NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 19: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) endorses Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a campaign rally in Queensbridge Park on October 19, 2019 in the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
I don’t watch presidential debates or election night returns. What happens happens. The play-by-play of the boxing match (debates) or the color commentary of election returns (as in a televised football game) are a sideshow and irrelevant to the outcome and the underlying realities.
The underlying reality of this election season is a pungent personality vs. pungent policies. The former causes you to grimace; the latter ruins your life. For me, the choice is obvious: I can’t allow the grating of my teeth by a tweet or rally speech to be an excuse to let into power those who’d engineer national bankruptcy.
Biden is the aging and incontinent godfather of a philosophical crime family. A vote for him is an endorsement of left-wing radicalism. Say what you will, voting “D” this time around is a knowing or unknowing sanction of socialism and all its crudity. The stable for filling departments and agencies if Biden should win will be the same one that gave us an unsavory California and middle class flight from wherever they hold the reins of power. The same folks who gave us catcalls like “defund the police” – or “rethinking”, choose your verb – will give us a militarized EPA, and a militarized everything else in the Article II branch and beyond … with the exception of the actual military.
Biden (center) with Warren and Bernie.
If you think that Biden is such a nice guy that he won’t appoint the dwellers of his own party then you must have locked yourself into a Salvador Dali painting. His party has welcoming room for what used to be called the hard left, people like Sandy (AOC) and her sophomoric Squad and Bernie and his bros. Occupy Wall Street is now Occupy DNC. Socialism is no longer a dirty word to the party’s base.
It makes no difference if Biden appoints an Elizabeth Warren or an Ilhan Omar type. It’s only a question of how far left to go and how fast.
Today’s left amazingly, actually believes socialism works. When someone cites its long history of failures, they respond with the addition of an adjective like “democratic” or “It’s never been tried”. It’s classic No-True-Scotsman fallacy, as in “No true socialist would be like that.” The tactic is to change socialism’s definition by adding a modifier (democratic) and a purity test and it’s all better. Yeah, really.
The deficiency of socialism has little to do with the means of getting there: election or revolution. It’s just anti-human; it unleashes the worst in us; it’s a recipe for a fiasco. Voting “D” this time around is a vote for fiasco. The only remaining question is how fast will Biden get us there if elected.
In the wake of the 2016 election, I got into a spat with friends over the issue of voter fraud in our elections. Many dismissed the gravity of the problem in their zeal to hype Hillary’s almost 3 million popular vote margin over Trump. I maintained: Not so fast. The Dems run up the score in the few deep blue states (Actually, the Dems deserve red.). And what about that score? Is the popular vote pristine, meaning one-man-one-vote? Does each ballot represent a vote by an eligible voter? Or, conversely, is the vote total polluted with a lot of noise in the form of ballots emanating from dead people, identity theft, or serial instances of multiple voting. You can’t know the extent the problem till you look.
When we look, we find it. The Heritage Foundation website maintains a log of voter fraud cases. Take a look here.
Last night, Tucker Carlson played a clip of rampant voter fraud in Ilhan Omar’s district (D, Minn. 5th congressional dist.). If the clip wasn’t doctored to tell a lie, then the pictures won’t. If nothing else, they probably pull back the covers on a black market in votes like the one for drugs, sex, porn, or murder-for-hire. See below.
Check fraud is easy if no one checks for ID; likewise in the black market of votes. The fraud is facilitated if voter rolls are infrequently cleaned of the deadwood, as in California in both its forests and voter registration rolls. Add same-day registration and widespread vote-by-mail and the integrity of the popular vote becomes a meaningless talking point.
One antidote is the Electoral College. The Electoral College dilutes the influence of the popular manias in deep blue states as well as malfeasance with the franchise. Like the fact that smartness isn’t evenly distributed in the population, so with corrupted voting in the states. It demands of the winner that he or she have a broader appeal than the corrupted vote totals in a few highly populous states. Now there’s a civics lesson long forgotten.
Years ago, I ran into a piece by William F. Buckley, Jr. I must paraphrase the quote from memory: “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” A citizen should develop some grounding in the issues and times that confront us. The act of voting should be the outcome of those insights. The key word is “should”, and “should” doesn’t mean “is”.
Instead, we are bombarded with pleas to vote … by God, just vote! It’s horrible advice. The survival of our citizen republic demands a virtuous public. Virtue is inconceivable without some grasp of its historical and philosophical basis, which requires time and effort to know some very basic things. Absent this foundation, we will turn our citizen republic into the rule of the whipsawed and momentary electoral majorities who are animated by media-inducing impressions and blinkered perceptions.
Sound familiar? Look to our city streets and you’ll see the march of the truly ignorant, and then stop to realize that they’ll vote. A college education or the possession of a diploma cannot be counted on as proof of wisdom and virtue. Just think, your vote will probably be cancelled by the ill-informed, and many others who will be crammed into mailboxes by who knows whom.
Portland protesters geared for war against the police.
Don’t get caught up in the fads of thought that are all the rage on our campuses, media, and our self-anointed elect among the glitterati. Many of these babbles are passing fads, only temporary enthusiasms that can’t stand the test of time due to their falsehoods and internal contradictions.
Inform yourself by gathering knowledge to answer some basic questions. Here are some queries to chew on.
What is our basic nature? Is our essential nature “positive”, “negative”, or a combination? Depending on your assessment, the choice may lead to a shining city on a hill or to the darkest of history’s tyrannies.
Lenin (center) in 1917 or 1918 with his Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom).
The crystallization of the “positive” view is of recent vintage and advocates the perfectibility of people. Thus, we’ll have placed over us a class of people with the hidden knowledge for perfection. They pressure for the powers to achieve the prescribed ideal … and then we’ll have to say goodbye to idiosyncrasies, liberty, and restraints on the state. Progressives, the folks torching our cities, and a good portion of the Democratic Party’s base and leaders are beguiled by the idea. They’re enraptured by big a government with big powers to engineer the ideal.
In contrast, our Founders combined the “positive” and “negative”. They were “positive” in that people could be virtuous but it required civilization’s little platoons: family, faith, and civil society. Without virtuous self-restraint, the “negative” in mankind – original sin in Christianity – will take hold and we’ll have bad men and women riding herd on a chaotic society. The recognition of our potential for evil led Madison and others in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1787 to the Constitution with its government constrained by law and enumerated powers.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Oil on Canvas, Howard Chandler Christy.
