I begin with “crowding out”. Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine. It happens in venues other than those based on mammon. Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society? A vampire could work as a metaphor.
Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society. What is the victim, civil society? Our definitions are muddled. The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government. To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life. Sorry, that’s way too cute. Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook. Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”. The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary. Government isn’t about voluntary. People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick. Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA. Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.
Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together. That’s the socialist thing at work. They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).
This came to mind while streaming Pandora. An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s. What the heck is that? Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959. Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods. The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.
Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes. The result is a mess.
I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan. They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land. He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices. What they, the Prog’s, produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum. Yes, curriculum. For them, curriculum is the answer. There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.
Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person. It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running. Do you get the picture? The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).
Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull. Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.
Issues develop not with curriculum per se. Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach. The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching? The substance mentioned before. Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus. No room here for the faith. A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor. A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court. The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.
It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage. Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”. Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint. And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?). Not exactly a level playing field here.
And government programs can be hip. Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible. Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths. If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in. Consider gay marriage and transgender rights. Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes). The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.
I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school. California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons. So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again. Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc. “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins. Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.
It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”. Scroll through the links. Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse. Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana. I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”. The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected. Could it be that marijuana has a constituency? It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.
But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert. It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure). Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association). Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here). It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here). The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.
But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?
I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to. “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia. The possibilities are endless. If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society. And then is civil society all that civil? It certainly is more political. Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government. Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Who said this? Bernie Sanders? AOC in one of her Twitter fits? Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation? Good guesses, but wrong. The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding). And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry. It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.
The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do. For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government. Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government. Sounds like the Green New Deal?
I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM). The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker. A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion. Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”. Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.
Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did. For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling. The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles. The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.
Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling. There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece. Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations. What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods? Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.
2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.
An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding. Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic. I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.
Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)
Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world. Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there. Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact. An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either. A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.
Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control. Bad, very bad.
Candidate Obama in 2008 came out with this zinger of condescension about folks in the hinterlands: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. It’s as if the blue-collar dwellers outside the east and west coast soirees of the well-off are wallowing in falsehoods. Really, the urban fashionistas believe this drivel. Though, the pot-and-kettle thing keeps passing through my head. The self-proclaimed haute couture in look and thought have their own bigoted, ignorant fictions bouncing in their craniums. Legends abound in Appalachia and among the coastal with-it.
Pres. Obama with Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen at a 2014 fundraiser.
Widespread oppression of the “marginalized” – a special designation awarded to any group organized and loud enough – is gospel among the beautiful people. These people haven’t left the world of the “Mississippi Burning” script. To them, the “oppressed” are abused up and down the US interstate system. Big journalism acts as the modern Hesiod of these urban legends. Mythology isn’t an ancient phenomenon. It’s alive and well among attendees at Dem Party fundraisers.
But wiping egg off the faces of urban America’s “better” people is developing into a habit. Jussie Smollet is one among many rotten egg producers. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, the functionaries at MSNBC, the networks, Hollywood, WaPo (The Washington post), NYT, et al – the list is getting too long – can’t wait to jump at the bait. They w-a-n-t to believe the myth is true. The only problem is that the playing field is littered with lies.
Let me count the ways. Be prepared, the list is long.
(1) In November 2016, a Muslim woman at U. of Michigan caterwauled that a 20-something white male threatened to burn her if she didn’t remove her hijab. The WaPo was hoaxed. Hoax #1.
(2) Taylor Volk, a bisexual student at North Park U., said she was targeted with hateful notes and emails shortly after Trump’s election victory. Hoax #2.
(3) In, once again, Nov. 2016, Ashley Boyer of Philadelphia blamed that staple of these fibs – white/male/Trump supporter – for harassing her with a gun and getting rid of the “n’s”. The charge went viral only to be debunked by police. Hoax #3.
(4) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana in Nov. 2016 (Getting the idea?) charged white men for robbing her and yelling racial slurs. The only problem: it wasn’t true because she said so. Hoax #4.
(5) In May of 2017, racial slurs, anti-gay insults, and Nazi references were spray painted on a church by, as it turned out, the church’s own organist. The WaPo ended up cleaning its face of egg. Hoax #5.
(6) An 18-year-old Muslim woman, Yasmin Seweid, of NYC in Dec. 2016 declared that she was assaulted by drunken white Trump supporters in the subway. She confessed. Hoax #6.
(7) Dec. 2016: David Williams of Denton, Texas, torched his own car and spray painted “n’ lovers” on his garage. A police investigation exposed the scheme as a hoax, but not before David and his wife garnered $5,000 from a GoFundMe page. Hoax #9.
(8) A Muslim student at Beliot College in Feb. 2017 found anti-Muslim smears on his dorm room door. He did it according to the Beliot police chief. Hoax #8.
