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.
Sonam Sheth, politics and national security reporter at Business Insider, from her Twitter page.
While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”. What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment. The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso. Journalism isn’t journalism any longer. It’s fevered imaginations run wild.
To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile. It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious – mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization. This will be brief.
Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper. While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York. Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance. Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:
“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”
“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack! While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism? Hmmmm.
Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider. I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations. They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape. It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.
Salvador Dali
Now to the article. The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”. A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.
The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.
First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”. “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee. It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black assailant.
Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan. In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so. Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade. Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.
Illegal immigrants sit in a group after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. (Associated Press).
For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same. It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States. But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.
From the pardon, she builds the edifice. In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”. The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”. Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons. If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich. There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.
President Bill Clinton and Denise Rich attend a funraiser for ‘The G & P Charitable Foundation for Cancer Research’ in October 1998, in New York City. (DIANA WALKER/LIAISON)
As for Sheth’s insinuation of “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime? You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide. For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC. For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn. Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so. She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.
I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late. Certainly they felt “pressure”. Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied? Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.
Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results. There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now. But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now. I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.
Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality. First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer. In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government. He can inquire into any investigation under his purview. It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election. Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).
Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute. If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system. He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around. It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.
Sheth’s story is a mess. It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism. It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper. As per the old cliché, there’s no there there. For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system. The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”, Sonam Sheth, Business Insider, 8/27/17, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-decision-pardon-joe-arpaio-160000939.html
Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
“Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318
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/
