Edmund Burke in the late 18th century warned of the disaster awaiting the French nation as their revolution teetered off into the Reign of Terror. Political power and political institutions are poor substitutes, he wrote, for the character forming role of traditional faith, family, and the “little platoons” of civilization reaching beyond the home in voluntary associations in the neighborhood and community. When someone’s detailed scheme bypasses the “little platoons” in order to politically engineer a better person for an imaginary better world, a calamity awaits. Past human experience proves it.
A man cleans a skull near a mass grave at the Chaung Ek torture camp run by the Khmer Rouge in this undated photo. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The 20th century is littered with the horrors of these political experiments of grand social engineering; a lesson that today’s Democrats have forgotten or never learned. Towed by zealous and immature minds, the party lurches to the extreme left side of the political spectrum in an embrace of a fairy-tale heaven on earth with them as the grand viziers overseeing the immense project, just like the previous students of Karl Marx: Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, and Castro before them. We are on the cusp of a replay of that sordid story.
Soviet central planning is in the offing in the form of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Higher taxes, racial reparations, and “reimagine policing” will confiscate more wealth, enforce racial group guilt leading to more wealth and property seizures, and lay the population open to the zealous and partisan mobs after law enforcement has been “reimagined”, something reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, the Bolshevik goons, and the Jacobin’s inflamed Paris hordes. Few will recognize the country once Sanders and the Squad have realized their dream.
We need look no further than our own past for additional proof of the consequences, a time before Bernie bros and the giddy AOC. In 1864, Maj. Gen. John Carleton wanted to finally solve the Navajo problem. In an earlier expedition, he looked upon the Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River at the edge of the Staked Plains in eastern New Mexico as an ideal place to ship the entire Navajo nation (the Diné), in spite of others who cautioned him of the poor soil and fetid water. He had in his mind the quick transformation of an entire nation into sedentary pastoralists and no one could dissuade him. So began the infamous 450-mile Long Walk of the Navajos from their ancestral lands in present-day northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to far eastern New Mexico.
Maj. Gen. James Henry Carleton
Carleton is a case study of the zealot with great political power which was conferred upon him in the midst of the Civil War. He was an energetic, strong-willed detail man who was confident in his design for the Diné and ability to make it happen. It resulted in a four-year-long reign of misery with a Navajo death toll of around 2,400. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman put the kibosh to the whole thing in 1868 and signed a treaty which allowed the Navajos to return to a large reservation in their ancestral land.
Map of the Navajo Long Walk.Photograph c. 1864 of Navajos after enduring the forced march to Hweeldi, or the Bosque Redondo.Navajo group at Indian Issue House, Bosque Redondo era, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, ca. 1864–1868. Photograph by the United States Army Signal Corps, courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives.This group of Navajos and U.S. Soldiers gathered together near Fort Sumner during the Navajo internment at Bosque Redondo in 1866.
There’s just something ominous about people with great power who claim to know what’s best for us. Today’s Democratic Party is filled with the very same arrogant half-ignorant. Unschooled in the dangers and failures of big government and utopias, they push ahead in the hope that the population will confer upon them the power to do what they promise. The promise is a devastating and hollow one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Be careful what you wish for because you will get it.”
A family wearing masks walks in downtown Los Angeles on March 22. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)
Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America in 1831 to initially examine our penal systems. His observations quickly expanded to include the distinctive nature of the American character in contrast to Europeans. He described an American as more rambunctious, independent, and more likely to accept risk. Using sailing ships to illustrate the point, even though the seamanship and vessels were quite similar, American ships got to Canton for a load of tea with one stop at port in a two-year voyage while European voyages consisted of multiple stops. Needless to say, Americans had a higher return-on-investment.
As he writes, “… the European navigator is cautious about venturing onto the high seas. He sets sail only when the weather is inviting.” An American “sets sail while the storm still rages” and “often ends in shipwreck, yet no one else plies the seas as rapidly as he does.” Further, highlighting self-reliance, “Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own.”
