A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
Politically-inspired murder has spasmodically erupted throughout history, especially from the late 19th century to the present. Lately, it appears to be a more frequent guest to our political struggles. Intemperate discourse is all-too-common. Ramped up rhetoric, fueled by claims of vague and impersonal harms, has found expression in thuggishness, and even murder. Welcome to Charlottesville on August 12.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of the modern era. “The propaganda of the deed” (meaning: violent action as the catalyst for revolution) was all the fashion in anarcho-socialist circles at the turn of the 19th into 20th centuries. Assassinations, bombings, and robberies were the preferred means of activism of a violent element in Europe and the U.S. The mayhem was one of the prime motives for the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920’s.
The assassination of Pres. McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in New York, 1901. He would be executed in the electric chair later in the year.Luigi Galleani, anarcho-socialist shortly before his deportation in 1919. He was a loud and frequent exponent of the “propaganda of the deed”. Carlo Budda, brother of terrorist bombmaker Mario Budda, once said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw”.The Wall Street bombing of 1920, killing 30 people, was carried out by Galleani’s followers.
Individual and group violence has continued apace. Some of it spontaneous; some of it premeditated; and some of it less fatal, as in mere bullying and assault-and-battery. College campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge have become noted for the Antifa goons patrolling the corridors of higher learning.
More recently, taking it to new heights, was James Hodgkinson in his hunt for Republicans on June 14. On Saturday, August 12, James Alex Fields, Jr., plowed his car into crowd of counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19.
James Alex Fields, Jr., and his damaged car.
Are we approaching the Vietnam War era’s daily mortality counts? On the one side we have the wickedness of the tiki-torch carrying white thugs. Aggrieved by the alleged oppression of whites, they are on hair trigger for violence. On the other, we have the ready-made insta-mob of the consortium of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, et al. The scene is starting to resemble post-WWI Weimar Germany with its street battles of left and right gangs.
Berlin street fight scene between Nazis and communists in the early 1930’s.
It’s sad that both sides seem to be taking their cue from ISIS in Raqqa. The left had their Raqqa moment in June. The right’s imitation waited till August. The similarities are striking. Like ISIS defending their caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq, Hodgkinson preferred gunfire. Fields adopted the Nice and London method of political expression by simply smashing people with a vehicle.
It’s also sad that we have a president that can’t rise above any personal slight, no matter how slight, during these moments of sorrow. His combative nature muddies any attempt to have us rise to the “better angels of our nature”.
Mr. President, drop the twitter feed!
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a ‘tragic, tragic weekend.'”, Joe Heim, Washington Post, 8/14/2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.6ee9f78a1d31
Bernie Sanders, American socialist politico extraordinaire.Nicolas Maduro celebrates election results that give him carte blanche to remake the country’s constitution in his own image.
Remember Obama’s jab at Romney in 2012 for Romney’s suggestion that Russia is a serious threat to our interests? Back then, our too-cool-for-school president said in debate to Romney, “The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back”. Now, in a tantrum over losing an election, the Dems sound more like Romney than Mr. Too-Cool. Well, the rhetorical gambit can be used in many ways.
Watch the above video. Maduro, the president-for-life – or maybe El Comandante fits the bill – has been implementing Bernie’s economic playbook. The free-stuff economic approach is playing out in the streets, shops, and stomachs of the average Venezuelan.
Caracas grocery store, 2015.
In Cuba, first came the dictatorship, then came the economic ruination. In Venezuela, economic ruination arrived, then the dictatorship. I suppose that Bernie will expound criticism before cameras about Maduro’s means to achieve Bernie’s ends.
Havana neighborhood, 2016.
I often wonder about the academy’s (schools and colleges) delinquency in implanting economic sense in the young. People don’t seem to know the meaning of socialism or its consequences. How else to explain the popularity of Bernie, a softer (and elderly) version of Maduro?
The closest parallel to the current debacle over the Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare might be the failure of the far more numerous opposition to the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1920. The divided nature of the opposition spelled their doom and anchored the Bolsheviks in power for over 70 years.
There are 3 effectual political parties in America: (1) the Republican Party, (2) the Semi-Republicans, and (3) the Democratic Party. Like the Whites in the Russian Civil War, the Republicans couldn’t sublimate their pet interests and form a united front to attain the ultimate goal of saving the country from Obamacare.
In contrast, the Democrats acted with the iron discipline of the Lenin-led Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik’s reward was a 70-year lease on power over millions. Could this be ditto for the Democrats?
Bolshevik leadership, 9th Party Congress, 1920.Congressional Democratic leadership, 2017.
Let there be no mistake: parties #2 and #3 have made it possible for American healthcare to continue to be on a death watch. Escalating premiums, deductibles, and declining participation by medical providers will proceed.
Americans will become acquainted with the truism that health insurance isn’t healthcare. Insurance is a piece of paper that no one need accept, unless the Dems push to enslave the medical industry as the Bolsheviks chained Russians. Are we now to look forward to Medicaid-for-all?
What? “Man”? Have I committed a faux pas? Have I exposed my hidden longing for male hegemony?
“Man” in the title was meant to refer to “humankind”, not the archaic meaning fraught with all kinds of triggers for today’s amped-up sensitivities of some college millennials. No need to run for the couches and crayons. Please disband the tantrum mob. No harm was intended. The title merely rolls off the tongue easier without too many words and syllables. I preemptively apologize to the easily offended.
Obsessing over God’s gender has hit the divinity schools. To balance out the deity’s “correct” nature, should we have more images of God as a god-ette? Should the Sistine Chapel ceiling be repainted?
What I really mean to ask is, have we made ourselves God?
Now, with the pronoun battle put to rest (or maybe not), the campaign to invent new sexes – the waste product of divorcing sex, gender, whatever, from genitalia and chromosomes – has made a hash of our language. Confusion reigns and the hyper-sensitive are on patrol.
No such confusion, however, exists among the mostly urban sophisticates about the reasons for the boy/girl behavioral differences that would be apparent to anyone who happened upon a playground. While grudgingly having to accept some role for biology – genetic discoveries are too profound to completely ignore – in the nature/nurture battle, it’s really nurture now, nurture all the time, and nurture everywhere. Social circumstances occupy the pride of place for academic and big media drivel on the subject, the first step in the deification of the person.
The upshot of it all is the psycho-motor reflex among Progressive types to embark on the project to socially engineer away the differences, or to make our boys more like our girls and our girls more like our boys. To wit, make “man” – or “person-kind” if you will – the protagonist and prime mover in the Genesis story.
After all, it is asserted, we contrived the social surroundings and, therefore, must be willing to recontrive them more to the zeitgeist of today’s cultural nomenklatura. The endgame has no end, but is a perpetual crusade to blur distinctions, crown the person as the determiner of all reality, and disembowel institutions and anything old that confer responsibility and restraint.
The passion for the nurture thing lends itself to social fabrication. It is engineering with human beings as the raw material. God is no longer the clock-maker of all things. We are.
National Geographic magazine might be a bellwether of some cosmopolitan thinking on the subject. In the cover story “Genius” for its May issue, the author, Claudia Kalb, much expounds on the importance of social influences in the production of geniuses.
Really, really smart people, she proclaims, have abetting “social networks”. Those without, as in all our popularly-identified oppressed classes, suffer the lot of the forgotten. Women and the poor are two favorites. As Kalb writes,
“Throughout history women have been denied formal education, deterred from advancing professionally, and under-recognized for their achievements …. People born into poverty or oppression don’t get a shot at working toward anything other than staying alive.” (1)
The point has just enough of a kernel of truth to be dangerous. The call for coddling social networks is a blank check for all sorts of interventions to even the score. If women are handcuffed by the world, then spousal roles must be made to change, divorce made easier, the public treasury thrown open, paychecks additionally garnished, and volumes added to the tax and regulatory codes. The entertainment industry, the courts, and public schools are enlisted for the cause. Little goes unaffected.
Wonder Woman standing firm and erect, but with a physique that couldn’t crush a marshmallow.
