The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century. Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian. Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s. The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.
Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard. Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion. It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears. Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one. The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry. The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.
Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government. Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings. The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.
Vincent Colyer
Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary. In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned. They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest. Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes. He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.
Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.
“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom. It is the blind spot of the Progressive. Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit. Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.
What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification. Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”. In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.
Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.
It didn’t last 20 years. By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore. Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”. The thing was demolished in 1972.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.
If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):
Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC. It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il. In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca. Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La. Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC. Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere. Need I say more?
Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il. No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen. Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”
The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing. They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”. A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6). Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility. This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.
Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape. Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence. Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.
California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives. “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class. Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant. Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.
The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home. Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience. Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district. Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.
And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking. No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.
The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”. In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class. If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016, http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition, http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
“The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone, https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
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.
Watch Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel interview one of the student leaders, Keeley Mullen, of the Million Student March in November of 2015. Pay attention to her list of demands and her reasoning … for what there was of it.
There’s the familiar clamor for money: $15/hr. student minimum wage, free college education, and vanquishing all student loan debt. When asked who’s going to pay for the largesse, Keeley’s train of logic goes off the tracks. She clearly sets her sites on the usual suspects of the “1%” and the “corporate model” of education. The rich and an abstraction are either at fault or to be looted. The incoherency is astounding.
Next, look at the furor faced by Yale’s Prof. Nicholas Christakis in November 2015 for asking students to lighten up and accept some semblance of free speech on campus (see Sources for a full account). Look for the crowd’s regimented mannerisms of finger clicking and turning one’s back with arms elevated and crossed above the head. And, of course, listen for the self-anointed victim’s insistence of an apology for ethereal hurts and accommodations to recover from the hard-to-pin-down harms.
The screams and assertions-without-proof come from an assumption that the power to control lies with the self-identified victim. The fingered and generalized “perp” is to have no defense. Those who disagree with the mob enter into discourse at great peril.
Speaking of mobs, view this scene at UC Berkeley in October of 2016 as student activists blocked white students from entering Sather Gate. Prominent on the barricades were LGBTQ firebrands.
The chant “Go Around” was aimed at white students for their purported “privilege”. Again, the stench of victimhood surrounds the event.
Or, rocket forward to January 2017 and the Women’s March. Here Ashley Judd strays into the Hitler cliché in a Trump diatribe along with the laundry list of bogeymen including a variety of “isms” and misogyny.
This is not one of Ashley’s finer moments.
Alicia Keys stepped to the mike with a syncopated chant of “We’re on fire”. By now, the March’s bellicosity has become quite trite (to borrow the phonetic rhythm of the Keys’ style of speechifying).
Scarlett Johanssen took her turn on stage to carry on with the misogyny angle and elevate Planned Parenthood (PP) to the Godhead. Did it occur to her that the debate about PP in public policy revolves around the question of making others pay for it? She could donate her annual salary – all tax deductible – for the next number of years to keep the thing afloat, so long as PP avoids the Auschwitz model of body parts marketing.
What do the above clips have in common, besides the fact that they’re all examples of Lefty activism? They project the alluring facade of group persecution. No single individual is responsible for anything. Groups carry a ready-made pardon for any and all conduct, if you’re so lucky as to land in the right cluster of fashionable victims. Their absolution can be reduced to the refrain, “It’s not my fault”.
Lately, the Right hasn’t been immune to the intoxicant. The manic-Right steps in it as they bemoan anything foreign, differently pigmented, and the wispy “establishment”. Railing against affirmative action has become an easy crutch to explain away a lack of industriousness by some – even though, in the case of affirmative action, it must be admitted that we have a program to benefit victims that creates victims. The effort is a walking contradiction.
Our modern fixation with blaming others has a pedigree going back to Genesis, if you’re a fundamentalist – if not, then figuratively speaking. Blaming others is first on the checklist to escape responsibility reaching back to Eve’s appetite for fruit.
We’ve become very ingenious in inventing schemes to dodge personal guilt. Our imaginations run wild in dreaming of social and political systems, and the philosophies to go with them, to circumvent individual accountability by subsuming difficulties in mysterious evildoers. Today’s campus snowflake has the same train of thought as yesterday’s Parisian mob parading around the streets with the heads of the Bastille’s guards on pikes.
