Detroit unemployment office sometime in the 1970’s.
Degringolade: noun, a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition); downfall.
Opinion polls in October show the Democrats are on the cusp of one-party rule, as in California. Are Americans so hot for a recap of the 1970’s? I know that it’s a 50-year-old saga but it should reside in the memories of a sufficient number of people to have some influence on younger relations. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be true.
The ingredients for a replay are present. A poorly informed public seems ready to reregulate the economy, retax the population (hypothetically, the rich), pursue disastrous social engineering crusades, adopt a near-totalitarian refashioning of life in the quest for a fantasy future that was drawn up by non-scientists who mangle science for ideological ends, and gargantuan fiscal and monetary policies that will financially grease the skids for the degringolade.
To vote Democrat is a vote for the degringolade. To ignore what a person says in the hope that they won’t do it is the height of folly. Their announced positions are frightening. Medicare for All is socialism for your healthcare. The Green New Deal is totalitarian central planning. Ending fracking is one part of the campaign to kill fossil fuels and destroy supply chains which will escalate the price of everything. Tax increases ostensibly on the rich will atrophy investment capital, the mother’s milk of an economy and your children’s future. “Reimagining” policing is playing with fire since it will result in more miscreants on your streets, fewer repercussions for misbehavior, fewer armed police officers and more poorly-educated social workers dabbling in the mystical arts of human psychology – bottom line: neither you nor your property will be safe. Free college is a budget-busting escapade to produce more ill-informed people with degrees. The codification of infanticide will become a legal fact, at taxpayer expense. Forget about a border meaning anything. Even “modified” doses of any or all of this is the feeding of poison at only a slightly slower drip rate.
It took awhile after 1960 for violent crime to spike by the 1980’s. Vox reported in September 2020 that homicides surged 53% and assaults 14% across 27 US cities this summer when compared to the same period last year. Is this a harbinger of things to come as it was in 1965?A Chicago police officer picks through debris at the crime scene where a number of people were shot, including a 3-year-old child, in a city park on the south side of Chicago, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)
To chisel all of the above in granite, your constitutional republic will be refashioned to make the entire program a permanent end-state. With the emasculation of the Electoral College, red states will be neutered and all of us will be governed by the ignorant follies emanating from the big cities and the coasts. Once in power, the Democrats will gerrymander the Senate’s rules while packing the body with four more sure-Democrat seats, in addition to packing the Supreme Court. The courts as neutral arbiters in the application of the laws will cease.
FDR’s court-packing scheme from the 1930’s.
If you expect the midterm elections to provide a corrective, you’re going to be very disappointed. The above changes will reduce the impact of any negative blowback after the Democrats have already been in power for two years to implement the revolution. All that California has come to represent will be a national experience.
To see where we are heading, we need to go back to the 20th century and relearn the fact that history is a battle of ideas. Those ideas take us in different directions and have real world consequences. This fact is a central theme of the accompanying video, “Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas”. The program appeared on PBS in the early 2000’s, and while it begins with a focus on 9/11 and globalization, it centers on a century-long debate between free markets and government control of the economy. Two individuals take center stage: John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.
Friedrich Hayek (l) and John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes will become the only true prophet for all things economic to Democrats and British Labourites. Hayek won’t achieve his due till he wins the Nobel prize for economics in the late 1970’s and his ideas are adopted by insurgent Republicans and Tories who would be led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They would end the economic mess left by Keynes and his political handlers mostly in the Democratic and Labour Parties.
Grab a cup of coffee, take some time (a couple of hours), and educate yourself on the real stakes in this election. Don’t go to the polls with only Trump in mind. The candidates carry with them much more than personalities. They also bring a set of programs overlaying a contentious philosophy that will have serious effects on you and generations thereafter.
Barack and Michelle Obama superimposed over their plush Martha’s Vineyard estate.
First ladies normally leave office with high approvals because they aren’t sullied by the messiness of politics and are normally remembered for their high-minded crusades. Think of Nancy Reagan (just say no), Laura Bush (literacy), the pre-activist Michelle Obama (child nutrition), and Melania Trump (child well-being). When they choose to get into the muck, however, you realize that they were willing participants in a four-year choreographed charade – or 8 years in Michelle’s case. Michelle Obama, very rich and secure, residing in her $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard 7,000 square foot estate, lectures us on our incipient racism and her opponents’ vileness. It’s beyond despicable; it’s ignominious and disgusting. She’s proof that elections can bring out the worst in us. It is doing it do her.
The discreditable side of Michelle Obama has been volubly evident this election. Her latest podcast monologue (see below) is chock full of partisan rhetoric, the kind of bombast that can be easily dismissed by anyone with a brain.
She blithely blasts Trump for no COVID plan. No one has a “plan” till they know the nature of the problem. By her measure, neither did her beloved husband during the Ebola, SARS, swine flu (H1N1) and Zika outbreaks. Biden advisor at the time, Ron Klain, recalled about H1N1,
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”
Not surprisingly, Michelle didn’t say a word about her husband’s neglect of the mandated stockpiles of PPE and medical supplies such as ventilators.
