Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
In our times, 5 decades is too long. Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade. What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us? One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts. The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes. Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.
The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots. Great song, horrible philosophy. Here’s a good rendition:
The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise. He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth. He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter). The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country. Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.
Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.
The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump. Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America. What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.
Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state. This isn’t about “price controls”. It’s about economic euthanasia. Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state. No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.
Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.
I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love. It’s a form of engineered social amnesia. Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?
Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.
The Democratic presidential hopefuls in debate in South Carolina, Feb. 25, 2020.
Hillary Clinton, September 9, 2016:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”
Hillary Clinton speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, Sept. 9, 2016, where she made the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment.
Clinton slimed an entire demographic for mere partisan political advantage. Well, I’d like to inform Ms. Clinton that “deplorables” exist in her own party. They were on display in South Carolina last night. It was an extremely ironic episode in shaming Bernie for his “socialism” while the other 6 advanced different degrees of it. Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, Free…, named and unnamed boosts in taxes, open borders, etc., are, in their own ways, heralding a socialist future.
To add to the irony, 2 billionaires were on the stage. How could big-moneyed men be so socialistic, whether under Steyer’s environmental radicalism or Bloomberg’s nanny statism/gun grabs/Green New Deal? They’re either grossly ignorant or simply pathetic.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his The Red Wheel series on the Russian Revolution recounts a realistic conversation in 1916 between Lenin and Alexander Parvus, a long-time socialist (indeed, “democratic socialist” as they all called themselves, and was the title of Lenin’s publication, Social Democrat) and successful businessman. In Solzhenitsyn’s rendering, Parvus concocted the scheme of enlisting the financial help of Kaiser’s Germany to fund Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia. German money, indeed, kept the Bolsheviks afloat in Russia as a revolutionary enterprise in 1916 and 1917. Parvus was rich – like Bloomberg and Steyer – and was free with his money to advance the cause.
Alexander Parvus
Lenin’s old trope about using the money from the rich to buy ropes to hang them would be quite appealing to Bernie bros. But why are Mike and Tom so eager to walk under the noose? The contradiction is so glaring that the only practical conclusion is that they are fools.
That’s another reason to keep the whole gang from ever getting close to the White House.
Bernie Sanders appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday (below) to say a number of things including his tendency to make sure to praise the world’s most hideous regimes, like Castro’s.
Rather than dialing it back, he doubles-down on the “good” things about communist rule on the island. He mentioned Castro’s great strides in literacy. It would never cross his mind that communist literacy campaigns are another pillar in totalitarian control. See, if the communist state controls all avenues of information and media, being able to read becomes another means to control and shape the individual’s mind. Far from liberating the person, it locks him and her in a communist mental prison. Bernie is so decrepit in his thinking that he can’t bring himself to think that literacy can be put to evil purposes.
A teacher lectures on the history of the Communist Party of China at Red Flag Elementary School in Chongqing, June 28.
To him, as in a Marxist, government is geared to outcomes such as the equal distribution of wealth. That feat doesn’t come naturally so great government power is required to control all sources of wealth. In contrast to him, our founder’s sense of government was based on its alignment with and under “nature” and “Nature’s God”. To be in accord with God’s design, government is subservient to a higher law which includes the moral law, and integral to the moral law – or law of nature – are the natural rights of human beings. Bernie’s conception tramples all over those fundamental natural rights to get to his artificial equality. Bernie’s entire career is an affront to the founding.
Don’t expect him to know or care. He’s an old dog who hasn’t learned any new tricks. All he can do is yap class warfare and blather about any issue (climate change) that furthers a Castro-like control of all sources of wealth. Personally, I think he knows but has spent his whole life mentally corrupted by Marxist drivel on the evils of one person having more than another. Keep this guy away from sharp objects and the levers of power.
In the previous post I wrote, “It [socialism] sells … to a small slice of our over-credentialed but grossly ill-educated population.” Could persistent ignorance in the face of trillions spent on education be a major factor for socialism’s appeal today? I don’t know, but socialism has risen from an underground of cranks to a near takeover of one of our major political parties. Bernie Sanders is about to achieve what Eugene Debs failed to do in the early 20th century: be a standard bearer of a major party.
Eugene Debs had to quit the Democratic Party to run five times for president as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Democrats wouldn’t have him. John Dewey, the guru of education from his lofty perch at Columbia University, said that he was a socialist but advocated not using the term because of its ill-favored reputation with the public.
Eugene Debs, the rail union president and ex-Democrat who ran five times as a Socialist for the U.S. presidency, campaigned with fiery speeches. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)
Socialism was associated with the worst sort of violence in the early years of the labor union movement. The Haymarket Square Riot (1886) and Homestead Strike (1892) still seared in the public’s mind.