The Paris mob with the heads of the guards on pikes after the guards ventured out of the fortress to negotiate their own surrender.Mostly college students in the downtown area of Los Angeles to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 8-9, 2016.
Surely there were many in the Paris crowd who found the behavior revolting, just as there probably were “safe space” activists who objected to the recent muscling of Charles Murray as goons also set about inflicting a concussion on his professorial escort at Middlebury College. Still, group guiltlessness, no matter the moment in history, provides cover for barbarity. Indeed, it’s the lubricant.
Students disrupt Charles Murray during his presentation at Middlebury College, March 2, 2017.
Denouncing others for your problems has been the principle incubator of government’s ruination of their own people. Take 2 examples from the 20th century: Argentina’s slide into Peronism and Weimar Germany’s inter-war dance with hyperinflation.
You could say that Germany’s affliction with hyper-inflation in the 1920’s was baked in the cake. Many Germans at the time liked to blame the Versailles Treaty and its reparations burden for its problems. More correctly, Germany’s government flooded the country with Treasury bills that were translated into money in order to finance the war. A money glut already existed by the time the guns fell silent on 11-11-11-1918.
Then, after the war, the monetary fire hose was yanked wide open by Germany’s elected government because it suited popular interests. Public debt shot up as spending expanded on things like generous public employee compensation while tax revenues stagnated from massive tax evasion. Inflation was welcomed by German exporters – it made German products cheaper in overseas markets – and government officials and their supporters as a way to injure the Allies and their reparations’ bill with worthless script.
The witches’ brew culminated in 4.97 x 1020 marks circulating about the country. The annual inflation rate reached its zenith at 182 billion percent by the end of 1923. Those on inflexible incomes as in salaried workers, pensioners, and depositors were wrecked.
A billion mark note, November, 1923. Large denominations were necessary to conduct transactions.Worthless marks, 1923. Sweeping them off the streets as litter and a woman lighting a fire with it.
In all of it, lurking deep in the German pscyhe, was an unwillingness to accept their defeat. As ex-Harvard and Stanford professor Niall Ferguson concludes in his The Ascent of Money (p. 105),
“… a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance – rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten – led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself.”
Germany’s cavalier treatment of fiscal and monetary matters has its tentacles in a widespread psychological predisposition to reject the war’s outcome, and in a reflex to blame others. The skids were greased for the rise of the then nascent NSDAP (Nazi Party). More about that later.
Juan Peron drinking coffee between 1945 and 1955.
It just so happens that travelling around Italy well into the rule of il Duce (Mussolini) was an Argentinian military officer, Juan Peron. On assignment by the War Ministry in 1939 to study mountain warfare in the Alps, attend the University of Turin, and perform as military observer in Europe, he became acquainted with Italian Fascism. The experience would leave an impression.
His valuable assistance in a couple of military coups, and a deepening partnership with powerful labor unions, would ensure his rise to power. The political marriage of Peron and Argentina’s mega-unions was made possible by his championing of their power, benefits, and perks in his his role as Labor Minister and later as Vice-President. The well-traveled route to ruination is programmed in the GPS: sympathies turned into extravagant giveaways to powerful special interests.
Peron as Vice President (r) and his political benefactor, Pres. Edelmiro Farrell, 1945.
The distinction in popular American conversation between fascism and the Left is more of a naked prejudice than a reality. It shows in the career of Juan Peron. In 1945, Peron is running for president as the Labor Party’s candidate, having previously established himself as the champion of their cause for years. The unions, and his wife’s (Evita) demagoguery, rescued him from jail so he could run as president. He ran as the unions’ protector and bulwark against Yanqui (U.S.) interference, a familiar leftist trope. His fascist sympathies were apparent to American officials during the war, raising concerns about Argentina’s intentions in the latter stages of the war.
His fascist connections would bear fruit in a kind of underground railroad to Argentina for Nazi war criminals. Such is the ideological mish-mash of Peronism.
So, what is Peronism? It’s a disparate collection of ideas and beliefs that can be boiled down to “It’s not my fault”. The first gambit of professed guiltlessness is to throw aspersions at the Left’s favorite foil, the rich. In 1948, Peron spelled it out in a speech.
