Islamic State fighters in a show of force in the Syrian city of Raqqah, 2013. Picture: APAntifa protest/riot, USA, 2017.
Appearances, it is said, can be deceiving. The old cliché is true to a large extent when comparing the two groups pictured above: ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, and antifa (as in “anti-fascist”) in Berkeley. We must remind ourselves that the “antifa” crowd has yet to behead anybody, if we can get beyond the ISIS-inspired fashion tips. But the bio’s of the movements have a similar trajectory, including the germination of self-radicalized and inspired lone wolfs.
Within Islam, a militancy has arisen just as lethal as 1970’s Black September. Black September wasn’t so much a vicious religious campaign as an anti-imperialist and socialist goon-fest that culminated in bloody extravaganzas like the massacre of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Not so much into the socialist thing, today’s ISIS , Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., have cooked up a toxic brew of anti-West fervor with a fealty to sharia. They are religion on speed and with a sword … and AK-47’s and RPG’s as well. Their ideal, especially true for ISIS, is an 8th century lifestyle and conquest for Allah.
Within today’s Left, an analogous combativeness is obvious to anyone with a smartphone. The whole left side of the political spectrum acts like they’re on Walter White’s customer list for meth in “Breaking Bad”. The Democrats have transformed themselves into the institutionalized version of the enraged Left. If language is any gauge, the serial use of expletives shows the highly agitated state of the party.
Here’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) and her newfound fondness for f-bombs:
(see 1 below)
Or take a policy disagreement about healthcare and label your opponents as reenacting something like the Wansee Conference (remember, the Nazi confab to plan the Final Solution). Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) is no shrinking violet when it comes to vitriol. On May 4, she said regarding the House GOP’s healthcare bill,
“This isn’t football. It’s not about scoring points. Trumpcare will devastate Americans’ healthcare. Families will go bankrupt. People will die. Disease, sickness, and old age touch every family. Tragedy doesn’t ask who you voted for.” (see 2 below)
Can you blame an impressionable activist on the emotional fringe of the Left taking these words to heart and grabbing a semi-auto and going on the hunt? Yes, I can pin personal responsibility on the easily led for any subsequent mayhem, but the Left’s political celebrities painting disagreement in stark terms doesn’t exactly set a tone for sober dialogue.
Protester in a Donald Trump mask and emoting with the fickle finger of fate outside midtown NY hotel during a fundraiser for the state Republican Party on April 14, 2016.
Or take this blog post in the liberal but supposedly respectable HuffPost of June 6 by one Jesse Benn, “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any”. Benn’s short bio on his Twitter page includes “Member of the intolerant Left. No war but class war.” In the blog he wrote,
“In the face of media, politicians, and GOP primary voters normalizing Trump as a presidential candidate—whatever your personal beliefs regarding violent resistance—there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.” (see 3 below)
Is “normalizing Trump” the worrisome issue for the country … or is an attempt at “normalizing violent resistance” the real threat to public decency? Apparently for Benn, the political ends justify the violent means. Rattle that operational principle around in your brain as your mind wonders through the history of its progeny of gulags and Lubyanka wannabees.
Or take the ladies on ABC’s The View describing Trump as “certifiable” or a “moronic gentile”. Absent is even the slightest attempt at moderation. In many circles of the Left, the vilest words seem to be a staple of everyday conversation.
The people on the stage and in the audience on this day appear more as a like-minded mob than anything resembling a gathering of sensible adults.
Or take this CNN report on the raucous incivility at various congressional town halls.
While the effort is made to compare these outbursts to the Tea Party of recent memory, they should not be confused for spontaneous uprisings of the general public. In reality, they are an orchestrated campaign of the Left’s politically connected activists. The subject was examined in one of my earlier blog posts (see “The Left’s Hive in Action: The Modern Edition”).
The hatefulness courses its way through the mainstream media and party channels. And, to no great surprise, it spills out onto the streets and into the fevered imaginations of the true believer.
James Hodgkinson in protest outside a post office in Belleville. Ill. Undated photograph.James Hodgkinson was feeling the “Bern”. He altered his Facebook page to reflect his commitment.