Your vote is a stamp of approval for one of these two courses, whether you know it or not. From Aesop’s Fables: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!”
Why does Big Government have a propensity for failure, especially when given intractable problems to solve?
Friedrich Hayek’s answer: the knowledge problem – no small group of people in any government have the knowledge and mental capacity to direct the many-faceted lives and minds of a population. We must know our limits; too many on the left don’t know theirs as they ignorantly unleash the law of unintended consequences.
The inherent totalitarianism in The Green New Deal will produce scads of unforeseen ill-effects, replicating California’s experience of blackouts and expensive energy and an economic scorched earth.
SONOMA, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 10: Traffic lights in the Sonoma area are out due to power outages on October 10, 2019 in Sonoma, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
A government takeover in Medicare for All will translate into Iron Curtain health care. Be prepared for a gradual deterioration of medical services: rationing, decrepit facilities, a decline in innovation and the striving for excellence, and life and death decisions made on the basis of bureaucratic formulas. We’ll get the chance to experience the disaster of urban renewal of the 60’s and 70’s in our next hospital visit. Oh, I forget, it’ll be free … and centralized and like the DMV.
… to say nothing of the loss of freedom in healthcare. For the masses of us, we’ll be funneled into treatment reminiscent of an inner-city public hospital’s emergency room on a Saturday night. Naturally, the rich will have recourse to the best of the highly proficient medical wildcats operating in a medical black market, or just jet to the lavish establishments that’ll pop up beyond our borders. Healthcare will remain grossly hierarchical with the privileged few getting more and the rest of us sitting in a chaotic emergency room next to a gang’s stabbing victim.
Patients forced to wait for treatment in the hallways of an Atlanta Hospital in 2006 due to lack of space and overcrowding. (Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)1970’s Soviet hospital room.
Marking a ballot is much more than a romantic attachment to particular candidate. The act carries with it all of the above and more.
Is “tax the rich” practical?
Big Government necessitates Big Taxes. It’ll be sold as “tax the rich” but it’ll end up as a tax everybody receiving a paycheck. The rich will hide their wealth or flee; everybody else will be at the mercy of the payroll department and the IRS. Don’t underestimate the inventive ways for Big Government hucksters to extract more sustenance out of the people to feed their Leviathan.
Look at the income tax. In the beginning it targeted the rich ($1 million or more in annual income), then it creeped down the income ladder, and then withholding was invented. The “genius” of withholding is that they get their money before you get yours (withholding), and then they command under penalty of law that you tell them whether it was enough. It’s ludicrous.
The scurrying about to avoid the lash of exorbitant taxes by those with the means to do so will further sap economic vitality. In the end, the ones who don’t have the means to escape the whip – the average person – will be socked with the bill in the form of reduced paychecks, lost opportunities for their children, and deteriorating standards of living.
Tax-raising schemes siphon a good portion of the rewards of the people’s labor to legions of government workers and Big Government’s brood of ideological and rent-seeking dependents. The result is a bloated government with not enough money to support the bloat as the well-to-do sit in their posh seaside villa on some island outside the reach of the IRS. In the end, you know who’ll bear the brunt of that sorry state of affairs.
Rest assured that it won’t be Jeff Bezos in his secluded estates in Seattle and Washington, DC, or his Texas ranch, or the South Pacific island that he’ll purchase to escape the clutches of Bernie/Warren/AOC. There will be no escape for his underlings in the distribution centers.
What is meant by equality? Is it equality of result or equality of opportunity? Which way do the parties lean?
Today’s equality at the hands of left-wing zealots isn’t the equality of the Founders or MLK’s “I have a dream”.
Martin Luther King making his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the capitol mall, August 1963.
The choice between the two equalities leads in two radically different directions. Up to the recent invention of critical race theory and the sophistry of using racism to fight “racism” (affirmative action), the preference was for equal opportunity in the 20th-century actions and policies to remove unwarranted obstacles in law (de jure) and practice (de facto) that lead to seriously problematic discriminations.
Yet, waiting in the wings among the civil rights crusaders were the revolutionary ambitious. Not satisfied with the proscriptions on discriminatory behavior, and schooled in the Marxist perspective that the oppressed are acculturated to the oppression, these zealots demand nothing less than the complete restructuring – maybe the complete overturning – of our way of life. Everyone’s life is to be invalidated and made unpleasant in the pursuit of a war against a cloudy abstraction: systemic racism.
Equality of result is their weapon of choice. The ammunition for the weapon is a numerical goal straitjacketed to proportionality. 13% of the population means 13% in every social, economic, and political measure. If the stats stray from the number, the hucksters of the Left say that it is evidence of the hidden form of racism that penetrates all that we are. We, the accusation goes, are “privileged” because we rigged the system to our (white) advantage, even though many of the “privileged” aren’t white. That’s a recasting of Marx’s justification for the proletarian revolution for a different clientele.
In the corrupted parlance of government- and academic-speak, it is called “disparate impact”. You may as well know the arcane multisyllabics used to disguise the foolishness.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. It’s more than that. It’s a moonshot from stat to revolution.
“Inequities” (lack of fairness) is in vogue as another word of choice for those enamored of stat-slinging for revolution. Can there be, though, more than one explanation, other than racism, for a socio-economic stat’s divergence from proportionality? For instance, is the over-representation of black males in the violent crime numbers due to something other than the banal “racism”? A person could cite any number of reasons for the circumstance without placing the blame on a broad and skulking ill-feeling toward black people.
Take any social and economic stat’s divergence from proportionality for any of the law’s “protected classes” (Women are 51% of the population but account for 100% of all births.) and funnel the variances into the single cause of bigotry – intentional or unintentional, overt or covert – and you will have the nonstop, hair-on-fire crusade to eliminate causes that aren’t causes. Churches are vandalized; campuses are plagued by roving mobs; downtowns are torched; and the criminal justice system is increasingly staffed by people who’ll do anything to force the world to conform to the proportionality.