Plans don’t take shape till you know the disposition of the enemy. The liberation of Europe in 1944 couldn’t begin until we had some idea of where the Germans were and their capabilities. COVID-19 was special, very special. It’s identification, transmissibility, spread, symptoms, and lethality were unknown in January to … everybody! Once we began to know the enemy, travel bans, quarantines, lockdowns, expansion of medical facilities, therapeutics, and a Manhattan Project for a vaccine were pushed into place. Her podcast harangue was an empty rant without benefit of any suggestions for how she, or Biden, would do it differently. If you buy her balderdash, then, please, for your own sake, stay away from real estate offices. Michelle, you should know better.
Then she goes into a rant about Trump’s mask-wearing tendencies. Apparently, she wants universal mask-wearing at all times, even during moments when the science shows it to be ridiculous. Transmissibility of the virus outdoors has not been established even at this late date. The fear-mongering about the loss of “countless lives” is pure political hot air from science illiterates who are eager to employ generalities to pursue a naked partisan aim.
A real scientific mind, which Michelle shows no indication of having, would recognize the uneven impact on the population. Mitigations need to be targeted on the vulnerable, and, as it turns out, few of us are. Anyone healthy who is infected will have a case of the flu. We know that now; understandably we didn’t in the beginning. Michelle is stuck in January. She shows no sign of recognition of the destroyed lives in emotional depression, delayed medical procedures, job loss, bankrupted fortunes, retarding a child’s mental development, etc., from her favorite mitigations.
A mature adult acknowledges every day that life is a balancing of risk, even down to the decision to get up in the morning. Michelle’s authoritarianism is a recipe for civilizational collapse in a destructive crusade for zero-risk. Michelle, you should know better.
The rant continues in her attack on Trump for “sowing division and hatred” against black and brown people. Her entire line of attack is shattered by the reality on the ground. Residents and shop owners in our urban centers know who’s torching and assaulting people in their neighborhoods. Hint: it isn’t solely “people of color”. Michelle is right if her purpose is to deflect blame for the destruction from black and brown people. As it turns out, it’s white people from her socioeconomic strata who are instigating the mayhem. And, Michelle, mayhem it is. You are gaslighting, not Trump, by asking people to ignore their lyin’ eyes as they watch the Antifa and BLM-inspired pandemonium. Au contraire, you, Michelle, and your Democratic Party allies are complicit in “sowing division and hatred” by manufacturing hypothetical grievances under an unprovable abstraction, systemic racism. It’s a disgraceful attempt to invent racism when you can’t prove it, but you need it as a foil in furtherance of a power grab. Michelle, you should know better.
Michelle, no one, Trump included, has called for the arrest of protesters. That’s straw man demagoguery. The demand for law and order concerns the looting, vandalism, assaults, killings, and the setting of businesses ablaze.
Riot-damaged Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.
The many protests around the country are irrelevant to the shooting of cops, the spittle-laced fulminations in their face, the wanton infliction of injury, the homicidal acts of arson at federal buildings, etc., etc. It matters not if the ratio of protest to violence is 10 to 1. Simple protests don’t draw the attention of federal authorities. The 10 riots among the 100 protests is an immediate concern for the victims caught up in the havoc. And when you and your political allies quietly sanction the violence through misdirection, you’re an accomplice. As a mother, Michelle, you should understand this. Michelle, you should know better.
Michelle Obama’s behavior during this election season is a primer on how to destroy a first lady’s reputation.
Joe Biden in the debate last Tuesday laughably tried to dismiss the threat of “Antifa” by defining the term as an abstraction, an idea only. Or as he might have said, “Nothing there, man.” Tell that to the local shop owners who watched a lifetime’s work go up in flames, or the police officers and other innocents who were maimed and killed by “Antifa” and their kissing cousins, BLM. The denial of reality by the higher-ups in the Dem establishment is astonishing.
Will you let them get away with it?
Antifascist organizers had a visible, and at times violent, presence in Berkeley on Aug. 27, 2017. (Photo: Emilie Raguso)“Mostly peaceful” arson in Minneapolis in May.
Their logic goes something like this: organized violence doesn’t exist because there isn’t a central command. Oh really? Radical Muslim extremism doesn’t exist either since it’s a shadowy underworld of shifting alliances and individuals. No central command there either. Violent jihadism is only an abstraction, using the Dems’ syntax, since individuals and groups come and go within a constantly-changing web of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other ephemeral groupings among the Sunni and Shia. Again, tell that to the relatives of the occupants of graveyards scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond.
The logic is beyond astounding; it’s insane. When confronted by a bystander, House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, called Antifa a “myth”. And off the Dems and their sympathizers go into their ritual denunciations of white supremacists. In fact, they go further in lumping anyone who dare confront the “myth” on the streets as “white supremacists”. Dems, you can’t have it both ways: organized Antifa doesn’t exist in spite of the charred buildings, new funerals and hospitalizations, but they magically reappear as an implicit counterpoint to their new all-encompassing menace, “white supremacy”. To borrow from Biden, “Come on, man.”