Daniel (1734-1820) and his wife Rebecca travelling westwards to Kentucky, by George Caleb Bingham, 1851 or 1852. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our ancestors flooded over the Appalachian Mtns. How many Americans today could withstand the ardors of the trek and cut a living out of the wilderness? I suspect a diminishing few..
Are we the same people as our ancestors? I wonder. Some have concluded that we have been “feminized”, meaning that we increasingly dread risk in the same manner as a mother is apoplectic about the most minimal discomfort to her baby. We might be about as far removed from our 19th century predecessors as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is from its gray wolf ancestor (Canis lupus), about 14,000 years, for good or for ill.
Take for instance the ready submission to the wearing of masks in regards to COVID-19. One pundit referred to the compunction for mask wearing as “walking billboards of fear”. She’s right! Many of these people are strolling advertisements of gripping phobias.
The docility doesn’t stop there. It extends to the willing acceptance without questioning of authoritarian decrees for lockdowns, six-foot social distancing, an end to common worship, etc. The meek may inherit the earth, but our inheritance will resemble an existence in a padded cell overseen by a cadre of wardens and guards.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the indispensable role of the entrepreneur as economic adventurer. Everyone else rides in his or her wake, not everyone being so compose by temperament or ability. These economic adventurers aren’t mommies but swashbucklers of risk and innovation. We still produce them but they are easily counterbalanced by a growing army of power-hungry “experts” and a growing national population inured and dependent on the credentialed with political power.
The ground has been prepared for a new public ethos. It’s a mental state among a critical mass of the population that hovers between three semi-mystical orders: the cults of safety, the “expert”, and the state who embodies them. Combine the longing for a zero-risk utopia, a class of certified shamans with the hidden gnosis, and an authority with the power to make it happen and you have a society more at home in the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the Federalist Papers. Safety and little tolerance for risk surpasses every other consideration and the public timidly goes along.
Helicopter parents of today – a byproduct of the cult of safety.Kids on bikes in helmets. Today, to jump on a bike without one is considered recklessness of the highest order.Kids on bikes in a photo from the 1950’s. How did we ever survive?
We have a population riddled with the submissive and the dependent, a dependency on the state and its credentialed overseers. The situation cultivates a population in paralysis when the promised services disappear because state and local authorities reneged on their civic responsibility in places like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc., etc., etc. Few citizens are willing, able, and emotionally ready to stop the annihilation of their communities. They have boxed themselves into a corner with the only recourse being the scramble to flee. Popular docility means that we go from the acceptance of authoritarian decrees to a bewilderment in the face of mobs who rampage with the quiet endorsement of the powerful.
This is not meant to be a piece against the wearing of masks. The use of masks should be, like all mitigations, conditional, conditional, conditional. It should not be a papal bull emanating out of the state capitol or DC. And if it does, there will be moments when the surviving residue of self-reliance and personal responsibility will have to rear its head to check an overweening state.
Can we recover from the stupor inculcated by the modern, progressive state? I don’t know. We are becoming a different breed of citizen. Indeed, are we more subject than citizen?
Li Zhensheng at the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
We are experiencing a collective amnesia. As the Democratic Party descends further into a mania for a collectivistic dystopia, reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and as the movement’s younger zealots deface the public square and intimidate alternative voices, our country seems adrift on what to make of it all, having forgotten or never been informed that history is rhyming, as Mark Twain would have put it.
It takes monumental courage to persevere in the face of brutalities from the mob, like the ones currently pillaging our public squares. There are a few such people who deserve our everlasting praise for their stand for decency. One such person was Li Zhensheng, the sometimes covert photographer of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who passed away June 23 of this year in Queens. He gave voice to millions of voiceless victims who, without him, would have remained nameless and unknown abstractions.
He showed in good resolution what a crowd of mostly young and indoctrinated zealots can mutilate in the name of their narrow, close-minded cause. Thank you, Li Zhensheng, for reminding us of the danger posed by street-thugs-with-a-cause.
The Cultural Revolution poster says it all: “Destroy the old!”