Equality is refashioned into paranormal activity, something akin to ghost hunting for systemic racism, and therefore its vagueness makes it very useful. If you want to locate the locus of the pseudo-science, look no further than the Democratic Party. The loudest yapping for equality of result comes from the “D” side of the aisle. The R’s are much more likely to pursue the other option.
What is socialism?
The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesting Trump’s health care plan on Jul. 5, 2017, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. (Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket—Getty Images)Members of the Democratic Socialists of America gathered in New York City in May 2019.
Joe Biden in late August of this year plaintively proclaimed, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” The statement is beside the point. We don’t rely on looks to determine whether somebody is a socialist with a soft spot for rioters. Friedrich Engels, frequent co-author with Karl Marx and businessman/scion of a wealthy family, didn’t have the “looks” of a socialist revolutionary either. Biden isn’t the reincarnation of Engels, but he is very confused.
Biden might cite his long career in politics as proof that he isn’t one, but we’re not referring to the Biden of 1973. The 1973 Biden isn’t the 2020 Biden and the 1973 Democratic Party isn’t the 2020 Democratic Party. They used to have pro-lifers in the Party. The Overton window (the range of acceptable policies) of the Party has moved far left, along with the Party’s standard-bearer. Socialism is found on the left side of the spectrum alongside the Party’s base and a good portion of its leadership.
Bernie Sanders and AOC
As for a working definition, socialism has often been described as public (government) “ownership” of the means of production (nearly all consequential property), or at least of Lenin’s economic “commanding heights”. Keep in mind that “ownership” is a form of control. Government can control the “commanding heights” without ownership, and that can be achieved with legislation and decrees to establish powerful taxation and regulatory regimes. A more accurate definition would substitute “ownership” with “control”.
There is a substantive difference in government intervention between the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Green New Deal. The controls to prevent conspiracies to dominate markets is far removed from power to micro-manage everything from Exxon to a dealership’s showroom to a mother’s decision to turn on the air conditioning to the residential preferences of a homebuyer to …. The control goes beyond the mere authoritarian and right into the space reserved for totalitarian. Bluntly put, it’s socialism.
Biden endorsed it, and many other forms of government force to dictate choices and habits of the people. He may offer a somewhat scaled-down version of it but, really, the argument in his party is over the shade of red – the color historically adopted by socialists – not whether it is red. Are we to get full-blown central planning (Bernie/AOC) or just a much bigger one than today’s scattershot version (Biden)?
Where would JFK fit in this party with his across-the-board tax cuts? There would be little room for the JFK of 1963 in platform committees chaired by Elizabeth Warren (wealth tax, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, racial reparations, defund the police, witch hunts for the chimerical systemic racism, open borders, etc.), Bernie (ditto), and AOC (ditto). He could be excused for thinking that he had accidentally stumbled into a meeting of Castro’s politburo.
Despite Biden’s denials, the acceptance of socialist proposals makes it hard for him to claim that he isn’t one. If elected, the government would move further left than even his professed political soulmate and career lefty, Obama, attempted.
The denial by Never-Trumpers like John Kasich is preposterous. He says that he “knows” that Biden isn’t a radical, but the verb belongs in the same category as “look”. You can’t “know” if his announcements and party’s official platform say otherwise. Kasich “hopes” that Biden isn’t a radical. Hope that a person isn’t what they say they are is a poor basis for adult conversation.
It’s like a prayer defense in basketball. The defense is actually a failure to play defense and a “hope” that your opponent will miss the shot. I’ve seen it as a high school basketball coach for many years. I’ve had to call many a timeout to stop it. “Hope” that your opponent is incompetent is a sure path to a losing record.
Socialism is poison to a nation, and it matters not if the dosage is administered by Bernie/AOC or Biden. Poison is still poison.
What is progressivism?
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in debate in 2016.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 proclaimed, “I’m a progressive who gets results and I will be a progressive president who gets results.” Well, what is she?
The genealogy of progressivism goes back to the 19th century, right alongside The Communist Manifesto, the Socialist International, eugenics, and the bankruptcy of racial supremacism. Some academics became impatient with the messiness of our constitutional republic and wanted to streamline it into the orderliness of the science lab, their beau ideal. Popular sovereignty would be pushed to the periphery of governance and the actual administration of it, the part in actual contact with the citizen, would be placed in the hands of people like them, the academically trained.
Progressivism is a cult, the cult of the expert; the expert ordained by an academic clerisy.
So, we had the minions of the EPA declare a retired couple’s property a sensitive wetland and thereby effectively seized control of it. It would result in the 2012 Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA in which the Court recognized the right of a citizen to seek redress of agency overzealousness in the courts. The EPA asserted that a good portion of their actions were beyond the reach of the courts. The EPA’s stand is the quintessence of the omnipotence of the “expert” enshrined in progressive dogma.
In this Oct. 19, 2011, photo, Chantell and Mike Sackett talk about their battle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over their right to build a home on a lot near Priest Lake. The EPA said that the lot included wetlands. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the couple. (Kathy Plonka)
Overwhelmingly, today, the official sponsor of progressivism is the Democratic Party. Progressives know where their big government bread is buttered; the Republicans, rejecting their earlier dalliances with it (think TR), chose a more free-market bun to spread the condiment.
Everywhere from the Democratic Party platform to the public antics of their leaders is displayed something for additional government cadres to do. Free college means more government hires in the Department of Education, and the IRS to enforce the new tax provisions to pay for the monstrosity. A wealth tax is a subsidy for IRS empire-building since new bean-counters and enforcers will have to brought on board to squeeze the dough out of a reluctant public. Racial reparations are a sop to DC’s identity-politics industrial complex and the IRS since eligibility will have to be determined, enforced, and checks written. The Green New Deal is as close to Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, as any prior attempt going back to Woodrow Wilson’s War Socialism in the heady days of WWI. Government planning is always labor intensive for government. New crusades against the spectral “systemic racism” is an invitation for a vast expansion of employment opportunities in the DOJ and the panoply of race-hustling agencies. When they aren’t directing the state’s powers and agents at their political opponents, the Party’s advocacy is a laundry list of more things for government to do. Now that’s progressivism in a nutshell.
The Democratic Party’s positions are a vast recruitment program for new armies of government employees to control the lives of the people while leaving a rump of a private sphere. The enlistees will have the paper qualifications of “expert” to brandish, and additional comrades thanks to the Pelosi/Schumer/Biden gang. Once in place, you’ll play hell to remove them.