This affront to language and logic is a common staple of our current political discourse. For another example, there’s the “mostly peaceful” protests. By that logic, the Bolshevik Revolution and its Red Terror were “mostly peaceful”. The French Revolution and its Reign of Terror were also “mostly peaceful”. Mao was a “mostly peaceful” tyrant. Ditto for Stalin. Jack the Ripper was “moistly peaceful”. How much time in his life was devoted to murdering women?
Debris from the “mostly peaceful” desecration of churches during the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.“Mostly peaceful” corpses from the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.
Are we so rattled in our minds that some of us can seriously entertain this gibberish. The Dems and their fellow travelers trot out as proof FBI Director Christopher Wray’s recent reference to Antifa as a movement and not an organization. It proves nothing. Locally-organized, intense social media interaction with comrades, and funding sources showing up as plane tickets and rental trucks filled with supplies and munitions, indicate something far more systematized than sporadic “mostly peaceful” protesters incited by “white supremacists”, who just so happen to be protecting their neighborhoods and shops.
The rented box truck was spotted at 2pm on Wednesday in Louisville, as Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was still speaking at a press conference about the grand jury findings in the Breonna Taylor case. (photo: Daily Mail)
Here’s a question for the gullible: Can something be organized without a formal national directorate? Antifa central doesn’t have to exist in the world of the internet. All that is necessary is fanatics with an internet connection. We have an abundance of both, so the know-how, inspiration, hooligans, and money will take care of themselves.
Matthew Iglesias is onto something in his April 2019 Vox piece entitled “The Great Awokening”. While I don’t agree with everything that he has to say, he makes sense with his central point: white liberals have shifted far left.
Ronald Reagan was famous for having said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” And oh how they have left many of the rest of us behind as well.
Shortly after Trump announced his infection with the coronavirus, Twitter, that cacophonous funhouse of the easily ignitable, was aflame with wishes for his death. From whence cometh the vitriol? It arose from the fever swamps of the comfortable, mostly white liberal Democrats whose militant views dominate today’s Party.
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez looks on during the Democratic Presidential Committee summer meeting on August 23, 2019 in San Francisco. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Iglesias mostly focuses on the Party’s embrace of the far left’s take on racial issues like the now-ritualistic censure of the esoteric “systemic racism” – which is carte blanche for federal government intrusion into all aspects of a person’s life and thus producing the clamor’s totalitarian flavor – and the snakepit of racial reparations. But it’s more than that. The rise of the hard left in the Party is apparent in the Party’s tolerance of socialism, with or without the modifier of “democratic” (AOC, The Squad, and Bernie), and the green socialism of The Green New Deal. Ideas once rejected out of hand in the Party’s leadership circles are now part of the coalition to be negotiated with.
Like COVID, these new risible ideological commitments were easily transmissible in the form of a green light from the Party’s elites to the base. Many Dems not already there, the more moderate core, were pulled like the gravity of a large planet further left. The rest may have kept their party affiliation but were no longer reliable, having been repelled by the Party’s leftward leap. Could this help explain 2016? Could be.
Michelle Bassaro, a Trump supporter, in her apartment in Nanty Glo, Pa. She said she voted for the Democrat in her district in the midterm election to balance the administration’s power. (Credit. (photo: Ross Mantle for The New York Times)
Interestingly, according to Iglesias, the beneficiaries of the new left-wing Party, the famous “other”, particularly “people of color”, don’t seem to be so enamored of this vision as Iglesias makes clear in his reading of a variety of social surveys. Here’s an opening for Trump and the Republicans.
This election is said by many to be a referendum on Trump. Yes, it is, but it is also a referendum on a new hard left Democratic Party. The question is, which referendum will win out? The first happenstance is only possible if the electorate is so ill-informed of the danger, or the Democrats’ succeed in their usual dirty tricks of stuffing the ballot boxes – or more accurately the mailboxes.
Now that possibility might produce a third option: a fraud election.
A pack of wolves feeding on a carcass or humans in wolves’ clothing feasting on someone who challenged their accustomed arrangements?
Milieu: noun, a person’s social environment.
Trump and his boosters refer to DC as The Swamp for understandable reasons. More accurately, though, it’s an extended pack of wolves, a carnivore’s milieu.
A glimpse of the DC milieu: a Washington, DC, metro station.
What made the career employees of Big Government so hostile to Donald J. Trump? After all, there’s clear evidence that they had it in for him as he unwittingly stepped into their den by winning in 2016.
The latest disclosure to the Senate Judiciary Committee unveils a Russian Intelligence assessment that Hillary Clinton personally approved an operation in 2016 to “to stir up a scandal against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” The news indicates that at least some in Russian Intelligence believed that she was up to no good, and therefore capable of being exploited to serve the Russian interest in sowing the seeds of discord within one of Russia’s adversaries, us.