Enter the self-radicalized lone wolf of Islamic extremist fame, and now of the Left. It has been said of ISIS that it inspires uncoordinated attacks of soft targets in the West. These are the terror assaults in San Bernadino, Orlando, Fort Hood, Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester, Germany, etc. A person’s broad and general affinity for militancy combined with inspiration and knowledge from a website could produce some scary results. Overheat the bombast long enough and a blood bath sometimes erupts.
Omar Mateen, the shooter, center, and the scene at the Pulse Nightclub, June 12-13, 2016.
ISIS will proudly and loudly take credit when one of their excitable long-distance psychopaths goes on a rampage. The Left will not.
James T. Hodgkinson, the attempted assassin of Republicans in Alexandria on June 14, is essentially of a mind with Jesse Benn. He took the admonition for violence seriously. Oh, the Left will demur after the fact about following the lead of al-Baghdadi, Robespierre, or Lenin in advocating executions as a path to nirvana. Like Benn, or the legions on college campuses seeking safe spaces (even as they assault guest speakers), Hodgkinson had only the m-o of your run-of-the-mill lefty activist ready to man the phones for Bernie or grab a sign and join the picket line. Who’d have thought that he’d take Benn’s and John Paul Sarte’s call for “necessary violence” literally?
Here’s James Hodgkinson being interviewed in 2011. The Left’s exploitation ploy has an upfront place in his mind. Yet, he showed no sign that a commando assault on Republicans was in his future.
Yeah, the guy has anger management issues and has been abusive, but who could forecast how the combination of an explosive personality, zealous commitment to the Left’s victimology, and ample role models of incivility before cameras, microphones, and word processors would affect a fanatic?
This isn’t Las Vegas. If you think the odds of connecting the dots to a shooting spree are anything other than low – say, 2-to-1 or less – then running a hedge fund or assessing risk for an insurance company may not be in your future.
Hodgkinson Facebook post.
ISIS has Raqqa as the capital of its caliphate. The Left has no capital as such; however, it monopolizes thought, action, and culture in megalopolis, USA. From its media centers, the Left’s coarseness disseminates. The signals are being picked up in like manner as a Muslim teenager in a Brussels ghetto cruising the net for ISIS sites originating in Raqqa.
Substitute the cultural centers of the Left – The View, the firing squad of late-night comedians, the social media organs of the The Resistance, the eagerness of legacy media to join in the feeding frenzy, and the functioning core of the Democratic Party for instance – for Raqqa media central. Both politico-media cultures help animate “Raqqa moments” of butchery.
Is there much difference between Omar Mateen of Pulse Nightclub fame and James Hodgkinson of Alexandria ball field notoriety? Are they any different in their metamorphosis from simple activist to butcher?
Certainly, and sadly for the rest of us, the Left had their Raqqa moment.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Senator drops f-bombs during speech”, CNN, 6/9/2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVmSAXttrtg
2. “Elizabeth Warren on GOP health bill: ‘People will die’”, Jaclyn Reiss, 5/4/2017, Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/05/04/elizabeth-warren-gop-health-bill-people-will-die/GZ0khNWSmJtiAQv2UA9iCP/story.html
3. “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any”, Jesse Benn, HuffPost, 6/17/2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-benn/sorry-liberals-a-violent-_b_10316186.html
4. “Congressional Shooter Loved Bernie, Hated ‘Racist’ Republicans, and Beat His Daughter”, Daily Beast, 6/14/2017, http://www.thedailybeast.com/congressional-shooter-loved-bernie-sanders-hated-racist-and-sexist-republicans
Arrogance is more than a wrinkle in an individual’s personality. Today, arrogance has evolved beyond a solitary quirk. It is a major political personality type commonly found in today’s civic ecosystem. Yes, just combine “political”, “personality”, and “type”. Arrogance is a widespread stance of the psyche (personality) that is deeply embedded in a person’s views of governance (political). Indeed, the formulation works the other way: a person’s views of governance are deeply embedded in the stance of the psyche.