Please view the photographs with an eye for their resemblance to what is happening today in places as diverse as our Senate Judiciary Committee during the orchestrated sliming of Brett Kavanaugh to the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC, and beyond. Today’s mobs take no second place for wanton depravity.
Beatings and public humiliations. Sound familiar?Youthful zealots. Look familiar? Youthful zealots. Look familiar?Public beatings and humiliations. Look familiar?Assault, battery, and humiliation. Remind you of anything on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, NYC, etc.?More of the same, like more of the same on our urban streets.More of the same.Pity the victim who falls to the mob.More beatings and public humiliations. Welcome to the world of BLM and Antifa. The scope of their vision is totalitarian.More of the same. I could flood the zone with Li’s photographs, every one a precursor of our current and thuggish street theater.
Our left-leaning media, hot for any evidence of disenchantment with Trump by their blatant showcasing of anti-Trump groups like the Lincoln Project, missed, or simply ignored, the even more eventful sea change in the Democratic Party. In the July 7 Democratic primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District, Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel, a three-decade veteran of Congress.
An old-style liberal of the JFK stripe, Engel faced a socialist – which is a more truthful word for radical progressive – in the person of Bowman, and lost. The Party is stampeding left, pulling the old party war horses along with them, and nary a word from the media about this coup d’tat. Now, this is a party more at home with Marx than James Madison — when they aren’t busy concocting excuses for toppling his statue.
Oh how 15 years can make a big difference. In a 2005 interview, Engel said the despicable (despicable to the ears of the Squad and BLM), “We, as a country, aren’t perfect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes. But I think our vision—what we want to share, what can be taken from our experience—is overwhelmingly positive. I don’t agree with the Blame America crowd.” Sounds about right to me; however, today, those words are more likely to only come out of the mouths of Republicans. Today’s Democrats are fire-breathing advocates for the construction of their soviet.
Like Trump or no, him and his party are opposed by a socialist revolutionary party. That is the pertinent fact on the ground.
Rioters throw back tear-gas canisters fired by federal law-enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., July 29, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
Please read the interview between National Review’s Michael Brandon Dougherty (a man of the right) and Michael Tracey ( a left-leaning independent journalist) found here.
Michael Brandon DoughertyMichael Tracey
What you have been reading and viewing in mainstream media about our current urban disorders is a sham. It is the duty of the responsible citizen to ferret out fact from fiction, there being much to filter and uncover. The needs of our current moment require something more than quips on Facebook.
A party line was evident since the disturbances first erupted in our cities a couple of months ago. The Democratic Party line is to characterize the events as “peaceful protests”, with emphasis on “peaceful”. Jerry Nadler (D, NY), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, went so far as to characterize contrary reports of violence as a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington DC.” The word “peaceful” is ubiquitously attached to “protest” in Dem Party circles and throughout much of our biased legacy media: CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and big city urban dailies like the NYT and WaPo. But is it true?
No, no, no! Tracey went across the country reporting on the events. He didn’t find “peaceful protests”. He discovered something that can only be described as an insurrection. While ostensibly the “protests” started as an outcry against racism, at the tip of the spear were white middle-class urban twenty-somethings, and the victims were overwhelmingly minorities, many black. Far from there being only marches and speeches, Tracey discovered a bombed-out, boarded-up, and vandalized urban landscape stretching for blocks, a hulking mass of dystopia.
A portion of downtown Minneapolis after the riots.
Portland he describes as “unique”. It has been in a permanent state rebellion for years. So, why are the Democrats so keen on hiding the truth about Portland, et al? One answer: politics! Since the election of Trump, the “Resistance” became the “Movement”, not that there’s much difference between the two. The “Movement” encompasses more than the armed militia of the Democratic Party on the streets of Portland – BLM, Antifa, and other muscular utopians – but also the cores of our major cultural institutions. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russia at the dawn of revolution depicts a similar malign disorientation. The threat is real and broad based.
Louis Vitton store front, downtown Portland, May 29.
