Category: 2020 election

Years ago, I ran into a piece by William F. Buckley, Jr. I must paraphrase the quote from memory: “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” A citizen should develop some grounding in the issues and times that confront us. The act of voting should be the outcome of those insights. The key word is “should”, and “should” doesn’t mean “is”.

Instead, we are bombarded with pleas to vote … by God, just vote! It’s horrible advice. The survival of our citizen republic demands a virtuous public. Virtue is inconceivable without some grasp of its historical and philosophical basis, which requires time and effort to know some very basic things. Absent this foundation, we will turn our citizen republic into the rule of the whipsawed and momentary electoral majorities who are animated by media-inducing impressions and blinkered perceptions.

Sound familiar? Look to our city streets and you’ll see the march of the truly ignorant, and then stop to realize that they’ll vote. A college education or the possession of a diploma cannot be counted on as proof of wisdom and virtue. Just think, your vote will probably be cancelled by the ill-informed, and many others who will be crammed into mailboxes by who knows whom.

Don’t get caught up in the fads of thought that are all the rage on our campuses, media, and our self-anointed elect among the glitterati. Many of these babbles are passing fads, only temporary enthusiasms that can’t stand the test of time due to their falsehoods and internal contradictions.

Inform yourself by gathering knowledge to answer some basic questions. Here are some queries to chew on.

• What is our basic nature? Is our essential nature “positive”, “negative”, or a combination? Depending on your assessment, the choice may lead to a shining city on a hill or to the darkest of history’s tyrannies.

The crystallization of the “positive” view is of recent vintage and advocates the perfectibility of people. Thus, we’ll have placed over us a class of people with the hidden knowledge for perfection. They pressure for the powers to achieve the prescribed ideal … and then we’ll have to say goodbye to idiosyncrasies, liberty, and restraints on the state. Progressives, the folks torching our cities, and a good portion of the Democratic Party’s base and leaders are beguiled by the idea. They’re enraptured by big a government with big powers to engineer the ideal.

In contrast, our Founders combined the “positive” and “negative”. They were “positive” in that people could be virtuous but it required civilization’s little platoons: family, faith, and civil society. Without virtuous self-restraint, the “negative” in mankind – original sin in Christianity – will take hold and we’ll have bad men and women riding herd on a chaotic society. The recognition of our potential for evil led Madison and others in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1787 to the Constitution with its government constrained by law and enumerated powers.

Your vote is a stamp of approval for one of these two courses, whether you know it or not. From Aesop’s Fables: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!”

• Why does Big Government have a propensity for failure, especially when given intractable problems to solve? 

Friedrich Hayek’s answer: the knowledge problem – no small group of people in any government have the knowledge and mental capacity to direct the many-faceted lives and minds of a population. We must know our limits; too many on the left don’t know theirs as they ignorantly unleash the law of unintended consequences.

The inherent totalitarianism in The Green New Deal will produce scads of unforeseen ill-effects, replicating California’s experience of blackouts and expensive energy and an economic scorched earth.

A government takeover in Medicare for All will translate into Iron Curtain health care. Be prepared for a gradual deterioration of medical services: rationing, decrepit facilities, a decline in innovation and the striving for excellence, and life and death decisions made on the basis of bureaucratic formulas. We’ll get the chance to experience the disaster of urban renewal of the 60’s and 70’s in our next hospital visit. Oh, I forget, it’ll be free … and centralized and like the DMV.

… to say nothing of the loss of freedom in healthcare. For the masses of us, we’ll be funneled into treatment reminiscent of an inner-city public hospital’s emergency room on a Saturday night. Naturally, the rich will have recourse to the best of the highly proficient medical wildcats operating in a medical black market, or just jet to the lavish establishments that’ll pop up beyond our borders. Healthcare will remain grossly hierarchical with the privileged few getting more and the rest of us sitting in a chaotic emergency room next to a gang’s stabbing victim.

Marking a ballot is much more than a romantic attachment to particular candidate. The act carries with it all of the above and more.

• Is “tax the rich” practical?

Big Government necessitates Big Taxes. It’ll be sold as “tax the rich” but it’ll end up as a tax everybody receiving a paycheck. The rich will hide their wealth or flee; everybody else will be at the mercy of the payroll department and the IRS. Don’t underestimate the inventive ways for Big Government hucksters to extract more sustenance out of the people to feed their Leviathan.

Look at the income tax. In the beginning it targeted the rich ($1 million or more in annual income), then it creeped down the income ladder, and then withholding was invented. The “genius” of withholding is that they get their money before you get yours (withholding), and then they command under penalty of law that you tell them whether it was enough. It’s ludicrous.