Add a splash of science to the social ingredients and you can also relegate the baggage of moral restraint to the trash heap. Restraint was implanted by dad’s deadly glare, mom’s firm hand, and a pulpit’s fiery sermons. From there, it is embedded in the frontal lobes of the brain. Genius is correlated to creativity and creativity is generated by ignoring those frontal lobes, in Kalb’s rendering (2). I’m not so sure about Kalb’s causal train of thought but it does relegate the conscience to simply being an impediment to personal self-fulfillment, or “genius”. Once again, we have more fuel for more social fabrication to blast furnace away objective limits.
Nihilism becomes a factor of social production, or, more accurately, it’s about the annihilation of predetermined forms in favor of a freewheeling rejiggering of reality to match momentary fads of thought. Old time religion, the nagging voice of the old morality, marriage, and the dictionary must either face social expulsion or be contorted out of all recognition. As one scholar put it, the scorched earth is in the service of modern Progressivism’s ultimate goal: “the emancipation of the uninhibited self” (3).
The “uninhibited self” knows no restraint. Even chromosomes are no barrier to any thought, wish, or belief about ourselves. Don’t worry about science saying otherwise. The tent of science, faux or otherwise, is big enough to include people willing to wrap an aura of scientific truth around any self-conception. The gender revolution is born.
National Geographic magazine, January 2017 issue.
It’s a coup d’etat of the mind over the body. It’s a matter of a person convincing “ze-self” of being something in spite of their body saying otherwise. What’s next? Will transgender lead to trans-species?
Welcome to reptile man. Cosmetic surgery and tats can make your body conform to your self-image.
Progressivism is an ally in the “emancipation of the uninhibited self”. After all, what is Progressivism? In a nutshell, it is the rosy belief in the power of the state to actualize every person’s highest potential. The “highest potential” need have no reference to a deity. The “uninhibited self” is the new deity, and the referee of first and last resort of all things.
Even the limits of the economic principle of scarcity has no relevance in this universe. The state’s efforts at a takeover of healthcare, for instance, are about leashing the nation’s medical providers to the crusade. If you have a son living under your roof at age 26, the state will command your medical insurance provider to keep covering him. And for all those without insurance, the state will deconstruct the whole industry and throw open the public purse to further the fantasy that people have healthcare if they possess a piece of paper with “insurance” printed at the top. Actually, they have something with as much value as 1923 German marks ($1 =4,210,500,000,000 German marks) . What good is it if nobody will take it?
Children playing with stacks of marks and a man with a wheel barrow of marks to buy a loaf of bread, 1922 Weimar Republic, Germany.Post-Obamacare healthcare as government provides it for free to ever larger segments of the U.S. population?
What government is waiting to do for medical care it has done to schooling, motor vehicle management, and the ghetto. The cost of the “emancipation of the uninhibited self” comes in the form of destroyed lives, wrecked neighborhoods, and classrooms as incubators of good little Democrats and knowers of not much else.
4-6 hours wait time at California DMV offices after the state awards drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.Inside the DMV office is worse.
Government can’t be the agent for liberating the self. The task is too gargantuan and the goal too pernicious. And there ain’t enough money. Maybe Dirty Harry of Clint Eastwood fame said it best:
“A Man’s Got to Know his Limitations” – regarding “man”, that includes the 2 God-created genders as well as the other 24 recently-discovered permutations.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Genius”, Claudia Kalb, National Geographic, May 2017, p. 48-49.
2. Ibid, p. 44.
3. The point was raised in an interview of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, by Hugh Hewitt on July 4, 2016. The full conversation can be obtained at http://www.hughhewitt.com/dr-larry-arnn-4th-july-reflection-declaration-lincoln-dr-harry-jaffa/ .
In the article, she outlines the conflicting demands facing the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the party needs to recapture the middle-America working class. On the other, they are the party of coastal, urban, media, and academic populations for an obvious reason: it is the social orientation of the activist base and party elites. The people that man the phone banks, attend the rallies, donate money, and run the party are socially so far removed from the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. The core of the party has views to match the obsessions from these quarters. Which way to go – reach out to the neglected and despised, or stay glued to the base?
Some want the party to become more appealing to the working-class-without-college-degrees. Others, like Frank Rich, the party’s chief apologist and favorite economist, say, “Forget about ’em”. Read his piece “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/…/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly… .
I don’t know how the Democrats can square this circle. There’s no way to make transgender bathrooms, the drumbeat of rampant misogyny and racism, climate-change hysteria, unrestrained immigration, a bullying multiculturalism, and socialism here/there/everywhere the key to an outreach program to anyone outside the Dems’ isolated demographic echo chambers.
They’ve got the wrong message and reputation for the wrong crowd. Good luck in reversing that.
Islamic State fighters in a show of force in the Syrian city of Raqqah, 2013. Picture: APAntifa protest/riot, USA, 2017.
Appearances, it is said, can be deceiving. The old cliché is true to a large extent when comparing the two groups pictured above: ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, and antifa (as in “anti-fascist”) in Berkeley. We must remind ourselves that the “antifa” crowd has yet to behead anybody, if we can get beyond the ISIS-inspired fashion tips. But the bio’s of the movements have a similar trajectory, including the germination of self-radicalized and inspired lone wolfs.
Within Islam, a militancy has arisen just as lethal as 1970’s Black September. Black September wasn’t so much a vicious religious campaign as an anti-imperialist and socialist goon-fest that culminated in bloody extravaganzas like the massacre of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Not so much into the socialist thing, today’s ISIS , Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., have cooked up a toxic brew of anti-West fervor with a fealty to sharia. They are religion on speed and with a sword … and AK-47’s and RPG’s as well. Their ideal, especially true for ISIS, is an 8th century lifestyle and conquest for Allah.
Within today’s Left, an analogous combativeness is obvious to anyone with a smartphone. The whole left side of the political spectrum acts like they’re on Walter White’s customer list for meth in “Breaking Bad”. The Democrats have transformed themselves into the institutionalized version of the enraged Left. If language is any gauge, the serial use of expletives shows the highly agitated state of the party.
Here’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) and her newfound fondness for f-bombs:
(see 1 below)
Or take a policy disagreement about healthcare and label your opponents as reenacting something like the Wansee Conference (remember, the Nazi confab to plan the Final Solution). Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) is no shrinking violet when it comes to vitriol. On May 4, she said regarding the House GOP’s healthcare bill,
“This isn’t football. It’s not about scoring points. Trumpcare will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die. Disease, sickness, and old age touch every family. Tragedy doesn’t ask who you voted for.” (see 2 below)
Can you blame an impressionable activist on the emotional fringe of the Left taking these words to heart and grabbing a semi-auto and going on the hunt? Yes, I can pin personal responsibility on the easily led for any subsequent mayhem, but the Left’s political celebrities painting disagreement in stark terms doesn’t exactly set a tone for sober dialogue.
Protester in a Donald Trump mask and emoting with the fickle finger of fate outside midtown NY hotel during a fundraiser for the state Republican Party on April 14, 2016.
Or take this blog post in the liberal but supposedly respectable HuffPost of June 6 by one Jesse Benn, “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any”. Benn’s short bio on his Twitter page includes “Member of the intolerant Left. No war but class war.” In the blog he wrote,
“In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.” (see 3 below)
Is “normalizing Trump” the worrisome issue for the country … or is an attempt at “normalizing violent resistance” the real threat to public decency? Apparently for Benn, the political ends justify the violent means. Rattle that operational principle around in your brain as your mind wonders through the history of its progeny of gulags and Lubyanka wannabees.
Or take the ladies on ABC’s The View describing Trump as “certifiable” or a “moronic gentile”. Absent is even the slightest attempt at moderation. In many circles of the Left, the vilest words seem to be a staple of everyday conversation.
The people on the stage and in the audience on this day appear more as a like-minded mob than anything resembling a gathering of sensible adults.
Or take this CNN report on the raucous incivility at various congressional town halls.
While the effort is made to compare these outbursts to the Tea Party of recent memory, they should not be confused for spontaneous uprisings of the general public. In reality, they are an orchestrated campaign of the Left’s politically connected activists. The subject was examined in one of my earlier blog posts (see “The Left’s Hive in Action: The Modern Edition”).