“… economic policy which maintained that this was a permanent and perfect school of capitalist exploitation should be replaced by a doctrine of social economy under which the distribution of our wealth, which we force the earth to yield up to us and which furthermore we are elaborating, may be shared out fairly among all those who have contributed by their efforts to amass it.” [my emphasis]
This kind of thing might just as easily come out of the mouths of today’s social justice warriors. In fact, it did. I refer you to Keeley Mullen at the beginning.
Peron put a label on his gambit, “Justicialism”. Anyway, it’s the same old victim/victimizer dualism at work in a set of different geographical coordinates. Peron condensed the oppressed down to the “workers”. Point #4 of his “Twenty Truths” says, “There is only one class of men for the Perónist cause: the workers”.
Practically speaking, what did this secular sermonizing mean for the fortunes of the country? The economy was politicized and the nation became a basket case of bailouts, national defaults, and international financial interventions. Per capita (per person) GDP was the same in 1988 as it was 1959. The economy didn’t grow – a complete reversal of the situation from around the turn of the century (1870-1913). Argentina would be overtaken by the “Asian tigers” (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea).
Inflation, that ‘ol government-engineered bugaboo, would flair up in double digits between 1945-1952, 1956-1968, 1970-1974; and reach new heights of ferocity by trebling and quadrupling in 1975-1990. The crescendo was 5,000% in 1989.
In 1989, the country couldn’t even turn on the lights with daily blackouts averaging 5 hours. The government ran out of money – not because it spent it, but because it ran out of paper and the printers went on strike. A riot erupted in a Buenos Aires supermarket when a 30% on-the-spot price increase was announced over the store’s loudspeaker. Pandering to self-anointed victims with the usual blame in tow has very unpleasant side-effects.
It hasn’t gotten much better: 2002 “Price Watch” price increase in a Buenos Aires supermarket. It could occur hourly.
Where inflation leads, default follows. It happened in 1982, 1989, 2002, and 2004. If victim/victimizer blame-game mythology was a drug awaiting FDA approval, it would not only be proven to be not efficacious (the legal approval standard), but found poisonous. There’d be a run on law firm ads on cable tv if it got past the regulators.
Peron certainly wasn’t running the show during the whole period of Argentina’s slide into insolvency. His main contribution was showing the country how to do it. Thanks Juan and Evita.
Juan and Evita waving to the crowd in 1950.
Entire political groups are wallowing in a blame-game belief system. These ideological movements are nothing but outsized masquerade balls for “It’s not my fault”. Many would turn out to be e quite lethal. Reaching down into history’s nightmares we find Mussolini’s Fascist Party, the inspiration for Peronism.
Mussolini next to a bronze Caesar outside Fascist Party headquarters, 1943.
If one didn’t know better, Mussolini could be easily confused with Lenin if a stranger was limited to listening to him on the radio. His political dogma was a grab bag of international socialism’s platitudes with “international” replaced by “national”. We’d hear the same worn out pronouncements of “exploitation” and sympathy for the “oppressed”. Naturally, the victim requires a victimizer, or some such sort. It’s a necessary ingredient for the “exploitation” gambit. Often, cast for the role are the “privileged” or, better yet, the “rich”.
It’s too easy to prove the point. Take a look at these samples, in chronological order:
In 1910, still in his old incarnation as an “international” socialist, he said, “There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters”.
Jump forward to 1919, now as full-fledged socialist of the “national” variety – a Fascist – he blathers, “This is what we propose now to the Treasury: either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them”. The list of “victims” is expanded to war veterans.
In 1921, he announced, “When the war is over, in the world’s social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth’s riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”
In 1933 he declares war on “laissez-faire” and “capitalism”: “To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.”
As an aside, in the 1930’s, after FDR’s ascendancy in the U.S., Mussolini recognized his affinity with the New Deal and its intellectual godfather, John Maynard Keynes: “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”
Further, “Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”
I could go on, if one was convinced that the quotes were out of context. They aren’t. They were typical and commonplace for him. Our social justice warriors of today should be careful when they throw about the charge of “fascist”. They unknowingly have a more intense fondness for Mussolini’s beliefs than the Federalist Society.
And while I’m at it, what about that frothy, toxic brew fermenting in Germany at the time of Mussolini’s heyday? Once again, those old stalking horses of “exploitation” and “oppression” appear under the guise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) doctrines. For these folks, the Allies, their degenerate and corrupting civilization (in their words), the Jews, Jewry’s capitalist lapdogs (in their words), and opposing street-gang socialists of the “international” variety fulfill the role of victimizer or oppressor.