The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee cried foul regarding these latest revelations, but the connection of Russiagate to Hillary can’t be dismissed out of hand. The Steele dossier was a predicate for the Obama administration’s dirty tricks on the Trump campaign. The money trail for the vile screed goes back to the Hillary campaign and the DNC. That’s true beyond question.
Christopher SteeleHillary Clinton
There existed in the wolf’s den – DC – a disposition to utilize anything real or imagined to discredit Trump, his people, and presidency by miring him in innuendo, and, boy, did they succeed. Using false evidence like the dossier and fueled by their hatred for Trump, they ginned up the FBI to spy on Trump and his people; staffed up an excessively protracted tribunal called the Mueller probe; turned willing accomplices in the bureaucracy to act under cover of “whistle-blower” to release and take out of context a phone call and then turn it overt to ravenous partisan predators in Congress; and hogtie his presidency in manufactured scandal for most of his term. This is more than a swamp with venomous vipers; it’s a forest overpopulated with wolves.
Top row from left are former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former FBI Director James Comey, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and former national security adviser Susan Rice. Bottom row from left are former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
Ironies of all ironies, a stronger case for collusion with Russia is evident in Hillary’s and the DNC’s relationship with Russian disinformation operatives. It turns out that Christopher Steele was working with a known Russian agent. It can be credibly shown that the claims in Steele’s dossier was fed to him by this lone operative. From there, the thing ends up in affidavits for spying warrants on Trump and his campaign and in the hands of Democrat headhunters throughout DC. The wolves were given the scent.
It’s stunning that the American people might be poised to put those snarling wolves and band of headhunters back in power. Once they return to power, their skullduggery will be flushed down the memory hole and a lesson taught to the people for being so impertinent as to make a choice that the wolves and the rest in their milieu disapprove.
It’s also amazing that the American people might vote to bow before these self-styled lords.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 19: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) endorses Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a campaign rally in Queensbridge Park on October 19, 2019 in the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
I don’t watch presidential debates or election night returns. What happens happens. The play-by-play of the boxing match (debates) or the color commentary of election returns (as in a televised football game) are a sideshow and irrelevant to the outcome and the underlying realities.
The underlying reality of this election season is a pungent personality vs. pungent policies. The former causes you to grimace; the latter ruins your life. For me, the choice is obvious: I can’t allow the grating of my teeth by a tweet or rally speech to be an excuse to let into power those who’d engineer national bankruptcy.
Biden is the aging and incontinent godfather of a philosophical crime family. A vote for him is an endorsement of left-wing radicalism. Say what you will, voting “D” this time around is a knowing or unknowing sanction of socialism and all its crudity. The stable for filling departments and agencies if Biden should win will be the same one that gave us an unsavory California and middle class flight from wherever they hold the reins of power. The same folks who gave us catcalls like “defund the police” – or “rethinking”, choose your verb – will give us a militarized EPA, and a militarized everything else in the Article II branch and beyond … with the exception of the actual military.
Biden (center) with Warren and Bernie.
If you think that Biden is such a nice guy that he won’t appoint the dwellers of his own party then you must have locked yourself into a Salvador Dali painting. His party has welcoming room for what used to be called the hard left, people like Sandy (AOC) and her sophomoric Squad and Bernie and his bros. Occupy Wall Street is now Occupy DNC. Socialism is no longer a dirty word to the party’s base.
It makes no difference if Biden appoints an Elizabeth Warren or an Ilhan Omar type. It’s only a question of how far left to go and how fast.
Today’s left amazingly, actually believes socialism works. When someone cites its long history of failures, they respond with the addition of an adjective like “democratic” or “It’s never been tried”. It’s classic No-True-Scotsman fallacy, as in “No true socialist would be like that.” The tactic is to change socialism’s definition by adding a modifier (democratic) and a purity test and it’s all better. Yeah, really.
The deficiency of socialism has little to do with the means of getting there: election or revolution. It’s just anti-human; it unleashes the worst in us; it’s a recipe for a fiasco. Voting “D” this time around is a vote for fiasco. The only remaining question is how fast will Biden get us there if elected.
Years ago, I ran into a piece by William F. Buckley, Jr. I must paraphrase the quote from memory: “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” A citizen should develop some grounding in the issues and times that confront us. The act of voting should be the outcome of those insights. The key word is “should”, and “should” doesn’t mean “is”.
Instead, we are bombarded with pleas to vote … by God, just vote! It’s horrible advice. The survival of our citizen republic demands a virtuous public. Virtue is inconceivable without some grasp of its historical and philosophical basis, which requires time and effort to know some very basic things. Absent this foundation, we will turn our citizen republic into the rule of the whipsawed and momentary electoral majorities who are animated by media-inducing impressions and blinkered perceptions.
Sound familiar? Look to our city streets and you’ll see the march of the truly ignorant, and then stop to realize that they’ll vote. A college education or the possession of a diploma cannot be counted on as proof of wisdom and virtue. Just think, your vote will probably be cancelled by the ill-informed, and many others who will be crammed into mailboxes by who knows whom.
Portland protesters geared for war against the police.