The economic impact on private-sector Americans will be catastrophic, with the exception of the employees in the real estate industry of the greater metropolitan DC area.
If you’ll notice, the Democratic Party comes across as despicable, despicable in where they want to lead the country. Nothing was said about possible Republican malfeasance because the threat to the country comes from the Left, and Democratic Party is the party of the Left.
Today, the parties are more ideologically homogeneous than ever before. In the past, parties were coalitions. No longer. When was the last time you heard of a prominent pro-life Democrat? They are gone, along with the Scoop Jackson, Harry Truman, and JFK types. There can’t be a lot of anti-red Democrats because too many of them are red. Vote Democrat and you’ll get in tow many of the horrors that reason and history make abundantly clear.
Trump’s tweets are beside the point.
Before you mark your ballot, or mark the ballots for other people – thanks to rampant vote-by-mail schemes – please understand what’s at stake. Your vote, or votes, is a judgment on human nature with all that comes with it. It’s a choice for or against stern and pervasive mommy government, something clearly inimical to the Constitution and our mental health. It’s a judgment on the advisability of grotesquely taxing job creators and expecting no ill-effects. It’s a choice on the meaning of equality: one that grants carte blanche to a busybody Leviathan or one that is more in keeping with a color-blind society. It’s a choice for or against socialism and progressivism and their deadening effects on the vitality of a free society. Your vote should never be a choice of personalities. If it is for you, don’t vote. Your choice could saddle the rest of us with an appalling future.
In case you haven’t seen it, here is the clip of the woman who was tasered and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s football game.
A couple of immediate observations are in order. (1) Is outdoor mask wearing under the condition of social distancing efficacious? I have very good reason to doubt it. If irrelevant, the rule is madness and its enforcement to the extent of tasering and cuffing is dastardly. (2) The mild reaction of bystanders is deeply disturbing. The mindless compliance with probable stupidity and meekness while viewing the manhandling of a person is astounding. Something deep has happened to us, our leaders and us. Troubling, very troubling.
Across the country, we are experiencing despotism from state executives on down – the federal component being more restrained. Mostly, these encounters occur in “blue” jurisdictions even though the municipality might be in a “red” state. This says volumes about a common political DNA between progressive (Left-leaning) governments and the smothering of popular common sense. We are into the 9th month of the pandemic and many nations and would-be despots in our country are threatening to reimpose their totalitarian edicts as if they have learned nothing since January.
Either science has stood still or our rulers are blockheads. My money is on the latter.
Lockdowns, or versions of them, are much talked about, despite the ineffectiveness of the first go-around as evidenced by the resurgence of the virus in various locales. Universal mask-wearing is commanded, even outdoors, in spite of the absence of evidence of the bug’s spread in the open air in dispersed situations. Incidentally, the fear spread to the almost 7,000-ft. Logan Pass trail in Glacier National Park (Aug. 2020). The sight of people masking-up is shocking to me to this day for what is says about us as a people.
Schools are shuttered in many districts – and the mass of 4th graders remaining 4th graders into their 5th-grade year – without any evidence after 9 months of the bug’s spread among children and to adults. Astounding.
Whoever said it was spot-on (and it probably wasn’t Einstein): “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Repeating ineffective earlier actions may reflect the quixotic and paralyzing belief in no-risk. Combined with progressivism’s despotism streak, we have a population willing to stand by as a person displays more common sense than the people who are tasering and cuffing her. Astounding, absolutely astounding.
David Mamet, author and playwright, writing in the Aug. 10 edition of National Review (“The Nazis Got Your Mom”) succinctly captures in a short paragraph the absolute absurdity of two pieces of politicized boilerplate of our farcical times: Systemic Racism and Social Justice. They are part of a repetitive political jihad that fails to learn from past experience.
During the California lockdown, Mamet is cruising the websites of one of his favorite book stores and notices the plethora of anti-Trump offerings along with the business’s promise to fight the scourge of Systemic Racism. He continues as follows:
“Now, I don’t know what Systemic Racism is, but neither does anyone else. Like Social Justice, any communicable meaning is destroyed by the adjective. Both terms are indictments of Human Evil; its perpetrators are easily identifiable: They are those who request a definition.”
So we have the prefect weapons for this generation of revolutionary busybodies to control our minds and behavior. This will end at the same place where earlier political crusades landed: misery. Why? He writes:
“… the greatest lesson of History is that we never learn from History. And that no great crime was ever committed save in the name of Progress, or its stablemates Historical Necessity and Redress of Past Wrongs.”
The crushing thing about this latest round of lunacy is that it has captured the imagination of almost the entirety of one of our two institutional parties, the Democratic Party. The idiocy is free to flow through the “D” side of the ballot and our branches of government at all levels.
The madness has left the asylum and is poised to enter policy in a big way. Some people see it … like Mamet.
I am reading two books: Byron York’s “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump” and Gordon Wood’s “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson”. Today’s quote comes from “Friends Divided”.
‘Friends Divided’ by Gordon S. Wood
But, first, a few words are in order about “Obsession”. Reading just the first few chapters will elicit a slow burn about our secluded and insular DC elites. This Soviet-style nomenklatura is seriously undermining the whole concept of a self-governing republic. Please read it.
John Adams wrote in an essay in the Boston Gazette in 1765, “But when restraints [on government] are taken off, it becomes an incroaching [sic], grasping, restless, and ungovernable power.”
Antifa, BLM, rioters, statue topplers, the base and leadership of the Democratic Party, and infantile academics like Ibram X. Kendi are making Adams into the possessor of a crystal ball. They want to construct a totalitarian Leviathan on racial reparations, escalating taxes, The Green New Deal, government health care in the form of Medicare for All, and a jihad against a racism that is so broadly defined as to encompass controls on all aspects of a person’s life – in Kendi’s sophomoric mind, the battle for race-based “equities”. “Equities” is cover for equality-of-result at the hands of an omnipotent state. Revel’s totalitarian temptation (previously mentioned) is on full display.
A set of infected chickens will come home to roost if given the chance. Our times are interesting … and dangerous.