Hitler in the early 1920s.
Sometimes a catchy slogan can encapsulate all of the purported horribles. For many Germans at the time, it was the “stab-in-the-back” myth. Germany’s war effort, it was said, was undermined by traitorous acts at home. The zeal to blame others will be injected with too much caffeine.
The origin of the fable could be traced to a 1919 conversation between German Gen. Erich Ludendorff and British Gen. sir Neill Malcom.
Sir Neill Malcolm, 1931Gen. Erich Ludendorff
Malcolm asked Ludendorff for his opinion of the major reason for Germany’s defeat. Ludendorff responded with the lack of home front support for the war. Malcolm clarified with the question: “Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff jumped at the suggestion, “Stabbed in the back? Yes, that’s it, exactly; we were stabbed in the back”. Thus was born a rationale to blame others rather than Germany’s reckless prosecution of the war … authored by people like Ludendorff.
Subsequently, Jews became an easy target to assign blame. Alfred Rosenberg – NSDAP ideologist and later to be hung as a war criminal – spelled it out: “In theory the majority decides, but in reality it is the international Jew that stands behind it [all the evils that befell Germany].”
Alfred Rosenberg in London, 1933.Alfred Rosenberg, on the left with hands crossed, at a party meeting in Munich, 1925.
To give a flavor of this version of the noxious scapegoat, here’s a quote from a pamphlet, “The Jew as World Parasite”:
“In this war for the very existence of the German people, we must daily remind ourselves that Jewry unleashed this war against us. It makes no difference if the Jew conceals himself as a Bolshevist or a plutocrat, a Freemason or uses some other form of concealment, or even appears without any mask at all: he always remains the same. He is the one who so agitated and spiritually influenced the peoples that stand against us today such that they have become more or less spineless tools of International Jewry.”
The comment could be penned by any of the Nazi usual suspects. Regardless, it’s a replay of the same old monotonous blame-game.
The Jew in Nazi propaganda as an evil force lurking behind the Allies.
Need I go into Marx and Lenin’s overwrought costuming of blame as elaborate political theory? The oppressed/oppressor jig is the heart of the program. Focusing on Lenin for brevity’s sake, he castigates the “bourgeois” (i.e. capitalist) state as “the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class”. Marx’s dull verbosity is of the same vein.
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao during Labor Day demonstration, 2016, the Philippines.
“It’s Not My Fault”, if history is any guide, is a real crowd-pleaser. All-too-often, it’s a scheme to bilk others – usually a select few – and gravitate power to a politically enterprising cadre. The scenario is a zombie that won’t stay down. We are seeing it play before our eyes.
As was stated before, the so-called “alt-right” has fashioned for itself a nice little corner in the who’s who of oppressors. They like to talk of the predations of the “establishment”. Like all such iterations, the more airy and vague the oppressor, the better and more useful. Lenin would be comfortable with the language. The term was a favorite of some rallying to the Trump bandwagon.
Not to be outdone, the modern Left in its post-election incarnation is targeting Republican lawmakers as the corporeal symbol of their laundry list of oppressors. Their recent behavior at townhalls isn’t bi-partisan, directed at both Republicans and Democrats. It targets Republicans. It is not reflective of the general American electorate. It’s a coordinated, well-financed operation … of the Left.
What unites the Left’s partisans is an ideology rooted in a view of the world of those without “privilege” in need of a powerful state to even out the results of an unfair existence. The rationale is tailored to demand the creation and expansion of entitlements, like Obama’s ACA. The environment-as-victim, with its climate change dogma hitched, is ready-made for use on the barricades. Any attempts to roll back the administrative state – except when it comes to restraint on sexual license – is a carte blanche excuse to gin up the hive. Efforts to lower taxes on the upper-income brackets is always and forever seen as an assault on government’s sacred duty to equalize life’s results.
It’s like a video on perpetual rewind. More correctly, it’s like those present-day renditions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern garb. The stage set and costumes may be different, but it is still the play, “It’s Not My Fault!”
The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, 2008. Weimar Germany’s hyper-inflationary crisis is described in pp. 101-107; Argentina’s economic collapse under Peron is described in pp. 109-116.