We are facing a real revolutionary march down the well-traveled road of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and the Bolshevik’s Red Terror. This will not end in a pretty place if allowed to fester and grow. The American people will have to steel themselves against an onslaught of misinformation meant to advance a huge totalitarian-like power grab. So, please read.
Priest and landlord condemned before a Red Tribunal during the Bolshevik Red Terror..
The Great Skedaddle, July 1861. Union troops flee in panic from the Bull Run battlefield and won’t stop till they get to Washington, DC.The Great Skedaddle II.
This is something to drive our steel pipe, hand laser, and match wielding rioter/protester into shrieks of hysterical comparisons with the Wehrmacht conquest of Europe … for the halfwit semi-literate on our college campuses capable of making the comparison. In July of 1861, Union forces in their first major confrontation with Southern troops fled in a panic from the battlefield on Bull Run Creek all the way back to Washington, DC. It was called The Great Skedaddle. A similar Skedaddle is taking place as many are fleeing the violence and totalitarianism on the west coast for the safer environs of the mountain time zone.
The evidence of it is all around, especially if you live in the epicenter of the destination of the teeming hordes, as I do. My sons are trying to buy a house in our corner of the country and are facing a feverish market. Real estate agents, based on the statements of buyers, say it’s due to the rampaging disorder and totalitarian shutdowns throughout the Pacific time zone. Yes, low interest rates play a role, but they say that an unusually high spike is occurring right now. It seems that freedom and safety have a quality all their own.
The prevalence of the totalitarian shutdowns is indeed taking a toll. Many in the market say that the shutdowns and particularly the school closings have lasted way too long. The prospect of their kids falling further behind by the mandated “distance learning” is intolerable. In contrast, Hellgate School District in the Missoula area has announced a full-open of 5-day in-person instruction in the fall, with an in-home option. Try that in California as sunshine state dwellers face the opposition of the teacher and public employee unions and the trendy and despotic cultural leftism in Sacramento. Good luck with that.
Many have mentioned the blue/red divide in the country. Me too. We are sorting each other out by belief and geography. But its more than that now. The current atmosphere has taken on the character of a panicked flight for safety. The more accurate dichotomy might be blue/sanctuary (by “sanctuary” I don’t mean the silly boilerplate used to disguise the effort to nullify federal immigration law). More and more people see the pyrotechnics, beatings, shootings, shuttered businesses, and empty schools as a Mad Max movie set that they happen to live in. So, for many, off to the next time zone over.
Is it time to pack up and head East? Some small companies in Southern California are moving logistics operations to Texas and other neighboring states to reduce overhead. (iStockphoto)
As a refugee myself, I understand. I have a greater appreciation for the predicament of the Sonoran resident fleeing the cartels. And, now, so do the nervous denizens of Seattle-to-LA. Welcome to The Great Skedaddle II.
Someone adds fuel to a fire set in downtown Portland during protests on Friday, May 29, 2020, in downtown Portland. (photo: Mark Graves/The Oregonian)
People wonder where we got the screaming college students who demand the immediate surrender to their opinions by everyone. People also might wonder where we got the roaming gangs of radical left twenty-somethings who claim the wisdom to pass judgment on centuries-old personages not advantaged from sitting at the feet of narrowly doctrinaire professors like they did. Seldom can it be said that fanatics are born. They are bred in the culture, family, and schools. Probably, the first two set the stage for the influence of the third.
Then these twisted minds filter out into corporate boardrooms, the professions, media, and teaching positions to perpetuate the cycle. I was reminded of the phenomena after reading a back issue of National Geographic Magazine from December 2018.
After the first four articles, I began to wonder whether I was reading “Mother Jones Magazine” under another title. They amounted to a single op-ed for bigger-getting-bigger government of the international variety, of cultural left agitprop, socialist redistribution, and the lionization of a once honorable activist who descended into rank partisanship (John Lewis, D, Md.). The National Geographic Society has been absorbed into collectivism’s Borg.