The type has a love affair with the word “expert”. This subspecies of the political herd claims a monopoly on “expert”. Either they assert unrivaled possession of knowledge, wisdom, and expertise, or they lay claim to the support of a-l-l “experts”. Whichever way, further debate is arbitrarily proclaimed to be worthless since opposition is tarred as a pack of Neanderthals. It’s a not-so-kind way to end debate in your favor.
The concoction fuels an entire faction – the self-styled “Progressive” – within our grand debate. The two elements of arrogance and Progressivism are in a symbiotic relationship. They interact and reinforce each other.
It’s a politico-psychological complexion in clear contrast to the usual boastful egoism of your run-of-the-mill elected buffoon. Individual political actors may show an excess of confidence in the rightness of their views. That will always be true. The above is something altogether quite different. It’s arrogance with a political dimension.
The inception of political arrogance into the bloodstream arose from academia and the genus of politician who tethered themselves to partisan academics. No better example can be found than in the career of Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson in 1902 as Princeton University president.
The Progressives arose in a time flush with the giddy excitement of scientific discovery and thought that originated in the 19th century and lapped over into the 20th. It was the moment of Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Mendeleev, Einstein, the Curies. The modern expert rooted in science is born, and “science” is applied to everything. The expert was no normal individual who is acknowledged as adroit in a particular field of study. A public perception emerges of the sage of science with an excellence of mind capable of addressing all questions – even those matters that are, as it would turn out, beyond their competence.
Confidence was brimming for this new “expert”, chockablock with formal classroom instruction and much practical application of the expertise. In America, production of such individuals fell to the universities whose curriculum came to mirror the German model of fusing teaching and research. The founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 was emblematic as the other schools rushed to reform their programs to match. Not surprisingly, Wilson garnered his PhD in the new “political science” at Johns Hopkins.
Hopkins Hall circa 1885, on the original downtown Baltimore campus.Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University.Johns Hopkins Glee Club, 1883. Wilson is in the top row, second from left.
The cross-fertilization of Germany to America wasn’t limited to academic structure. On the currents came ideas. Prominent was Hegel’s notion of historical progress. The new sciences created a frothy atmosphere for the expectation that we were on the cusp of a new dawn, i.e. progress. It’s the zeitgeist of Hegel’s imagination.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, age 58, as rector of University of Berlin
The “spirit of the age” of the swing period from the 19th to the 20th centuries was heavily Darwinian. Darwin’s insights were licentiously applied beyond biology into history and nearly all facets of culture. At the time, John Dewey, from his perch at Columbia University as the new god of education, pinpointed the Progressives’ debt to Darwin:
“The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.” (see 5 below)
Charles Robert Darwin at age 45, circa 1854, as he was working on the publication of “On the Origins of Species”.
Wilson was particularly fond of the outlook and blended it with all things political. He was quick to jettison what he viewed as the Founders’ antiquated ideas about human nature, natural rights, and limited government. They were said to be Newtonian and outdated. Instead, the proper metaphor is evolution and Darwin.
“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.” The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” (see 1 below)
What did it mean to accord Darwin the role of epistemological Moses? Answer: A free pass is rhetorically granted to people like Wilson to refashion our Constitutional order to the dictates of the experts in the latest fashions of thought in poli sci departments. The potential exists for a new Constitutional convention, or at least an amendment, with every issue of an academic journal. It’s actually like a more erudite version of revolution without the cordite.
The fate of the republic, the Progressives argued, can’t be placed in the hands of dirty politicos. The old politics was construed as debased by cigar smoke, backroom dealing, and corruption. The new Progressive vision would be, they contended, a sterilized governance under the supposed beneficent judgment of administrators and operatives with baccalaureates.
Gilded age corruption as the Progressives viewed it.
The upshot was that the rule of law and the limits on government functionaries were effectively neutered. “Don’t lament the happenstance”, the Progressive acolyte would assure us . Wilson and the Progressive legions promised that we’d be better off with the replacement of the Founders’ dinosaur with enlightened experts ensconced in administrative bureaus. Of course, we’ll have less popular sovereignty, but what a small price to pay for the benefits of direction from papered (i.e. degreed) “experts”? Eh?