The hatefulness courses its way through the mainstream media and party channels. And, to no great surprise, it spills out onto the streets and into the fevered imaginations of the true believer.
James Hodgkinson in protest outside a post office in Belleville. Ill. Undated photograph.James Hodgkinson was feeling the “Bern”. He altered his Facebook page to reflect his commitment.
Enter the self-radicalized lone wolf of Islamic extremist fame, and now of the Left. It has been said of ISIS that it inspires uncoordinated attacks of soft targets in the West. These are the terror assaults in San Bernadino, Orlando, Fort Hood, Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester, Germany, etc. A person’s broad and general affinity for militancy combined with inspiration and knowledge from a website could produce some scary results. Overheat the bombast long enough and a blood bath sometimes erupts.
Omar Mateen, the shooter, center, and the scene at the Pulse Nightclub, June 12-13, 2016.
ISIS will proudly and loudly take credit when one of their excitable long-distance psychopaths goes on a rampage. The Left will not.
James T. Hodgkinson, the attempted assassin of Republicans in Alexandria on June 14, is essentially of a mind with Jesse Benn. He took the admonition for violence seriously. Oh, the Left will demur after the fact about following the lead of al-Baghdadi, Robespierre, or Lenin in advocating executions as a path to nirvana. Like Benn, or the legions on college campuses seeking safe spaces (even as they assault guest speakers), Hodgkinson had only the m-o of your run-of-the-mill lefty activist ready to man the phones for Bernie or grab a sign and join the picket line. Who’d have thought that he’d take Benn’s and John Paul Sarte’s call for “necessary violence” literally?
Here’s James Hodgkinson being interviewed in 2011. The Left’s exploitation ploy has an upfront place in his mind. Yet, he showed no sign that a commando assault on Republicans was in his future.
Yeah, the guy has anger management issues and has been abusive, but who could forecast how the combination of an explosive personality, zealous commitment to the Left’s victimology, and ample role models of incivility before cameras, microphones, and word processors would affect a fanatic?
This isn’t Las Vegas. If you think the odds of connecting the dots to a shooting spree are anything other than low – say, 2-to-1 or less – then running a hedge fund or assessing risk for an insurance company may not be in your future.
Hodgkinson Facebook post.
ISIS has Raqqa as the capital of its caliphate. The Left has no capital as such; however, it monopolizes thought, action, and culture in megalopolis, USA. From its media centers, the Left’s coarseness disseminates. The signals are being picked up in like manner as a Muslim teenager in a Brussels ghetto cruising the net for ISIS sites originating in Raqqa.
Substitute the cultural centers of the Left – The View, the firing squad of late-night comedians, the social media organs of the The Resistance, the eagerness of legacy media to join in the feeding frenzy, and the functioning core of the Democratic Party for instance – for Raqqa media central. Both politico-media cultures help animate “Raqqa moments” of butchery.
Is there much difference between Omar Mateen of Pulse Nightclub fame and James Hodgkinson of Alexandria ball field notoriety? Are they any different in their metamorphosis from simple activist to butcher?
Certainly, and sadly for the rest of us, the Left had their Raqqa moment.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Senator drops f-bombs during speech”, CNN, 6/9/2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVmSAXttrtg
2. “Elizabeth Warren on GOP health bill: ‘People will die’”, Jaclyn Reiss, 5/4/2017, Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/05/04/elizabeth-warren-gop-health-bill-people-will-die/GZ0khNWSmJtiAQv2UA9iCP/story.html
3. “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any”, Jesse Benn, HuffPost, 6/17/2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-benn/sorry-liberals-a-violent-_b_10316186.html
4. “Congressional Shooter Loved Bernie, Hated ‘Racist’ Republicans, and Beat His Daughter”, Daily Beast, 6/14/2017, http://www.thedailybeast.com/congressional-shooter-loved-bernie-sanders-hated-racist-and-sexist-republicans
Arrogance is more than a wrinkle in an individual’s personality. Today, arrogance has evolved beyond a solitary quirk. It is a major political personality type commonly found in today’s civic ecosystem. Yes, just combine “political”, “personality”, and “type”. Arrogance is a widespread stance of the psyche (personality) that is deeply embedded in a person’s views of governance (political). Indeed, the formulation works the other way: a person’s views of governance are deeply embedded in the stance of the psyche.
The type has a love affair with the word “expert”. This subspecies of the political herd claims a monopoly on “expert”. Either they assert unrivaled possession of knowledge, wisdom, and expertise, or they lay claim to the support of a-l-l “experts”. Whichever way, further debate is arbitrarily proclaimed to be worthless since opposition is tarred as a pack of Neanderthals. It’s a not-so-kind way to end debate in your favor.
The concoction fuels an entire faction – the self-styled “Progressive” – within our grand debate. The two elements of arrogance and Progressivism are in a symbiotic relationship. They interact and reinforce each other.
It’s a politico-psychological complexion in clear contrast to the usual boastful egoism of your run-of-the-mill elected buffoon. Individual political actors may show an excess of confidence in the rightness of their views. That will always be true. The above is something altogether quite different. It’s arrogance with a political dimension.
The inception of political arrogance into the bloodstream arose from academia and the genus of politician who tethered themselves to partisan academics. No better example can be found than in the career of Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson in 1902 as Princeton University president.
The Progressives arose in a time flush with the giddy excitement of scientific discovery and thought that originated in the 19th century and lapped over into the 20th. It was the moment of Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Mendeleev, Einstein, the Curies. The modern expert rooted in science is born, and “science” is applied to everything. The expert was no normal individual who is acknowledged as adroit in a particular field of study. A public perception emerges of the sage of science with an excellence of mind capable of addressing all questions – even those matters that are, as it would turn out, beyond their competence.
Confidence was brimming for this new “expert”, chockablock with formal classroom instruction and much practical application of the expertise. In America, production of such individuals fell to the universities whose curriculum came to mirror the German model of fusing teaching and research. The founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 was emblematic as the other schools rushed to reform their programs to match. Not surprisingly, Wilson garnered his PhD in the new “political science” at Johns Hopkins.
Hopkins Hall circa 1885, on the original downtown Baltimore campus.Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University.Johns Hopkins Glee Club, 1883. Wilson is in the top row, second from left.
The cross-fertilization of Germany to America wasn’t limited to academic structure. On the currents came ideas. Prominent was Hegel’s notion of historical progress. The new sciences created a frothy atmosphere for the expectation that we were on the cusp of a new dawn, i.e. progress. It’s the zeitgeist of Hegel’s imagination.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, age 58, as rector of University of Berlin
The “spirit of the age” of the swing period from the 19th to the 20th centuries was heavily Darwinian. Darwin’s insights were licentiously applied beyond biology into history and nearly all facets of culture. At the time, John Dewey, from his perch at Columbia University as the new god of education, pinpointed the Progressives’ debt to Darwin:
“The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.” (see 5 below)
Charles Robert Darwin at age 45, circa 1854, as he was working on the publication of “On the Origins of Species”.
Wilson was particularly fond of the outlook and blended it with all things political. He was quick to jettison what he viewed as the Founders’ antiquated ideas about human nature, natural rights, and limited government. They were said to be Newtonian and outdated. Instead, the proper metaphor is evolution and Darwin.
“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.” The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” (see 1 below)
What did it mean to accord Darwin the role of epistemological Moses? Answer: A free pass is rhetorically granted to people like Wilson to refashion our Constitutional order to the dictates of the experts in the latest fashions of thought in poli sci departments. The potential exists for a new Constitutional convention, or at least an amendment, with every issue of an academic journal. It’s actually like a more erudite version of revolution without the cordite.
The fate of the republic, the Progressives argued, can’t be placed in the hands of dirty politicos. The old politics was construed as debased by cigar smoke, backroom dealing, and corruption. The new Progressive vision would be, they contended, a sterilized governance under the supposed beneficent judgment of administrators and operatives with baccalaureates.
Gilded age corruption as the Progressives viewed it.
