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
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.
Riots at UC Berkeley, Feb. 2, 2017, to protest the campus appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos.Gorsuch before the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 2017. (NBC News)
The Gorsuch nomination is a barometer of the condition of our politics. It’s a toxic environment of a lack of candor and a surplus of self-serving hyperbole. The very definition of a party partisan has gone through a transformation from party loyalty to ideological conformity. Heterodoxy in the parties has given way to orthodoxy. The fever is aggravated by the dramatic rise in the stakes. The breathtaking expansion of government power has exponentially increased the consequences and opportunities for those who wish to monopolize it. So much at stake and so many true-believers. No wonder Court nominations threaten to rip the republic apart. And, by gauging the reaction of Democratic Party activists to Trump’s victory, now the same is true of presidential elections.
“The Resistance” takes to the streets in – where else? – Berkeley, Ca.
How did we get to this sad state of affairs? For one, let’s consider the main legacy of Progressivism: the omni-competent state, or a government of virtuosos and unlimited possibilities. The Progressives’ faith in the “expert” means the deliberations of representative assemblies are more and more replaced by the deliberations of panels of hypothetical geniuses. The assumption is that the fortunes of humanity should not be left to the petty whims of politicos not in tune with the academic zeitgeist. The most undemocratic features of our constitutional order – the administrative agencies and courts – have feasted on this prejudice. Today, regulations govern more than laws, and judges have extracted prerogatives that were previously left to state legislatures and city councils.
Their legitimacy to rule doesn’t rest on the franchise but on their self-proclaimed knowledge and wisdom. When they or their politician advance-men lose an election, intelligence is said to be thwarted.
C.S. Lewis
The danger posed by such a narrow caste with pretensions to power was obvious to some. C.S. Lewis – writing at a time (1943) when Fascism was one of the popular versions of caste-rule, just as it was reified into a Luftwaffe bombing British cities – fingered the error in his essay, “The Poison of Subjectivism”. He wrote,
Many a popular “planner” on a democratic platform, many a mild-eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes that ‘good’ means whatever men are conditioned to approve. He believes that it is the function of him and his kind to condition men; to create consciences by eugenics, psychological manipulation of infants, state education and mass propaganda.
The rule of “experts” is the rule of perpetual busybodies, a class of people without second-thoughts. Humility doesn’t appear as a defining characteristic. Leave it to Friedrich Hayek, though, to bring them down to
Friedrich A. Hayek
earth when he stated, “No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society”. Expanding the field from a single person to a small group doesn’t much improve matters. Hayek asserts that markets, as large aggregates of individuals, know more than a small cohort of self-ordained wise-men. Failure results when power follows the false assumption that all pertinent knowledge is concentrated in a few.
Hayek’s lesson never caught on with our modern Progressives. The power of the centralized authority in the federal government, as gauged in 20th century federal outlays through Republican and Democratic administrations, resembles a ski slope — or, as Bob Hope would have said, his nose. It’s proof, once you start this kind of thing, that the government becomes a perpetual-motion-machine almost immune even to the best of intentions of those wishing to restrain it.
Stephen Moore, “The Growth of Government in America”, April 1, 1993, https://fee.org/articles/the-growth-of-government-in-america/. In inflation-adjusted 1990 dollars.
The incline continues into the new millennium in federal spending per household. The dip in 2009 was due to the end of many TARP bailouts.
Veronique de Rugy, “The Rapid Expansion of Federal Spending Per Household”, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Nov. 1, 2010, https://www.mercatus.org/publication/rapid-expansion-federal-spending-household. In Inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars.
The federal government’s hyperactivity has distracted it away from its core Constitutional responsibilities like defense and managing immigration in favor of crusades like inflating our energy bills, directing our choice of light bulbs, a national sanctioning of sodomy as the basis for marriage, imposing a national license to take prenatal life, and dictating your elementary school’s bathroom policy. It’s so ludicrous, but nonetheless a sign of the times. Increasing federal power has intensified the battle over who’s to man (or woman) the federal parapets. Every election and Supreme Court appointment is freighted with dire potentialities.
