U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as, from left, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – The Squad – listen during a news conference last year. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Public discourse in the public square is dead and sensible deliberation in our institutions is gone. Increasingly our thoughts and speech are hyperbolic. Dramatic audio-visuals in the form of net-connected material such as podcasts and the full range of social media have replaced quiet contemplation and scholarship. Since the schools are mostly absent at the switch, people have little to rely on to mediate what they’re seeing and hearing. And when a extremist ideology comes to dominate one of our major parties, we have all the makings for a catastrophic rift.
See below.
Cultural antecedents are at the root. These antecedents differ by geography. Tradition has a higher survival rate outside the big cities, corporate boardrooms, big media centers, and the classroom. Inside those nuclei, it’s a worldview wedded to hedonistic collectivism. It’s not that metropolitan elites, and those who aspire to be, are hedonists. Their life pattern is typically traditional in marriage and family formation; but it’s what’s in their heads that makes all the difference: hedonistic collectivism. They near-homogenously vote that way. Meaning, they vote left.
The Democratic Party has become the epicenter of this urban belief system. As such, the Party has moved radically left and is essentially an urban phenomena. The belief system is baked in the cake of urban politics, and, by the way, is disseminated to the kids everywhere, but particularly to those in the inter-connected, cell phone world of exurbia-to-core. What we have is an isolated Party that has moved so far left that an uber-liberal like Pelosi is now mainstream. This is not a Party conducive to Truman or JFK any longer.
The Republican Party is essentially where it was since Calvin Coolidge, with only slight deviations. This is expected of a Party more compatible with our philosophical legacy. Key is the understanding of fixed standards going back to the ancient nexus of Jerusalem-Athens.
Therefore, the current political battle lines are Jerusalem-Athens vs. hedonistic collectivism. In Constitution-speak, it’s the real Constitution vs. a “living” one. In the hands of the Left, the rule of law becomes the rule of men but sold as the rule of law.
So, the rift isn’t due to a movement of both parties from each other. It’s a product of the big shift of the Democratic Party to the left, which means a fuller embrace of hedonistic collectivism. Combined with their political throw weight in densely packed urban areas, they can, if they marshal their critical masses, outvote everywhere else. Thus, their worldview has the potential to be imposed throughout the land. 2020 offers their best chance ever.
Is the rest of the country ready for the central planning of The Green New Deal (even if modified), centralized and massive gun registration and confiscation, invasions into the pulpit to force alignment with the left’s ethos, carte-blanche to abortion, toothless law enforcement, promiscuous nationwide lockdowns, forced acceptance of transgenderism in all manner of social interaction, the ongoing seeding of leftist ideology in the schools, and the radical restructuring of our Constitutional order to permanently empower the cities and their political machines? I don’t know, but we might be getting ready to have a taste.
My guess is that the rest of the country won’t sit idly by. They won’t wait for the next Congressional bi-elections to right the ship. Anyway, Congress has allowed itself to be turned into a glorified debating society as executive powers have filled the void. Obama proved that you don’t need legislation when you’ve got your phone and pen. An urban-dominated federal government will have tradition-minded areas up against a wall with no escape. The only recourse for those traditionally minded will be extensive civil disobedience and resistance – sadly, some of it will be armed. When you back a person into a corner, things go badly and quickly.
As a teacher in the public schools, I’ve seen this many times. Buckle up for a wild ride. It won’t matter if a new Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress appear to modify their rough edges and compromise. You have to remember that it’s a compromise from the position of the radical left, democrat-socialists in power. In the end, the system still moves left, just at a slightly slower pace – especially after they rigged the system of government through court-packing, defanging the minority after the loss of the filibuster, made the Electoral College an irrelevancy, and cowed the Supreme Court with vicious attacks.
Sanctuary cities point the way in showing that a resistance can thumb their noses at a clear federal authority and get away with it. Likewise, traditionally-minded areas could just as easily follow the same script. Only in this case, these people are more likely to believe in the private ownership of firearms and the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment as a hedge against tyrannical government.
I’m not endorsing this possible outcome. I’m forecasting it. I hope, I hope that I’m wrong.
The outcome of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tx., 1993. Our current flashpoints for violence will occur with groups already sensitive to federal government impositions.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks in Tampa, Florida on September 15, 2020 during a roundtable discussion with Tampa-area veterans and military families. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)
First, let’s stop referring to “election night” on Nov. 3. It’s actually election month or . . . longer, thanks to the COVID craziness and the Democrats’ success in turning our election system into Silly Putty. It’ll be Christmas for lawyers.
If in the end the flamboyant circus mimics the current polls, the American people will get more, much more, than Trump moving out of the White House. They will get Venezuela: Trump out and Maduro clones in. The electorate can’t say that they didn’t vote for the clones. Of course, they voted for the socialists. Not voting for the antidote means the stampede of the toxin. Simple. Sooner than they might wish, they will experience the toxin, socialism.
Socialism offers what no society can deliver: free stuff for everyone all the time. The whole schema is made possible only by deception. Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” is the Democrats’ “The Art of Deception” in their campaign for things that aren’t true. Let me count the ways.
Take tax cuts. Democrats don’t like them. Being socialists-without-the-label, they have a near-genetic tic to spasmodically attack the rich in grasping lurches to seize assets; though, they must admit that there’s simply not enough there to fund their laundry list of inanities. That $400,000 DMZ for their beloved tax hikes is horse feathers. There isn’t enough above that DMZ either. And so, capital flees, and we get to relearn the old fact that capital flight is job flight, and another generation living in their parent’s basement way past their prime.
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
The Republican tax cuts of late 2017, and Paul Ryan’s and Mitch McConnell’s congressional vetoes of some of the worst of Obama’s 8-year regulation spree, boosted the economy out of Obama-slumber. Now we might vote ourselves back into the induced coma. The Democrats will hide any of this from adult reasoning because they might be exposed for actually believing in this batty stuff. There are few things more dangerous than the deadly true believer. The problem is, we might learn sometime after Nov. 3 that we turned over the gavel to a bunch of them.
Take the COVID panic that never ceases. This one’s easy. Everyone makes mistakes when you don’t know, and can’t know till later. Take the prima donnas of the donkey party. The top Democrat foghorns were boosting tourism and brandishing the xenophobia canard like a drunk loosens his bank account on the Vegas strip as the virus was slipping into US ports. Their attacks don’t offer anything new but the worst of what had already been tried, and without end. This line of gibberish is the rhetorical equivalent of pond scum. It’s a crime to logic. But don’t expect the party head honchos to let you in on the dirty little secret.