One common technique in the arsenal of today’s Left is “branding”. Subsuming totalitarianism under a catchy phrase – or “brand” – frequently does the trick. For example, the conservative-looking President and CEO of the National Geographic Society, Tracy Wolstencroft, opined on the need for a “Planet in Balance”. What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means: it means Control, control of the mind and everything else through government power.
Tracy Wolstencroft
It’s the same old ploy first pushed by Stanford’s great gift to the cause, Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb”. First Ehrlich postulates X number of people and Y number of resources and, voilà, we have disaster – unless we adopt Ehrlich’s tome to replace the Bible, erect a plethora of government carrots and sticks, and implement mammoth brainwashing in the schools-turned-reeducation-camps.
Wolstencroft goes through the trite litany of the usual suspects of overpopulation, apocalyptic climate change, and no more tigers, et al, and we arrive at the all-too-familiar ground of environmental totalitarianism. His unacknowledged eco-socialism, like all socialisms, has an alluring fetish for eco-totalitarianism. Of course, Wolstencroft’s gazillions earned in the securities industry will insulate him from the consequences of his beliefs while everyone else enters the new normal of personal malaise common to all socialisms. His kids will be okay; as for everyone else’s …?
Following Wolstencrofts’ sermon was chief editor Susan Goldberg’s softball interview of John Lewis in a piece titled “We Can Lay Down the Burden of Race”. Au contraire, Lewis can hardly put it down. He has spent a lifetime in the fever swamps of race politics. For Lewis, it’s Jim Crow and 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, forever.
John Lewis
He makes much of the Charlottesville “riot” (2017) but was dismissive of the rioting and looting in Ferguson, Mo., (2014). He called for an end to the violence in Minneapolis (2020), to his credit, but couldn’t avoid the society-wide “justice denied” mantra for which he clung till his last breath. He didn’t seem too concerned for the rights of property owners (black or white), the right to self-defense (black or white), the right to equal protection for Asians and “whites” in college admissions, while advancing the cause of other nations’ citizens who happen to be in our country in violation of our laws: an odd stance for someone who claimed to be a stalwart of justice for African-Americans as he ironically pushed the interests of another group (the “undocumented”) to the detriment of his own.
He just couldn’t let go of the race thing when he said, “… the scars and stings of racism are still deeply embedded in our society ….” He never wanted to get rid of it and kept moving the goal posts to retain its usefulness as a whipping boy. He’s like Christopher Reeves who couldn’t shed the stereotype of Superman. Lewis rose to fame fighting Jim Crow and he would forever claim its presence, even when the nation did all it could to eradicate it. Unlike Reeves, though, Lewis reveled in his race-baiting persona and rode it to fame and a career in politics.
There was no pushback by our stalwart (?) member of the fourth estate, Susan Goldberg.
The socialism line was front and center in the next piece on the Inupiat people of Alaska. A frequently repeated angle in the story was the tendency of the glorious Inupiat people to equally share the proceeds of the glorious hunt. All well and good for a small tribe wishing to remain the same, except they weren’t … remaining the same, that is. These folks weren’t wearing animal skins and possessed weapons and tools that didn’t come from the bones of the bowhead whale, the tools and weapons of choice for their ancestors. The outfit of an Inupiat hunter pictured in the article belied the impression of an indigenous people at one with nature. The rifle slung over the shoulder came from one of those factories belching pollution and exploiting hundreds of wage slaves in a scheme to bilk unearned profits from the masses, or so the young writer might have written if he wasn’t so enamored with patronizing another non-white colonized people (using the lingo of the “social justice warrior”).
Inupiaq Eskimo hunters carry a rifle and walking stick while walking over the shore ice along the Chukchi Sea, Barrow, Alaska. (photo: Design Pics Inc/Alamy)
To be honest, the depiction was one of manifest incongruency. Some association with capitalism must have its appeal for the brave Inupiat people. They seem to want a lot of our stuff. I would too if I was beset by a polar bear and had to resort to a sharpened piece of whale bone at the tip of a wooden shaft.