(9) Synagogues and Jewish schools were the subject of bomb threats in March 2017. Surprise, the peril was linked to Trump. Well, a US-Israeli man was arrested. Wait, the story gets richer. An ex-reporter with The Intercept, Juan Thompson, kept the pot boiling with new threats to Jewish community centers. He would be indicted shortly thereafter. Hoax #9.
(10) In May 2017, racist, anti-black notes appeared at St. Olaf College. The WaPo had to walk back their story after a black student was identified as responsible for the slurs. Hoax #10.
(11) Racist messages – “Go home n***er” – were discovered at the Air Force Academy’s prep school. Sadly for the hate-crime posse, one of the targeted black students was the author. Hoax #11.
(12) A Kansas State University student reported to police racist graffiti on his car in November 2017. Later he admitted to doing it himself. Hoax #12.
(13) Racist graffiti is all the rage with hoaxers. In Nov. 2017, racist graffiti was discovered on the mirror in a Missouri high school. He prank was conducted by a “non-white” enrollee. Hoax #13.
(14) A Texas waiter at an Odessa steak house Facebooked in Dec. 2018 a racist slur on a napkin, and it went viral … of course. The only problem: The waiter admitted to faking it. Hoax #14.
(15) The Covington Catholic High School episode of Jan. 2019 was a disgrace. The WaPo and the Detroit Free Press were all over the story with an account of an elderly Native American being abused by prep-school white boys in MAGA hats. The story as it ran in the media – to put it mildly – was misleading. The Black Hebrew Israelites taunted the kids with vile insults and Nathan Philips (the Native American activist) provoked them by incessantly chanting and pounding his drum in their faces. Hoax #15.
(16) A spate of anti-Semitic vandalism hit NYC in Nov. 2018. It turned out that the culprit was a Democratic party activist and former City Hall intern, not a follower of Alex Jones. Hoax #16.
(17) Donald Trump was blamed for the arson of a black church in Greenville, Miss., back in Nov. 2016. The WaPo must have been embarrassed when a fellow black congregant was fingered as responsible. Hoax #17.
The Greenville, Miss., episode of a false hate crime.
(Thanks to the Daily Caller for the list.)
Why the mad rush to believe the unbelievable? The answer might be found in the need to validate a pre-recorded fable of the world. Traditional journalistic skepticism be damned. It’s full-speed-ahead toward a much too deeply rooted folklore in our commercial and media centers, aka big cities. Big media has been caught in too many falsehoods. Their credibility is shot. If they can’t deliver reliable news and information, what can they serve up?
A void exists to be filled by the rhetorical burps of Twitter and Facebook and the retinue of “fact checkers”, and they are linked in a miasma of interrelationships. Facebook, for instance, uses Snopes.com to filter “fake news” and hate speech. Snopes is a mess, if court documents in the divorce of the married co-founders is any indication. Former candidates for political office (on a “dump Bush” platform), prostitutes, vixens with a “dome” complex on pot, and no functioning standards of objectivity are rampant (reported by Forbes and The Daily Mail). A fact-checking degree is offered at some colleges but that’s no guarantee. Naïve and left-leaning 21-year-olds aren’t about to produce the gospel.
What we are left with is each one of us running to our corners with our personal “truth”, emotional explosions when faced with pushback, no deliberation, and a mountain of urban legends that are held in a death grip like a Bible in a foxhole.
Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum. It’s called “world citizen”. It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.
As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed. Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both? Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws. The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
These Democrats aren’t kidding. They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident. The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev. 12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.
Robert O’Rourke at a rally at the El Paso border.
That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here. Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason. The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine? Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade. “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.
Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall. She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus. And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee). Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.
Federal District Court Judge Jessie Furmam.
“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country. That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file. Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens. Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc. With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?
Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US. Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections. SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE). They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes. In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions. The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration. Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship. They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.
Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen. And why not? It’s a rich vein of votes. It works to elect Democrats. In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard). Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic). In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.
If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen? Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise. For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant. Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.
Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?
RogerG
* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.
Mike Allen’s Axios AM this morning came out with numbers from the Institute for Policy Research showing women as slightly better educated than men and slightly less likely to be in the workforce. Once again, numbers don’t lie, conclusions do.
What do the numbers mean? Can’t tell. Numbers naturally bounce within a range. The better educated factoid may mean – emphasis on “may” – a profusion of girls willing to sit a total of 16-18 years in a school desk to get degrees in the “soft sciences” and the law. Without a deep dive, who knows what the figure means. High concentrations in the “soft sciences” – a term meant to cover a subject without much math, physical science, and classical reading – says nothing about employability and practical knowledge given their huge corruption potential. “Better educated” may mean a greater acceptance of curricular hoop-jumping, not “better informed” or any other similar synonym.
Students in a women’s studies class at Pepperdine University.
For instance, identity studies (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) doth not make an Einstein. They make partisan activists.
Watch the drop in female workforce participation be used to press the campaign for more government spending and employer mandates. But, as before, what does the number really mean? It may mean more women choosing child-bearing and raising than a paycheck. An uptick in fertility might go a long way in explaining the statistic.