People wait in line as a food bank hands out 1,600 food bags at a pop-up pantry in San Francisco, Calif.ornia, on April 20 amid historic work furloughs and layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic. (Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle)
Oh, and then there’s The Green New Deal. Now here’s a bad high school science term paper that was heralded as a serious idea by a college graduate who shouldn’t have graduated who happened to get into Congress from a district that would sooner vote for Fidel Castro than a Republican. Got it? Well, we should know where this is headed. Blowing up the US economy based on the giddy mental burps of a group plagued by an absence of mature discernment won’t end well.
The whole idea is preposterous. Dynamiting a lusty portion of the US economy, promising a gargantuan federal jobs program that past experience has shown won’t work, the Sovietizing of the US economy under central planning, and the resultant shrinkage of our economy, will drag down millions.
Look into what happened to the California north coast after the expansion of the protected lands for redwoods in the 1990’s. The lumber mills evaporated. Go, look at the meteoric rise in those counties of welfare participation and every other social pathology that would presage the meth-addled existence in the decaying hulk of the old rust belt. At that time, the easy-out for Clinton and the gang was re-training for tourism, like today’s re-training for coding. It’s the same old song, and with the same old results.
Again, don’t expect the Democrats to come clean. They hide behind the rhetorical legerdemain of “we’ll phase it out” (Biden) or “managed decline” (Newsom). It’s all meant to make you feel good about them destroying your livelihoods. It’s all meant to have them avoid the use of the word “kill” – as in kill fracking or kill fossil fuels. Even the flighty-headed representative from NY’s 14th congressional district wants a “phase ” out. It’s all word games with your future in the chopping block.
New York’s 14th Congressional District representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
And then there’s the line of attack on Republicans for having the temerity to repeal Obamacare’s colossal boondoggle. Remember the lost insurance plans, the lost doctors, many states relegated to one plan on Obamacare’s exchanges, skyrocketing rates because of mandated coverages so that, for example, men must pay for pap smears, the $250 penalty for refusing to buy what Obama and his crew cooked up, and the creation of a panel of unaccountable czars to pass judgment on the medical futures of seniors?
Into the current maelstrom come the millions of dollars of ads accusing Republicans of threatening the coverage for preexisting conditions. The interesting fact is, the repeal would still allow those policies and grandfather existing ones. All repeal proposals of which I am aware guarantee protections for those people with preexisting conditions. Trump repeatedly stated that he wouldn’t accept any repeal and replacement without it.
So, on what is the assault based? Nothing! They need scary stories to get people to vote for them. Just shower enough money on the lie and it magically becomes true.
A photo of discarded ballots taken the weekend of May 9, 2020 in Las Vegas, NV. Want to vote . . . 11 times? (Photo: Las Vegas Review-Journal)
I’m not sure any of this will matter. 50 million (maybe more?) have already voted by mail. We’ve just experienced the end of ballot integrity, the secret ballot, and new openings for enterprising miscreants in a growing black market for votes. We are well on our way to the sunset of public deliberation and rational discourse. It’s all about power, no matter what. We’ve found a new way to join the ranks of Venezuela. We choose it.
Joe Biden in the debate last Tuesday laughably tried to dismiss the threat of “Antifa” by defining the term as an abstraction, an idea only. Or as he might have said, “Nothing there, man.” Tell that to the local shop owners who watched a lifetime’s work go up in flames, or the police officers and other innocents who were maimed and killed by “Antifa” and their kissing cousins, BLM. The denial of reality by the higher-ups in the Dem establishment is astonishing.
Will you let them get away with it?
Antifascist organizers had a visible, and at times violent, presence in Berkeley on Aug. 27, 2017. (Photo: Emilie Raguso)“Mostly peaceful” arson in Minneapolis in May.
Their logic goes something like this: organized violence doesn’t exist because there isn’t a central command. Oh really? Radical Muslim extremism doesn’t exist either since it’s a shadowy underworld of shifting alliances and individuals. No central command there either. Violent jihadism is only an abstraction, using the Dems’ syntax, since individuals and groups come and go within a constantly-changing web of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other ephemeral groupings among the Sunni and Shia. Again, tell that to the relatives of the occupants of graveyards scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond.
The logic is beyond astounding; it’s insane. When confronted by a bystander, House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, called Antifa a “myth”. And off the Dems and their sympathizers go into their ritual denunciations of white supremacists. In fact, they go further in lumping anyone who dare confront the “myth” on the streets as “white supremacists”. Dems, you can’t have it both ways: organized Antifa doesn’t exist in spite of the charred buildings, new funerals and hospitalizations, but they magically reappear as an implicit counterpoint to their new all-encompassing menace, “white supremacy”. To borrow from Biden, “Come on, man.”
This affront to language and logic is a common staple of our current political discourse. For another example, there’s the “mostly peaceful” protests. By that logic, the Bolshevik Revolution and its Red Terror were “mostly peaceful”. The French Revolution and its Reign of Terror were also “mostly peaceful”. Mao was a “mostly peaceful” tyrant. Ditto for Stalin. Jack the Ripper was “moistly peaceful”. How much time in his life was devoted to murdering women?
Debris from the “mostly peaceful” desecration of churches during the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.“Mostly peaceful” corpses from the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.
Are we so rattled in our minds that some of us can seriously entertain this gibberish. The Dems and their fellow travelers trot out as proof FBI Director Christopher Wray’s recent reference to Antifa as a movement and not an organization. It proves nothing. Locally-organized, intense social media interaction with comrades, and funding sources showing up as plane tickets and rental trucks filled with supplies and munitions, indicate something far more systematized than sporadic “mostly peaceful” protesters incited by “white supremacists”, who just so happen to be protecting their neighborhoods and shops.
The rented box truck was spotted at 2pm on Wednesday in Louisville, as Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was still speaking at a press conference about the grand jury findings in the Breonna Taylor case. (photo: Daily Mail)
Here’s a question for the gullible: Can something be organized without a formal national directorate? Antifa central doesn’t have to exist in the world of the internet. All that is necessary is fanatics with an internet connection. We have an abundance of both, so the know-how, inspiration, hooligans, and money will take care of themselves.
Matthew Iglesias is onto something in his April 2019 Vox piece entitled “The Great Awokening”. While I don’t agree with everything that he has to say, he makes sense with his central point: white liberals have shifted far left.
Ronald Reagan was famous for having said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” And oh how they have left many of the rest of us behind as well.
Shortly after Trump announced his infection with the coronavirus, Twitter, that cacophonous funhouse of the easily ignitable, was aflame with wishes for his death. From whence cometh the vitriol? It arose from the fever swamps of the comfortable, mostly white liberal Democrats whose militant views dominate today’s Party.