Wanting a lot of our stuff was one theme in the next excursion into a mind that tilts left. Who’d the editors choose to join the lineup? It was Jared Diamond, UCLA Geography prof and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He presented an incoherent piece of punditry that rambled through the 9/11 hijackers, ebola, social envy, and to his main point: inequality is the single biggest threat to harmony and the march to kumbaya (pidgin English for “Lord, come be here”).
Jared Diamond
Let’s take a timeout to unwrap the “inequality” thing. Definitions first. Don’t confuse “same” with “equality”. Things don’t have to be the “same” to be “equal”, and vice versa. It depends on your metric for both. If your measuring stick is quantity of wealth, as it seems to be for Diamond, he obviously means the equality in wealth and not a demand for people to be the same in all things as they pursue it. Diamond’s obsession is with “wealth”.
But is the inequality of it always and forever bad? Is it the principle cause of all bad things today? Color me skeptical. Inequality is found everywhere in nature. Why not with us? Everything from rocks to trees and from snakes to apes are not equal. Watch a herd of hippos and the dominant alpha male protect his harem. He’s got more than the rest of the male pachyderms. I’ve got a forest of pines on my property and none of them are equal. Some have obviously hogged more light. The only way for equality to exist is our forcible intervention to cultivate uniformity in a tree farm behind fences, something reminiscent of a gulag.
So with people. Individuals, tribes, groups, and societies vary in their accumulated wealth. I suppose that the riches could be resented if it was capriciously extracted by force. But what if it was sanctioned by time-honored custom? What if it was an outcome of some person’s natural affinity for acquiring it and having the freedom to pursue the natural affinity? Ditto for societies. Some possess an ethos that comports well with rising standards of living, and the acceptance of some having more, they being the catalyst for the wealth that unavoidably spreads to many, many others.
Got it? If not, read a little from Joseph Schumpeter.
Fon Ndofoa Zofoa III of Babungo, the Northwest province of Cameroon. He inherited 72 wives and 500 children after his father’s death. (photo: CNN)
Diamond can’t seem to grasp the naturalness of inequality. And he can’t grasp the fact that when you try to impose it, as in a tree farm, you never really get rid of it. You only changed the protocols for it. Instead of a Vanderbilt getting rich from providing a cheaper and more luxurious service to the public, the Bolsheviks created the grasping party and state apparatchik – the nomenklatura in Soviet-speak. If you want to talk about arbitrary, that’s arbitrary. The whole system is only possible if the state is the sole proprietor of the guns in the place – i.e., the police, secret and otherwise, and the armed forces (no posse comitatus laws here). Those unwilling to tolerate the scheme disappear or find themselves in the “tree farm”. Inequality oozes out despite their best efforts to eradicate it.
A Soviet-era poster of the heroes of the Soviet state.
Nonetheless, Diamond charges forward into his diagnosis of our greatest sin: inequality. You see, in Diamond’s words, the 9/11 killers were born of “inequality” in his final analysis. You see, in Diamond’s words, the conduit for inequality is globalization. From the interconnectedness of globalization, we are supposed to get envy on the part of the non-white everywhere. And envy translates into resentment, and then he gets back to the terrorism thing. His whole schema is a binge of rambling incongruity.
Yes, Jared, ease of travel and communication makes it much easier to spread the hatred of America as the Great Satan and provide the opportunity for boxcutter-wielding fanatics to turn airliners into missiles. But what genuinely animated them? Was it really their anger at not possessing a house in the ‘burbs? If you listen to their words, they are bitter about Western decadence. Remember, these are the same people who throw homosexuals off of six-story buildings. They want a return to their seventh century. Diamond, go ahead, try to uncover their hidden motivations through Jungian projection. I’ll rely on their words.
ISIS fighters.