The scurrying about to avoid the lash of exorbitant taxes by those with the means to do so will further sap economic vitality. In the end, the ones who don’t have the means to escape the whip – the average person – will be socked with the bill in the form of reduced paychecks, lost opportunities for their children, and deteriorating standards of living.

Tax-raising schemes siphon a good portion of the rewards of the people’s labor to legions of government workers and Big Government’s brood of ideological and rent-seeking dependents. The result is a bloated government with not enough money to support the bloat as the well-to-do sit in their posh seaside villa on some island outside the reach of the IRS. In the end, you know who’ll bear the brunt of that sorry state of affairs.

Rest assured that it won’t be Jeff Bezos in his secluded estates in Seattle and Washington, DC, or his Texas ranch, or the South Pacific island that he’ll purchase to escape the clutches of Bernie/Warren/AOC. There will be no escape for his underlings in the distribution centers.

• What is meant by equality? Is it equality of result or equality of opportunity? Which way do the parties lean?

Today’s equality at the hands of left-wing zealots isn’t the equality of the Founders or MLK’s “I have a dream”.

The choice between the two equalities leads in two radically different directions. Up to the recent invention of critical race theory and the sophistry of using racism to fight “racism” (affirmative action), the preference was for equal opportunity in the 20th-century actions and policies to remove unwarranted obstacles in law (de jure) and practice (de facto) that lead to seriously problematic discriminations.

Yet, waiting in the wings among the civil rights crusaders were the revolutionary ambitious. Not satisfied with the proscriptions on discriminatory behavior, and schooled in the Marxist perspective that the oppressed are acculturated to the oppression, these zealots demand nothing less than the complete restructuring – maybe the complete overturning – of our way of life. Everyone’s life is to be invalidated and made unpleasant in the pursuit of a war against a cloudy abstraction: systemic racism.

Equality of result is their weapon of choice. The ammunition for the weapon is a numerical goal straitjacketed to proportionality. 13% of the population means 13% in every social, economic, and political measure. If the stats stray from the number, the hucksters of the Left say that it is evidence of the hidden form of racism that penetrates all that we are. We, the accusation goes, are “privileged” because we rigged the system to our (white) advantage, even though many of the “privileged” aren’t white. That’s a recasting of Marx’s justification for the proletarian revolution for a different clientele.

In the corrupted parlance of government- and academic-speak, it is called “disparate impact”. You may as well know the arcane multisyllabics used to disguise the foolishness.

Talk about jumping to conclusions. It’s more than that. It’s a moonshot from stat to revolution.

“Inequities” (lack of fairness) is in vogue as another word of choice for those enamored of stat-slinging for revolution. Can there be, though, more than one explanation, other than racism, for a socio-economic stat’s divergence from proportionality? For instance, is the over-representation of black males in the violent crime numbers due to something other than the banal “racism”? A person could cite any number of reasons for the circumstance without placing the blame on a broad and skulking ill-feeling toward black people.

Take any social and economic stat’s divergence from proportionality for any of the law’s “protected classes” (Women are 51% of the population but account for 100% of all births.) and funnel the variances into the single cause of bigotry – intentional or unintentional, overt or covert – and you will have the nonstop, hair-on-fire crusade to eliminate causes that aren’t causes. Churches are vandalized; campuses are plagued by roving mobs; downtowns are torched; and the criminal justice system is increasingly staffed by people who’ll do anything to force the world to conform to the proportionality.

Equality is refashioned into paranormal activity, something akin to ghost hunting for systemic racism, and therefore its vagueness makes it very useful. If you want to locate the locus of the pseudo-science, look no further than the Democratic Party. The loudest yapping for equality of result comes from the “D” side of the aisle. The R’s are much more likely to pursue the other option.

• What is socialism?

Joe Biden in late August of this year plaintively proclaimed, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” The statement is beside the point. We don’t rely on looks to determine whether somebody is a socialist with a soft spot for rioters. Friedrich Engels, frequent co-author with Karl Marx and businessman/scion of a wealthy family, didn’t have the “looks” of a socialist revolutionary either. Biden isn’t the reincarnation of Engels, but he is very confused.

Biden might cite his long career in politics as proof that he isn’t one, but we’re not referring to the Biden of 1973. The 1973 Biden isn’t the 2020 Biden and the 1973 Democratic Party isn’t the 2020 Democratic Party. They used to have pro-lifers in the Party. The Overton window (the range of acceptable policies) of the Party has moved far left, along with the Party’s standard-bearer. Socialism is found on the left side of the spectrum alongside the Party’s base and a good portion of its leadership.