Gov. Whitmer of Michigan (D) announced the status of the lockdown order in March 2020. Gov. Newsom (D) of California extended his lockdown order in June 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives his annual ‘State of the City’ speech at City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 19, 2020. ( photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)Ibram X. KendiBlack Lives Matter organized protest in Washington DC on June 6, 2020.Black Lives Matter protest with the usual Marxits slogans.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In 1977, Jean-Francois Revel, a man of the French left at the time, came out with The Totalitarian Temptation. He was repulsed by the Euro-left’s unwillingness to shed their deeply embedded reflex for totalitarian control.
Jean-Francois Revel
In the vein of Rahm Immanuel’s (Pres. Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2010) famous maxim, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, “progressives” and powerful Democrats have exploited COVID, riots, fires, and blackouts to express their inner totalitarian. Revel would not be surprised if he were alive today. It appears that once you cradle the left’s belief system, you develop affectations for centralized control down to the intimate details of a population’s lives.
I put progressives in quotes because it is the moniker of choice for a wide range of control freaks from Mayor Garcetti of LA to Gov. Newsom of California to Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University – though I’m a bit tentative about Kendi for a number of reasons. I shouldn’t be. He is a man of the left and the possessor of a powerful drive for power. They all do. It’s in their political DNA.
Control Freaks in California
Gov. Newsom (D) of Califonria delivers report on the status of the state’s fires on August 24, 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. (Photo: Kevin Sanders)
Right now, California is burning up. Of course, for the state’s overlords, it can’t be the outgrowth of the decades of environmentalist policies that are the favorite of the ruling party. And the Democratic Party is THE ruling party of California. The state has become such a Democrat Malta among the states that it can swing the national popular vote by millions in a presidential election to the loser, thereby giving the Party a tiresome talking point for at least the next four years.
Indubitably, with the tedious boast comes the incessant demands to rig the system to allow Big Urban to run the country. How would Big Urban run the country? Look at California. Mayor Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.” The state’s energy system can’t deliver the goods – electricity that is – after Democrat politicos piloted the state to the “future”, the future of the Book of Eli (see the movie).
A map shows potential power outages by PG&E in California October 9, 2019.Scene from the The Book of Eli.
It turns out that greenie energy is expensive and unreliable energy. The decrees for solar panels on your roof, flim-flamming the rate structure to punish the dissenter from the Party line, the tomfoolery of net-metering, and Byzantine utility regulations that forcibly shift resources from the delivering of electricity to the construction of the greenie utopia have translated into blackouts, the grid becoming a force multiplier for firestorms, and rates running from 15₵ to 50₵ per kWh depending on a labyrinth of time-of-day, season, and “tiers”. Thus, a resident receives a bill that reads more like a grad school dissertation or one of those Big Tech privacy statements. They’re unreadable. So, just shut up and write the check.
Electricity is a classic copper-to-coffee commodity. It need not be priced by a Gordian knot of rules, unless your rulers are auditioning for the role of commissar. For example, my utility in northwest Montana charges a flat $30 monthly fee and 8.26₵ per kWh. What does that mean? It means, first, that I can calculate my bill by looking at my meter. Secondly, with air conditioning running full blast in the summer, I received a bill for $125 as opposed to $450 in California (as of 2015).
Okay, some Golden State residents might say, “That’s not my bill.” You are fooling yourself. It may not be your bill; but if it isn’t your bill, it certainly is a classic example of the beggar-thy-neighbor approach to life. You benefit because somebody else is forced to pay what you don’t. And if they don’t pay, the utilities turn to beggar-thy-neighbor in having maintenance be the beggar. Thus, Paradise, Ca., burns down.
An aerial view of destruction from the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., off Clark Road in November 2018. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Democrat executives seem beset by all manner of catastrophes. Garcetti can’t keep the lights on and Newsom can’t either, plus keep the state from going up in flames. Blame-shifting is the usual response. The culprit is frequently some abstruse threat, a kind of politically useful bogeyman. Newsom’s favorite is “climate change”. He declared, “This [the fires] is a climate damn emergency.” To him, there’s nothing to debate, and he’ll brook no debate, dismissing those who disagree as “deniers”. It’s the typical attempt at public-shaming of people who won’t kowtow to the Party line.
There’s good reason not to bend a knee at the altar of the Sierra Club. Forest debris and dead trees have been piling up in the state’s forest for decades, as per the grand poohbahs of the greenie movement. If fires occur according to environmentalism’s vanguard elite, let ‘em burn because it is Gaia’s will. For those in the fire’s way, it’s their fault for being there. These powerful zealots are as calloused as the Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev when he wrote in 1918 during the Red Terror:
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
“In the basements of the Cheka” by Ivan Vladimirov (1919)
Newsom would probably prefer (I hope) that opponents not be lined up against the wall, just muzzled till they die out. Soon, the alternative voices will be replaced by the indoctrinated young when they reach the age of consent. Thus, the imperative to politicize the k-through-college curriculum, exactly like Soviet schools.
Then it’ll be a clear path to … more fires, third world power reliability, and an existence typified in The Book of Eli. The mounting difficulties will lead to more controls, not less. The powers-that-be will need more regulators and Party discipline to address the errors from the previous batch of edicts. 100 million dead trees exploding into massive conflagrations will mean a de-kulakization of the foothills and mountains (reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930’s war on the peasant) by herding the outlying residents into the tight urban cores (the state’s current and future war on the ‘burbs and “exurbia”).
A panorama of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada.A fire as blow torch: The Big Creek fire consumes a home as it blows through the Sierra-Nevada and 1,000 acres in 30 seconds in CNN photo from Sept. 10, 2020.
The power disruptions won’t be addressed by greater investment in delivery and production. Instead, small-is-beautiful will be the mantra: smaller homes; fewer and smaller appliances; the reduction of personal conveyance to glorified golf carts and graffitied and filthy public transport; and an end to air conditioning. See, the environmentalist’s future is a self-anointed elites’ playground for directing everyone’s lifestyle, mind, and behavior. Their current penchant for semi-totalitarianism will blossom into the full-throated variety.