The conversation between Sir Neill Malcolm and Erich Ludendorff can be found in Wheeler-Bennett, John W. (Spring 1938), “Ludendorff: The Soldier and the Politician”, Virginia Quarterly Review. 14 (2): 187–202.
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 much talked-about divide in America of “blue” versus “red” is real. The two factions conflict at the most basic cultural level. A “blue” mind-set pervades almost everywhere by its control of and access to media, corporate America, and educational institutions. It invades and conflicts with the more traditional outlook of “red” America. You can’t get away from blue-America’s weltanschauung (worldview). It’s omnipresent.
Super Bowl LI provided no sanctuary from the onslaught. An Audi ad has a male voice worrying about the discrimination his daughter will face: “Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets?” You can watch it here.
If the commercial was targeting the NFL fan base, the probable $10 million ad buy may have missed the mark. NFL fans are almost two-thirds male, three-quarters white, 91% age 18 or older, and almost three-quarters earning $40k or more (as of 2013). Was this advertising or sermonizing?
An alternative explanation follows the provocation principle of media marketing. Just be over-the-top in some way and you’ll get looks, clicks, and tweets. But why does outrageousness appear to overwhelmingly lean left? I suspect sermonizing to be closer to the truth.
Pontificating wasn’t limited to a compulsive anguish over alleged gender inequities. If the audience wasn’t pummeled with the usual pickups and beer, multiculturalism and its cousin “diversity” were thrust at viewers. Airbnb, a marketer of vacation properties, seemed more intent on establishing its multicultural bonafides than renting a Maui condo.
Coca-cola trotted out a 2014 Super Bowl commercial with the same message. Beauty and goodness are glued to racial and ethnic diversity, not to individual goodness, in these things. To be in the land of the righteous, “difference” as part of group identity is the sanctifying grace. Group “difference” alone is all that matters. It stops there.
Once ethnic and racial diversity is conferred with the halo of goodness, where is a person to stand on the key “diversity” issue of immigration? Quite frankly, opposition to open borders must place you somewhere between purgatory and hell.
An all-in for diversity creates a mind prejudiced against accepting the jarring realities related to “diversity”. Harvard’s Robert Putnam stumbled into a hornets’ nest in 2007 when he uncovered the downside. His research discovered a decline in civic engagement and social capital in diverse communities. People don’t care much about each other and they withdraw into the isolation of their homes. He writes, “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
Maybe the withdrawal “like a turtle” could have something to do with the ethnic youth gangs. Nortenos and Surenos gang alliances, MS-13, etc., plague many of the poorer ethnic neighborhoods.
MS-13 gang members, Los Angeles
Granted, gangs have been evident throughout U.S. history in all slices of the poorer demographic pie.
Camorra mob, NYC – Navy St. Gang – Sicilian, Italian immigrantPurple Gang, Detroit – Jewish immigrant gang
They are a notable feature of ethnic districts, much replenished with new arrivals during periods of high immigration. It may be a result of a social anomie, an uprooted people without the civic controls of the old country. Still, the prospect of declining public morality is threatening to any family having to live with it. Perhaps, “hunkering down” and separating oneself from the immediate surroundings is an understandable reaction.
My guess is that ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods have a better chance if residents have common values and language, and a common middle class educational, income, and occupational orientation. That would mean some sense of assimilation. “Assimilation”, though, is blasphemy in the church of diversity.
Many of the Super Bowl commercials were sermons from the diversity seminary. More than that, they are a window into the modern corporate soul. Along with the appropriate dress and manners in the corporate boardroom, part of the uniform includes a blue-America ethos.
The secular martyring of girls and immigrants and the worship of diversity are elements of the dogma. Rob Schwartz, chief executive of the marketing firm of TBWA\Chiat\Day New York (whose clients include McDonald’s, Michelin, GoDaddy, Nissan) at halftime proclaimed, “If there’s anything that’s screaming out here, it’s diversity. People are saying, ‘Is this trolling Trump?’ I don’t think it’s trolling. It’s a big smack in the face of ‘dude, this is America.”
Corporate mission statements are bland affirmations of Schwartz’s enthusiastic declaration. “Diversity” is a mantra in Coca-cola’s self-professed mission: “The Coca-Cola Company’s global diversity mission is to mirror the rich diversity of the marketplace we serve and be recognized for our leadership in Diversity, Inclusion and Fairness in all aspects of our business …. Diversity is at the heart of our business.”