Don’t get caught up in the fads of thought that are all the rage on our campuses, media, and our self-anointed elect among the glitterati. Many of these babbles are passing fads, only temporary enthusiasms that can’t stand the test of time due to their falsehoods and internal contradictions.
Inform yourself by gathering knowledge to answer some basic questions. Here are some queries to chew on.
What is our basic nature? Is our essential nature “positive”, “negative”, or a combination? Depending on your assessment, the choice may lead to a shining city on a hill or to the darkest of history’s tyrannies.
Lenin (center) in 1917 or 1918 with his Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom).
The crystallization of the “positive” view is of recent vintage and advocates the perfectibility of people. Thus, we’ll have placed over us a class of people with the hidden knowledge for perfection. They pressure for the powers to achieve the prescribed ideal … and then we’ll have to say goodbye to idiosyncrasies, liberty, and restraints on the state. Progressives, the folks torching our cities, and a good portion of the Democratic Party’s base and leaders are beguiled by the idea. They’re enraptured by big a government with big powers to engineer the ideal.
In contrast, our Founders combined the “positive” and “negative”. They were “positive” in that people could be virtuous but it required civilization’s little platoons: family, faith, and civil society. Without virtuous self-restraint, the “negative” in mankind – original sin in Christianity – will take hold and we’ll have bad men and women riding herd on a chaotic society. The recognition of our potential for evil led Madison and others in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1787 to the Constitution with its government constrained by law and enumerated powers.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Oil on Canvas, Howard Chandler Christy.
Your vote is a stamp of approval for one of these two courses, whether you know it or not. From Aesop’s Fables: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!”
Why does Big Government have a propensity for failure, especially when given intractable problems to solve?
Friedrich Hayek’s answer: the knowledge problem – no small group of people in any government have the knowledge and mental capacity to direct the many-faceted lives and minds of a population. We must know our limits; too many on the left don’t know theirs as they ignorantly unleash the law of unintended consequences.
The inherent totalitarianism in The Green New Deal will produce scads of unforeseen ill-effects, replicating California’s experience of blackouts and expensive energy and an economic scorched earth.
SONOMA, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 10: Traffic lights in the Sonoma area are out due to power outages on October 10, 2019 in Sonoma, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
A government takeover in Medicare for All will translate into Iron Curtain health care. Be prepared for a gradual deterioration of medical services: rationing, decrepit facilities, a decline in innovation and the striving for excellence, and life and death decisions made on the basis of bureaucratic formulas. We’ll get the chance to experience the disaster of urban renewal of the 60’s and 70’s in our next hospital visit. Oh, I forget, it’ll be free … and centralized and like the DMV.
… to say nothing of the loss of freedom in healthcare. For the masses of us, we’ll be funneled into treatment reminiscent of an inner-city public hospital’s emergency room on a Saturday night. Naturally, the rich will have recourse to the best of the highly proficient medical wildcats operating in a medical black market, or just jet to the lavish establishments that’ll pop up beyond our borders. Healthcare will remain grossly hierarchical with the privileged few getting more and the rest of us sitting in a chaotic emergency room next to a gang’s stabbing victim.
Patients forced to wait for treatment in the hallways of an Atlanta Hospital in 2006 due to lack of space and overcrowding. (Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)1970’s Soviet hospital room.
Marking a ballot is much more than a romantic attachment to particular candidate. The act carries with it all of the above and more.
Is “tax the rich” practical?
Big Government necessitates Big Taxes. It’ll be sold as “tax the rich” but it’ll end up as a tax everybody receiving a paycheck. The rich will hide their wealth or flee; everybody else will be at the mercy of the payroll department and the IRS. Don’t underestimate the inventive ways for Big Government hucksters to extract more sustenance out of the people to feed their Leviathan.
Look at the income tax. In the beginning it targeted the rich ($1 million or more in annual income), then it creeped down the income ladder, and then withholding was invented. The “genius” of withholding is that they get their money before you get yours (withholding), and then they command under penalty of law that you tell them whether it was enough. It’s ludicrous.
The scurrying about to avoid the lash of exorbitant taxes by those with the means to do so will further sap economic vitality. In the end, the ones who don’t have the means to escape the whip – the average person – will be socked with the bill in the form of reduced paychecks, lost opportunities for their children, and deteriorating standards of living.
Tax-raising schemes siphon a good portion of the rewards of the people’s labor to legions of government workers and Big Government’s brood of ideological and rent-seeking dependents. The result is a bloated government with not enough money to support the bloat as the well-to-do sit in their posh seaside villa on some island outside the reach of the IRS. In the end, you know who’ll bear the brunt of that sorry state of affairs.
Rest assured that it won’t be Jeff Bezos in his secluded estates in Seattle and Washington, DC, or his Texas ranch, or the South Pacific island that he’ll purchase to escape the clutches of Bernie/Warren/AOC. There will be no escape for his underlings in the distribution centers.
What is meant by equality? Is it equality of result or equality of opportunity? Which way do the parties lean?