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez looks on during the Democratic Presidential Committee summer meeting on August 23, 2019 in San Francisco. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Iglesias mostly focuses on the Party’s embrace of the far left’s take on racial issues like the now-ritualistic censure of the esoteric “systemic racism” – which is carte blanche for federal government intrusion into all aspects of a person’s life and thus producing the clamor’s totalitarian flavor – and the snakepit of racial reparations. But it’s more than that. The rise of the hard left in the Party is apparent in the Party’s tolerance of socialism, with or without the modifier of “democratic” (AOC, The Squad, and Bernie), and the green socialism of The Green New Deal. Ideas once rejected out of hand in the Party’s leadership circles are now part of the coalition to be negotiated with.
Like COVID, these new risible ideological commitments were easily transmissible in the form of a green light from the Party’s elites to the base. Many Dems not already there, the more moderate core, were pulled like the gravity of a large planet further left. The rest may have kept their party affiliation but were no longer reliable, having been repelled by the Party’s leftward leap. Could this help explain 2016? Could be.
Michelle Bassaro, a Trump supporter, in her apartment in Nanty Glo, Pa. She said she voted for the Democrat in her district in the midterm election to balance the administration’s power. (Credit. (photo: Ross Mantle for The New York Times)
Interestingly, according to Iglesias, the beneficiaries of the new left-wing Party, the famous “other”, particularly “people of color”, don’t seem to be so enamored of this vision as Iglesias makes clear in his reading of a variety of social surveys. Here’s an opening for Trump and the Republicans.
This election is said by many to be a referendum on Trump. Yes, it is, but it is also a referendum on a new hard left Democratic Party. The question is, which referendum will win out? The first happenstance is only possible if the electorate is so ill-informed of the danger, or the Democrats’ succeed in their usual dirty tricks of stuffing the ballot boxes – or more accurately the mailboxes.
Now that possibility might produce a third option: a fraud election.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 19: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) endorses Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at a campaign rally in Queensbridge Park on October 19, 2019 in the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
I don’t watch presidential debates or election night returns. What happens happens. The play-by-play of the boxing match (debates) or the color commentary of election returns (as in a televised football game) are a sideshow and irrelevant to the outcome and the underlying realities.
The underlying reality of this election season is a pungent personality vs. pungent policies. The former causes you to grimace; the latter ruins your life. For me, the choice is obvious: I can’t allow the grating of my teeth by a tweet or rally speech to be an excuse to let into power those who’d engineer national bankruptcy.
Biden is the aging and incontinent godfather of a philosophical crime family. A vote for him is an endorsement of left-wing radicalism. Say what you will, voting “D” this time around is a knowing or unknowing sanction of socialism and all its crudity. The stable for filling departments and agencies if Biden should win will be the same one that gave us an unsavory California and middle class flight from wherever they hold the reins of power. The same folks who gave us catcalls like “defund the police” – or “rethinking”, choose your verb – will give us a militarized EPA, and a militarized everything else in the Article II branch and beyond … with the exception of the actual military.
Biden (center) with Warren and Bernie.
If you think that Biden is such a nice guy that he won’t appoint the dwellers of his own party then you must have locked yourself into a Salvador Dali painting. His party has welcoming room for what used to be called the hard left, people like Sandy (AOC) and her sophomoric Squad and Bernie and his bros. Occupy Wall Street is now Occupy DNC. Socialism is no longer a dirty word to the party’s base.
It makes no difference if Biden appoints an Elizabeth Warren or an Ilhan Omar type. It’s only a question of how far left to go and how fast.
Today’s left amazingly, actually believes socialism works. When someone cites its long history of failures, they respond with the addition of an adjective like “democratic” or “It’s never been tried”. It’s classic No-True-Scotsman fallacy, as in “No true socialist would be like that.” The tactic is to change socialism’s definition by adding a modifier (democratic) and a purity test and it’s all better. Yeah, really.
The deficiency of socialism has little to do with the means of getting there: election or revolution. It’s just anti-human; it unleashes the worst in us; it’s a recipe for a fiasco. Voting “D” this time around is a vote for fiasco. The only remaining question is how fast will Biden get us there if elected.
Years ago, I ran into a piece by William F. Buckley, Jr. I must paraphrase the quote from memory: “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” A citizen should develop some grounding in the issues and times that confront us. The act of voting should be the outcome of those insights. The key word is “should”, and “should” doesn’t mean “is”.
Instead, we are bombarded with pleas to vote … by God, just vote! It’s horrible advice. The survival of our citizen republic demands a virtuous public. Virtue is inconceivable without some grasp of its historical and philosophical basis, which requires time and effort to know some very basic things. Absent this foundation, we will turn our citizen republic into the rule of the whipsawed and momentary electoral majorities who are animated by media-inducing impressions and blinkered perceptions.
Sound familiar? Look to our city streets and you’ll see the march of the truly ignorant, and then stop to realize that they’ll vote. A college education or the possession of a diploma cannot be counted on as proof of wisdom and virtue. Just think, your vote will probably be cancelled by the ill-informed, and many others who will be crammed into mailboxes by who knows whom.
Portland protesters geared for war against the police.
Don’t get caught up in the fads of thought that are all the rage on our campuses, media, and our self-anointed elect among the glitterati. Many of these babbles are passing fads, only temporary enthusiasms that can’t stand the test of time due to their falsehoods and internal contradictions.
Inform yourself by gathering knowledge to answer some basic questions. Here are some queries to chew on.
What is our basic nature? Is our essential nature “positive”, “negative”, or a combination? Depending on your assessment, the choice may lead to a shining city on a hill or to the darkest of history’s tyrannies.
Lenin (center) in 1917 or 1918 with his Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom).
The crystallization of the “positive” view is of recent vintage and advocates the perfectibility of people. Thus, we’ll have placed over us a class of people with the hidden knowledge for perfection. They pressure for the powers to achieve the prescribed ideal … and then we’ll have to say goodbye to idiosyncrasies, liberty, and restraints on the state. Progressives, the folks torching our cities, and a good portion of the Democratic Party’s base and leaders are beguiled by the idea. They’re enraptured by big a government with big powers to engineer the ideal.
In contrast, our Founders combined the “positive” and “negative”. They were “positive” in that people could be virtuous but it required civilization’s little platoons: family, faith, and civil society. Without virtuous self-restraint, the “negative” in mankind – original sin in Christianity – will take hold and we’ll have bad men and women riding herd on a chaotic society. The recognition of our potential for evil led Madison and others in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in 1787 to the Constitution with its government constrained by law and enumerated powers.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Oil on Canvas, Howard Chandler Christy.
Your vote is a stamp of approval for one of these two courses, whether you know it or not. From Aesop’s Fables: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!”