Flyer printed at the office of the German-language and left-wing newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1886. The call for participants to arm themselves is circled.A near-contemporaneous rendering of the bomb explosion killing 7 police officers that set off the riot.SALEM EVENING NEWS, Massachusetts, May 6, 1886.
Today, socialism is about to be served up as the other choice on the ballot, in spite of its perfect historical record of carnage. Legions of Bernie bros and glib half-wits in Congress are openly advocating the hot mess. Socialism may lose, but is its time coming? Are we, to alter a bit Moynihan’s famous quip, defining social, political, and economic deviancy down to the point of making the horrible acceptable?
This election may be a first. To borrow from Neil Armstrong on the moon, is this election a small step for socialist man and a giant leap for socialist mankind? Absent a resounding electoral slaughter, we may be in serious trouble from this election forward.
Bernie Sanders raises as fist as he speaks at his caucus night rally Des Moines, Iowa February 1, 2016. (Rick Wilkin/Reuters)
The vast majority of votes are counted in Nevada (88%). Bernie Sanders in a 8-person race got almost 50% (47%). Yeah, it’s a small state but it adds to the big “mo” for Bernie and his bros as he heads into Super Tuesday and its treasure trove of delegates. If Bernie was placed on a color swatch in the Home Depot paint department, he would be full-on red with the others still huddling around the darker end of the slip of paper.
Now begins – if the Dem hierarchy succumbs to what appears to be inevitable – the effort to mainstream his socialism. Bernie, his bros, and the Squad try to emphasize the “democratic” in front of “socialism”. Poison, whether administered through so-called “democratic” or totalitarian means, is frankly irrelevant. It sells, though, to a small slice of our over-credentialed but grossly ill-educated population.
Socialism is toxic no matter its modifier. Government with its army of employees, lawyers, regulators, enforcers, laws, programs, and regulations will make the word “private” in front of “citizen” a dead letter. Government and its politics will overhang and penetrate nearly all aspects of life like a Beijing smog. Albania as the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania wasn’t a basket case because a dictator – Enver Hoxha – ruled over it. It was ruined by socialism.
Enver Hoxha as communist dictator of Albania.Shkoder, Albania, 2017. The consequences of Hoxha’s socialism.
Now, Bernie, his bros, the Squad, and many in the activist base of today’s Dem Party want to recapitulate Albania right here in America. Of course, they try to dodge that reality by hiding behind the word “Scandinavian” like they do “democratic”. Scandinavia shed its 1960’s-70’s socialism by the 1990’s because it was making them into Albania. Rather than learn that lesson, Bernie and company want to relive the disaster.
The rest of this year’s Dem offerings are just slightly lighter shades of red on the swatch – still, though, on the darker end. They differ only in the size of the dose of poison.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) on The View, Feb. 19, 2020.
The old term “yellow dog districts” needs an update. If you’ve forgotten, there really were districts in the Jim Crow South filled with white people who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act began the process of sending them into extinction, and rightly so. Though, that hasn’t stopped the rise of village idiot districts. These are districts filled with people who would sooner vote for a village idiot than a Republican. In this case, it’s more than a caricature. They actually do vote them into office.
Granted, idiocy crosses the partisan divide; however, it’s a special kind of idiocy that runs deep in today’s Democratic Party. The lunacy stems from the mental maturity of a toddler and extends into a person’s 30’s, and maybe beyond. These are adults who espouse tooth-fairy economics for example. Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provide proof of the existence of the “village idiot district”.
Many things stand out as I watch her performances. One thing is her glibness and confidence as she spouts nonsense. When pressed on how she’ll pay for her list of freebies, for instance, she mentions such things as a “transaction tax” on securities trades to pay for the scheme. She has no concept of the impact of her tax on behavior. Her notion of economics has much in common with a slave economy. Slave economics functions on the principle that you can whip and chain people with taxes and regulation and they will continue to perform as before. In other words, she is a college economics major without a high-schooler’s understanding of incentives and disincentives. You punish people in a free economy and they will seek to avoid the lash. Welcome, Alexandria, to Reality 101.
So, two things will happen under the tutelage of the Democrats’ dominatrix: (1) businesses find it harder to get capital, and therefore fewer businesses, usually startups – something not totally unwelcome to a socialist – and (2) she ends up with less dough for her cockamamie handouts. Welcome, Alexandria, to lecture #2 of Reality 101.
She reminds me of the high school sophomore who goes home after History class to tell dad of the Battle of Khe Sanh, of which he participated and said nothing. She looks and speaks with the self-assurance of an oracle while taxing the patience of dear old dad. The only problem on The View is that she is sitting with 3 other self-assured sophomores; McCain deserves to be excluded.