Will any of this address the alleged malefactor, climate change? It might, but only if we and California are impoverished. Then again, the warming might persist unabated. Our GDP is to be lowered, but the Sierra Club can’t control China’s CCP or India. It only seems to control California. Other countries are beginning to experience the joys of air conditioning and they won’t have any qualms about coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Other states similarly won’t view the disaster that is California as being a wholesome path to follow. The end result is a mutilated California and a climate change that continues its inexorable march.
Coal-fired power generation in China.
Is the goal a diminishment of climate change – which won’t be – or just a naked power grab to control all behavior and minds? Bet on the latter. Budding totalitarians can’t help themselves because they are, in their heart of hearts, little busybodies. As incessant buttinskies, mostly upset that the world didn’t conform to them, they seek power to make it so. Call it a form of therapy, one that comes at the expense of everybody else. And the rich go along because they can appear high-minded and, by the way, have the wealth to shield themselves from the many ill-consequences. It’s an alliance of the logically incontinent and the self-loathing/self-serving. As with the Russian peasants of the 1930’s, though, there will be no place to run for the average Joe and Josephina.
An Academic Control Freak
The surrender to this class of power-seeking busybodies began when late 19th-century academicians peddled the “expert” as the proper repository for governmental power. It’s progressivism’s greatest “contribution” to civilization. The accolade of “expert” was reserved for people like them, folks with degrees. A degree wrongly became a synonym for wisdom.
Our modern campuses of insulated little social cocoons are now a hotbed where certain whims are nurtured and fortified in ideologized academic departments and staffs. The graduates with those unexamined assumptions trickle out into the institutional centers of power and influence. The ridiculousness becomes the incontrovertible “truth” in the uncultivated mind of the rioters, BLM, Antifa, opening ceremonies of NFL and NBA games, corporate HR departments, and Democratic Party slogans. Within a fortnight, the miscreants who recently chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” were turned into beacons of light.
Ibram X. Kendi
One of the academic abettors of this philosophical tyranny is Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, the occupant of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Professorship of the Humanities. The previous possessor of the title was philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. So, the position went from Wiesel’s classical liberalism to the racism of classical liberalism. It’s the crux of Kendi’s infantile explanation for all of human experience.
He wallows in the impatience of Marx, but replaced the proletariat with race, particularly blacks. Marx rejected previous norms and institutions – everything from family to constitutions, much of the corpus of classical liberalism and a good portion of western civilization to boot – because they inexorably exploited the masses of “wage slaves”, the working class. He was consumed with results, not the results of minor adjustments but with the apocalypse of existential revolution to overturn all of society. Take Marx’s general outline, replace a few nouns, recognize that both are obsessed with imposing fantastical complete equality in all its manifestations, and you have Kendi’s hectoring invective, How To Be An Antiracist.
This polemical diatribe is taken as the stuff of real scholarship. Au contraire, it’s a 284-page op-ed, a set of opinions wrapped up in biased verbiage. The quality of Kendi’s thinking can be seen in his clownish attempt to define the thing that he claims is the omni-explanation for nearly all of reality, racism. He writes, “Racism is a marriage of racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” In case you missed it, he sounds like an eighth-grader in repeating a form of the word and its surrogates in his definition of the word. The circular thinking resides alongside his opinions, which are one kind of conclusion, being used to reach other conclusions. There’s much in this polemic that is sand in the gears of logic.
He’s proof that ethnic studies departments do not broaden the mind but generate the next generation of radicalized activists. And they are pouring into the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Rochester, Kenosha, almost anywhere sympathizers hold the reins of power.
A riot against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon, August 2, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
None of Kendi’s end-state of absolute equality can be achieved without the power to impose it. Inequality rears its head no matter what. Past attempts at equality-mongering (Remember the Iron and Bamboo Curtains?) only led to an aristocracy of overseers – people like Kendi – to patrol the jurisdictions of the equality-of-all-things. If the commissariat didn’t exist, life would revert back to its prior condition of an overclass of the powerful, talented, or most fortuitist. Unknowingly or knowingly, if Kendi and his followers get their bite at the golden apple of power, it’ll just be the powerful of the few with the guns.
The walls of absolute equality will have to be forever manned with incessant forays into people’s lives to enforce the multitude of decrees, sub-decrees, sub-sub-decrees, ad infinitum. Kendi and his initiates in the streets are actually control freaks par excellence.
Kendi is only one of the latest inductees into the rogue’s gallery. He’ll have to maneuver for floor space with the likes of Xi Jinping and Stalin. Much of the Democratic Party leadership is waiting in the wings to join him and them. As for the rest of us, we’ll have nowhere to run. The United States as the traditional haven from tyranny will have been eclipsed. Sad, really sad.
Pres. Nixon in an off-camera remark to ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith in 1971 said, “We are all Keynesians now”, or something like it. Nixon was describing his about-face on the gold standard and the imposition of wage and price controls. Nixon announced that once again the government interventionism of Keynes – the high priest of Democratic Party economics going back to FDR – was back in vogue in response to the onset of stagflation (stagnant economic growth and inflation). Smith was astounded by Nixon’s reversal and compared it to a Christian declaring, “all things considered, I think Mohammad was right.” It’s interesting to see how a thing becomes so pervasive that it seeps into individuals and groups historically resistant to it.
President Richard Nixon during an Interview with John Chancellor, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith and Nancy Dickerson for the Television Special Program “A Conversation with the President” (1971).
Bobos in America
The same could be said of cultural shifts. For instance, a new set of values and mores percolates from the world of the beau monde (the beautiful people, the smart set, the jet set) to the acquisitive middle class. One of the recurring worries for Republicans is the gradual shift of the suburbs to the Democrats. What would account for it? Here’s a thought, reworking Nixon’s famous quip: We are all bobo’s now.
Bobo’s? The term jumped into the vernacular when David Brooks authored Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There in 2000. The portmanteau (two words collapsed into one) of “bourgeois” and “bohemian” signified the presence of a new and growing social class starting in the 1970’s. It was a blending of meritocratic capitalism (bourgeois) and the hedonism of the counter-culture (bohemian). The socially unconventional became married to the pursuit of wealth and status.
A witticism of Andrew Breitbart’s completes the theoretical outline. He was famous for saying “politics is downstream from culture”. So, as goes a person’s values and mores, so goes a person’s politics. As goes the values and mores of suburbanites, so goes their politics.
