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.