Apple proudly announces its fealty at the “diversity” altar. It’s integral to their employee relations and hiring:
“We see diversity as everything that makes an employee who they are. We foster a diverse culture that’s inclusive of disability, religious belief, sexual orientation, and service to country …. Creating an inclusive culture takes both commitment and action. We’re helping employees identify and address unconscious racial and gender bias. We’re cultivating diverse leadership and tech talent. We’re continuing our advocacy for LGBTQ equality, investing in resources for Veterans and service members and their families, and exploring new ways to support employees with disabilities.”
Apple’s corporate scripture is a veritable laundry list of the fashionable victims’ groups.
Seattle-based Starbucks is similarly hitched to the “diversity” train. Under the mission statement heading “Creating A Culture of Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity” we find the following bullet points,
“At the heart of our business, we seek to inspire and nurture the human spirit – understanding that each person brings a distinct life experience to the table. Our partners are diverse not only in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age, but also in cultural backgrounds, life experiences, thoughts and ideas.”
“Embracing diversity only enhances our work culture, it also drives our business success. It is the inclusion of these diverse experiences and perspectives that create a culture of empowerment, one that fosters innovation, economic growth and new ideas.”
A Google search would uncover more of the stuff. Corporate America is immersed in the doctrines of secular martyring and diversity. And so are the kiddies. The education blob is wallowing in it as much as any corporate HR department. Nothing like spreading the faith to the next generation of soon-to-be activists.
“Diversity” has a prominent place in the curricular standards for the youngest of the blob’s clients, kindergartners. Under California’s “Historical and Cultural Context” of the “Visual Arts Content Standards” for kindergarten, the state pays homage to “diversity” in the section titled “Understanding the Historical Contributions and Cultural Dimensions of the Visual Arts”:
“Students analyze the role and development of the visual arts in past and present cultures throughout the world, noting human diversity as it relates to the visual arts and artists.”
The “diversity” incantation is littered throughout your public school protocols. I’ve got nearly 30 years of exposure to the hogwash as a public school teacher at the secondary and community college levels.
How does this secular doctrine enter the state’s mandates for teaching the kids? The stuff percolates from the college ed departments, and they train the teachers and administrators. A sample of such guidance is enlightening.
Lily Wong Fillmore of UC Berkeley, like many of her professional kin in college ed departments, lays out her view of the situation in her study, “The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” . Beware, teachers, you’re part of the problem in her estimation. Under the heading “But is diversity the problem?”, she writes,
“The problem has never been that the kids, whatever their background, couldn’t handle the rigors of the school’s curriculum––they could, and would have––the problem has been that educators have doubted that all of their students are prepared or motivated to do the work the curriculum required.”
You see, cutting to the chase, according to Fillmore, teachers and others are not sufficiently devoted to the “diversity” mantra. More likely, teachers face the realities that Ms. Fillmore pretends doesn’t exist. Ms. Fillmore, et al, can’t accept the uncomfortable possibility that “diversity” puts intense stress on public institutions. But don’t mention that, and don’t dare bring into question the false god of “diversity”.
Despite the pressures on the schools, the ed blob’s satellites fully embrace the same party line. The ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), one of the blob’s guidance and lobbying arms, is a stickler for “diversity”. In its “Introduction: Teaching in Diverse, Standards-Based Classrooms”, “diversity” is approvingly referred to as a “mosaic”.
“Factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and language also contribute to the classroom mosaic and may influence the cultural characteristics that students bring.”
And what do the ASCD’s “experts” want to do about it? “Diversity”, the abstraction, is always-and-forevermore good and the young ‘uns must be made to accept it. Littered throughout the “Teaching in Diverse …” document is fetishization of “diversity”. As in,
“Cultural diversity gives students a chance to learn about different languages, customs, and worldviews.”
“Through everyday activities in diverse school settings, students are challenged to find ways of interacting effectively with students who are culturally different. In so doing, they develop important skills in cross-cultural competence.”