Andrew Breitbart
The counter-culture seeped into the jet set and then into the aspiring middle class and their ‘burbs. At the upper end of the social matrix, it’s found in all sorts of cosmopolitan settings: corporate boardrooms; the corporate boardrooms of the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/MLS (Big Sports), including their millionaire and billionaire players and coaches; anywhere the sartorial excellence of a Desmond Merrion suit is commonly on display; unsurprisingly our faculty lounges up and down the K-grad school pyramid; big media throughout its digestive tract; and anywhere open and closed office spaces are inhabited by people with a college degree. The residential destination for this comfortable counter-culture could be a penthouse, but frequently it’s outside the urban core where there’s room for manicured space – the ‘burbs and the vast stretches under the reign of large-lot zoning.
This is not a culture of the 1950’s stiff-necks of grey flannel suits in an IBM corporate suite. These bankers, moguls, buccaneers of high finance, partners in Big Law, and entrepreneurs of Big Tech vote Democratic and shower contributions on its favorite causes. The holy grail for them is environmentalism as it was for the Gaia-worshippers hanging out in Big Sur. This goes a long way in explaining the enthusiasm for climate-change nostrums in the form of the lifestyle totalitarianism under anything labeled “green” and “sustainable”. They can afford the costly mitigations or simply bear the expense to avoid them. An army of lawyers and accountants is a text message away, as is a plane ticket to that second home in Barbados.
Bobo style
The fact that the regular middle class isn’t in a position to bear the brunt of their new-found social and political enthusiasms prevents them from going all-in for the program. The prospect of high taxes, impaired professional opportunities, deteriorating futures for their children, and counter-culture values producing counter-culture politicians who don’t esteem public safety is like a wintertime dunk in the North Sea for our groggy suburbanites.
The predicament for the Republicans is that the ‘burbs are no longer reliable. It won’t take much for them to follow the inclinations of their values and disregard their direct interests. It’s an opening for the Democrats that is made possible by Trump’s coarse tweets.
Soccer moms?
Even so, I still don’t get it. Why flirt with ruination by a Soviet-style economy and cultural Marxism because Trump won’t discipline his tongue or tweets? It sounds like amputating your foot (our way of life) for a hang nail (Trump’s boorishness).
Case In Point: Bobos in the NFL
NFL executive Peter O’Reilly was given a tour of the Super Bowl volunteer headquarters Tuesday afternoon by Elle Kehoe, director of volunteers for the Super Bowl in 2017.
The predicament for Republicans presents a predicament for fans also, many of whom are in the suburbs. Today’s locker rooms resemble less the smelly and crude places of Jim Brown’s day and more a premier suite at the Waldorf Astoria.
San Francisco 49ers locker room.Carolina Panthers training facility.
The contracts of the crème de la crème talent rank them with the Saudi royal family, or at least the GDP of a Central American country. Even the payout for a journeyman player for the years that they are in the league is handsome enough to justify taking time off from the real world to cash in. Lebron James and Patrick Mahomes can afford to be trendy, and so they are in lifestyle and mind. Stephan Curry and his coach Steve Kerr have status and wealth to insulate themselves from the real consequences of their beliefs. They can afford to perpetuate insidious insinuations about America and its people and never really pay a price. Every woke event to go viral will provoke another half-witted turn before cameras and microphones as if they have something profound to say.
Watch this video of rich NFL players making politically-charged statements.
What’s the average fan to do as his stores are looted and burned and he is constantly shamed for being a racist while sitting with his family at his favorite restaurant? On the tube, the fan must weather the haranguing lectures of people who are athletically talented at doing one thing, dunces about any other serious topic, but now demand to be taken seriously as a modern-day Socrates.
I personally couldn’t take it anymore. I haven’t watched the NBA in the last few years, and now don’t plan to. The NFL, like the NBA, including MLB and the rest of corporate Big Sports, have turned themselves into advertising agencies for Marxist political movements. If they existed in 1917 Russia, they’d be barking Bolshevik slogans and wearing warm-ups with Lenin’s visage instead of George Floyd’s. Watching a game under these conditions is like viewing one of those massive Mayday spectacles in Pyongyang with chintzy revolutionary slogans and the huge cult-of-personality portable murals. The game is now clickbait for revolution.
Yes, part of the problem is the insulation from how the other half lives and works – more like 95% – that wealth and esteem accord. That’s not all. Another ingredient is the increasing bureaucratization of Big Sports, the thing that makes them “big”. Bureaucracies require armies of administrative white-collar managers. Knowledge, interest, and personal experience with the sport isn’t necessary. More important is experience in administrative fields made possible by a college education. At this point, we have corporate NFL as distinguished from the sweaty lives of athletes on the field. The worlds are galaxies apart, unless you are among the league’s player aristocracy.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell chat at an NFL event in Seattle in 2014.
Roger Goodell, the current commissioner, a three-sport high school star but hobbled with injuries before he could matriculate to college, has a similar route up the greasy pole as any one of the 69 Goldman Sachs partners. Here it is: BA in economics from Washington & Jefferson College (Penn.) > intern in the New York City office of NFL commissioner Rozell in ’82 > New York Jets office intern in ’83 > assistant in the NFL’s Public Relations Dept. in ’84 > assistant to AFC president Lamar Hunt in ’87 > variety of administrative roles under commissioner Tagliabue to 2001 > NFL’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer in 2001 > NFL commissioner in 2006. Goodell never strapped on shoulder pads for one minute in college or the big show. He’s a creature of a corporate swamp.
Dawn Aponte (r) and the Miami Dolphins Dennis Hickey.
Take a look at Dawn Aponte, the Chief Football Administrative Officer, NFL Football Operations: grew up on Statin Island, NY > accounting BA from University of Delaware in ’93 > New York Jets accountant, ’93-’94 > MA in finance and management from Wagner College and law degree from New York Law School by 2001 > New York Jets personnel assistant in 2001 > Jets manager of football administration in 2003 > NFL’s management council as vp of labor finance in 2006 > Cleveland Browns vp of football administration in 2009 > Miami Dolphins senior vice president of football operations in 2010 > Dolphins executive vice president of football administration in 2012 > business development executive at RSE Ventures, a sports and entertainment tech firm in 2016 > NFL’s chief administrator of football operations in 2017. Her world is east coast cosmopolitan/east coast college/white collar salary/up the greasy pole.