Today’s equality at the hands of left-wing zealots isn’t the equality of the Founders or MLK’s “I have a dream”.
Martin Luther King making his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the capitol mall, August 1963.
The choice between the two equalities leads in two radically different directions. Up to the recent invention of critical race theory and the sophistry of using racism to fight “racism” (affirmative action), the preference was for equal opportunity in the 20th-century actions and policies to remove unwarranted obstacles in law (de jure) and practice (de facto) that lead to seriously problematic discriminations.
Yet, waiting in the wings among the civil rights crusaders were the revolutionary ambitious. Not satisfied with the proscriptions on discriminatory behavior, and schooled in the Marxist perspective that the oppressed are acculturated to the oppression, these zealots demand nothing less than the complete restructuring – maybe the complete overturning – of our way of life. Everyone’s life is to be invalidated and made unpleasant in the pursuit of a war against a cloudy abstraction: systemic racism.
Equality of result is their weapon of choice. The ammunition for the weapon is a numerical goal straitjacketed to proportionality. 13% of the population means 13% in every social, economic, and political measure. If the stats stray from the number, the hucksters of the Left say that it is evidence of the hidden form of racism that penetrates all that we are. We, the accusation goes, are “privileged” because we rigged the system to our (white) advantage, even though many of the “privileged” aren’t white. That’s a recasting of Marx’s justification for the proletarian revolution for a different clientele.
In the corrupted parlance of government- and academic-speak, it is called “disparate impact”. You may as well know the arcane multisyllabics used to disguise the foolishness.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. It’s more than that. It’s a moonshot from stat to revolution.
“Inequities” (lack of fairness) is in vogue as another word of choice for those enamored of stat-slinging for revolution. Can there be, though, more than one explanation, other than racism, for a socio-economic stat’s divergence from proportionality? For instance, is the over-representation of black males in the violent crime numbers due to something other than the banal “racism”? A person could cite any number of reasons for the circumstance without placing the blame on a broad and skulking ill-feeling toward black people.
Take any social and economic stat’s divergence from proportionality for any of the law’s “protected classes” (Women are 51% of the population but account for 100% of all births.) and funnel the variances into the single cause of bigotry – intentional or unintentional, overt or covert – and you will have the nonstop, hair-on-fire crusade to eliminate causes that aren’t causes. Churches are vandalized; campuses are plagued by roving mobs; downtowns are torched; and the criminal justice system is increasingly staffed by people who’ll do anything to force the world to conform to the proportionality.
Equality is refashioned into paranormal activity, something akin to ghost hunting for systemic racism, and therefore its vagueness makes it very useful. If you want to locate the locus of the pseudo-science, look no further than the Democratic Party. The loudest yapping for equality of result comes from the “D” side of the aisle. The R’s are much more likely to pursue the other option.
What is socialism?
The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesting Trump’s health care plan on Jul. 5, 2017, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. (Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket—Getty Images)Members of the Democratic Socialists of America gathered in New York City in May 2019.
Joe Biden in late August of this year plaintively proclaimed, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” The statement is beside the point. We don’t rely on looks to determine whether somebody is a socialist with a soft spot for rioters. Friedrich Engels, frequent co-author with Karl Marx and businessman/scion of a wealthy family, didn’t have the “looks” of a socialist revolutionary either. Biden isn’t the reincarnation of Engels, but he is very confused.
Biden might cite his long career in politics as proof that he isn’t one, but we’re not referring to the Biden of 1973. The 1973 Biden isn’t the 2020 Biden and the 1973 Democratic Party isn’t the 2020 Democratic Party. They used to have pro-lifers in the Party. The Overton window (the range of acceptable policies) of the Party has moved far left, along with the Party’s standard-bearer. Socialism is found on the left side of the spectrum alongside the Party’s base and a good portion of its leadership.
Bernie Sanders and AOC
As for a working definition, socialism has often been described as public (government) “ownership” of the means of production (nearly all consequential property), or at least of Lenin’s economic “commanding heights”. Keep in mind that “ownership” is a form of control. Government can control the “commanding heights” without ownership, and that can be achieved with legislation and decrees to establish powerful taxation and regulatory regimes. A more accurate definition would substitute “ownership” with “control”.
There is a substantive difference in government intervention between the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Green New Deal. The controls to prevent conspiracies to dominate markets is far removed from power to micro-manage everything from Exxon to a dealership’s showroom to a mother’s decision to turn on the air conditioning to the residential preferences of a homebuyer to …. The control goes beyond the mere authoritarian and right into the space reserved for totalitarian. Bluntly put, it’s socialism.
Biden endorsed it, and many other forms of government force to dictate choices and habits of the people. He may offer a somewhat scaled-down version of it but, really, the argument in his party is over the shade of red – the color historically adopted by socialists – not whether it is red. Are we to get full-blown central planning (Bernie/AOC) or just a much bigger one than today’s scattershot version (Biden)?