The upshot was that the rule of law and the limits on government functionaries were effectively neutered. “Don’t lament the happenstance”, the Progressive acolyte would assure us . Wilson and the Progressive legions promised that we’d be better off with the replacement of the Founders’ dinosaur with enlightened experts ensconced in administrative bureaus. Of course, we’ll have less popular sovereignty, but what a small price to pay for the benefits of direction from papered (i.e. degreed) “experts”? Eh?
The scene was set for the establishment of the real fourth branch of government: the administrative state, not elected and unaccountable. But are these purported paragons of knowledge and disinterested discernment – these GS-level employees and their administrative heads – really what they’re cracked up to be? Are they immune to ideological bias? Are they really insulated from pressure group influence? Are they partisan? Are we actually, in other words, any better off than under the naked rule of Tammany Hall?
There’s too much to consider to suggest otherwise, or at least cause a downgrade in the Progressive promise. Let’s throw back the curtain to expose the revolving door between ideological groups and bureaucratic/legislative leadership. For example, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the nation’s premiere environmentalist activist groups, is a personnel pipeline to Democrats on capitol hill and the Obama administration.
If you’re interested, here’s NRDC’s short video of their mission statement to give you some sense of their secular zealotry. Take note of the ideological hyperbole.
The relationship between the Dems and environmental activism in the form of groups like the NRDC is understandable given the natural penchant for ideological birds of a feather to flock together. And its critical for the environmentalist cause to be well entrenched on both the legislative and administrative sides of the policy-making equation. Here’s a sample of the NRDC recruits to the Dems’ effort at political warfare:
David McCintosh, former air pollution attorney at NRDC, took the position of senior legislative adviser to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Michael Goo, NRDC’s legislative director on climate issues, appointed as special counsel for Ed Markey (D, Mass.).
Karen Wayland, NRDC legislative director of six years, became the top staffer on energy and environmental issues for Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.).
Melissa Bez, NRDC official, joined the staff of Henry Waxman (D, Ca.).
Eben Burnham-Snyder, NRDC official, was spokesman for Markey’s House Energy and Environment Subcommittee of 2009.
Brad Crowell, NRDC official, was environmental aide to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D, R.I.).
Chris Murray, another NRDC officer, was a staffer for Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D, Ind.).
The relationship was indicative of an influence of what many at the time (2009) called a “NRDC mafia” within the machinery of Democratic Party politics. (see 8 below)
We should dispel with the Progressive contention of a disinterested and apolitical technocrat wisely guiding us through the pitfalls of life. Government employees come to their jobs with biases and prejudices akin to the hoi polloi. Passing through their office doorway isn’t like dipping under the water in baptism. Their weaknesses and prejudices aren’t washed away but carried with them to the desk and the field.
Partisanship is glaringly apparent in certain tranches of government employment. Typical surveys of political party affiliation are inconclusive since most don’t distinguish between, for example, defense and non-defense employment sectors. The numbers lump together all employees thereby diluting any preference that might exist if one could see the pool in its parts. But occasionally figures crop up that are telling.
One was the breakdown of political party contributions by federal employees in executive branch departments for the 2015-2016 election cycle. The difference between 6 and 5 digits (and 4 digits) in political cash is profound. The State Department laundered $299,224 to the Democrats and only $24,241 to the Republicans. Treasury Department employees flooded the zone with $170,897 to the Dems while only managing to scrape together $1,925 for the Republicans. Laborers in the Justice Department shoveled $137,603 to the Dems with only $14,939 going to candidates with an “R” after their name. The same pattern recurs with $139,483 to the D’s and $12,319 for the R’s in the Department of Health & Human Services. The disparity was $120,271/$14,377 in the Energy Department. Adding together the numbers for 7 executive departments in one study produced a 5-to-1 advantage in lucre for the Dems (see 9 below).
The federal government employees’ puppy love for the Dems is understandable. After all, the Democrats are the party of big government and that means job security and splendid compensation packages for big government’s worker bees. It certainly, though, shoots a torpedo through the hull of the disinterested and unbiased technocrat. They are motivated by the same incentives that afflicted Boss Tweed’s ward healers.
Could the average government worker be singularly exceptional in avoiding the crass interests of the unwashed masses? If so, we’d have to accord the bureau’s office doorway, once again, with the magical cleansing powers of something akin to Christian baptism. Somehow that seems to me a bit of stretch.
Ironically, unaccountable and biased government has been slowly gestating since the Pendleton Act of 1887. The act put words to the hope of removing raw patronage from government service. Certainly a noble endeavor. Instead, what we got morphed into an army of folks with some know-how, ladled with bias and self-interest, and its harder to fire them than removing wisdom teeth.
The hubris of the Progressive politician and their knee-jerk claim to ownership of “experts” in and outside of the government are chief characteristics of this political personality type. It stems from a misplaced faith in human omniscience and a forgetfulness of our frailties. Furthermore, it dodges any assessment of these “experts” and their politicized overseers.
We now enter the land of “argument from authority”. Since most politicians, journalists, and laymen only possess, at best, a cursory understanding of science, they resort to the “experts”, with the modifier “all” attached to more easily dispatch those who might disagree. It’s acting out this old syllogism (see 11 below):
For Progressive politicos, they’d like to replace “probably” with “must”. The language adjustment makes their job of selling their preferred policy prescriptions so much easier while condemning opposition in one fell swoop.
An example of the tactic (one of many that one could cite) occurred in 2014 during the ebola outbreak in West Africa. Controversy erupted over Obama’s decision not to impose a travel ban on infected regions. He tried to lay claim to “experts” as a class when, in fact, expert opinion wasn’t so monolithic in support of his decision.
Here’s part of President Obama’s speech on the issue.
In a poll by SERMO, a leading social network of licensed physicians in the U.S., 75% answered “yes” to a question about whether all travel to the U.S. from West Africa should be halted (see 10 below). This factoid isn’t mentioned to posit one side’s “experts” over another’s. It is mentioned to show an overused rhetorical gambit to win a political fight, the political deoxyribonucleic acid (dna) of Progressive political theater.
Or take this episode that erupted on Fox News’s The Five on June 3. Note the unquestioning reliance on “experts” by the self-designated Progressive Juan Williams as he criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Watch the sweeping conclusions from such half-witted devotees of “science” as Nancy Pelosi or Jerry Brown.
While Juan is more personable, the politicos are forcefully insistent. Should we say “arrogant”?
Bill Nye, a Cornell graduate in mechanical engineering, approaches disagreement to his faith in climate-change orthodoxy as close to a mental disorder, or maybe a serious mental malfunction. In his mind, all climate oscillation questions are settled; nothing more to do here. Nye’s mind is a closed mind. Yet, Nye appears to be unaware of a general rule of thumb of science: the grander the conclusion, the greater the need for elbow room for modification later. Modesty, however, isn’t a Nye character trait. Watch Nye and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson go at it.
Nye’s suggestion about disagreement being a form of “cognitive dissonance” comes close to Sovietizing opponents. The Soviet authorities labeled dissenters to Soviet and Marxist policies as suffering from “psychopathological mechanisms”. Has the Kremlin left a lasting impression on Nye and others in the Progressive orbit? The episode exposes the arrogance of the ideological zealot hiding behind a veneer of science.
The ploy of political arrogance reminds me of John C. Calhoun’s old blather about the goodness of slavery.
John C. Calhoun by Matthew Brady, 1849.
In his calculus , some are suited to rule while others are to be ruled. Specifically, some are meant to own human beings and others are meant to be owned. He contends that it is the natural order of mankind since all are said to prosper.
“A mysterious Providence had brought together two races, from different portions of the globe, and placed them together in nearly equal numbers in the Southern portion of this Union . They were there inseparably united, beyond the possibility of separation. Experience had shown that the existing relation between them secured the peace and happiness of both. Each had improved; the inferior greatly; so much so, that it had attained a degree of civilization never before attained by the black race in any age or country.” (see 13 below)
Calhoun’s view of humankind isn’t that far removed from that of our Progressive friends. There are those fit to govern, and those best fitted to be governed. Elections are seen as wholly unnecessary to confer legitimacy on the arrangement. It is said to be natural.