The intensity of modern political battle has weeded out the faint-hearted and those lacking the zeal of the true-believer. A 2014 Pew Research Center study of party registrants illustrates the growing ideological polarization of the two parties. As they found,
The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past.
Distribution of Democrats and Republicans on a 10-item scale of political values. Pew Research Center, 2014.
The chart shows a widening rift in 2014 in ideological purity among the parties’ rank-and-file.
Or, take a look at this chart from the same study. The mountain peaks for the Democrats (blue) shift to the left as the peaks for the Republicans (red) move right.
The same phenomena shows up in the halls of Congress (below). In the 93rd Congress (1973-4), there existed liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. By the 112th Congress (last bar graph below), they’re as extinct as woolly mammoths.
The party bases are uniformly polar opposites, and its reflected in the two Congressional caucuses. The leavening of other voices is gone. For nominees like Gorsuch, the Democrats’ howling base will push any Senator with a “D” after their name into rabid opposition.
Even the definition of “moderate” has shifted. Today’s moderate Democrat is only interested in some restraint in the party’s abortion blank check. Other than that, the vast majority are in lock-step with Mother Jones and the rest of the left-wing hive. Not good for any Republican Court nominee … unless a Republican president commits political suicide by presenting a choice who’ll gain the editorial board endorsements of Mother Jones and The Nation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not decrying the vanishing “moderate” in both parties. It’s one thing to to be moderate in temperament, quite another to be moderate in your thinking. All-too-often the moderate thinker has a mind that resembles an attic. In it one finds a collection of mental bric-a-brac. Lying around is the anachronistic foolishness of grandma’s time alongside some of more recent vintage – all thrown up there to be accessed for the production of inane pronouncements.
But these “moderates” serve the purpose of forcing the core of both parties to come together to make political sausage. Their presence makes the art of governing easier, even if, as is more likely, the result is a continuation of the non-stop march to social and fiscal ruin. Remember the old adage of Republicans as caretakers of the Democrat-engineered welfare state?
Sen. Joseph Biden (left) leaning and talking to Robert Bork during Bork’s confirmation hearings, 1987. (The New Yorker)
Yet, the consequence of the disappearance of the muddled middle is no-holds-barred political war on nearly everything and in nearly every venue, including Supreme Court nominees before the Senate. The writing was on the wall when Robert Bork’s name came up in 1987. Ted Kennedy manufactured party opposition with the now-familiar chant, “He’s out of the mainstream”. Honestly, the “mainstream” for Ted is the blue hump in the previous chart’s last bar graph. Qualifications be damned; for the true blue like Kennedy, the ramifications are too important to be left to quaint considerations like “qualifications” and “bi-partisanship”.
After pioneering ideological reasons for blocking a Supreme Court nominee, the Democrats didn’t want to push their luck and swiftly approved Bork’s replacement, Anthony Kennedy, shortly thereafter.
In today’s political total war, everything is enlisted for the cause. The older self-restraint became the first casualty. Take for instance the filibuster. Talking a bill to death ended in the House in 1842 when the House became too large a herd to corral for meaningful work. It persists in the Senate, but rarely used for federal judicial nominations.
Here’s where it gets tricky for the Senate. There’s two types of Senate filibusters with different cloture (end debate and go to a vote on the issue at hand) requirements. To end a “legislative” filibuster, a three-fifths (60) vote is required by Rule 22. Ending a rules-change filibuster demands a higher threshold of two-thirds (66) … until Harry Reid in 2013.
To clarify, the old claim that it takes a vote of 60 to approve a nomination is inaccurate. A majority is required to approve a nomination. It’s just getting to the consenting vote that presents the problem. 60 votes are required to end debate (cloture) and proceed with the vote on the fate of the nominee.