The scene was set for the establishment of the real fourth branch of government: the administrative state, not elected and unaccountable. But are these purported paragons of knowledge and disinterested discernment – these GS-level employees and their administrative heads – really what they’re cracked up to be? Are they immune to ideological bias? Are they really insulated from pressure group influence? Are they partisan? Are we actually, in other words, any better off than under the naked rule of Tammany Hall?
There’s too much to consider to suggest otherwise, or at least cause a downgrade in the Progressive promise. Let’s throw back the curtain to expose the revolving door between ideological groups and bureaucratic/legislative leadership. For example, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the nation’s premiere environmentalist activist groups, is a personnel pipeline to Democrats on capitol hill and the Obama administration.
If you’re interested, here’s NRDC’s short video of their mission statement to give you some sense of their secular zealotry. Take note of the ideological hyperbole.
The relationship between the Dems and environmental activism in the form of groups like the NRDC is understandable given the natural penchant for ideological birds of a feather to flock together. And its critical for the environmentalist cause to be well entrenched on both the legislative and administrative sides of the policy-making equation. Here’s a sample of the NRDC recruits to the Dems’ effort at political warfare:
David McCintosh, former air pollution attorney at NRDC, took the position of senior legislative adviser to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Michael Goo, NRDC’s legislative director on climate issues, appointed as special counsel for Ed Markey (D, Mass.).
Karen Wayland, NRDC legislative director of six years, became the top staffer on energy and environmental issues for Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.).
Melissa Bez, NRDC official, joined the staff of Henry Waxman (D, Ca.).
Eben Burnham-Snyder, NRDC official, was spokesman for Markey’s House Energy and Environment Subcommittee of 2009.
Brad Crowell, NRDC official, was environmental aide to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D, R.I.).
Chris Murray, another NRDC officer, was a staffer for Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D, Ind.).
The relationship was indicative of an influence of what many at the time (2009) called a “NRDC mafia” within the machinery of Democratic Party politics. (see 8 below)
We should dispel with the Progressive contention of a disinterested and apolitical technocrat wisely guiding us through the pitfalls of life. Government employees come to their jobs with biases and prejudices akin to the hoi polloi. Passing through their office doorway isn’t like dipping under the water in baptism. Their weaknesses and prejudices aren’t washed away but carried with them to the desk and the field.
Partisanship is glaringly apparent in certain tranches of government employment. Typical surveys of political party affiliation are inconclusive since most don’t distinguish between, for example, defense and non-defense employment sectors. The numbers lump together all employees thereby diluting any preference that might exist if one could see the pool in its parts. But occasionally figures crop up that are telling.
One was the breakdown of political party contributions by federal employees in executive branch departments for the 2015-2016 election cycle. The difference between 6 and 5 digits (and 4 digits) in political cash is profound. The State Department laundered $299,224 to the Democrats and only $24,241 to the Republicans. Treasury Department employees flooded the zone with $170,897 to the Dems while only managing to scrape together $1,925 for the Republicans. Laborers in the Justice Department shoveled $137,603 to the Dems with only $14,939 going to candidates with an “R” after their name. The same pattern recurs with $139,483 to the D’s and $12,319 for the R’s in the Department of Health & Human Services. The disparity was $120,271/$14,377 in the Energy Department. Adding together the numbers for 7 executive departments in one study produced a 5-to-1 advantage in lucre for the Dems (see 9 below).
The federal government employees’ puppy love for the Dems is understandable. After all, the Democrats are the party of big government and that means job security and splendid compensation packages for big government’s worker bees. It certainly, though, shoots a torpedo through the hull of the disinterested and unbiased technocrat. They are motivated by the same incentives that afflicted Boss Tweed’s ward healers.
Could the average government worker be singularly exceptional in avoiding the crass interests of the unwashed masses? If so, we’d have to accord the bureau’s office doorway, once again, with the magical cleansing powers of something akin to Christian baptism. Somehow that seems to me a bit of stretch.