Where would JFK fit in this party with his across-the-board tax cuts? There would be little room for the JFK of 1963 in platform committees chaired by Elizabeth Warren (wealth tax, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, racial reparations, defund the police, witch hunts for the chimerical systemic racism, open borders, etc.), Bernie (ditto), and AOC (ditto). He could be excused for thinking that he had accidentally stumbled into a meeting of Castro’s politburo.
Despite Biden’s denials, the acceptance of socialist proposals makes it hard for him to claim that he isn’t one. If elected, the government would move further left than even his professed political soulmate and career lefty, Obama, attempted.
The denial by Never-Trumpers like John Kasich is preposterous. He says that he “knows” that Biden isn’t a radical, but the verb belongs in the same category as “look”. You can’t “know” if his announcements and party’s official platform say otherwise. Kasich “hopes” that Biden isn’t a radical. Hope that a person isn’t what they say they are is a poor basis for adult conversation.
It’s like a prayer defense in basketball. The defense is actually a failure to play defense and a “hope” that your opponent will miss the shot. I’ve seen it as a high school basketball coach for many years. I’ve had to call many a timeout to stop it. “Hope” that your opponent is incompetent is a sure path to a losing record.
Socialism is poison to a nation, and it matters not if the dosage is administered by Bernie/AOC or Biden. Poison is still poison.
What is progressivism?
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in debate in 2016.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 proclaimed, “I’m a progressive who gets results and I will be a progressive president who gets results.” Well, what is she?
The genealogy of progressivism goes back to the 19th century, right alongside The Communist Manifesto, the Socialist International, eugenics, and the bankruptcy of racial supremacism. Some academics became impatient with the messiness of our constitutional republic and wanted to streamline it into the orderliness of the science lab, their beau ideal. Popular sovereignty would be pushed to the periphery of governance and the actual administration of it, the part in actual contact with the citizen, would be placed in the hands of people like them, the academically trained.
Progressivism is a cult, the cult of the expert; the expert ordained by an academic clerisy.
So, we had the minions of the EPA declare a retired couple’s property a sensitive wetland and thereby effectively seized control of it. It would result in the 2012 Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA in which the Court recognized the right of a citizen to seek redress of agency overzealousness in the courts. The EPA asserted that a good portion of their actions were beyond the reach of the courts. The EPA’s stand is the quintessence of the omnipotence of the “expert” enshrined in progressive dogma.
In this Oct. 19, 2011, photo, Chantell and Mike Sackett talk about their battle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over their right to build a home on a lot near Priest Lake. The EPA said that the lot included wetlands. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the couple. (Kathy Plonka)
Overwhelmingly, today, the official sponsor of progressivism is the Democratic Party. Progressives know where their big government bread is buttered; the Republicans, rejecting their earlier dalliances with it (think TR), chose a more free-market bun to spread the condiment.
Everywhere from the Democratic Party platform to the public antics of their leaders is displayed something for additional government cadres to do. Free college means more government hires in the Department of Education, and the IRS to enforce the new tax provisions to pay for the monstrosity. A wealth tax is a subsidy for IRS empire-building since new bean-counters and enforcers will have to brought on board to squeeze the dough out of a reluctant public. Racial reparations are a sop to DC’s identity-politics industrial complex and the IRS since eligibility will have to be determined, enforced, and checks written. The Green New Deal is as close to Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, as any prior attempt going back to Woodrow Wilson’s War Socialism in the heady days of WWI. Government planning is always labor intensive for government. New crusades against the spectral “systemic racism” is an invitation for a vast expansion of employment opportunities in the DOJ and the panoply of race-hustling agencies. When they aren’t directing the state’s powers and agents at their political opponents, the Party’s advocacy is a laundry list of more things for government to do. Now that’s progressivism in a nutshell.
The Democratic Party’s positions are a vast recruitment program for new armies of government employees to control the lives of the people while leaving a rump of a private sphere. The enlistees will have the paper qualifications of “expert” to brandish, and additional comrades thanks to the Pelosi/Schumer/Biden gang. Once in place, you’ll play hell to remove them.
The economic impact on private-sector Americans will be catastrophic, with the exception of the employees in the real estate industry of the greater metropolitan DC area.
If you’ll notice, the Democratic Party comes across as despicable, despicable in where they want to lead the country. Nothing was said about possible Republican malfeasance because the threat to the country comes from the Left, and Democratic Party is the party of the Left.
Today, the parties are more ideologically homogeneous than ever before. In the past, parties were coalitions. No longer. When was the last time you heard of a prominent pro-life Democrat? They are gone, along with the Scoop Jackson, Harry Truman, and JFK types. There can’t be a lot of anti-red Democrats because too many of them are red. Vote Democrat and you’ll get in tow many of the horrors that reason and history make abundantly clear.
Trump’s tweets are beside the point.