As majority leader, Reid sidestepped the rules for ending debate (cloture) by motioning that Rule 22 requires a majority vote for cloture. Of course, Rule 22 says no such thing. The presiding officer rejected Reid’s intentional misreading of Rule 22. Having worked all this out beforehand in the Democratic caucus, Reid appealed to the whole Senate who voted to accepted his interpretation of Rule 22. A majority of Senators – all Democrats – voted to accept his reading of the rule in spite of its plain language. This is the “Reid Rule”, a method to change the rules of the Senate with only a majority vote.
Watch Senators Reid and the Republican leader McConnell speak to the matter in 2013.
Prior to the Reid Rule – or maneuver if you will – it was next to impossible to alter the operations of the Senate by changing the rules. Tooth fairies were more real than a 66-vote for cloture. Hellbent on getting Pres. Obama’s judicial choices past Republican opposition, Reid paved an interstate through any road blocks to his desired end: Pres. Obama’s goal to pack the courts with “living Constitution” wunderkinds.
A Progressive in a black robe is a dangerous person – dangerous only in a political sense, that is. A Progressive is impatient to change things and regards the Constitution, laws, and any stricture as wet clay to be molded to that end. One wonders why we should even bother to publish or put anything in writing. Separation of powers? What separation of powers? The delineation of powers in Articles I, II, III was made pointless. Applying the law in cases morphed into boundless interpretation following a witch’s brew of allegedly modern circumstances. The courts became super legislatures following penumbras rather than law. The possibilities are only as limited as a judge’s imagination.
Control of the courts, all of a sudden, became a high-stakes game. Everyone knows it. A state’s plebiscite to define marriage in a manner familiar to anyone going back to Emperor Justinian and further to Hammurabi – and maybe even to Lucy, our prehistoric ancestor in East Africa – could now be interpreted by jurists as something akin to the Nuremberg Laws. The beginning of life is not be defined by the people’s elected representatives but rather a majority of nine life-time appointees on a judicial panel in Washington, D.C. Conceivably, nothing is outside the purview of the judiciary.
With so much at stake, the days were numbered for the filibuster, especially in light of the gathering around opposing ideological poles in both parties. The only modern use of the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments prior to the new millennium was Abe Fortas’s attempted elevation from Associate Justice to Chief Justice in 1968 by Pres. Johnson. It occurred at a time when liberal R’s and conservative D’s still existed. As it turned out, opposition was truly bi-partisan and Fortas had a darker side of corruption. Not only did Fortas fail in winning his Chief Justice appointment, he was forced to resign his Associate Justice seat to avoid impeachment.
Pres. Johnson presenting Assoc. Justice Abe Fortas (r) as his nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, June 1968.
The Fortas mess was an extremely rare occurrence in the history of the Senate filibuster for Court nominees. Even Clarence Thomas didn’t face one. We’d have to wait the dawn of the new millennium, after party orthodox purity was well under way, and judicial powers have raised the stakes so high, before the filibuster became a reliable weapon in ideological warfare.
The election of George W. Bush in 2000 incensed Democrats. He was considered by them to be a usurper after the hotly contested election. Immediately following the inauguration, the liberal hive was all abuzz. In January 2001, Bruce Ackerman, Yale law professor writing in The American Prospect, fearing a wave of conservative jurists, favored the Democrats’ use of the filibuster to block Bush’s judicial appointments. The judicial filibuster ball really started rolling after that.
Bush’s first 11 courts of appeal nominees never made it out of the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee from 2001 to 2003. To be fair, Republican majorities did the same to Clinton’s choices by 2000. Yet, widespread filibustering didn’t begin till 2003 and a slim 51-49 Republican majority. 10 appeals court choices were then blocked by Democrats with a filibuster threat. Bill Frist, the Republican Majority Leader, began to publicly talk of the “nuclear option” – ending the filibuster for judicial nominations – as Democrats’ use of the filibuster promised to be a frequent tactic.
The threat of the “nuclear option” faded after a compromise got the bulk of Bush’s nominees through in 2005. But blocking tactics without the need for filibusters continued through Bush’s second term as Democrats assumed control of the Senate in 2007.