As for a working definition, socialism has often been described as public (government) “ownership” of the means of production (nearly all consequential property), or at least of Lenin’s economic “commanding heights”. Keep in mind that “ownership” is a form of control. Government can control the “commanding heights” without ownership, and that can be achieved with legislation and decrees to establish powerful taxation and regulatory regimes. A more accurate definition would substitute “ownership” with “control”.

There is a substantive difference in government intervention between the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Green New Deal. The controls to prevent conspiracies to dominate markets is far removed from power to micro-manage everything from Exxon to a dealership’s showroom to a mother’s decision to turn on the air conditioning to the residential preferences of a homebuyer to …. The control goes beyond the mere authoritarian and right into the space reserved for totalitarian. Bluntly put, it’s socialism.

Biden endorsed it, and many other forms of government force to dictate choices and habits of the people. He may offer a somewhat scaled-down version of it but, really, the argument in his party is over the shade of red – the color historically adopted by socialists – not whether it is red. Are we to get full-blown central planning (Bernie/AOC) or just a much bigger one than today’s scattershot version (Biden)?

Where would JFK fit in this party with his across-the-board tax cuts? There would be little room for the JFK of 1963 in platform committees chaired by Elizabeth Warren (wealth tax, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, racial reparations, defund the police, witch hunts for the chimerical systemic racism, open borders, etc.), Bernie (ditto), and AOC (ditto). He could be excused for thinking that he had accidentally stumbled into a meeting of Castro’s politburo.

Despite Biden’s denials, the acceptance of socialist proposals makes it hard for him to claim that he isn’t one. If elected, the government would move further left than even his professed political soulmate and career lefty, Obama, attempted.

The denial by Never-Trumpers like John Kasich is preposterous. He says that he “knows” that Biden isn’t a radical, but the verb belongs in the same category as “look”. You can’t “know” if his announcements and party’s official platform say otherwise. Kasich “hopes” that Biden isn’t a radical. Hope that a person isn’t what they say they are is a poor basis for adult conversation.

It’s like a prayer defense in basketball. The defense is actually a failure to play defense and a “hope” that your opponent will miss the shot. I’ve seen it as a high school basketball coach for many years. I’ve had to call many a timeout to stop it. “Hope” that your opponent is incompetent is a sure path to a losing record.

Socialism is poison to a nation, and it matters not if the dosage is administered by Bernie/AOC or Biden. Poison is still poison.

• What is progressivism?

Hillary Clinton in 2016 proclaimed, “I’m a progressive who gets results and I will be a progressive president who gets results.” Well, what is she?

The genealogy of progressivism goes back to the 19th century, right alongside The Communist Manifesto, the Socialist International, eugenics, and the bankruptcy of racial supremacism. Some academics became impatient with the messiness of our constitutional republic and wanted to streamline it into the orderliness of the science lab, their beau ideal. Popular sovereignty would be pushed to the periphery of governance and the actual administration of it, the part in actual contact with the citizen, would be placed in the hands of people like them, the academically trained.

Progressivism is a cult, the cult of the expert; the expert ordained by an academic clerisy.

So, we had the minions of the EPA declare a retired couple’s property a sensitive wetland and thereby effectively seized control of it. It would result in the 2012 Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA in which the Court recognized the right of a citizen to seek redress of agency overzealousness in the courts. The EPA asserted that a good portion of their actions were beyond the reach of the courts. The EPA’s stand is the quintessence of the omnipotence of the “expert” enshrined in progressive dogma.

Overwhelmingly, today, the official sponsor of progressivism is the Democratic Party. Progressives know where their big government bread is buttered; the Republicans, rejecting their earlier dalliances with it (think TR), chose a more free-market bun to spread the condiment.

Everywhere from the Democratic Party platform to the public antics of their leaders is displayed something for additional government cadres to do. Free college means more government hires in the Department of Education, and the IRS to enforce the new tax provisions to pay for the monstrosity. A wealth tax is a subsidy for IRS empire-building since new bean-counters and enforcers will have to brought on board to squeeze the dough out of a reluctant public. Racial reparations are a sop to DC’s identity-politics industrial complex and the IRS since eligibility will have to be determined, enforced, and checks written. The Green New Deal is as close to Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, as any prior attempt going back to Woodrow Wilson’s War Socialism in the heady days of WWI. Government planning is always labor intensive for government. New crusades against the spectral “systemic racism” is an invitation for a vast expansion of employment opportunities in the DOJ and the panoply of race-hustling agencies. When they aren’t directing the state’s powers and agents at their political opponents, the Party’s advocacy is a laundry list of more things for government to do. Now that’s progressivism in a nutshell.