For the slaveholder in the antebellum South, the distinction is race. For the Progressive, it’s possession of a sheet of paper on a wall. In both worldviews, justification to rule isn’t to hinge on a plebiscite. The masses of “inferiors” – for Calhoun, those with high melanin counts; for Progressives, those without 4 years of academic hoop-jumping – must simply accept the ukases of their “betters”.
My inclination leans toward Thomas Jefferson’s view when he said “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god” (see 14 below). Progressives need to get off their horse and recognize that they have no copyright on the truth. Humility is in order, not political arrogance.
Thomas Jefferson in 1805 by Rembrandt Peale.
Yet, they might realize that relinquishing their boots and spurs would undercut their agenda. Dispensing with the feudalism would leave them in the position of the emperor with no clothes. Sadly, therefore, they’ll cling to their arrogance as an alcoholic to a cheap bottle of whiskey. Sad, truly sad.
RogerG
(I’m also on Facebook at Roger Graf with synopsis and room for comments)
Bibliography and sources:
1. “19th century society and culture”, University of Indiana Northwest, http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/h114_2002/nineteenthcentury.htm
2. “Woodrow Wilson: Godfather of Liberalism”, Ronald Pestritto, Graduate Dean and Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, 7/31/2012, http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/woodrow-wilson-godfather-liberalism
3. “Woodrow Wilson and the Rejection of the Founders’ Constitution”, Ronald Pestritto, Charles and Lucia Shipley Professor in the American Constitution, Hillsdale College,
4. “Woodrow Wilson on Administration”, First Principles Series, The Heritage Foundation. Contain Wilson’s “The Study of Administration”, July 1887; http://origin.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-on-administration
5. “Darwin’s Constitution”, Bradley C.S. Watson, National Review, 5/17/2010, https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/338503/darwins-constitution
6. “The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics”, William Schambra and Thomas West, The Heritage Foundation, 7/18/2007, http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-progressive-movement-and-the-transformation-american-politics
7. “Transparency Problems: Collusion with Environmental Activists”, EPAFacts, https://epafacts.com/transparency-problems/collusion-with-environmental-activists/. EPA Facts is an online publication of the Environmental Policy Alliance. SourceWatch.org pans the group as a big business front. SourceWatch, though, is no neutral observer. Its leftist bias is given away in its rhetoric. In its article on the Environmental Policy Alliance, the SourceWatch reduces the group to the PR firm Berman & Co. In describing Berman & Co., it says, “The firm operates a network of dozens of front groups, attack-dog web sites, and alleged think tanks that work to counteract minimum wage campaigns, keep wages low for restaurant workers, and to block legislation on food safety, secondhand cigarette smoke, drunk driving, and more.” The synopsis could have been written by any of Bernie Sanders’s campaign staffers.
8. “‘NRDC mafia’ finding homes on Hill, in EPA”, Darren Samuelsohn, NY Times, 3/6/2009, http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/03/06/06greenwire-nrdc-mafia-finding-homes-on-hill-in-epa-10024.html
9. “Which Political Party Receives the Most in Political Contributions from Federal Employees”, Ralph R. Smith, FedSmith.com, 5/19/2016, https://www.fedsmith.com/2016/05/19/which-party-receives-the-most-in-political-contributions-from-federal-employees/
10. “75% of Doctors Support Travel Ban from West Africa According to SERMO Poll”, PR Newswire, 10/14/2014, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/75-of-doctors-support-travel-ban-from-west-africa-according-to-sermo-poll-279014441.html. PR Newswire is a distributor of news releases based in New York City. “The service was created in 1954 to allow companies to electronically send press releases to news organizations ….” (wikipedia).
12. “Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union”, wikipedia.org.
13. “John C. Calhoun Sees ‘Slavery in its true light…'” (1838), document link for W.W. Norton’s textbook Give Me Liberty: An American History, Eric Foner, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/foner2/contents/ch11/documents02.asp
14. Letter: “Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman”, June 24, 1826, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/214.html
Camarillo Mental Hospital, 1941 … or the California State Legislature, 2017?
California is a beautiful state, but why is it so intent on ruining itself? The state is keen on making a sequel to Havana-care. Government-run healthcare is in the offing for most every soul in the state if SB562 is released from the asylum.
State Senators Toni Atkins (l) and Ricardo Lara (r) before their adoring fans.
The bill, midwifed by State Senators Ricardo Lara and Toni Atkins (of course, both Dems), would saddle the state’s residents with a $400 billion tab according to the legislature’s auditors – 3x’s the entire state budget for next year. In a fit of hallucinogenic wish-fulfillment, Lara spewed the line that the bill would “clamp down” on costs because it would eliminate “the need for insurance companies and their administrative costs and profits”. (source: see below)
What?! Has this guy lost his mind?
Did it occur to the would-be Socrates of the state legislature that the insurance companies would be replaced by … government? You know, the thing that has given you some of the worst roads in the nation, schools maimed with heroin-induced political correctness, sky high taxes and energy rates, one of the nation’s worst poverty (ranked 35) and violent crime rates (ranked 38), and a bullet train to Shangri-la.
Such thinking makes Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole seem like a dose of reality.
RogerG
Source:
“Healthy California Act annual price tag: $400 billion”, Tracy Seipel, The Mercury News, 5/23/17, http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/22/healthy-california-act-annual-price-tag-400-billion/
In Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, the cities are London and Paris. London is stable and relatively safe and prosperous. Paris is embroiled in violence and mob rule. The contrast is the backdrop for the meat of the story.
The technique of juxtaposing opposing things sheds light on the consequences of divergent courses of action. One thing is commonly a formula for disaster while the other, even as it may be heartily resisted in real time, is the only path to betterment. For example, let’s take two people who are known for their ideas: Bernie Sanders, U.S. senator from Vermont, and Jose Pinera, Chilean economist.
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. speaks at a campaign stop, Wednesday, March 30, 2016, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)Jose Pinera, Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard, Chilean Secretary of Labor (1978-80), Secretary of Mining (1980-1), now of the Cato Institute.
I cling to the notion that the ideas rolling around in a person’s head is far more important for governance than personality traits like affability. A person may be pleasant and genial but horribly disastrous if their ideo-philosophy was ever put into practice. Conversely, the irascible and altogether disagreeable sort may be spot-on with their ideas and beliefs. Not to say that these archetypes of the psyche apply to Sanders or Pinera, but it makes clear the preeminence of ideas over the window dressing of personality.
What is it about the ideas and beliefs of these two people that makes such a clear contrast? Well, Sanders is an intellectual fossil from the fellow-traveler collectivism of the 1930s or the SDS activism of the 1960s. The guy is stuck in a time warp. Pinera represents the renaissance of the liberty-loving economics of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek from the 1970s to the present. The Sanders path is the socialist road to “immanentizing the eschaton” (heaven-on-earth wish fufillment), as Eric Voegelin or William F. Buckley would have said. Pinera presents a different fork in the road.
The gallery of contrasts:
The fist of revolution: The conferees of the left’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) after the signing of their manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, June 15, 1962. Tom Hayden stands in the front far left.A young Bernie Sanders from the 1970s.
Watch Bernie Sanders, in a 1985 radio interview, expound as an apologist of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas as the Sandinistas worked to build a Central American sequel to Castro’s Cuba.
Milton Friedman receives the Nobel Prize for economics, 1976.
Watch Milton Friedman get heckled by a left wing activist at his 1976 Nobel ceremony, an all-too-familiar scene on today’s college campuses.
Ludwig von Mises, Austrian economist, advocate of free markets, and professor to Friedrich Hayek.Friedrich Hayek, 1950, free market economist and Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974.
Sanders came onto his socialism honestly. He wasn’t a late bloomer. At the University of Chicago as a student in the early 1960s, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. It’s a commitment that he’d carry into doddering old age and a near miss for the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2016.