When Republicans objected to Obama’s nominees in 2013, prior advocates of the judicial filibuster turned into vehement critics. Politics produces a bumper crop of hypocrites, and ideological zealotry sanctions a scythe to cut through anyone and anything to achieve a secular eschaton. What was done by the Democrats – invent a way to change the Senate’s rules with a simple majority and use it to end the filibuster for judicial nominations – will be picked up by the Republicans to approve an originalist on the bench.
Watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell exactly repeat Harry Reid’s 2013 maneuver to change the 60-vote threshold for cloture (end debate and vote on the nominee) in advance of the Gorsuch vote.
After this, the vote to approve the nominee follows the historical precedent of a majority to approve the nomination. The fate of Neil Gorsuch could have been decided on a simple majority vote if the Democrats eschewed the filibuster, as what happened to Clarence Thomas’s nomination in 1991. Now it’s kaput for the judicial filibuster.
One of the arguments against ending the filibuster was that the loss would put the last nails in the coffin of bi-partisan comity. News flash: comity was well on its way out since the Florida recount imbroglio of 2000.
We would see the increasing reliance on ad hominem politics occurring as credal purity came to characterize the parties. How many adherents of Hayek and Friedman still exist in the Democratic Party? Conversely, what about the standing of Keynes in the Republican Party?
The fate of ex-Democrat Phil Gramm of Texas is instructive. Gramm was a Democrat and a believer in the Laffer curve, two things that don’t comport in today’s Democratic Party. Like many such Democrats, their party’s hostility to anyone challenging the reigning statist orthodoxy drove people like them out. They became Republicans. It was a harbinger of things to come.
The Gorsuch nomination got caught up in this new political ecosystem. It’s a jungle with the courts as the new Tyrannosaurus Rex, with the administrative state in tow as clones. Their presence draws the attention of everyone.
The temperature once had a chance to cool when the state didn’t have such a large apetite. It’s different today. Control of the state is on everybody’s radar screen because the cost of playing blind and deaf may make you the meal. The stakes are too high for quaint niceties.
Maybe our chances for civility would improve if we scaled back the monster. But that would require the defeat of the Democrats’ statism. If true, a return of the Democratic Party to a more heterogeneous composition would be more therapeutic than a revival of RINO’s (Republicans In Name Only) in the GOP. Something to consider.
RogerG
Sources:
“Scalia’s Supreme Court Seat Has Been Vacant For More Than 400 Days”, The New York Times, March 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/15/us/supreme-court-nominations-election-year-scalia.html?_r=0
“The Poison of Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis, 1943 essay. It can be obtained in Microsoft Word format here: https://calvin.edu/search/?q=the+poison+of+subjectivism&btnG=&site=calvin&client=calvin&proxystylesheet=calvin&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=the%20poison%20of%20subjectivism&gsc.page=1
“Lewis & the Omnicompetent State (Part 1)”, Dr. Alan Snyder, professor of History, Southeastern University, Pondering Principles, Nov. 7, 2015, http://ponderingprinciples.com/2015/11/lewis-the-omnicompetent-state-part-1/
For a fuller treatment of Hayek’s knowledge problem see “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, Friedrich A. Hayek, The American Economic Review, Sept. 1945. A free copy can obtained here: https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/
“The State of Disunion”, Lucas Rodriguez and Spencer Segal, Stanford Political Journal, Nov. 2, 2016, https://stanfordpolitics.com/the-state-of-disunion-901513b6b356
“Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life”, Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
“Polarization in Congress has risen sharply. Where is it going next?”, Christopher Hare, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, The Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/13/polarization-in-congress-has-risen-sharply-where-is-it-going-next/?utm_term=.e7cc91347bef
“A Filibuster on a Supreme Court Nomination Is So Rare It’s Only Worked Once”, Elizabeth King, Time, 2/8/17, http://time.com/4659403/neil-gorsuch-filibuster-abe-fortas/
“Filibuster and Cloture”, U.S. Senate website, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm
“George W. Bush judicial appointment controversies”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_judicial_appointment_controversies
“How Schumer turned against a filibuster he once tried to save”, Reid Pillifant, Politico, http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/11/how-schumer-turned-against-a-filibuster-he-once-tried-to-save-009838
“How 52 Senators Made 60 = 51”, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Stanford Law & Policy Review, March 19, 2014, https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-law-policy-review/online/how-52-senators-made-60-51
Could this be a typical PolitiFact.com newsroom cubicle as well?