Kids say the darndest things, and so do some adults who think like kids.
Bernie Sanders strides to the podium to announce his victory in the New Hampshire Democrat primary, 2/11/2020. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe)
The red/blue assignment on our election maps is wrong. The Democrats should be red, like the Labor Party in Britain. Now, anywhere from 25% to 35% of Democrat voters favor an avowed socialist. With Sanders’s narrow plurality in New Hampshire, to go along with his plurality in Iowa, he is in the hunt to win the nomination if not earn the moniker of “front runner”. In the past, the Dems got away with it through advocacy of slow-motion socialism – espousing socialism with plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability was accomplished by flippant self-identification as a “capitalist” – Warren’s trick. Capitalist or no, the Dems have pressed closer and closer to more and more government control of the economy and much of everything else. Socialism should be defined as “control” of the economy and not limited to “ownership”. Control is achieved with or without ownership.
Elizabeth on the campaign trail, 2019. (photo: Ethan Miller)
Sorry, Elizabeth Warren, you ought not get way with denying your true self. Sanders is more honest than you are.
Last night’s results removed the mask. To be a Democrat, you have just painted yourself one of the many shades of red … along with the espousal of taxpayer-funded abortion from conception to the drive home from the hospital – another kind of red.
A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)
In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family. While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching. I ended up in teaching. It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle. Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology. Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.
Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967. Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.
Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today. The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.
Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do. Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism. What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy? A mess!
No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy. Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”. What’s that? It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another. How? Stay tuned.
I was reading about it this morning. 40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering. Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia. Right? No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.
The burlesque of net-metering.
The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse. No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed. It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights. The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar. The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels. That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain. It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames. The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.
The alternative is simple. If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them. Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager. Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions. But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves. The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.
For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet. Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering. You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.” AOC has interesting company.
Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.
Don’t buy into the racket. Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2. The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one. What does that say about us?
Authorities announced Wednesday that the 2017 Thomas fire was caused by Southern California Edison power lines.(Mike Eliason / Associated Press)
Once a myth gets firmly established, you’ll play like hell to correct the popular falsehood. Here’s one. We are said to use only 10% of our brain. It isn’t true. Neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says “… we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time” (Read about it here).
The myth-making potential of human beings was fully on display as I was listening this morning to Rush Limbaugh. I normally don’t tune into the program but just happened to take a listen. At that moment, a caller was describing how a Californian could exploit the mandates and tax breaks to pay nothing for their electricity. Limbaugh was initially caught flat-footed. Then during a break he uncovered the reality of the scam. And so can anyone if they apply your brain.
The flim-flam is another rendition of the shell game. Like the peanut under the walnut shell, socialist governments move the community’s wealth around to create the illusion of getting something for nothing for a favored segment of the population. If the recipients far outnumber the coerced givers, you’ll run into Margaret Thatcher’s maxim: “‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”. In other words, borrowing another epigram from Economics 101: “There is no such thing as a free lunch” (known by the acronym TINSTFL).
The state’s commissars use the smoke and mirrors of their laws to fabricate a distorted market. Artificial demand is concocted by ordering home builders and home buyers to install and buy the greenie equipment, or else pay the government-created and extortionate electricity rates. It’s like paying protection money. The costs are hidden by piling them onto the backs of taxpayers through subsidies and tax breaks, and forcing them onto the utility companies’ bottom line.
Installing solar panels in California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
No wonder the state’s grid is deteriorating into a public hazard.
Piedmont, Ca., seventh-graders participate in the global strike for climate change in San Francisco on Sept. 20, 2019. (Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource)
Overton Window: noun; the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range.
A Google search produced the above definition (more on the concept here). We are experiencing an attempt to impose the limits of acceptable opinion on certain issues. That word, imposition and its derivatives, will occur a lot in this piece. No better example can be found than the construction of an Overton window on the issue of climate change. As with any imposition, the range of acceptability is being forced upon all, while also being arbitrary with the mode of enforcement more indicative of mob behavior. A highly excitable throng endeavors to manhandle the window leftward.
The Global Climate Strike of students of September 20-27, 2019, brought to mind the idea of the Overton window. Here we have young people ranging in age from elementary to college boycotting their classes to engage in protests demanding more government power to control people for the purpose of “saving the planet”. I have my doubts about whether the goal is to “save the planet” or simply expand government power to impose a political clique’s narrow vision of the good.