The Democratic Party’s positions are a vast recruitment program for new armies of government employees to control the lives of the people while leaving a rump of a private sphere. The enlistees will have the paper qualifications of “expert” to brandish, and additional comrades thanks to the Pelosi/Schumer/Biden gang. Once in place, you’ll play hell to remove them.

The economic impact on private-sector Americans will be catastrophic, with the exception of the employees in the real estate industry of the greater metropolitan DC area.

If you’ll notice, the Democratic Party comes across as despicable, despicable in where they want to lead the country. Nothing was said about possible Republican malfeasance because the threat to the country comes from the Left, and Democratic Party is the party of the Left.

Today, the parties are more ideologically homogeneous than ever before. In the past, parties were coalitions. No longer. When was the last time you heard of a prominent pro-life Democrat? They are gone, along with the Scoop Jackson, Harry Truman, and JFK types. There can’t be a lot of anti-red Democrats because too many of them are red. Vote Democrat and you’ll get in tow many of the horrors that reason and history make abundantly clear.

Trump’s tweets are beside the point.

Before you mark your ballot, or mark the ballots for other people – thanks to rampant vote-by-mail schemes – please understand what’s at stake. Your vote, or votes, is a judgment on human nature with all that comes with it. It’s a choice for or against stern and pervasive mommy government, something clearly inimical to the Constitution and our mental health. It’s a judgment on the advisability of grotesquely taxing job creators and expecting no ill-effects. It’s a choice on the meaning of equality: one that grants carte blanche to a busybody Leviathan or one that is more in keeping with a color-blind society. It’s a choice for or against socialism and progressivism and their deadening effects on the vitality of a free society. Your vote should never be a choice of personalities. If it is for you, don’t vote. Your choice could saddle the rest of us with an appalling future.

You are not voting for prom queen.

RogerG

Edmund Burke in the late 18th century warned of the disaster awaiting the French nation as their revolution teetered off into the Reign of Terror. Political power and political institutions are poor substitutes, he wrote, for the character forming role of traditional faith, family, and the “little platoons” of civilization reaching beyond the home in voluntary associations in the neighborhood and community. When someone’s detailed scheme bypasses the “little platoons” in order to politically engineer a better person for an imaginary better world, a calamity awaits. Past human experience proves it.

The 20th century is littered with the horrors of these political experiments of grand social engineering; a lesson that today’s Democrats have forgotten or never learned. Towed by zealous and immature minds, the party lurches to the extreme left side of the political spectrum in an embrace of a fairy-tale heaven on earth with them as the grand viziers overseeing the immense project, just like the previous students of Karl Marx: Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, and Castro before them. We are on the cusp of a replay of that sordid story.

Soviet central planning is in the offing in the form of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Higher taxes, racial reparations, and “reimagine policing” will confiscate more wealth, enforce racial group guilt leading to more wealth and property seizures, and lay the population open to the zealous and partisan mobs after law enforcement has been “reimagined”, something reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, the Bolshevik goons, and the Jacobin’s inflamed Paris hordes. Few will recognize the country once Sanders and the Squad have realized their dream.

We need look no further than our own past for additional proof of the consequences, a time before Bernie bros and the giddy AOC. In 1864, Maj. Gen. John Carleton wanted to finally solve the Navajo problem. In an earlier expedition, he looked upon the Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River at the edge of the Staked Plains in eastern New Mexico as an ideal place to ship the entire Navajo nation (the Diné), in spite of others who cautioned him of the poor soil and fetid water. He had in his mind the quick transformation of an entire nation into sedentary pastoralists and no one could dissuade him. So began the infamous 450-mile Long Walk of the Navajos from their ancestral lands in present-day northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to far eastern New Mexico.

Carleton is a case study of the zealot with great political power which was conferred upon him in the midst of the Civil War. He was an energetic, strong-willed detail man who was confident in his design for the Diné and ability to make it happen. It resulted in a four-year-long reign of misery with a Navajo death toll of around 2,400. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman put the kibosh to the whole thing in 1868 and signed a treaty which allowed the Navajos to return to a large reservation in their ancestral land.

There’s just something ominous about people with great power who claim to know what’s best for us. Today’s Democratic Party is filled with the very same arrogant half-ignorant. Unschooled in the dangers and failures of big government and utopias, they push ahead in the hope that the population will confer upon them the power to do what they promise. The promise is a devastating and hollow one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Be careful what you wish for because you will get it.”

RogerG