One of the more important shifts in the sociology of professional employment is the increasing prevalence of college journalism graduates in the newsroom. And they seem to be pushing the profession to the left. Some undoubtedly will disagree but others have noticed, such as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. See this 2013 article from US News & World Report, “Who’s Checking the Fact Checkers?”(https://www.usnews.com/…/study-finds-fact-checkers-biased-a…).
Allison Graves, rookie PolitiFact reporter
An example of the trend is the background of the youthful Allison Graves, the rookie PolitiFact journalist who branded “false” Hugh Hewitt’s claim that the Obamacare exchanges are in a death spiral. She’s a creature of the University of Missouri-Columbia school of journalism – a 2016 graduate with a BA in journalism. She credits experience as city editor/reporter for the Journalism Department’s newspaper and padded her resume’ with “Copy editor/Nightside news editor” at “Fangirl the Magazine” (according to her LinkedIn page).
21-year-old rookies are now in charge of “acceptable” political discourse. Her involvement with PolitiFact is no act of serendipity. The school of journalism has a direct umbilical cord to PolitiFact. The school partners with PolitiFact in training young gatekeepers (see “How Mizzou Journalism Students Help Fact-Check for PolitiFact” on the mediashift.org website).
Prof. Mike Jenner and U. Of Missouri School of Journalism partnering with PolitiFact in a class session. (Stephanie Mueller/Columbia Missourian/AP)
This brings me back to my central assertion: the absence of a rich classical education among most college graduates is hampering their maturity of judgment. Therefore, their faddish leftism runs unchecked to the manifest disservice of the American public.
I was led to this book after listening to a podcast of an interview with a scholar who uses “1984”, “Brave New World”, “Darkness at Noon”, and this book in teaching the nature of 20th century totalitarianism. Originating back in 1945, the book sheds light on the frame of mind leading to statism, particularly of the progressive variety.
It explores, through fantasy, the smothering materialist dogmas that dominate academia and excuse the attempted expansion of the state into every crevice of life. Materialism reduces all of existence to material factors. It is activated in the social engineering of a cadre of all-knowing “experts”, the seed of totalitarianism.
The conflict that erupts in the book between the reigning materialism and traditional metaphysics is the essence of the current division of America into “red” and “blue” precincts. The state religion of blue-America is materialism. Any space left for “spirituality” is of the undemanding sort, and conveniently fashioned for personal eccentricities.
In the parlance of the book, the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) and the progressive bloc at Bracton College are synonymous with the bastions of blue-America. Art imitates life, eh?
Politics can exhibit “Eusociability”. The term refers to the highest level of community-building among some animals, such as the hives of the hymenoptera class of insects – wasps, bees, etc. Political eusociability is becoming increasingly evident among the Left since the election of Trump.
As in a wasps’ hive in an agitated state, the activists of the Left are swarming. The Left’s fury isn’t the spontaneous activity of scattered individuals – or “organic” as some would say – but behave as a horde neurally connected through the bio-chemicals of past activism and social media, triggered with the seed money of donors.
Consider the financial backers to be the “angel investors” of the hive. An example would be Democracy Alliance.
An example of today’s left-wing angel investors: the “Democracy Alliance”Prominent donors to the “Democracy Alliance” are George Soros (l) and Tom Steyer (r)
Hive-funding can go through a circuitous route, almost like money-laundering. One such example would be Alliance for Global Justice, headquartered in Tucson, Az. An examination of its 503(c) IRS form 990 reveals a list of wealthy donors that includes The Bridgewater Fund, The Tides Foundation, Ben & Jerry Foundation, etc. It, in turn, ladles the money out. Crowdrise’s page for a fundraiser for Alliance for Global Justice (AGJ) describes refusefascism.org as a project of AGJ. Money moves about.