Ironically, unaccountable and biased government has been slowly gestating since the Pendleton Act of 1887. The act put words to the hope of removing raw patronage from government service. Certainly a noble endeavor. Instead, what we got morphed into an army of folks with some know-how, ladled with bias and self-interest, and its harder to fire them than removing wisdom teeth.
The hubris of the Progressive politician and their knee-jerk claim to ownership of “experts” in and outside of the government are chief characteristics of this political personality type. It stems from a misplaced faith in human omniscience and a forgetfulness of our frailties. Furthermore, it dodges any assessment of these “experts” and their politicized overseers.
We now enter the land of “argument from authority”. Since most politicians, journalists, and laymen only possess, at best, a cursory understanding of science, they resort to the “experts”, with the modifier “all” attached to more easily dispatch those who might disagree. It’s acting out this old syllogism (see 11 below):
For Progressive politicos, they’d like to replace “probably” with “must”. The language adjustment makes their job of selling their preferred policy prescriptions so much easier while condemning opposition in one fell swoop.
An example of the tactic (one of many that one could cite) occurred in 2014 during the ebola outbreak in West Africa. Controversy erupted over Obama’s decision not to impose a travel ban on infected regions. He tried to lay claim to “experts” as a class when, in fact, expert opinion wasn’t so monolithic in support of his decision.
Here’s part of President Obama’s speech on the issue.
In a poll by SERMO, a leading social network of licensed physicians in the U.S., 75% answered “yes” to a question about whether all travel to the U.S. from West Africa should be halted (see 10 below). This factoid isn’t mentioned to posit one side’s “experts” over another’s. It is mentioned to show an overused rhetorical gambit to win a political fight, the political deoxyribonucleic acid (dna) of Progressive political theater.
Or take this episode that erupted on Fox News’s The Five on June 3. Note the unquestioning reliance on “experts” by the self-designated Progressive Juan Williams as he criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Watch the sweeping conclusions from such half-witted devotees of “science” as Nancy Pelosi or Jerry Brown.
While Juan is more personable, the politicos are forcefully insistent. Should we say “arrogant”?
Bill Nye, a Cornell graduate in mechanical engineering, approaches disagreement to his faith in climate-change orthodoxy as close to a mental disorder, or maybe a serious mental malfunction. In his mind, all climate oscillation questions are settled; nothing more to do here. Nye’s mind is a closed mind. Yet, Nye appears to be unaware of a general rule of thumb of science: the grander the conclusion, the greater the need for elbow room for modification later. Modesty, however, isn’t a Nye character trait. Watch Nye and Fox News’s Tucker Carlson go at it.
Nye’s suggestion about disagreement being a form of “cognitive dissonance” comes close to Sovietizing opponents. The Soviet authorities labeled dissenters to Soviet and Marxist policies as suffering from “psychopathological mechanisms”. Has the Kremlin left a lasting impression on Nye and others in the Progressive orbit? The episode exposes the arrogance of the ideological zealot hiding behind a veneer of science.
The ploy of political arrogance reminds me of John C. Calhoun’s old blather about the goodness of slavery.
John C. Calhoun by Matthew Brady, 1849.
In his calculus , some are suited to rule while others are to be ruled. Specifically, some are meant to own human beings and others are meant to be owned. He contends that it is the natural order of mankind since all are said to prosper.
“A mysterious Providence had brought together two races, from different portions of the globe, and placed them together in nearly equal numbers in the Southern portion of this Union . They were there inseparably united, beyond the possibility of separation. Experience had shown that the existing relation between them secured the peace and happiness of both. Each had improved; the inferior greatly; so much so, that it had attained a degree of civilization never before attained by the black race in any age or country.” (see 13 below)
Calhoun’s view of humankind isn’t that far removed from that of our Progressive friends. There are those fit to govern, and those best fitted to be governed. Elections are seen as wholly unnecessary to confer legitimacy on the arrangement. It is said to be natural.