Why does Big Government have a propensity for failure, especially when given intractable problems to solve?
Friedrich Hayek’s answer: the knowledge problem – no small group of people in any government have the knowledge and mental capacity to direct the many-faceted lives and minds of a population. We must know our limits; too many on the left don’t know theirs as they ignorantly unleash the law of unintended consequences.
The inherent totalitarianism in The Green New Deal will produce scads of unforeseen ill-effects, replicating California’s experience of blackouts and expensive energy and an economic scorched earth.
SONOMA, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 10: Traffic lights in the Sonoma area are out due to power outages on October 10, 2019 in Sonoma, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
A government takeover in Medicare for All will translate into Iron Curtain health care. Be prepared for a gradual deterioration of medical services: rationing, decrepit facilities, a decline in innovation and the striving for excellence, and life and death decisions made on the basis of bureaucratic formulas. We’ll get the chance to experience the disaster of urban renewal of the 60’s and 70’s in our next hospital visit. Oh, I forget, it’ll be free … and centralized and like the DMV.
… to say nothing of the loss of freedom in healthcare. For the masses of us, we’ll be funneled into treatment reminiscent of an inner-city public hospital’s emergency room on a Saturday night. Naturally, the rich will have recourse to the best of the highly proficient medical wildcats operating in a medical black market, or just jet to the lavish establishments that’ll pop up beyond our borders. Healthcare will remain grossly hierarchical with the privileged few getting more and the rest of us sitting in a chaotic emergency room next to a gang’s stabbing victim.
Patients forced to wait for treatment in the hallways of an Atlanta Hospital in 2006 due to lack of space and overcrowding. (Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)1970’s Soviet hospital room.
Marking a ballot is much more than a romantic attachment to particular candidate. The act carries with it all of the above and more.
Is “tax the rich” practical?
Big Government necessitates Big Taxes. It’ll be sold as “tax the rich” but it’ll end up as a tax everybody receiving a paycheck. The rich will hide their wealth or flee; everybody else will be at the mercy of the payroll department and the IRS. Don’t underestimate the inventive ways for Big Government hucksters to extract more sustenance out of the people to feed their Leviathan.
Look at the income tax. In the beginning it targeted the rich ($1 million or more in annual income), then it creeped down the income ladder, and then withholding was invented. The “genius” of withholding is that they get their money before you get yours (withholding), and then they command under penalty of law that you tell them whether it was enough. It’s ludicrous.
The scurrying about to avoid the lash of exorbitant taxes by those with the means to do so will further sap economic vitality. In the end, the ones who don’t have the means to escape the whip – the average person – will be socked with the bill in the form of reduced paychecks, lost opportunities for their children, and deteriorating standards of living.
Tax-raising schemes siphon a good portion of the rewards of the people’s labor to legions of government workers and Big Government’s brood of ideological and rent-seeking dependents. The result is a bloated government with not enough money to support the bloat as the well-to-do sit in their posh seaside villa on some island outside the reach of the IRS. In the end, you know who’ll bear the brunt of that sorry state of affairs.
Rest assured that it won’t be Jeff Bezos in his secluded estates in Seattle and Washington, DC, or his Texas ranch, or the South Pacific island that he’ll purchase to escape the clutches of Bernie/Warren/AOC. There will be no escape for his underlings in the distribution centers.
What is meant by equality? Is it equality of result or equality of opportunity? Which way do the parties lean?
Today’s equality at the hands of left-wing zealots isn’t the equality of the Founders or MLK’s “I have a dream”.
Martin Luther King making his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the capitol mall, August 1963.
The choice between the two equalities leads in two radically different directions. Up to the recent invention of critical race theory and the sophistry of using racism to fight “racism” (affirmative action), the preference was for equal opportunity in the 20th-century actions and policies to remove unwarranted obstacles in law (de jure) and practice (de facto) that lead to seriously problematic discriminations.
Yet, waiting in the wings among the civil rights crusaders were the revolutionary ambitious. Not satisfied with the proscriptions on discriminatory behavior, and schooled in the Marxist perspective that the oppressed are acculturated to the oppression, these zealots demand nothing less than the complete restructuring – maybe the complete overturning – of our way of life. Everyone’s life is to be invalidated and made unpleasant in the pursuit of a war against a cloudy abstraction: systemic racism.
Equality of result is their weapon of choice. The ammunition for the weapon is a numerical goal straitjacketed to proportionality. 13% of the population means 13% in every social, economic, and political measure. If the stats stray from the number, the hucksters of the Left say that it is evidence of the hidden form of racism that penetrates all that we are. We, the accusation goes, are “privileged” because we rigged the system to our (white) advantage, even though many of the “privileged” aren’t white. That’s a recasting of Marx’s justification for the proletarian revolution for a different clientele.
In the corrupted parlance of government- and academic-speak, it is called “disparate impact”. You may as well know the arcane multisyllabics used to disguise the foolishness.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. It’s more than that. It’s a moonshot from stat to revolution.
“Inequities” (lack of fairness) is in vogue as another word of choice for those enamored of stat-slinging for revolution. Can there be, though, more than one explanation, other than racism, for a socio-economic stat’s divergence from proportionality? For instance, is the over-representation of black males in the violent crime numbers due to something other than the banal “racism”? A person could cite any number of reasons for the circumstance without placing the blame on a broad and skulking ill-feeling toward black people.
Take any social and economic stat’s divergence from proportionality for any of the law’s “protected classes” (Women are 51% of the population but account for 100% of all births.) and funnel the variances into the single cause of bigotry – intentional or unintentional, overt or covert – and you will have the nonstop, hair-on-fire crusade to eliminate causes that aren’t causes. Churches are vandalized; campuses are plagued by roving mobs; downtowns are torched; and the criminal justice system is increasingly staffed by people who’ll do anything to force the world to conform to the proportionality.
Equality is refashioned into paranormal activity, something akin to ghost hunting for systemic racism, and therefore its vagueness makes it very useful. If you want to locate the locus of the pseudo-science, look no further than the Democratic Party. The loudest yapping for equality of result comes from the “D” side of the aisle. The R’s are much more likely to pursue the other option.
What is socialism?
The Socialist Feminists of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesting Trump’s health care plan on Jul. 5, 2017, in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. (Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket—Getty Images)Members of the Democratic Socialists of America gathered in New York City in May 2019.
Joe Biden in late August of this year plaintively proclaimed, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” The statement is beside the point. We don’t rely on looks to determine whether somebody is a socialist with a soft spot for rioters. Friedrich Engels, frequent co-author with Karl Marx and businessman/scion of a wealthy family, didn’t have the “looks” of a socialist revolutionary either. Biden isn’t the reincarnation of Engels, but he is very confused.