The phenomena of hive-building can be traced back to the early labor organizing of the late 18th century into the more sophisticated 19th/20th century efforts of Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, and Marry Harris Jones (“Mother Jones”).
From “Solidarity”, publication of the IWW, 1917
Modern iterations of the activity include “Occupy….(fill in the blank)”, “the Resistance” (to Trump), “Fight Fascism”, and “Indivisible”.
“Occupy Wall Street” protest, Zuccotti Park, 2011“The Resistance”, a collection of groups for defeating Trump, 2017“Fight Fascism” in one of its forms, San Diego protest, 2017‘Indivisible’ movement grips St. Johns County, Fla., January 2017.
It’s simply hive activity, without splitting academic hairs over the fine distinctions between “community organizing”, mere “activism”, or “mobilizing”. It’s also not a conspiracy in the same vein as the Comintern (Communist International), which had a Moscow address. The organization’s constituent national communist parties were appendages of the Soviet Politburo.
No central commissariat exists for the hive. It is a web of scattered individuals and groups, united by compatible beliefs, a tendency to activism, most lacking permanence, and interconnected by social media and loose funding streams. They spring up as events warrant and vary to local circumstances. They can appear spasmodic, and frequently are.
The tie that binds is a remarkably consistent set of beliefs. You know, the litany of “isms” and “phobias” are prominent: racism, sexism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, etc., etc., etc. The list is notably fungible according to the fads-of-thought of the moment. For them, America is reduced to a collection of group victims. Their cure is Fabianism-with-an-edge.
Fabianism is a form of socialism without the violent overthrow of Marx and Lenin. It’s socialism with a human face – i.e., democracy. This form has been called “social democracy”. It favors human rights broadly defined and greater government control of the “commanding heights” of society, to borrow from Lenin. In Britain, it led to the formation of the Labour Party. In Europe, many national social democratic parties sprang up. In today’s America, it has found a home in the Democratic Party.
Early logo of Britain’s Fabian Society as a turtle. It displays the group’s desire for gradualism in bringing about a socialist country.Another common emblem of the Fabian Society as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as seen in a stained glass window. It would later be dropped for its negative connotation.
The modern Democratic Party has given the movement an institutional form. However, the plodding nature of a national political party is ill-suited to a base agitated by immediate events. The desire for respectability of a national party restrains the emotional explosion which has led some partisans to break away seeking the “Bern”, or “StopFascism”, or “Black Lives Matter”, or “Occupy” (the universe?), or …….. That’s the “edge” part of Fabianism-with-an-edge. Yet, party activists are still littered throughout the constellation of groups.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow holding up a copy of Indivisible’s Practical Guide to organizing against Trump
Taking a closer look into one these groups, Indivisible, will bring to light the interconnected nature of the hive. From their “Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”, the authors parrot the hive’s party line on the threat posed by Trump:
“…[Trump] will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image.”
Three of the four individuals listed as authors of the “Guide” – Ezra Levin, Adam Padilla, and Jeremy Haile – were ex-staffers of Democrat representatives. Levin and Haile were staffers for Lloyd Doggett (D-Tx). Padilla was a legislative assistant for Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). The fourth, Leah Greenberg, wife of Ezra Levin, is listed as the young policy director for the Tom Perriello gubernatorial campaign along with involvement in various “social justice” private and non-profit organizations according to her LinkedIn page.
Perriello is another interesting specimen. He served as representative in Virginia’s 5th congressional district from 2009-11, but was defeated in 2010 by Republican Robert Hurt. He is mentioned as the founder of Avaaz, ” a U.S. based civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict.” It’s a mission statement for the “social justice warrior” (SJW).
The “Guide” asserts that they are emulating the Tea Party circa 2009. But the Tea Party wasn’t organized by Hill staffers, or anyone representing the “establishment”. More believably, the kinship of the “the resistance” points to the “Occupy” factions of 2011 and the more recent campus SJW outbursts, not the Tea Party.
Below is an “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration from October 2011. It’s 6:46 in length.