Means and ends get muddled here. I was a college adjunct instructor in Physical Geography and was continually exposed to the ideological dogmas of climate change – “climate change” being the more robust and useful term as compared to the mere “global warming”. “Ideological” is the correct adjective for the belief system that riddles the curriculum, support materials (textbooks, et al), and teacher preparation. There is much about the movement’s claims to scientifically question. Yet, the movement glosses over the uncertainty about the climate issue’s severity, the exact nature of the phenomena, and the realities of proposed solutions to immediately rush to the goal of revolutionary social, economic, and political reorganization.
However, before the zealots get to their beloved revolution, prudence requires the rest of us to seriously consider a simple question: Are the zealots’ claims correct? Much has been said and written about the issue but only a small slice gets the light of day. To be clear, the purpose of this article is not to present a detailed examination of the activists’ assertions about “climate change”, but to report on a singular episode – the students’ Global Climate Strike – as part of an ongoing campaign to use politicized science so one may foist on the general public a drastic alteration in our settled social, economic, and political arrangements and confer near-totalitarian power in the hands of a select few.
If interested, if you have 32 minutes, below is a reminder that an honest debate on the science of climate change actually exists, something the fanatics would like to squelch and close the Overton window..
What happens when fanaticism replaces scientific inquiry? Well, we get young and impressionable minds ditching school for a day to help stampede lawmakers into creating the environmentalists’ Leviathan. How were the kids primed? Well, the ideology-as-science corrupted the dogma’s purveyors, the teachers, and permeates the kids’ media-rich social ecosystem. I know; I’ve been there, particularly at the campaign’s pedagogical front.
It’s interesting to know that the professional and degreed people with the least scientific background take up positions as the most prominent mouthpieces of the movement, some in taxpayer-funded government posts and some riding their earlier name-recognition in politics to a new and very lucrative career in climate change. Does the name “Al Gore” come to mind?
Almost any metropolis and city with a university presence will have a municipal position solely devoted to the issue of climate change. For instance, in my state of Montana, Chase Jones serves as the Energy Conservation Coordinator for the City of Missoula with the portfolio of developing and coordinating the city’s climate plan.
Chase Jones, City of Missoula Energy Conservation Coordinator
In a radio interview, he stipulated that he has a degree in Communications from University of West Virginia. He cut his teeth in Montana environmentalism through the Montana Conservation Corps, an environmental non-profit. The Chairperson of the Corps’s Board of Directors is Jan Lombardi who has a rich personal history in Democratic Party politics, Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), etc. Another member of the Board is Chris Pope, the Democrat representative of Montana House District 65 and possessor of a Spanish Degree from University of Oregon and Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale. Chase’s background and the résumés of those around him are symptomatic of the kinds of experiences that inclines them to accept broad and general scientific claims, especially if they confirm ideological biases, while they lack the detailed understanding to debate the substance of any of the many scientific aspects of a meta-issue like climate change.
Jan Lombardi (center), chairperson of the Montana Conservation Corps
These people are impressed by the pronouncements of large groups, as if the announcements put finis to any further scientific inquiry, and closes the Overton window to those who dispute them. They then can announce a “consensus” to dismiss the irritating queries of those of a more scientifically skeptical mind. All the while, they ignore the vast scholarship on groupthink and Public Choice Theory which does more to explain the behavior of large associations and bureaucracies in perverting pure science. The stance may work for the politically-motivated non-scientist, but it isn’t science. It’s partisan politics masquerading under the rubric of science.
Non-scientists are pushing the issue with the assistance of politicized scientists and their politicized associations. Large and long-established professional associations are particularly prone to fashionable political moods. Blacklisting is common. Remember McCarthyism? In regards to climate, remember nuclear winter, global cooling, and now global warming? Remember the Union of Concerned Scientists and their Doomsday Clock during Reagan’s defense buildup to counter the Soviet threat? Remember the blowback to Reagan’s idea of missile defense? Going back further, how about scientists’ enthusiasm for eugenics that would ultimately seep into the Final Solution? The wreckage is astounding whenever science is mingled with politics.
“Best Baby” contests promoted eugenics at the Oregon State Fair in the early 1900s. (courtesy of The Oregonian)
“Selection” of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau) in Poland during German occupation, May/June 1944. (Wikimedia Commons/Yad Vashem)
Inevitably, science will be the handmaiden to politics when the two are merged, with disastrous consequences.
The loudest advocates of a Green New Deal are likely to have the least acquaintance with real science. If anything, they have just enough exposure to be dangerous. Their stunted view is propagated to the young in a never-ending torrent from one grade to the next, from one movie to the next, and from one social media post to the next . The stage is set for a critical mass of people who lack the tolerance for opinions cynical of the artificial zeitgeist. The radical all of a sudden becomes the popularly “sensible” and those outside of this favored cohort will be dismissed, or worse. The eco-revolutionaries, hiding behind the innocence of youth, are well on their way to the kind of power to upend our way of life and build a new green order.