As mayor of Burlington, Vt., 1981-1989, Sanders was running a small New England town with its own foreign policy. It’s hotly debated whether he actually “honeymooned” in Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union in 1988. No doubt he wedded in 1988 and, with his new bride, jetted off to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation. The sequence is enticing: he wedded, flew off to Yaroslavl the next day, and vacationed while there. Sounds like a “honeymoon” to me. Call it a “working” honeymoon.
Bernie Sanders in Yaroslavl, the Soviet Union, 1988.
The infatuation with “workers’ paradises” extended to an attempt at establishing a Burlington embassy in Havana (I’m kidding … I think). One’s activities can be expected to follow one’s beliefs, I suppose.
In the run-up to the Democratic Convention in June of 2016, Bernie Sanders refused to endorse Hillary while regurgitating through a scroll of freebies for every conceivable victims’ group and a limitless demand for crusades against almost any and all disparities that may rear their heads in the course of human existence. It’s the stock and trade of all leftists going back to Karl Marx brooding away in the British Museum in 1873. Read the speech for yourself. The transcript source is below in the Bibliography.
The first paragraph sets the tone and the rest is the laundry list.
“Election days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end. They continue every day, every week and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice. That’s what the trade union movement is about. That’s what the civil rights movement is about. That’s what the women’s movement is about. That’s what the gay rights movement is about. That’s what the environmental movement is about.”
For Sanders, government is super mommy. Leaving aside it’s a gas chamber to prosperity, it stands in stark contrast to the ideas of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile, of whom Jose Pinera was considered a member, even though he was from Harvard and not the University of Chicago.
The story begins with the coup to remove Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.
Chile’s military overthrows the Marxist presidency of Salvador Allende, 1973. Allende’s defenders are detained face down outside the presidential palace. Earlier, Allende committed suicide rather than face arrest and exile.
The country was facing economic collapse and opposition intensified, particularly in the Chamber of Deputies, the country’s legislature. In August of 1973, the Chamber of Deputies invited the military to remove Allende. In a resolution they asked all responsible leaders, including the military, “… to put an immediate end to all situations herein … that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land …”.
Chile’s national legislature, the Chamber of Deputies.
Allende was cornered in the presidential palace. Rather than face arrest and exile, he shot himself with the AK-47 that was a gift from Castro.
Of the coup leaders, Augusto Pinochet emerged as the new president.
Augusto Pinochet, center, the day after the coup.
In the beginning, the junta seemed just as incapable of dealing with the country’s economic problems as Allende. Inflation reached an annual rate of 900%. Long before the coup there existed a pipeline for bright Chilean students to the University of Chicago, including its Economics Department. Milton Friedman had many of those students. They would prove to be the ones to show the way out of the morass.
The Chicago Boys, as they were called, were University of Chicago trained economists who were associated with the various governmental ministries in the new Pinochet regime. They invited Friedman to Chile and a short audience with Pinochet in 1975.
Milton Friedman with Augusto Pinochet, 1975. When asked later why he met with Pinochet, he responded by saying, “…for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean government [was like] a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean government to help end a medical plague”.Shortly after his return to Chicago, Friedman wrote a letter to Pinochet to state that Chile’s inflation problem arose “from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime”. Shortly following he would say, “… their difficulties were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism, and the welfare state.”
Substitute Sanders for Allende, at least for the economic theory. The shoe fits.
A lesson that never caught on with Bernie was apparent to the young minds in the Chilean ministries having to grapple with the scree of Allende’s concoction of public-treasury giveaways and the attempt at government directorship of everything under the sun – Marx’s favorite nostrum. Jose Pinera was one of those university-trained economists who served as minister of Labor and Social Security(1978-1980) and later as minister of Mining (1980-1) in the Pinochet government.
Pinochet meeting with Pinera as Pinera submits his labor union plan to Pinochet, 1979.
As minister of Labor, he moved to guarantee the right to collective bargaining without giving the unions carte blanche to cripple the country. But he is best known for rescuing Chile’s retirement system with a hybrid of public and private pensions. What we call “social security”.
Nothing could be further distinct in public policy from Bernie’s desire for government to do most everything through ownership, control, and the forced extractions of taxation. Pinera’s idea, first implemented in 1980, was to expand personal freedom with individual ownership. A person could actually own their pension, rather than be at the mercy of a government-run system like our Social Security’s old age pensions. 10% of wages, instead of going to the government, went into an individual’s private investment account. Older workers could opt to remain in the old government system. Low and behold, the savings rate ballooned and so did the extent of private ownership of the economy. It’s a far cry from Bernie’s super mommy.
The reforms helped ignite Chile’s economic miracle. Democracy was restored in 1990. The personal retirement accounts have given to workers an annual rate of return of over 10%. While the poverty rate for Latin America is 40%, it is 15% in Chile.
Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with,
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Similarly, we are in a period of both foolishness and wisdom. The reality of Bernie’s vision is currently playing out on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. Shortages, hunger, riots, and repression are the order of the day, as in late-eighteenth century Paris.
CARACAS, VENEZUELA – JANUARY 13, 2015: A shopper walks past nearly empty shelves at a supermarket due to a long term shortage in Caracas, Venezuela on January 13, 2015. (Photo by Carlos Becerra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)Opponents of the government of Nicholas Maduro protest in Caracas, Venzuela, April 8, 2017.More protests against the government of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro in Caracas, April 20, 2017.
For Bernie, no-one should face any risk so the government should insure against all the vicissitudes of life. The problem is, risk isn’t eliminated; it’s transmogrified into misery. Bernie refuses to learn from the Soviet Union, the whole eastern bloc behind the ol’ Iron Curtain, Havana, and today’s Caracas. The production of refugees is the only surplus in such places.
In a choice between an unreconstructed old leftist like Bernie Sanders and a young Jose Pinera (age 24 at the time of his pension proposal), take the young dude.
“Castro Foil: A quote from a fake news article is frequently circulated as a genuine quote from the Democratic presidential candidate.”, Snopes, http://www.snopes.com/sanders-america-embrace-socialism/
“The Daily Mail Snopes Story And Fact Checking The Fact Checkers”, Kalev Leetaru, Forbes, 12/22/2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#6120637a227f. I was drawn to this article because of my growing recognition that the fact-checkers need fact-checking.
“EXCLUSIVE: Facebook ‘fact checker’ who will arbitrate on ‘fake news’ is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes – and its staff includes an escort-porn star and ‘Vice Vixen domme'”, Daily Mail, . I was drawn to this article as I was reading the Forbes article above. While I am not able to determine the veracity of this report, it is inescapable that we must be on our guard to fact-check the fact-checkers.
“Transcript: Bernie Sanders speech in Burlington, Vermont”, Politico, 6/16/16, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/transcript-bernie-sanders-speech-in-burlington-vermont-224465. The speech is about Bernie’s intentions in the run-up to the Democratic Convention in July of 2016. There was no endorsement for Hillary Clinton.
“Sanders not ending campaign in Thursday’s video speech: spokesman”, John Whitesides, Reuters, 6/15/16, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-sanders-idUSKCN0Z126B
A backgrounder on Bernie Sanders can be found in Wikipedia under “Bernie Sanders”.
“George Will describes Bernie Sanders’ Soviet Union honeymoon”, Punditfact, 8/12/15, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/12/george-will/george-will-reminds-readers-about-bernie-sanders-u/. This is a discussion about whether Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, 2008. An account of the coup against the Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile and the influence of the American economists from the University of Chicago and Harvard on the Pinochet regime can be found on pp. 212-220, “The Big Chill”.
A further account of the coup is available in Wikipedia under “1973 Chilean coup d’état”.
The invitation of the Chamber of Deputies for the military to remove Allende can be found here: “Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile”, August 22, 1973, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agreement_of_the_Chamber_of_Deputies_of_Chile
“The Chicago Boys now and then”, Rebecca Liu, King’s Review, 9/27/16, http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/chicago-boys-now/
Watch Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel interview one of the student leaders, Keeley Mullen, of the Million Student March in November of 2015. Pay attention to her list of demands and her reasoning … for what there was of it.