Biden might cite his long career in politics as proof that he isn’t one, but we’re not referring to the Biden of 1973. The 1973 Biden isn’t the 2020 Biden and the 1973 Democratic Party isn’t the 2020 Democratic Party. They used to have pro-lifers in the Party. The Overton window (the range of acceptable policies) of the Party has moved far left, along with the Party’s standard-bearer. Socialism is found on the left side of the spectrum alongside the Party’s base and a good portion of its leadership.
Bernie Sanders and AOC
As for a working definition, socialism has often been described as public (government) “ownership” of the means of production (nearly all consequential property), or at least of Lenin’s economic “commanding heights”. Keep in mind that “ownership” is a form of control. Government can control the “commanding heights” without ownership, and that can be achieved with legislation and decrees to establish powerful taxation and regulatory regimes. A more accurate definition would substitute “ownership” with “control”.
There is a substantive difference in government intervention between the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Green New Deal. The controls to prevent conspiracies to dominate markets is far removed from power to micro-manage everything from Exxon to a dealership’s showroom to a mother’s decision to turn on the air conditioning to the residential preferences of a homebuyer to …. The control goes beyond the mere authoritarian and right into the space reserved for totalitarian. Bluntly put, it’s socialism.
Biden endorsed it, and many other forms of government force to dictate choices and habits of the people. He may offer a somewhat scaled-down version of it but, really, the argument in his party is over the shade of red – the color historically adopted by socialists – not whether it is red. Are we to get full-blown central planning (Bernie/AOC) or just a much bigger one than today’s scattershot version (Biden)?
Where would JFK fit in this party with his across-the-board tax cuts? There would be little room for the JFK of 1963 in platform committees chaired by Elizabeth Warren (wealth tax, Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, racial reparations, defund the police, witch hunts for the chimerical systemic racism, open borders, etc.), Bernie (ditto), and AOC (ditto). He could be excused for thinking that he had accidentally stumbled into a meeting of Castro’s politburo.
Despite Biden’s denials, the acceptance of socialist proposals makes it hard for him to claim that he isn’t one. If elected, the government would move further left than even his professed political soulmate and career lefty, Obama, attempted.
The denial by Never-Trumpers like John Kasich is preposterous. He says that he “knows” that Biden isn’t a radical, but the verb belongs in the same category as “look”. You can’t “know” if his announcements and party’s official platform say otherwise. Kasich “hopes” that Biden isn’t a radical. Hope that a person isn’t what they say they are is a poor basis for adult conversation.
It’s like a prayer defense in basketball. The defense is actually a failure to play defense and a “hope” that your opponent will miss the shot. I’ve seen it as a high school basketball coach for many years. I’ve had to call many a timeout to stop it. “Hope” that your opponent is incompetent is a sure path to a losing record.
Socialism is poison to a nation, and it matters not if the dosage is administered by Bernie/AOC or Biden. Poison is still poison.
What is progressivism?
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in debate in 2016.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 proclaimed, “I’m a progressive who gets results and I will be a progressive president who gets results.” Well, what is she?
The genealogy of progressivism goes back to the 19th century, right alongside The Communist Manifesto, the Socialist International, eugenics, and the bankruptcy of racial supremacism. Some academics became impatient with the messiness of our constitutional republic and wanted to streamline it into the orderliness of the science lab, their beau ideal. Popular sovereignty would be pushed to the periphery of governance and the actual administration of it, the part in actual contact with the citizen, would be placed in the hands of people like them, the academically trained.
Progressivism is a cult, the cult of the expert; the expert ordained by an academic clerisy.
So, we had the minions of the EPA declare a retired couple’s property a sensitive wetland and thereby effectively seized control of it. It would result in the 2012 Supreme Court decision in Sackett vs. EPA in which the Court recognized the right of a citizen to seek redress of agency overzealousness in the courts. The EPA asserted that a good portion of their actions were beyond the reach of the courts. The EPA’s stand is the quintessence of the omnipotence of the “expert” enshrined in progressive dogma.
In this Oct. 19, 2011, photo, Chantell and Mike Sackett talk about their battle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over their right to build a home on a lot near Priest Lake. The EPA said that the lot included wetlands. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the couple. (Kathy Plonka)
Overwhelmingly, today, the official sponsor of progressivism is the Democratic Party. Progressives know where their big government bread is buttered; the Republicans, rejecting their earlier dalliances with it (think TR), chose a more free-market bun to spread the condiment.
Everywhere from the Democratic Party platform to the public antics of their leaders is displayed something for additional government cadres to do. Free college means more government hires in the Department of Education, and the IRS to enforce the new tax provisions to pay for the monstrosity. A wealth tax is a subsidy for IRS empire-building since new bean-counters and enforcers will have to brought on board to squeeze the dough out of a reluctant public. Racial reparations are a sop to DC’s identity-politics industrial complex and the IRS since eligibility will have to be determined, enforced, and checks written. The Green New Deal is as close to Gosplan, the Soviet central planning agency, as any prior attempt going back to Woodrow Wilson’s War Socialism in the heady days of WWI. Government planning is always labor intensive for government. New crusades against the spectral “systemic racism” is an invitation for a vast expansion of employment opportunities in the DOJ and the panoply of race-hustling agencies. When they aren’t directing the state’s powers and agents at their political opponents, the Party’s advocacy is a laundry list of more things for government to do. Now that’s progressivism in a nutshell.
The Democratic Party’s positions are a vast recruitment program for new armies of government employees to control the lives of the people while leaving a rump of a private sphere. The enlistees will have the paper qualifications of “expert” to brandish, and additional comrades thanks to the Pelosi/Schumer/Biden gang. Once in place, you’ll play hell to remove them.
The economic impact on private-sector Americans will be catastrophic, with the exception of the employees in the real estate industry of the greater metropolitan DC area.
If you’ll notice, the Democratic Party comes across as despicable, despicable in where they want to lead the country. Nothing was said about possible Republican malfeasance because the threat to the country comes from the Left, and Democratic Party is the party of the Left.
Today, the parties are more ideologically homogeneous than ever before. In the past, parties were coalitions. No longer. When was the last time you heard of a prominent pro-life Democrat? They are gone, along with the Scoop Jackson, Harry Truman, and JFK types. There can’t be a lot of anti-red Democrats because too many of them are red. Vote Democrat and you’ll get in tow many of the horrors that reason and history make abundantly clear.
Trump’s tweets are beside the point.