The mind-set is buried in the psyche from a person’s earliest days all the way through adulthood. The problem isn’t with “diversity” as such. It’s the worship of “diversity”. The thing absorbs so much of the attention of the school that other necessities begin to recede, like discipline. In fact, “diversity” may be encouraging behavioral problems by giving a green light to grievance, real or imagined. The result can be unsafe schools. Take a look.
What is needed is to replace the overbearing “diversity” dogma with simple human kindness and respect. Yet, simple kindness isn’t nearly as useful in preparing young minds if your goal is the student taking one side in controversial issues … like immigration. C.S. Lewis wrote about the mind-forming potential of a biased curriculum in Abolition of Man.
“It is not a theory they put into his [the student] mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”
After years of “diversity” sermonizing, we have a generation much less likely to understand the counter argument to broad and nearly unfettered immigration. Not being able to understand the argument makes it easier to dismiss as mere bigotry. However, the real bigotry is a prejudice against other and unfamiliar arguments. This bigotry was implanted by a tendentious abstraction from the beginning.
Everywhere we look, we find the tentacles of the exhortation to treat girls and immigrants as secular martyrs. Alongside, the drumbeat of “diversity” plants multiculturalism as an unalloyed good. Counterfactual realities are waved aside as nonexistent. From Super Bowl commercials to the corporate boardroom to the classroom, it’s the same mind-numbing message. It’s as if we are expected to ignore the daily realities that brush up against us on the street and in our classrooms.
Chico Marx in Duck Soup could very well be the spokesman for the blue-America congregation when he said, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
RogerG
Sources:
“Escapism Reigns in Super Bowl Commercials, but Politics Proves Inescapable”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/5/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/business/super-bowl-commercials-politics.html?_r=0
“27 JAN 2013 SPORTS FAN DEMOGRAPHICS”, Danielle Eby, openddorse, http://opendorse.com/blog/2013-sports-fan-demographics/
“Challenge for Super Bowl Commercials: Not Taking Sides, Politically”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/2/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/super-bowl-advertising-fox-border-wall.html
“The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” Lily Wong Fillmore, University of California at Berkeley, The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !”
ASCD, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109011/chapters/Introduction@_Teaching_in_Diverse,_Standards-Based_Classrooms.aspx
“The downside of diversity: A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?”, Michael Jonas, 8/5/2007, Boston Globe, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/
While reading the December 20, 2016 issue of Forbes, I ran into an article, “The Just 100: America’s Best Corporate Citizens”. It extolled certain companies in a variety of industries for their humane and environmentalist policies.
Further into the issue was a small piece titled, “Giving Big to Change the World”. It identified 10 large donations that go big to “Change the World”. Michael Bloomberg’s $30 million grant to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the Donald Graham and William and Karen Ackman’s $50 million contribution to TheDream.US for scholarships to the undocumented, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation’s handout to The ClimateWorks Foundation to mold a “low-carbon society” are but a few examples.
Both pieces shared space with an article on Silicon Valley’s tech dynamo NIVIDIA and one of its founders, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Not uncommon for the Valley’s success stories, the author, Aaron Tilley, celebrated the lavish employee perks and environmentalism that permeates the corporate culture.
((Huang and NIVIDIA)
What’s the point? Colossal corporate America, big philanthropy, and Silicon Valley inhabit “blue” America. By “blue”, I mean bastions of progressivism, modern liberalism, and the Left. The terms are practically synonymous. And “blue” America is toxic to the rest of the country, called “red” America.
Today’s progressivism encompasses a fixation on sexual/melanin-count/ethnic diversity and solipsism (the relativistic libertine individual as the center of all things). It also incorporates environmentalism. Environmentalism isn’t science. It’s ideology. It is a cluster of beliefs at home with progressivism.
People sometimes confuse environmentalism with science, and try to bleach environmentalism of its “ism”. The two are distinct things. Science can depict the heat-trapping properties of CO2. It can’t predetermine policy choices requiring more than “heat-trapping” as a consideration. Filling the gap from fact to decision is environmentalism’s ideological bias to socially engineer a particular definition of the better person and society. The alleged betterment aligns with the prejudices of “blue” America to the detriment of “red” America.
The consequences are a purging of progressives in “red” America as “blue” America’s policy preferences threaten to destroy the livelihoods of many in “red” America. The 2016 election was a clash of the two Americas.