Don’t think for a moment that such women don’t contribute to the national wealth. Raising the next generation is the most fundamental act in making social capital, the basic stuff of economic growth. A unionized government worker isn’t a substitute for mom.
When we allow superficial numbers to proliferate, and put them in the hands of partisans to be massaged for political impact, we get nonsense, and worse. We get a ballooning public debt that will fall upon the heads of those very same kids. Number crunching becomes kid crunching.
Just watched Chris Wallace’s interview of presidential adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News Sunday. Wallace pressed Miller with numbers as “facts” to contradict the claim of an emergency on the southern border. They are facts-as-numbers, not facts-supporting-the-conclusion. The rhetorical hocus pocus plagues the immigration debate so much that it’s hard to think straight on the subject.
About the “facts”: they are numbers produced by a formula. The formula is overly reliant on tabulations at 48 border crossings along the 1,954 miles of the US/Mexico border because that’s where the bulk of counters are located. Border crossers are channeled and monitored there to profoundly influence whatever sum total happens to result. The vast voids between will contribute very little due to the emptiness.
The Tijuana border crossing.
It’s like limiting the threats to life and property to the number of reports making their way to the DA’s desk. The number is shaped by public perceptions of law enforcement’s effectiveness, personnel, bureaucratic behavior, social norms, and political will. See, there’s more to the number than the number.
Conclusions about “no emergency” are leaps and bounds beyond what the numbers can support. The presence of anywhere from 11 million to 21 million illegals should tell you something. The huge range means that we don’t know, and if we did, that would imply the complicity of government officials to allow illegal entry so illegals could be counted. Absurd … I think.
The reality should instill some humility, but it doesn’t. The battle of the numbers becomes the battle of tomfoolery.
Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles. The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.). We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious. It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior. We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains. The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor. The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering. But is it true? There’s good reason to say wowwww!
David Berreby
This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby. A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts. Fair enough. The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases. Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.
And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias. Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.
What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit. He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.
Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics. The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure. Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another. It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.
PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t! There are better biographies out there. The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses. The program says more about them than Il Duce.
One of the contributors to “The Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”.
Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement. In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe. They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants. Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.
Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.
Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”. It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea. But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama? If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.
Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence? One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end. I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love. When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.
Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem. All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”. And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know. Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.
FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism. He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration. Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal. Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?
A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not! It could have been given the way these people write.
Distraught Hillary campaign workers on election night, 2016.
I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic. The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge. It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda. The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.
“Social justice warriors”, also referred as the “Resistance”, protesting the Trump administration in New York City, 2017.
Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint. Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”. “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements. Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists? “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat. A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.
What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution. The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”). Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists. Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale. Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias. There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.
If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe. In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones. Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her Path to an Erotic Relationship with Socialism
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A Primer for AOC
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
Soviet-era housing in Latvia.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the medical school on his trip to Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1988. PHOTO: COURTESY OF VALERY VOLOVENKO
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
The wait in long lines outside a Soviet store, 1970’s.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
U.S. unemployment in the 1930’s. Notice that the unemployment rate never gets below 12% throughout the 30’s.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad Ideas Are Immortal
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
Poster of Stalin and his youth corps, the Young Pioneers.Young Pioneer walk during their school fest in Kemerovo, Eastern Siberia, 1981. The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, also Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the USSR for children of age 10?15 in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
A deadline of March 2020 for the House select committee to finish its Plan for a Green New Deal.
As in Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, you’ll find timelines/deadlines to achieve certain numerical goals. For example, in 10 years after passage, 100% of electrical generation will be commanded from the greenie favorites: wind, solar, biomass, etc. 100%!
A massive public works boondoggle to build the infrastructure to replace our current networks with one accommodating to the utopia. One hasty calculation by someone in the know sets the cost at $2 trillion. And I’m not taking into account the fact that much of the technology – such as storage – doesn’t even exist, and may not ever exist to any practical extent.
Mandates to meet the goals will fall upon businesses, farms, and homeowners. There will be a colossal reordering of life to achieve the targets.
The socialist dream of wealth equality will be pursued through the Plan. Lefty boilerplate like “just transition” [to the utopia] is scattered throughout.
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
The Teenager in Central Planning
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Bernie Sanders traveled to communist Cuba and urges a ‘political revolution.’ Will exile Miami take him seriously?”, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, 2/29/2016, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article62748002.html
“The Green New Deal, explained”, David Roberts, Vox, 1/7/2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez”
The Great Depression Was Ended by the End of World War II, Not the Start of It”, Peter Ferrara, Forbes, 11/30/2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/#2f706afb57d3
“Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt”, David Boaz, Reason, October 2007, https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s draft proposal for a select committee on a Green New Deal, and the rationale, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/preview#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey
“Five things to know about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal'”, Timothy Cama, The Hill, 11/24/2018,