Before you mark your ballot, or mark the ballots for other people – thanks to rampant vote-by-mail schemes – please understand what’s at stake. Your vote, or votes, is a judgment on human nature with all that comes with it. It’s a choice for or against stern and pervasive mommy government, something clearly inimical to the Constitution and our mental health. It’s a judgment on the advisability of grotesquely taxing job creators and expecting no ill-effects. It’s a choice on the meaning of equality: one that grants carte blanche to a busybody Leviathan or one that is more in keeping with a color-blind society. It’s a choice for or against socialism and progressivism and their deadening effects on the vitality of a free society. Your vote should never be a choice of personalities. If it is for you, don’t vote. Your choice could saddle the rest of us with an appalling future.
I am reading two books: Byron York’s “Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump” and Gordon Wood’s “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson”. Today’s quote comes from “Friends Divided”.
‘Friends Divided’ by Gordon S. Wood
But, first, a few words are in order about “Obsession”. Reading just the first few chapters will elicit a slow burn about our secluded and insular DC elites. This Soviet-style nomenklatura is seriously undermining the whole concept of a self-governing republic. Please read it.
John Adams wrote in an essay in the Boston Gazette in 1765, “But when restraints [on government] are taken off, it becomes an incroaching [sic], grasping, restless, and ungovernable power.”
Antifa, BLM, rioters, statue topplers, the base and leadership of the Democratic Party, and infantile academics like Ibram X. Kendi are making Adams into the possessor of a crystal ball. They want to construct a totalitarian Leviathan on racial reparations, escalating taxes, The Green New Deal, government health care in the form of Medicare for All, and a jihad against a racism that is so broadly defined as to encompass controls on all aspects of a person’s life – in Kendi’s sophomoric mind, the battle for race-based “equities”. “Equities” is cover for equality-of-result at the hands of an omnipotent state. Revel’s totalitarian temptation (previously mentioned) is on full display.
A set of infected chickens will come home to roost if given the chance. Our times are interesting … and dangerous.
Gov. Whitmer of Michigan (D) announced the status of the lockdown order in March 2020. Gov. Newsom (D) of California extended his lockdown order in June 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives his annual ‘State of the City’ speech at City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 19, 2020. ( photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)Ibram X. KendiBlack Lives Matter organized protest in Washington DC on June 6, 2020.Black Lives Matter protest with the usual Marxits slogans.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In 1977, Jean-Francois Revel, a man of the French left at the time, came out with The Totalitarian Temptation. He was repulsed by the Euro-left’s unwillingness to shed their deeply embedded reflex for totalitarian control.
Jean-Francois Revel
In the vein of Rahm Immanuel’s (Pres. Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2010) famous maxim, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, “progressives” and powerful Democrats have exploited COVID, riots, fires, and blackouts to express their inner totalitarian. Revel would not be surprised if he were alive today. It appears that once you cradle the left’s belief system, you develop affectations for centralized control down to the intimate details of a population’s lives.
I put progressives in quotes because it is the moniker of choice for a wide range of control freaks from Mayor Garcetti of LA to Gov. Newsom of California to Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University – though I’m a bit tentative about Kendi for a number of reasons. I shouldn’t be. He is a man of the left and the possessor of a powerful drive for power. They all do. It’s in their political DNA.
Control Freaks in California
Gov. Newsom (D) of Califonria delivers report on the status of the state’s fires on August 24, 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. (Photo: Kevin Sanders)
Right now, California is burning up. Of course, for the state’s overlords, it can’t be the outgrowth of the decades of environmentalist policies that are the favorite of the ruling party. And the Democratic Party is THE ruling party of California. The state has become such a Democrat Malta among the states that it can swing the national popular vote by millions in a presidential election to the loser, thereby giving the Party a tiresome talking point for at least the next four years.
Indubitably, with the tedious boast comes the incessant demands to rig the system to allow Big Urban to run the country. How would Big Urban run the country? Look at California. Mayor Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.” The state’s energy system can’t deliver the goods – electricity that is – after Democrat politicos piloted the state to the “future”, the future of the Book of Eli (see the movie).
A map shows potential power outages by PG&E in California October 9, 2019.Scene from the The Book of Eli.
It turns out that greenie energy is expensive and unreliable energy. The decrees for solar panels on your roof, flim-flamming the rate structure to punish the dissenter from the Party line, the tomfoolery of net-metering, and Byzantine utility regulations that forcibly shift resources from the delivering of electricity to the construction of the greenie utopia have translated into blackouts, the grid becoming a force multiplier for firestorms, and rates running from 15₵ to 50₵ per kWh depending on a labyrinth of time-of-day, season, and “tiers”. Thus, a resident receives a bill that reads more like a grad school dissertation or one of those Big Tech privacy statements. They’re unreadable. So, just shut up and write the check.
Electricity is a classic copper-to-coffee commodity. It need not be priced by a Gordian knot of rules, unless your rulers are auditioning for the role of commissar. For example, my utility in northwest Montana charges a flat $30 monthly fee and 8.26₵ per kWh. What does that mean? It means, first, that I can calculate my bill by looking at my meter. Secondly, with air conditioning running full blast in the summer, I received a bill for $125 as opposed to $450 in California (as of 2015).
Okay, some Golden State residents might say, “That’s not my bill.” You are fooling yourself. It may not be your bill; but if it isn’t your bill, it certainly is a classic example of the beggar-thy-neighbor approach to life. You benefit because somebody else is forced to pay what you don’t. And if they don’t pay, the utilities turn to beggar-thy-neighbor in having maintenance be the beggar. Thus, Paradise, Ca., burns down.
An aerial view of destruction from the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., off Clark Road in November 2018. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Democrat executives seem beset by all manner of catastrophes. Garcetti can’t keep the lights on and Newsom can’t either, plus keep the state from going up in flames. Blame-shifting is the usual response. The culprit is frequently some abstruse threat, a kind of politically useful bogeyman. Newsom’s favorite is “climate change”. He declared, “This [the fires] is a climate damn emergency.” To him, there’s nothing to debate, and he’ll brook no debate, dismissing those who disagree as “deniers”. It’s the typical attempt at public-shaming of people who won’t kowtow to the Party line.
There’s good reason not to bend a knee at the altar of the Sierra Club. Forest debris and dead trees have been piling up in the state’s forest for decades, as per the grand poohbahs of the greenie movement. If fires occur according to environmentalism’s vanguard elite, let ‘em burn because it is Gaia’s will. For those in the fire’s way, it’s their fault for being there. These powerful zealots are as calloused as the Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev when he wrote in 1918 during the Red Terror:
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
“In the basements of the Cheka” by Ivan Vladimirov (1919)
Newsom would probably prefer (I hope) that opponents not be lined up against the wall, just muzzled till they die out. Soon, the alternative voices will be replaced by the indoctrinated young when they reach the age of consent. Thus, the imperative to politicize the k-through-college curriculum, exactly like Soviet schools.