There’s the familiar clamor for money: $15/hr. student minimum wage, free college education, and vanquishing all student loan debt. When asked who’s going to pay for the largesse, Keeley’s train of logic goes off the tracks. She clearly sets her sites on the usual suspects of the “1%” and the “corporate model” of education. The rich and an abstraction are either at fault or to be looted. The incoherency is astounding.
Next, look at the furor faced by Yale’s Prof. Nicholas Christakis in November 2015 for asking students to lighten up and accept some semblance of free speech on campus (see Sources for a full account). Look for the crowd’s regimented mannerisms of finger clicking and turning one’s back with arms elevated and crossed above the head. And, of course, listen for the self-anointed victim’s insistence of an apology for ethereal hurts and accommodations to recover from the hard-to-pin-down harms.
The screams and assertions-without-proof come from an assumption that the power to control lies with the self-identified victim. The fingered and generalized “perp” is to have no defense. Those who disagree with the mob enter into discourse at great peril.
Speaking of mobs, view this scene at UC Berkeley in October of 2016 as student activists blocked white students from entering Sather Gate. Prominent on the barricades were LGBTQ firebrands.
The chant “Go Around” was aimed at white students for their purported “privilege”. Again, the stench of victimhood surrounds the event.
Or, rocket forward to January 2017 and the Women’s March. Here Ashley Judd strays into the Hitler cliché in a Trump diatribe along with the laundry list of bogeymen including a variety of “isms” and misogyny.
This is not one of Ashley’s finer moments.
Alicia Keys stepped to the mike with a syncopated chant of “We’re on fire”. By now, the March’s bellicosity has become quite trite (to borrow the phonetic rhythm of the Keys’ style of speechifying).
Scarlett Johanssen took her turn on stage to carry on with the misogyny angle and elevate Planned Parenthood (PP) to the Godhead. Did it occur to her that the debate about PP in public policy revolves around the question of making others pay for it? She could donate her annual salary – all tax deductible – for the next number of years to keep the thing afloat, so long as PP avoids the Auschwitz model of body parts marketing.
What do the above clips have in common, besides the fact that they’re all examples of Lefty activism? They project the alluring facade of group persecution. No single individual is responsible for anything. Groups carry a ready-made pardon for any and all conduct, if you’re so lucky as to land in the right cluster of fashionable victims. Their absolution can be reduced to the refrain, “It’s not my fault”.
Lately, the Right hasn’t been immune to the intoxicant. The manic-Right steps in it as they bemoan anything foreign, differently pigmented, and the wispy “establishment”. Railing against affirmative action has become an easy crutch to explain away a lack of industriousness by some – even though, in the case of affirmative action, it must be admitted that we have a program to benefit victims that creates victims. The effort is a walking contradiction.
Our modern fixation with blaming others has a pedigree going back to Genesis, if you’re a fundamentalist – if not, then figuratively speaking. Blaming others is first on the checklist to escape responsibility reaching back to Eve’s appetite for fruit.
We’ve become very ingenious in inventing schemes to dodge personal guilt. Our imaginations run wild in dreaming of social and political systems, and the philosophies to go with them, to circumvent individual accountability by subsuming difficulties in mysterious evildoers. Today’s campus snowflake has the same train of thought as yesterday’s Parisian mob parading around the streets with the heads of the Bastille’s guards on pikes.
The Paris mob with the heads of the guards on pikes after the guards ventured out of the fortress to negotiate their own surrender.Mostly college students in the downtown area of Los Angeles to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 8-9, 2016.
Surely there were many in the Paris crowd who found the behavior revolting, just as there probably were “safe space” activists who objected to the recent muscling of Charles Murray as goons also set about inflicting a concussion on his professorial escort at Middlebury College. Still, group guiltlessness, no matter the moment in history, provides cover for barbarity. Indeed, it’s the lubricant.
Students disrupt Charles Murray during his presentation at Middlebury College, March 2, 2017.
Denouncing others for your problems has been the principle incubator of government’s ruination of their own people. Take 2 examples from the 20th century: Argentina’s slide into Peronism and Weimar Germany’s inter-war dance with hyperinflation.
You could say that Germany’s affliction with hyper-inflation in the 1920’s was baked in the cake. Many Germans at the time liked to blame the Versailles Treaty and its reparations burden for its problems. More correctly, Germany’s government flooded the country with Treasury bills that were translated into money in order to finance the war. A money glut already existed by the time the guns fell silent on 11-11-11-1918.
Then, after the war, the monetary fire hose was yanked wide open by Germany’s elected government because it suited popular interests. Public debt shot up as spending expanded on things like generous public employee compensation while tax revenues stagnated from massive tax evasion. Inflation was welcomed by German exporters – it made German products cheaper in overseas markets – and government officials and their supporters as a way to injure the Allies and their reparations’ bill with worthless script.
The witches’ brew culminated in 4.97 x 1020 marks circulating about the country. The annual inflation rate reached its zenith at 182 billion percent by the end of 1923. Those on inflexible incomes as in salaried workers, pensioners, and depositors were wrecked.
A billion mark note, November, 1923. Large denominations were necessary to conduct transactions.Worthless marks, 1923. Sweeping them off the streets as litter and a woman lighting a fire with it.
In all of it, lurking deep in the German pscyhe, was an unwillingness to accept their defeat. As ex-Harvard and Stanford professor Niall Ferguson concludes in his The Ascent of Money (p. 105),
“… a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance – rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten – led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself.”
Germany’s cavalier treatment of fiscal and monetary matters has its tentacles in a widespread psychological predisposition to reject the war’s outcome, and in a reflex to blame others. The skids were greased for the rise of the then nascent NSDAP (Nazi Party). More about that later.
Juan Peron drinking coffee between 1945 and 1955.
It just so happens that travelling around Italy well into the rule of il Duce (Mussolini) was an Argentinian military officer, Juan Peron. On assignment by the War Ministry in 1939 to study mountain warfare in the Alps, attend the University of Turin, and perform as military observer in Europe, he became acquainted with Italian Fascism. The experience would leave an impression.
His valuable assistance in a couple of military coups, and a deepening partnership with powerful labor unions, would ensure his rise to power. The political marriage of Peron and Argentina’s mega-unions was made possible by his championing of their power, benefits, and perks in his his role as Labor Minister and later as Vice-President. The well-traveled route to ruination is programmed in the GPS: sympathies turned into extravagant giveaways to powerful special interests.
Peron as Vice President (r) and his political benefactor, Pres. Edelmiro Farrell, 1945.
The distinction in popular American conversation between fascism and the Left is more of a naked prejudice than a reality. It shows in the career of Juan Peron. In 1945, Peron is running for president as the Labor Party’s candidate, having previously established himself as the champion of their cause for years. The unions, and his wife’s (Evita) demagoguery, rescued him from jail so he could run as president. He ran as the unions’ protector and bulwark against Yanqui (U.S.) interference, a familiar leftist trope. His fascist sympathies were apparent to American officials during the war, raising concerns about Argentina’s intentions in the latter stages of the war.
His fascist connections would bear fruit in a kind of underground railroad to Argentina for Nazi war criminals. Such is the ideological mish-mash of Peronism.
So, what is Peronism? It’s a disparate collection of ideas and beliefs that can be boiled down to “It’s not my fault”. The first gambit of professed guiltlessness is to throw aspersions at the Left’s favorite foil, the rich. In 1948, Peron spelled it out in a speech.
“… economic policy which maintained that this was a permanent and perfect school of capitalist exploitation should be replaced by a doctrine of social economy under which the distribution of our wealth, which we force the earth to yield up to us and which furthermore we are elaborating, may be shared out fairly among all those who have contributed by their efforts to amass it.” [my emphasis]
This kind of thing might just as easily come out of the mouths of today’s social justice warriors. In fact, it did. I refer you to Keeley Mullen at the beginning.
Peron put a label on his gambit, “Justicialism”. Anyway, it’s the same old victim/victimizer dualism at work in a set of different geographical coordinates. Peron condensed the oppressed down to the “workers”. Point #4 of his “Twenty Truths” says, “There is only one class of men for the Perónist cause: the workers”.