The internet and diesel and fan turbines don’t make murderous zealots. People do that quite on their own. Who knows the origins of the world’s worst bad ideas? They have popped up since man first put stylus to clay. The last century and into our own was especially plagued by them. And some of them reside in the cranium of Jared Diamond. One could be Diamond’s infatuation with levelling. He won’t come out and say it but it’s all about international and national socialism. According to him, we must flood the zone – the zone being everywhere America’s upper and pampered middle-class are horrified – with dollars. Government-engineered Robin Hood is another way of saying “socialism”. Diamond is all into it.
But we’ve been doing it since the US first emerged as the numero uno economy at the dawn of the 20th century. After WWII, we jumped in with both feet with the Marshal Plan and endless foreign aid ever since. What has it earned us? We got the moniker of Great Satan and despots in poor countries peddling socialism as the path to power, and more inequality under their thumb. Redistribution, the go-to for the myopic like Diamond, hasn’t worked. It hasn’t even worked here with our own interminable War on Poverty. Is Diamond insane, following the well-known formula for its presence: repeating the same mistake but still expecting it to succeed?
A vacant and blighted home on Detroit’s east side. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
The error will be repeated so long as there is a constituency for it. The more, the merrier. One way to inflate the fan base is to internationalize it. Marx saw the advantage: Workers of the world unite! Diamond has no more use for the nation than Marx. He invents an “evil” – inequality – and pushes on to internationalism. People like Diamond have an instinct for it and quickly move to empower unaccountable international authorities to take what didn’t work in America – a War on Poverty – and implant it in a UN commissariat without the slightest say-so from the people who had their money appropriated. Internationalization is essentially autocratic bureaucratization. For Diamond, he doesn’t get it. He’s still wallowing in the ether of the heady days of the First International (1864), the agglomeration of 19th century socialist pinheads. He’s there with our century’s edition of the silly trope.
After four articles, the pressure had built up in me to such an extent that I had to respond. This is what goes for as “mainstream”. Nothing can be further from the truth, unless the poison of the past has suddenly become broadly chic again. In that case, we’re back to broadly popular insanity. If that is true, we’re in more trouble than I thought.
National Geographic Society and its signature publication is part of the problem, not the solution.
James Clyburn (D, S.C.) before the press on March 24, 2020.
The above quote came out of a statement from the alleged “conscience” of American politics, James Clyburn (D, S.C.), and House Majority Democrat Whip. The quip says a lot. It’s a “vision” similar to the end product of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism. For Americans who vote Democrat, are you aware that you’re voting for collectivist utopians? The debate over the pandemic relief bill brought this to light.
First, what’s the Marxist connection? Simple, it’s utopian egalitarianism in almost every sense of the word. Marx’s dialectic is essentially a series of interconnected episodes of class warfare with an apocalyptic final one (Proletarian Revolution) to usher in the world of equality. How’s that much different from the dream of the current leadership and base of the Democratic Party?
Clyburn’s remark speaks volumes. “Restructure things” comes dangerously close to totalitarian social engineering, reminiscent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Mao was really into “restructuring”. What of Clyburn’s “vision”? Of course, all secular prophets have a vision of a “better world”. But Clyburn’s, Mao’s, and Marx’s “vision” probably isn’t the one that you and I have in mind.
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. (photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)
So, in the mind of Clyburn and company, for the country to get relief from the shutdown, the bill must be packed with the means to move us along the path to Marx’s end-state. The Dems aren’t happy with simply taking care of the sick and unemployed. They demand the measures that’ll cripple our economy and way of life, as in any place where it has been tried.
A LAUSD bus driver joins school workers at SEIU Local 99, which represents about 30,000 support workers, as they march at Marlton School in February 2018. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
40 years as a one-party state has made California very vulnerable to bear markets, like the one that we’re experiencing right now. Sometimes black swan events can come in the form of a virus and the effects move down the money digestive tract to the California taxpayer. Watch out taxpayers, pensioners, younger government employees and the whole gamut of local governments.
There are two bears stalking the state. One is the huge bond and pension indebtedness and the other is the public employee unions. The second one gave birth to the first one.