Then it’ll be a clear path to … more fires, third world power reliability, and an existence typified in The Book of Eli. The mounting difficulties will lead to more controls, not less. The powers-that-be will need more regulators and Party discipline to address the errors from the previous batch of edicts. 100 million dead trees exploding into massive conflagrations will mean a de-kulakization of the foothills and mountains (reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930’s war on the peasant) by herding the outlying residents into the tight urban cores (the state’s current and future war on the ‘burbs and “exurbia”).
A panorama of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada.A fire as blow torch: The Big Creek fire consumes a home as it blows through the Sierra-Nevada and 1,000 acres in 30 seconds in CNN photo from Sept. 10, 2020.
The power disruptions won’t be addressed by greater investment in delivery and production. Instead, small-is-beautiful will be the mantra: smaller homes; fewer and smaller appliances; the reduction of personal conveyance to glorified golf carts and graffitied and filthy public transport; and an end to air conditioning. See, the environmentalist’s future is a self-anointed elites’ playground for directing everyone’s lifestyle, mind, and behavior. Their current penchant for semi-totalitarianism will blossom into the full-throated variety.
Will any of this address the alleged malefactor, climate change? It might, but only if we and California are impoverished. Then again, the warming might persist unabated. Our GDP is to be lowered, but the Sierra Club can’t control China’s CCP or India. It only seems to control California. Other countries are beginning to experience the joys of air conditioning and they won’t have any qualms about coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Other states similarly won’t view the disaster that is California as being a wholesome path to follow. The end result is a mutilated California and a climate change that continues its inexorable march.
Coal-fired power generation in China.
Is the goal a diminishment of climate change – which won’t be – or just a naked power grab to control all behavior and minds? Bet on the latter. Budding totalitarians can’t help themselves because they are, in their heart of hearts, little busybodies. As incessant buttinskies, mostly upset that the world didn’t conform to them, they seek power to make it so. Call it a form of therapy, one that comes at the expense of everybody else. And the rich go along because they can appear high-minded and, by the way, have the wealth to shield themselves from the many ill-consequences. It’s an alliance of the logically incontinent and the self-loathing/self-serving. As with the Russian peasants of the 1930’s, though, there will be no place to run for the average Joe and Josephina.
An Academic Control Freak
The surrender to this class of power-seeking busybodies began when late 19th-century academicians peddled the “expert” as the proper repository for governmental power. It’s progressivism’s greatest “contribution” to civilization. The accolade of “expert” was reserved for people like them, folks with degrees. A degree wrongly became a synonym for wisdom.
Our modern campuses of insulated little social cocoons are now a hotbed where certain whims are nurtured and fortified in ideologized academic departments and staffs. The graduates with those unexamined assumptions trickle out into the institutional centers of power and influence. The ridiculousness becomes the incontrovertible “truth” in the uncultivated mind of the rioters, BLM, Antifa, opening ceremonies of NFL and NBA games, corporate HR departments, and Democratic Party slogans. Within a fortnight, the miscreants who recently chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” were turned into beacons of light.
Ibram X. Kendi
One of the academic abettors of this philosophical tyranny is Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, the occupant of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Professorship of the Humanities. The previous possessor of the title was philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. So, the position went from Wiesel’s classical liberalism to the racism of classical liberalism. It’s the crux of Kendi’s infantile explanation for all of human experience.
He wallows in the impatience of Marx, but replaced the proletariat with race, particularly blacks. Marx rejected previous norms and institutions – everything from family to constitutions, much of the corpus of classical liberalism and a good portion of western civilization to boot – because they inexorably exploited the masses of “wage slaves”, the working class. He was consumed with results, not the results of minor adjustments but with the apocalypse of existential revolution to overturn all of society. Take Marx’s general outline, replace a few nouns, recognize that both are obsessed with imposing fantastical complete equality in all its manifestations, and you have Kendi’s hectoring invective, How To Be An Antiracist.
This polemical diatribe is taken as the stuff of real scholarship. Au contraire, it’s a 284-page op-ed, a set of opinions wrapped up in biased verbiage. The quality of Kendi’s thinking can be seen in his clownish attempt to define the thing that he claims is the omni-explanation for nearly all of reality, racism. He writes, “Racism is a marriage of racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” In case you missed it, he sounds like an eighth-grader in repeating a form of the word and its surrogates in his definition of the word. The circular thinking resides alongside his opinions, which are one kind of conclusion, being used to reach other conclusions. There’s much in this polemic that is sand in the gears of logic.
He’s proof that ethnic studies departments do not broaden the mind but generate the next generation of radicalized activists. And they are pouring into the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Rochester, Kenosha, almost anywhere sympathizers hold the reins of power.
A riot against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon, August 2, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
None of Kendi’s end-state of absolute equality can be achieved without the power to impose it. Inequality rears its head no matter what. Past attempts at equality-mongering (Remember the Iron and Bamboo Curtains?) only led to an aristocracy of overseers – people like Kendi – to patrol the jurisdictions of the equality-of-all-things. If the commissariat didn’t exist, life would revert back to its prior condition of an overclass of the powerful, talented, or most fortuitist. Unknowingly or knowingly, if Kendi and his followers get their bite at the golden apple of power, it’ll just be the powerful of the few with the guns.
The walls of absolute equality will have to be forever manned with incessant forays into people’s lives to enforce the multitude of decrees, sub-decrees, sub-sub-decrees, ad infinitum. Kendi and his initiates in the streets are actually control freaks par excellence.
Kendi is only one of the latest inductees into the rogue’s gallery. He’ll have to maneuver for floor space with the likes of Xi Jinping and Stalin. Much of the Democratic Party leadership is waiting in the wings to join him and them. As for the rest of us, we’ll have nowhere to run. The United States as the traditional haven from tyranny will have been eclipsed. Sad, really sad.
BOSTON, MA – OCTOBER 01: New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a rally calling on Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to reject Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court on October 1, 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
The thought plagues me. Are the American people so unwitting that they are willing to let into power a cultural entity so inimical to human flourishing? Is this “wisdom”, as in the “wisdom of the American people”? The congery is nothing but a patronizing and trite slapstick mouthed by grasping aspirants of power and worth about as much.
Democracy, after all, is just a game of voting and counting them up. As in a game of baseball (when the coaches and players aren’t kneeling), there are runs (votes) and a total score. The outcome is a matter of math, not “wisdom”. The result only becomes “wisdom” if it validates the presence of a benign culture from which sprang the result. But as a pundit from long ago would say, this ain’t your grandmother’s culture.
Antifa demonstrators in Portland in 2019.