Before you mark your ballot, or mark the ballots for other people – thanks to rampant vote-by-mail schemes – please understand what’s at stake. Your vote, or votes, is a judgment on human nature with all that comes with it. It’s a choice for or against stern and pervasive mommy government, something clearly inimical to the Constitution and our mental health. It’s a judgment on the advisability of grotesquely taxing job creators and expecting no ill-effects. It’s a choice on the meaning of equality: one that grants carte blanche to a busybody Leviathan or one that is more in keeping with a color-blind society. It’s a choice for or against socialism and progressivism and their deadening effects on the vitality of a free society. Your vote should never be a choice of personalities. If it is for you, don’t vote. Your choice could saddle the rest of us with an appalling future.
In case you haven’t seen it, here is the clip of the woman who was tasered and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s football game.
A couple of immediate observations are in order. (1) Is outdoor mask wearing under the condition of social distancing efficacious? I have very good reason to doubt it. If irrelevant, the rule is madness and its enforcement to the extent of tasering and cuffing is dastardly. (2) The mild reaction of bystanders is deeply disturbing. The mindless compliance with probable stupidity and meekness while viewing the manhandling of a person is astounding. Something deep has happened to us, our leaders and us. Troubling, very troubling.
Across the country, we are experiencing despotism from state executives on down – the federal component being more restrained. Mostly, these encounters occur in “blue” jurisdictions even though the municipality might be in a “red” state. This says volumes about a common political DNA between progressive (Left-leaning) governments and the smothering of popular common sense. We are into the 9th month of the pandemic and many nations and would-be despots in our country are threatening to reimpose their totalitarian edicts as if they have learned nothing since January.
Either science has stood still or our rulers are blockheads. My money is on the latter.
Lockdowns, or versions of them, are much talked about, despite the ineffectiveness of the first go-around as evidenced by the resurgence of the virus in various locales. Universal mask-wearing is commanded, even outdoors, in spite of the absence of evidence of the bug’s spread in the open air in dispersed situations. Incidentally, the fear spread to the almost 7,000-ft. Logan Pass trail in Glacier National Park (Aug. 2020). The sight of people masking-up is shocking to me to this day for what is says about us as a people.
Schools are shuttered in many districts – and the mass of 4th graders remaining 4th graders into their 5th-grade year – without any evidence after 9 months of the bug’s spread among children and to adults. Astounding.
Whoever said it was spot-on (and it probably wasn’t Einstein): “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Repeating ineffective earlier actions may reflect the quixotic and paralyzing belief in no-risk. Combined with progressivism’s despotism streak, we have a population willing to stand by as a person displays more common sense than the people who are tasering and cuffing her. Astounding, absolutely astounding.
David Mamet, author and playwright, writing in the Aug. 10 edition of National Review (“The Nazis Got Your Mom”) succinctly captures in a short paragraph the absolute absurdity of two pieces of politicized boilerplate of our farcical times: Systemic Racism and Social Justice. They are part of a repetitive political jihad that fails to learn from past experience.
During the California lockdown, Mamet is cruising the websites of one of his favorite book stores and notices the plethora of anti-Trump offerings along with the business’s promise to fight the scourge of Systemic Racism. He continues as follows:
“Now, I don’t know what Systemic Racism is, but neither does anyone else. Like Social Justice, any communicable meaning is destroyed by the adjective. Both terms are indictments of Human Evil; its perpetrators are easily identifiable: They are those who request a definition.”
So we have the prefect weapons for this generation of revolutionary busybodies to control our minds and behavior. This will end at the same place where earlier political crusades landed: misery. Why? He writes:
“… the greatest lesson of History is that we never learn from History. And that no great crime was ever committed save in the name of Progress, or its stablemates Historical Necessity and Redress of Past Wrongs.”
The crushing thing about this latest round of lunacy is that it has captured the imagination of almost the entirety of one of our two institutional parties, the Democratic Party. The idiocy is free to flow through the “D” side of the ballot and our branches of government at all levels.
The madness has left the asylum and is poised to enter policy in a big way. Some people see it … like Mamet.
I am reading two books: Byron York’s “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump” and Gordon Wood’s “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson”. Today’s quote comes from “Friends Divided”.
‘Friends Divided’ by Gordon S. Wood
But, first, a few words are in order about “Obsession”. Reading just the first few chapters will elicit a slow burn about our secluded and insular DC elites. This Soviet-style nomenklatura is seriously undermining the whole concept of a self-governing republic. Please read it.
John Adams wrote in an essay in the Boston Gazette in 1765, “But when restraints [on government] are taken off, it becomes an incroaching [sic], grasping, restless, and ungovernable power.”
Antifa, BLM, rioters, statue topplers, the base and leadership of the Democratic Party, and infantile academics like Ibram X. Kendi are making Adams into the possessor of a crystal ball. They want to construct a totalitarian Leviathan on racial reparations, escalating taxes, The Green New Deal, government health care in the form of Medicare for All, and a jihad against a racism that is so broadly defined as to encompass controls on all aspects of a person’s life – in Kendi’s sophomoric mind, the battle for race-based “equities”. “Equities” is cover for equality-of-result at the hands of an omnipotent state. Revel’s totalitarian temptation (previously mentioned) is on full display.
A set of infected chickens will come home to roost if given the chance. Our times are interesting … and dangerous.