Practically speaking, what did this secular sermonizing mean for the fortunes of the country? The economy was politicized and the nation became a basket case of bailouts, national defaults, and international financial interventions. Per capita (per person) GDP was the same in 1988 as it was 1959. The economy didn’t grow – a complete reversal of the situation from around the turn of the century (1870-1913). Argentina would be overtaken by the “Asian tigers” (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea).
Inflation, that ‘ol government-engineered bugaboo, would flair up in double digits between 1945-1952, 1956-1968, 1970-1974; and reach new heights of ferocity by trebling and quadrupling in 1975-1990. The crescendo was 5,000% in 1989.
In 1989, the country couldn’t even turn on the lights with daily blackouts averaging 5 hours. The government ran out of money – not because it spent it, but because it ran out of paper and the printers went on strike. A riot erupted in a Buenos Aires supermarket when a 30% on-the-spot price increase was announced over the store’s loudspeaker. Pandering to self-anointed victims with the usual blame in tow has very unpleasant side-effects.
It hasn’t gotten much better: 2002 “Price Watch” price increase in a Buenos Aires supermarket. It could occur hourly.
Where inflation leads, default follows. It happened in 1982, 1989, 2002, and 2004. If victim/victimizer blame-game mythology was a drug awaiting FDA approval, it would not only be proven to be not efficacious (the legal approval standard), but found poisonous. There’d be a run on law firm ads on cable tv if it got past the regulators.
Peron certainly wasn’t running the show during the whole period of Argentina’s slide into insolvency. His main contribution was showing the country how to do it. Thanks Juan and Evita.
Juan and Evita waving to the crowd in 1950.
Entire political groups are wallowing in a blame-game belief system. These ideological movements are nothing but outsized masquerade balls for “It’s not my fault”. Many would turn out to be e quite lethal. Reaching down into history’s nightmares we find Mussolini’s Fascist Party, the inspiration for Peronism.
Mussolini next to a bronze Caesar outside Fascist Party headquarters, 1943.
If one didn’t know better, Mussolini could be easily confused with Lenin if a stranger was limited to listening to him on the radio. His political dogma was a grab bag of international socialism’s platitudes with “international” replaced by “national”. We’d hear the same worn out pronouncements of “exploitation” and sympathy for the “oppressed”. Naturally, the victim requires a victimizer, or some such sort. It’s a necessary ingredient for the “exploitation” gambit. Often, cast for the role are the “privileged” or, better yet, the “rich”.
It’s too easy to prove the point. Take a look at these samples, in chronological order:
In 1910, still in his old incarnation as an “international” socialist, he said, “There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters”.
Jump forward to 1919, now as full-fledged socialist of the “national” variety – a Fascist – he blathers, “This is what we propose now to the Treasury: either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them”. The list of “victims” is expanded to war veterans.
In 1921, he announced, “When the war is over, in the world’s social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth’s riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”
In 1933 he declares war on “laissez-faire” and “capitalism”: “To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.”
As an aside, in the 1930’s, after FDR’s ascendancy in the U.S., Mussolini recognized his affinity with the New Deal and its intellectual godfather, John Maynard Keynes: “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”
Further, “Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”
I could go on, if one was convinced that the quotes were out of context. They aren’t. They were typical and commonplace for him. Our social justice warriors of today should be careful when they throw about the charge of “fascist”. They unknowingly have a more intense fondness for Mussolini’s beliefs than the Federalist Society.
And while I’m at it, what about that frothy, toxic brew fermenting in Germany at the time of Mussolini’s heyday? Once again, those old stalking horses of “exploitation” and “oppression” appear under the guise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) doctrines. For these folks, the Allies, their degenerate and corrupting civilization (in their words), the Jews, Jewry’s capitalist lapdogs (in their words), and opposing street-gang socialists of the “international” variety fulfill the role of victimizer or oppressor.
Hitler in the early 1920s.
Sometimes a catchy slogan can encapsulate all of the purported horribles. For many Germans at the time, it was the “stab-in-the-back” myth. Germany’s war effort, it was said, was undermined by traitorous acts at home. The zeal to blame others will be injected with too much caffeine.
The origin of the fable could be traced to a 1919 conversation between German Gen. Erich Ludendorff and British Gen. sir Neill Malcom.
Sir Neill Malcolm, 1931Gen. Erich Ludendorff
Malcolm asked Ludendorff for his opinion of the major reason for Germany’s defeat. Ludendorff responded with the lack of home front support for the war. Malcolm clarified with the question: “Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff jumped at the suggestion, “Stabbed in the back? Yes, that’s it, exactly; we were stabbed in the back”. Thus was born a rationale to blame others rather than Germany’s reckless prosecution of the war … authored by people like Ludendorff.
Subsequently, Jews became an easy target to assign blame. Alfred Rosenberg – NSDAP ideologist and later to be hung as a war criminal – spelled it out: “In theory the majority decides, but in reality it is the international Jew that stands behind it [all the evils that befell Germany].”
Alfred Rosenberg in London, 1933.Alfred Rosenberg, on the left with hands crossed, at a party meeting in Munich, 1925.
To give a flavor of this version of the noxious scapegoat, here’s a quote from a pamphlet, “The Jew as World Parasite”:
“In this war for the very existence of the German people, we must daily remind ourselves that Jewry unleashed this war against us. It makes no difference if the Jew conceals himself as a Bolshevist or a plutocrat, a Freemason or uses some other form of concealment, or even appears without any mask at all: he always remains the same. He is the one who so agitated and spiritually influenced the peoples that stand against us today such that they have become more or less spineless tools of International Jewry.”
The comment could be penned by any of the Nazi usual suspects. Regardless, it’s a replay of the same old monotonous blame-game.
The Jew in Nazi propaganda as an evil force lurking behind the Allies.
Need I go into Marx and Lenin’s overwrought costuming of blame as elaborate political theory? The oppressed/oppressor jig is the heart of the program. Focusing on Lenin for brevity’s sake, he castigates the “bourgeois” (i.e. capitalist) state as “the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class”. Marx’s dull verbosity is of the same vein.
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao during Labor Day demonstration, 2016, the Philippines.
“It’s Not My Fault”, if history is any guide, is a real crowd-pleaser. All-too-often, it’s a scheme to bilk others – usually a select few – and gravitate power to a politically enterprising cadre. The scenario is a zombie that won’t stay down. We are seeing it play before our eyes.
As was stated before, the so-called “alt-right” has fashioned for itself a nice little corner in the who’s who of oppressors. They like to talk of the predations of the “establishment”. Like all such iterations, the more airy and vague the oppressor, the better and more useful. Lenin would be comfortable with the language. The term was a favorite of some rallying to the Trump bandwagon.
Not to be outdone, the modern Left in its post-election incarnation is targeting Republican lawmakers as the corporeal symbol of their laundry list of oppressors. Their recent behavior at townhalls isn’t bi-partisan, directed at both Republicans and Democrats. It targets Republicans. It is not reflective of the general American electorate. It’s a coordinated, well-financed operation … of the Left.
What unites the Left’s partisans is an ideology rooted in a view of the world of those without “privilege” in need of a powerful state to even out the results of an unfair existence. The rationale is tailored to demand the creation and expansion of entitlements, like Obama’s ACA. The environment-as-victim, with its climate change dogma hitched, is ready-made for use on the barricades. Any attempts to roll back the administrative state – except when it comes to restraint on sexual license – is a carte blanche excuse to gin up the hive. Efforts to lower taxes on the upper-income brackets is always and forever seen as an assault on government’s sacred duty to equalize life’s results.
It’s like a video on perpetual rewind. More correctly, it’s like those present-day renditions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern garb. The stage set and costumes may be different, but it is still the play, “It’s Not My Fault!”
The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, 2008. Weimar Germany’s hyper-inflationary crisis is described in pp. 101-107; Argentina’s economic collapse under Peron is described in pp. 109-116.
The conversation between Sir Neill Malcolm and Erich Ludendorff can be found in Wheeler-Bennett, John W. (Spring 1938), “Ludendorff: The Soldier and the Politician”, Virginia Quarterly Review. 14 (2): 187–202.