Something happened along the way. This is not a culture infused any longer with the beatitudes, the Genesis and Exodus stories, The Passion Play, the recognition of human failing in the presence of original sin, and the founders. Instead, the vacuum is filled with state-love and its cult of the “expert”, smothering group identities, obsessive hand-wringing over innumerable inequalities, and a rejection of personal accountability and self-reliance.
In other words, we have a mess. The mess has been foisted on us by our “betters”, all of whom are networked by a common social experience, an experience much at odds with realities for the bulk of the population. Many had middle class, suburban upbringings – the only mundane aspect of their backgrounds – and attended elite universities. Church might have had some relevance in their early years but it’s hardly detectable now. The corporate boardroom isn’t that much different from the faculty lounge in resumé and belief.
Church attendance in the broader society is way down, and we are starting to see Bibles burnt in the public square and the desecration of churches and statues of saints. The fundamental premises of these actions are increasingly found in the Democratic Party. Christianity will only have a role if it serves the Party’s post-truth doctrines. Daily, you can watch Nancy Pelosi mangle the Bible’s persistent refrain for PERSONAL involvement in the lives of the needy into a command for a near-socialistic nanny state. That way, she and the rest of us can wash our hands of them by turning them over to civil service-protected, unionized public employees. It’s shameful.
Portland protesters burn Bibles, 2020.
The rise of socialism is key to the Party’s corruption. They protest – Elizabeth Warren, “I am a capitalist” – but the charge is unavoidable. If not now, when can we call them socialists? When does their claim to be capitalists give way to the reality of their socialism? Is it a difference of opinion over the choice of the verbs “own” and “control” between “power” and “property” in the definition, as in “government power to own/control property”? At a certain point, it’s difference without a difference. They propose such an immense expansion of government controls in The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and increased taxes (they say on the “rich”) that a deed becomes a meaningless piece of paper.
This is where we are heading if today’s Socialist Revolutionary Party, aka Democratic Party, is rewarded with victory in November. For many of you, it’s what you will vote for, knowingly and unknowingly, and what you’ll get. Your exclamations about Trump’s language and behavior can’t hide the fact of Bernie/AOC’s platform as scripture for policy-making. Some hate Trump so much that they are willing to sacrifice your children’s future. Elites won’t be affected because they will be still guaranteed legacy admissions into Harvard, not your kids.
The decline in you and your children’s fortunes is a certainty since socialism doesn’t work. A foul-mouthed executive can still function successfully, but socialism can’t, even if it is headed by Mother Teresa. Turning loose the rewards of unproductivity while increasing the penalties for productivity is not a prescription for national well-being.
The polls are troubling enough to keep me awake at night, particularly one about majorities of both parties favoring a “radical restructuring of the American economy”. I know, I know, the phrasing is so broad that it entices people to check it. Regardless, a thinking person would have to ask, who will do the restructuring? We don’t have a “structured” economy. Ours is one of spontaneous associations, also called freedom, also called a free market.
Central planning in LA. Mayor Garcetti and the city council endorsed a classic example of central planning in their drive to 100% green energy by 2045. Central planning is notorious for setting targets like those set by Gosplan in the USSR.
“Structured” economies have central planning, i.e., someone to structure them – like Gosplan in the USSR. Therein lies the rub: no small group of people can manage an economy, and it will have to be small since large groups undermine “planning”. It’s through planning that things are “structured”. The result is a Havana society of the largest open-air museum of classic 50’s automobiles and crumbling apartment buildings.
So, go ahead, hate Trump for his indelicate language and tweets and vote the socialist wolves into the American hen house. You’ll set back your children’s prospects for decades.
The prophet: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), British historian, philosopher, writer.
If you’re interested in plowing deeper into the causes of the current spate of riots, statue toppling, and angry mobs from Trump’s inaugural through the Kavanaugh hearings to the mayhem in our cities, one need look no further than a recent piece in National Review (August 29) by M. D. Aeschliman. In a nutshell, today’s urban street thugs – always half-literate despite privileged college admissions and comfortable upbringings – are unknowingly devotees of the 18th century’s Jean Jacques Rousseau, a man who dumped his children on the doorsteps of orphanages for someone else to be burdened with their upkeep. Rousseau is responsible for much of the secular dogmas and liturgies of today’s left. It’s a direct contradiction to Christianity and nearly all norms that have made human flourishing possible.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau would make two things broadly popular: hedonism and a coercive state. On the one hand, he dispensed with the truth of human corruptibility in the doctrine of original sin and replaced it with a benign emotionalism that was, in his mind, ruined by centuries of traditions. And off our angry urchins go running to the latest gang assault on a statue, a re-imbibing of the NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, and the erasure of anything older than last hour’s Twitter storm. The shattering of norms – that old stuff again – points the way to a radical individual autonomy and a sanctioning of depravity. For Rousseau, nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of self-defined sensualism.
Nicolas Poussin, Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan, 1631 – 1633.
On the other hand, if we aren’t to be governed by anything older than last night’s leftovers and life is one continuous bacchanalia, Rousseau deposits in tradition’s stead the shadowy, spectral-like “general will”. The people according to Rousseau have a mind, or “general will”, but how do we know what it wants? Good luck … and run to the hills. Flight is the only practical option because there will always be someone to step forward with the power to decipher the national brain. Der fuhrer would make much of the all-conquering national will as embodied in him. Lenin’s will was not safely questioned. Longevity as a real or imagined opponent of Mao was an alien concept. Need I mention others who drank from Rousseau’s well? Tradition- and norm-bashing seem to lead to ugly places.
The historian Thomas Carlyle, the real prophet of today’s woes, writing in the middle of the 19th century did more than anyone to accurately plumb the depths of the French Revolution – the child of Rousseau’s mendacious thoughts – in his book of the same name. As a radical to the Tories and Tory to the radicals, he could fathom the errors of a barnacle-encrusted society while at the same time appreciate the fragility of the social order. The Jacobins destroyed the old social order and created tyranny.
Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792 (artists: Jean Duplessis-Bertaux ).
Are BLM, Antifa, and the radicals now firmly ensconced in the leadership of the Democratic Party taking the place of yesteryear’s Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and Castro’s Cuban Communist Party? Or are we to separate the Democratic Party and place it alongside Kerensky’s Socialists? And you ought to know what happened to them. For the Bolsheviks, two’s a crowd and off to the gulag and execution squads for moderates and competitor extremists.
Please read the article … and reread it. You’ll get more out of it the second time around. If you don’t want to work that hard, turn in your citizenship card because a republic requires its citizens to do the heavy lifting, or be horrifically ruled by the few who will. Lenin had a name for them: The Vanguard Elite.
The Vanguard Elite: 1920 Bolshevik Party meeting: sitting (from left) are Enukidze, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Lenin and Rykov.