A local newspaper headline announces bankruptcy in Stockton, California June 27, 2012. (REUTERS/Kevin Bartram)
Here’s the scenario. Unsustainable defined-benefit public employee pensions – the most expensive to maintain, as opposed to the defined-contribution kind – requires a high rate of return to successfully service the payouts to retirees like my wife and I. The coronavirus bear market has shattered the 7 percent rate of return to adequately fund CalPers, CalSTRS, and any others out there. The pension bear was beget by the public employee union bear, the most powerful lobby in Sacramento. Who’ll make up the loss? If you said the taxpayer and lower-rung government employees, move to the front of the class.
The pension fund managers will go to the one-party state, which is housed in the state capital, to make ends meet. These clowns will then try to bilk more out of the “rich”. Already the top 1% of the state’s income earners account for 50% of the state income tax, which contributes 60-70% of the dough to the state’s coffers. What’ll happen? You guessed it: capital – meaning the “rich” – have already begun to flee to places like Incline Village just across the border in Nevada. Others seek refuge further points east. For a state that prides itself in its open heart for refugees, why is it so intense about making them?
Watch for how totalitarian taxation leads to totalitarianism. The State Franchise Tax Board is already manning up to scowl the nation for what it considers its truant millionaires and billionaires. We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about California’s attempt to fleece the new-found residents of other states. Does a state have the power to enter another state – literally or digitally – and force that state’s residents to prove that they didn’t spend 6 months in the People’s Republic?
The next in line to the guillotine will be local governments. To meet their pension obligations, they’ll have to layoff workers. It’s highly unlikely that the state with one of the highest combined rates of taxation in the nation can squeeze any more out of local residents. To pay the bill, they’ll have to raise the contributions from a shrunken workforce.
And what’ll happen to current retirees (like myself) whose retirement decisions were based on contractual obligations over a 30-year career? I’m nervous for the bear in the woods. Little did we know that Reagan’s 1984 commercial would have relevance beyond the Soviet threat. Watch the 1984 ad below to get my point.
The situation is clearly laid bare in a podcast interview of state Senator John Moorlach (R., Costa Mesa) by Will Swaim of the California Policy Center. You can listen to the discussion by clicking on Moorlach’s picture.
On Super Tuesday (yesterday), the Democratic Party may have stepped from the brink of a full-throated endorsement of truth-in-labeling. Appearances matter a lot, and most Dem voters seemed appalled at appearing to fondle a cranky septuagenarian holdover from the days of Tom Hayden and the SDS. They seem to want their socialism in an accumulation of smaller doses and without the “socialism” title. Comrade Sanders scraped a few wins in hard-left bastions (read California) and lost in many other locales that turned out to be more hospitable to another doddering septuagenarian of the plodding socialism-lite wing. A Super Tuesday vote for slow motion socialism?
When that great uncle, fresh from the dementia unit in a chronic care facility, becomes a party’s alternative to the ranting great uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, you know that the Dem bench is nearly empty. They both are nuts: one literally so, and the other a lifetime believer in falsehoods.
One wants to replicate the carnage of a long-dead Swedish socialism, thinking that the adjective “democratic” makes it all better, while extolling the virtues of totalitarian health care and literacy campaigns for the purpose of mind control. After all, Castro, Maduro, and Lenin can’t be all that bad … he says.
The other wants to dial back from “11” – to, let’s say, “9” – every one of the half-baked ideas to ooze out of the minds of the Squad and that good ol’ SDS crank. Instead of a real Green New Deal, the other wants a lime-green one. Instead of a full-on Medicare for All, he proposes a more haphazard government takeover but will, over time, eventually transform all health care workers into government employees. As for any damaging fallout, well, another group of government employees will be hired to clean up the mess, ad infinitum. Take each childish blathering of AOC and he will adopt it … but add a little water.
So, Dems, you have a choice between honest and damaging socialism and honest and damaging socialism-lite. And while you’re at it, vote to make pre- and post-natal abortion, along with gun confiscation, a commonplace. Both the honest fool and the demented one insist on it. They only differ in the amount of lead on their throttle-pressing foot.