Some concessions to popular consent will have to be made, but the threat of an opposing majority will have been lessened by a demography-wide closed mind. It will be a constituency willing to cede great power to a set of elite experts in the arts of the eco-gnosis. But to be on the cusp of power in the first place requires more than indoctrination. It’s necessary but not sufficient. To tip the edifice into a revolution, a panic must be created through crisis-mongering, or as long-dead progressive/socialist leading lights would have called it, the moral equivalent of war. What goes for the “conscience” of the Democratic Party, our giddy sophomore class president and congressional blowhard from NY’s 14th congressional district (AOC), parrots the war line along with sycophants in the party’s presidential derby. After the panic attack produces electoral success, once in power, they aren’t going to give it up because the population happens to be profoundly discomforted by the mandated changes. In this ends-justifies-means world, popular sovereignty will be luxury that can no longer be afforded. The whole scheme could end up being one man (or woman, et al)/one vote/one time.
A 1968 Cultural Revolution poster. The caption reads: “Destroy the old world; Forge the new world.” Today’s eco-activism is reminiscent of Mao’s campaign to reinvigorate the revolution.
This is more than a slippery slope. It’s a well-trodden path through the pages of history. Why are eco-activists so intent on repeating the horrifying record? Interesting question but the answer is obvious. They think that they’re immune to the trap many others have fallen into over the past couple of millennia.
They are kidding themselves. Over those very same millennia, power has proven to be quite an intoxicant. It overwhelms a person’s conciliatory and moderating nature. The goal of eco-purity will crowd out everything including tolerance for the opposition. To borrow from Lenin, a vanguard elite leading the way to the green future won’t trifle with elections unless they can be manipulated into validating predetermined decisions. Pure and simple, it comes down to imposing a small group’s preferred mode of living on a broad population who may be unaware of what is happening.
The 1920 Presidium of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Seated from left to right are Enukidze, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Lenin and Rykov.
I’m reminded of the circumstances in Russia in the few decades before the Revolution of 1917. One is struck by the wide acceptance of radicalism among the educated classes (teachers, the professoriate, students), many circles in urban populations, and some of the well-off gentry in the years leading up to the Revolution. It even penetrated the military’s officer corps. Denunciations bordering on treason, even advocating the assassination of government officials from the czar on down, riddled the last couple of decades of the regime. Socialism of a variety of shades was trendy, as is the “green future” and “sustainability” today.
Policy mistakes compounded the troubles. One was the decision in 1906 to confer a safe space from police intervention for university campuses. It was hoped that the policy would quiet things down on the campuses. It did no such thing. The radicalism was allowed to fester and boil over to nearly all sectors of society. The radicalized young of 1905 became the violent revolutionaries of 1917 and later Lenin’s shock troops in the imposition of the Bolshevik conception of the good.
Russia, 1917: Mass political meeting of workers at the giant Putilov factory. Bolshevik and other radical student agitators were active in fomenting strikes and other upheavals Tsarist Rusia.
Sound familiar as you view the images of the young faces demanding a Green New Deal in the Global Climate Strike? Those scenes of a radicalized youth who are radicalized by a radicalized curriculum, sustained over the many years of their matriculation, should send shivers down the spines of anyone knowledgeable of Russian history circa 1890 to 1921. In the end, a radicalized caste will get the opportunity to impose their narrow vision of the good on a population ignorant of their own children’s indoctrination.
The Overton window of tolerance for opposing views is shifting left. The zealot’s politicized science will be the only approved form of science. That means that the only accepted version of science will be the kind that has garnered the assent of the governing elite. It must, like everything else, serve the ends of the secular dogma’s dream of the good life. It’s so Orwellian.
Climate protesters September 24, 2019.
In the end, prepare to retreat back a couple of centuries in quality of life. These vision quests aren’t concerned about the production of wealth so much as dictating the smallest details of living for 330 million people. Conditions gradually deteriorate as the legacy of prior affluence begins to erode. Some flee and others adjust to a world without variance from the rules of the eco-commissars.
I’ll end this piece where it started: the student Global Climate Strike. Watch the speech of a sincere but naive youngster before a UN panel as she tearfully pleads for the erection of the eco-Leviathan. Also observe the shamelessness of the adults as they exploit a child whose personal identity has been supplanted by a fanatic’s nightmare of impending doom. Watching her as she gives her speech is wrenching enough, but remembering what has been done to her is much more terrifying.