Compare the above to the disruption of Charles Murray’s attempt to speak to students at Middlebury College.
When the above attempt at a lecture failed, Murray and Prof. Allison Stanger, professor of International Politics and Economics, went to a room to live stream their conversation. The disruptions continued in the auditorium, and when Murray and Prof. Stanger attempted to exit to her car, they were assaulted. Stanger required hospitalization.
Now, let’s take a look at a congressional townhall, the kind of thing that Greenberg, et al, are encouraging.
Or this one.
Or the harassment of Tom McClintock after leaving his townhall.
The townhall crowds appear to be older versions of the campus SJW’s . Five decades ago many of them might have been at home on Haight-Ashbury – at least spiritually.
The outbursts, cries, and incriminations aren’t spontaneous in the literal meaning of the word. I suspect that the swarms are people – local and transported – already active in the party, agitated by the election’s results, neurally connected by social media, loosely directed by certain websites, and reflective of blue-America, even if they might live in red-America. Rather than an inter-cultural phenomena spanning the cultural divide, quite the opposite, they emulate the deep cultural division in the country. The hive’s views have no home in red-America.
What does this portend for the country? Blue-America is still geographically stuck in blue-America. Their behavior has just become more rabid. The beliefs of identity politics, assaults on traditional Christianity, the blind faith in the omni-competent state, and hyper-environmentalism has no more credence today in “fly-over” country than it did before the election.
The danger for Republicans lies in the appearance of a groundswell. Such a thing could have an effect on impressionable “independents” and lukewarm Republicans. The Republicans could experience a dip in passion while independents fall away leaving the field open for the Fabians-with-an-edge in the Democratic Party.
If Republicans don’t counter-organize, the next couple of election cycles could pave the way for boys-in-dresses in the girls’ lockeroom and on the girls’ field hockey team. Be prepared for a sovietized EPA. The professions of Christian faith in the economy will be criminalized. Just take the California template and press it onto the country.
It’s time for red-America to get organized to challenge the hive. You might call it red-America’s “counter-swarm”.
“Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda – Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.”, https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
“Soros, Steyer, and Democracy Alliance Work to Retake Colorado: Left-wing donor club returns to its birthplace to win back state senate for Dems”, Lachlan Markey, The Washington Free Beacon, 8/5/16, http://freebeacon.com/politics/soros-steyer-and-democracy-alliance-work-to-retake-colorado/
The following is reply to a Charlotte Observer column by Isaac J. Bailey, “Franklin Graham’s God isn’t mine; is he yours?” (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article134819004.htmlfb_comment_id=fbc_1288950587859919_1289747547780223_1289747547780223#f35461721bd9bd)
I’m bowled over by Isaac Bailey’s remarkable incoherence. Is he presenting himself as an expert on Christian exegetics, or the purveyor of trendy pronouncements of Hollywood celebrities? Maybe both? Quoting a study-of-the-moment as scripture, while attempting to morph the Bible into the preface for the Democratic Party platform, is folly on steroids.
Mr. Bailey apparently doesn’t want a Christian to be a Christian. This may come as a surprise to Bailey but being Christian means acceptance of the deep truth of the Gospel, not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. To be an adherent of a particular faith is by nature to be exclusive. A person gets baptized as a Christian, not as a proselyte of a fashionably amorphous and undemanding spirituality common in west LA.
Mr. Bailey wants to obliterate the doctrines that define Christianity in the same manner as progressivism’s desire to interpret the Constitution out of existence. Remember, they claim, it’s a “living thing”, like the Constitution, waiting to be shaped by the boundless imagination. In his mind, we can have a new Jesus, like a new Constitution, every time a thought becomes fashionable among the beautiful people. It’s all so ludicrous.
Kanye West
Really, people like Bailey have movie-land visions running around in their heads of snake-handlers and fulminating sermons when they think of traditional Christianity. It’s a fictional script implanted in the mind that has little room for a devout, fundamentalist, and evangelical Christian being also caring, considerate, compassionate, and tolerant.
To put it bluntly, prejudice among “progressive” types is as common as anywhere else.