And so it goes for much of the NFL’s Operations squad. There are a few others with backgrounds in officiating or as players, but the majority go from college to the ladder up the corporate suite. By values and mores, the suits from lackeys to big salary have more in common, socially and culturally, with the faculty lounge, Manhattan, and Westchester County than the guy in the $120 jersey watching the game on his Costco-purchased tv and who admires Buffalo Wild Wings for its many big screen tv’s and “fine cuisine”.
No wonder we get the lefty platitudes thrown in our faces. The strategy comes from people who wouldn’t dare be caught in the company of tailgaters.
Bobos are now in charge of managing our sports enthusiasms, all other entertainments, media, 401k’s, and opinions. Singular instances of purported police misbehavior somewhere mean racism everywhere, as interpreted by a socially and politically homogeneous class who is far removed from their fan base. The green theology of the bobos means a head-of-the-line advantage to push every catastrophe into the climate change vortex. Current events are tinged by the mores, values, and related views of bobos at the commanding heights.
No wonder the ‘burbs flirt with the Democrats. The inundation of a uniform and one-sided perspective takes its toll. The bobos rule and set the tone for those on the lower rungs of the middle-class ladder. An increasingly irreligious, secular, and bohemian suburb is fertile ground for Democrat outreach.
At least, or until, the soccer moms and their significant others get what they asked for and will be forced to be wary of it. In other words, as with a drug addict, they will be shocked out of their political dalliances when their fortunes are scarred by their political choices. As a coach, I know that failure can be therapeutic.
I am not cheer-leading for failure but I see its silver lining. Too bad it’ll come at the expense of foreclosures and stunted opportunities for generations to come.
Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans players meet on the field during a moment of “unity” before an NFL football game Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in Kansas City, Mo. J.J. Watts called the boos from fans “unfortunate”. Watts naively thought the word to be innocent enough. In reality, the word is politically charged and synonymous with “systemic racism”. Unbeknownst to Watts, it is laden with political sloganeering. The booing fans had a better understanding than him. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Jason Whitlock’s post on Outkick.com about the NFL’s season opener says it all. It can be found here.
Jason Whitlock
Here’s the opening paragraph from today’s Daily Mail on the NFL’s opening night of the 2020 season: “Kansas City Chiefs fans booed a moment of silence aimed at promoting racial justice, the Houston Texans remained in the locker room during the Star-Spangled Banner, and the reigning Super Bowl champions lined up for a singing of ‘the black national anthem’ on Thursday night as the NFL opened its 2020 campaign under dramatically different circumstances than any other season in league history.”
I didn’t watch the game since I don’t have a taste for mixing left-wing politics with athletics. Make no mistake about it, the whole thing legitimized a left-wing agenda.
In the write-ups on the game, a ritualized justification for the politicized antics at the start of the game hovered around the words of “unity” and “solidarity”. What nonsense! Unity and solidarity for what? The lexicon is cover for the development of a group mind, the kind of group mind found in past and present ideologized tyrannies. Do places like Berlin, Moscow, Havana, and Pyongyang remind you of anything?
North Korean students perform in front of Kim’s statue at Changdok School in Pyongyang in 2012.
The words cover a pack of monstrous ideas, the kind of ideas that insult the mind. “Systemic racism” is inherently improvable but politically useful in a power grab. So were Marx’s “worker alienation”, Galton’s “genetic determinism”, Lenin’s “revolutionary theory”, National Socialist “racial inferiority”, and the like. Such words appeal to the worst in us, and not surprisingly bring out the worst in our behavior. Look at our college campuses and urban conflagrations. Disgusting!
BLM, ChicagoLooters smashing a window of a store front on School street after the Black Lives Matter rally at the Massachusetts State House. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The catch-words remind us of humanity’s past sins while ignoring how our political legacy paved the way for enormous betterment of all people. What will they replace it with, an energized central government with them in the catbird seat? The spectacle was appalling. It deserved to be booed, and I hope the ratings are terrible.
Goodbye NFL. You have managed to spoil a once good thing.
Do you wonder why the abuse, tantrums, assaults, and the hurtling of bricks at police in many of our cities seem to be increasingly performed by college-age adults, many of them middle class and white? One contributing factor could be people like Prof. K-Sue Park lecturing your kids. She’s got an impressive resumé with paper from Cornell, Cambridge, Harvard, and Berkeley. After all that matriculation, she somehow uncovered the mental yoga to make freedom of conscience a second-class right. Yep, free speech in her bizaare rendering must be made to conform to the jihad against every sort of inequality that a person can fabricate. Karl Marx was all about it, and so is Georgetown professor Park.
I ran into this jewel of the faculty lounge in my early morning readings. Here you can read the entire screed in her New York Times op-ed from 2017. This is what goes for erudite thought in our discombobulated times and halls of higher-now-lower learning.
In a nutshell, for Prof. Park of Georgetown Law, inequality of condition means inequality of speech. And by all means, everything must be equal … but nothing is, in nature or by the mind and hand of man or woman. Even our attempts to intentionally create it fail. There remained an immense gulf between Stalin and his poliburo and the rest of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The drive to the proletarian heaven produced an entire class of privileged government functionaries – the nomenklatura – with a character eerily synonymous with the 18th-century French aristocrats hanging around Versailles.
People like Park can’t get away from inequality even if they try. It’ll certainly empower people like her to the detriment of the proles. She’ll preside over the training of the young folks who’ll later be entitled to dispense judgments on allowable speech – of course, while keeping an eye on the personal assets of the speaker, not the facts of the case. If not in positions of power, her pupils will fill the ranks of the mobs busting into your homes and businesses yelling canned distillations of her teachings.
Police use pepper spray on protesters at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn streets in downtown Chicago on Aug. 15, 2020. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)
This isn’t law; it’s lawlessness. The law must be knowable and understandable. Park’s dangerous silliness makes it unknowable and mysterious, a perfect sanction for tyrants, as any decent study of history will show.
It’s amazing that a truly educated person can produce such bunkum. Yet, here we are with our politics roiled by claptrap, and dangerous claptrap at that. All to the tune of $175,000 per year (average salary of an Ivy League professor).
