut law.)  Still, Sweden has no minimum wage law, abolished its inheritance tax in 2004, and let go of much of its state-owned enterprises.  It’s vaunted public healthcare system is remarkably decentralized, a far cry from Bernie’s sovietized Medicare for All.  Bernie’s idea of socialism is the failed version, and can’t point to a functioning one this side of North Korea and Cuba.

Bernie wants to impose something that Sweden ran from.  Does he know it?  Don’t know, but the longing continues for a decrepit idea in the hope that it will be magically transformed into a success.  Bernie is the chief exponent of a made-in-America cargo cult.

RogerG

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Why the Dissatisfaction?

Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20

I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving.  Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well?  Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner).  Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”.  The problem is far, far more than economic.  The accompanying review of the books presents the case.

     

Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party?  I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”.  The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way.  The two elements have a nexus.

The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney.  Some call it civil society.  Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”.  Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism.  In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities.  In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy.  Church and family are replaced by commissars.

I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.

RogerG

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The Citizenship Question

A group of migrants gather at the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, as they try to pressure their way into the U.S.
Rodrigo Abd/AP

The citizenship question should be on the ballot, and please don’t psychoanalyze repressed racism as is the wont of the pseudo-Freudians in the Democratic presidential field. It’s simply a matter of pure reason. However, there’s more to the story according to John Yoo (UC Berkeley law professor) and James Phillips (Stanford law professor). They see a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision (Dept. of Commerce v. New York) blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question for those concerned about rule by unelected administrative apparatchiks (“Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose”, The Atlantic, see here).

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan listen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool/File Photo – RC183E07BA00

First, pure reason dictates the presence of the question. The Democrats’ lollapalooza of giveaways includes the extension of benefits to citizens of other nations in residence here, legal and illegal. How could you determine the fiscal impact of the lunacy if you can’t count the beneficiaries? Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) pulls 11 million out of the hat for the undocumented alone. MIT says its more like 22 million. A range of double means that we don’t know. Though, who would you trust for scientific rigor, Mayor Pete or MIT?

Mayor Pete

An additional reason cries for the inclusion of the query. I suspect that the foreign-born make up a huge slice of the population. If you want a data base on the nature of the current population for policy reasons – which is one of the reasons for having a census – to exclude a descriptor that stares at you as you drive through almost any hamlet, town, or city in California (and Chicago, New York City, etc., etc.) would limit the census to only being a tool to inflate Democrat representation in Congress. Get real, ferret out the non-citizens and their status.

Secondly, Yoo and Phillips see a positive in the Court’s majority opinion for those with qualms about omnicompetent administrative governance, particularly the promiscuous delegation of Congressional authority to the president and his administrative minions. Since Wilson and FDR, it has been the dream of “progressives” to supplant popular sovereignty with the rule of “experts”, never mind that the rule of experts can resemble the rule of Boss Tweed (“collusion” anyone?). The decision could be interpreted as a slap at “Chevron deference” (courts deferring to administrative judgment) and power-hungry power centers like the EPA.

If we still are prevented from knowing much about the people who are flooding into our country, at least we might be comforted by the realization that the EPA can’t kick us out of our house.

Read the Yoo and Phillips article.

RogerG

Postscript: On Friday, 7/12/2019, Pres. Trump issued an executive order to use other data bases to determine residency status of the population for the 2020 census.  Expect more lawsuits in attempts to obscure the actual number.

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Add Degree Inflation to the Other Forms of Malignant Inflation

Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, June 2019.

One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class.  He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one.  This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement.  I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students.  He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.”  My heart sank after hearing this.  I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion.  It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on.  How did we get to this place?

Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement.  Call it degree inflation.  The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.

Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.

And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s.  College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision).  As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups.  A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real.  The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).

I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”.  Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions.  It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it.  When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem.  For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.

Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.

Illogic abounds in the process.  On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it.  It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price.  You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.

To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody.  Nor should it be.  Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition.  Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.

RogerG

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Irritating Abuse of Language

On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.

We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do.  Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws.  The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.

A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”.  Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work.  Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing.  What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens.  Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here.  These people are the citizens of other countries.  They are not stateless people.

Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.

Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation.  The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.

So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities.  American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens.  If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.

Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.

Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded.  He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy.  Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”

I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it.  The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available.  American citizenship be damned.

Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections.  Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs.  Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members.  How does that make sense?

From now on, please clean up the language.  All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions.  The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all.  For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth.  Let’s talk like we understand the fact.

RogerG