A group of coal miners wave signs for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as they wait for a rally in Charleston, W.Va., Thursday, May 5, 2016. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
In Salena Zito’s piece in the Washington Examiner (1/29/17), “The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, the Democrats are facing near extinction in “red” America. As Kevin, a longtime Johnstown, Pa., Democrat and Hillary voter, said,
“There is no one who looks like me in the party anymore. Every single thing that is part of my weekly routine is constantly under attack by my own party. I am a gun owner, I am pro-life and I work in the energy sector. That pretty much makes me an enemy of my own party.”
The party is in the process of cannibalizing the more moderate Blue Dogs in its caucus. The faction has shrunk from 44 in 2006 to the 17 of today. The handwriting for the Dogs appeared on the wall in 2006. Joe Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, a classic Blue Dog, lost the party primary to the leftist Ned Lamont. Lieberman won the general running as an independent. Today, the party is the result of the cross-breeding of the Sierra Club, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. There’s no room for the pro-lifer … or the coal miner.
The party is reflexively Left and increasingly relegated to urban islands, college towns, and the coasts. The collapse of the party in the vast region between the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges and the western edges of Atlantic coastal plain is recounted in the loss of statehouses, governorships, and federal officeholders in this vast area not normally seen as haunts for the beautiful and trendy people.
The denizens of “blue” America are surprised that a West Virginia coal miner might find the infatuation with low carbon as a threat to the family income. Amazingly, the very thing that the trendy lefties are trying to destroy, coal, along with thousands of livelihoods, may end up rescuing states like California from the self-inflicted blackouts that will strangle those Santa Clara server farms.
You see, that “low-carbon” future may mean a chaotic energy one. “Sustainable” energy really means “variable” energy. Solar and wind don’t track household use. Solar peeks during the day while the ac continues whirring away at night. And, of course, the wind is the wind.
Sorry, there’s no way to store any surplus generated during the day or when the wind is howling. You use or lose it.
To keep energy flowing in the grid at all times during peaks and when lunar radiance has replaced solar, you need the backstop of nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro, and geothermal. But the phobia of climate change, so much in vogue in the blue bubbles, has resulted in a breakdown of the backstop. Blue states like California will feel the pinch.
Natural gas is the backstop. It is preferable not only because it’s cheaper. It’s because the alternatives have been executed (coal), fallen into obsolescence (nuclear), and nature doesn’t cooperate with droughts (hydro) and subsurface volcanism (geothermal).
For the lefty tekkies, coal is evil coal. A coal company exec will be a lonely person in the Santa Clara social circuit. Those coal-fired plants in the blue fiefdoms have long since gone the way of the dodo bird. Obama’s people were trying to exterminate the things nationwide before the Trump train disrupted the endeavor.
That leaves natural gas. Fracking – another thing despised by the activists – has made it cheap, for now. Prices are expected to rise this year. It is transported by pipeline, another thing on the activist hit list.
Storage is limited in a few central locations. If anything should happen to those places, especially in states handcuffed to windmills and solar panels, well, buy a generator, get a gun for protection (do this at least 2 weeks before things go dark), and barricade yourself in your home.
California was warned by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) of blackouts last year. In 2005, LA’s Aliso Canyon gas storage facility was closed due to a leak. It has only partially reopened. The nearby La Paloma plant will close soon as the direct fallout of the state’s climate change policies. The backstop in Southern California is beginning to be dismantled.
SoCalGas Aliso Canyon 3
New York, and much of the northeast, has similarly tacked left. Tony Clark, ex-FERC commissioner, said, “The Northeastern states are notorious for policies that de-industrialize their economies. They are nothing if not consistent.” If you lack a graduate degree in computer science, a resume’ chock-a-block full of tekkie employment, and sufficient personal wealth to rise above the over-inflated market, make a mad dash away from the coasts. Rescue yourself from “blue” lunacies.
When the lights start going out, will that sober up Angelinos and those in Manhattan penthouses to a greater appreciation of coal?
“Red” America understands that “blue” America is trying to impose a fantasy. If “blue” America is granted the power to do it, “red” America loses its livelihoods and “blue” America gets to experience “Escape from New York”. Lose, lose. Eh?
2016 was the year red said “no” to blue.
RogerG
Sources:
Forbes, 12/20/16
“The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, 1/29/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-democrats-diversity-challenge/article/2613114