For the slaveholder in the antebellum South, the distinction is race. For the Progressive, it’s possession of a sheet of paper on a wall. In both worldviews, justification to rule isn’t to hinge on a plebiscite. The masses of “inferiors” – for Calhoun, those with high melanin counts; for Progressives, those without 4 years of academic hoop-jumping – must simply accept the ukases of their “betters”.
My inclination leans toward Thomas Jefferson’s view when he said “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god” (see 14 below). Progressives need to get off their horse and recognize that they have no copyright on the truth. Humility is in order, not political arrogance.
Thomas Jefferson in 1805 by Rembrandt Peale.
Yet, they might realize that relinquishing their boots and spurs would undercut their agenda. Dispensing with the feudalism would leave them in the position of the emperor with no clothes. Sadly, therefore, they’ll cling to their arrogance as an alcoholic to a cheap bottle of whiskey. Sad, truly sad.
RogerG
(I’m also on Facebook at Roger Graf with synopsis and room for comments)
Bibliography and sources:
1. “19th century society and culture”, University of Indiana Northwest, http://www.iun.edu/~hisdcl/h114_2002/nineteenthcentury.htm
2. “Woodrow Wilson: Godfather of Liberalism”, Ronald Pestritto, Graduate Dean and Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, 7/31/2012, http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/woodrow-wilson-godfather-liberalism
3. “Woodrow Wilson and the Rejection of the Founders’ Constitution”, Ronald Pestritto, Charles and Lucia Shipley Professor in the American Constitution, Hillsdale College,
4. “Woodrow Wilson on Administration”, First Principles Series, The Heritage Foundation. Contain Wilson’s “The Study of Administration”, July 1887; http://origin.heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primary-sources/woodrow-wilson-on-administration
5. “Darwin’s Constitution”, Bradley C.S. Watson, National Review, 5/17/2010, https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/338503/darwins-constitution
6. “The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics”, William Schambra and Thomas West, The Heritage Foundation, 7/18/2007, http://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-progressive-movement-and-the-transformation-american-politics
7. “Transparency Problems: Collusion with Environmental Activists”, EPAFacts, https://epafacts.com/transparency-problems/collusion-with-environmental-activists/. EPA Facts is an online publication of the Environmental Policy Alliance. SourceWatch.org pans the group as a big business front. SourceWatch, though, is no neutral observer. Its leftist bias is given away in its rhetoric. In its article on the Environmental Policy Alliance, the SourceWatch reduces the group to the PR firm Berman & Co. In describing Berman & Co., it says, “The firm operates a network of dozens of front groups, attack-dog web sites, and alleged think tanks that work to counteract minimum wage campaigns, keep wages low for restaurant workers, and to block legislation on food safety, secondhand cigarette smoke, drunk driving, and more.” The synopsis could have been written by any of Bernie Sanders’s campaign staffers.
8. “‘NRDC mafia’ finding homes on Hill, in EPA”, Darren Samuelsohn, NY Times, 3/6/2009, http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/03/06/06greenwire-nrdc-mafia-finding-homes-on-hill-in-epa-10024.html
9. “Which Political Party Receives the Most in Political Contributions from Federal Employees”, Ralph R. Smith, FedSmith.com, 5/19/2016, https://www.fedsmith.com/2016/05/19/which-party-receives-the-most-in-political-contributions-from-federal-employees/
10. “75% of Doctors Support Travel Ban from West Africa According to SERMO Poll”, PR Newswire, 10/14/2014, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/75-of-doctors-support-travel-ban-from-west-africa-according-to-sermo-poll-279014441.html. PR Newswire is a distributor of news releases based in New York City. “The service was created in 1954 to allow companies to electronically send press releases to news organizations ….” (wikipedia).
12. “Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union”, wikipedia.org.
13. “John C. Calhoun Sees ‘Slavery in its true light…'” (1838), document link for W.W. Norton’s textbook Give Me Liberty: An American History, Eric Foner, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/foner2/contents/ch11/documents02.asp
14. Letter: “Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman”, June 24, 1826, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/214.html
Camarillo Mental Hospital, 1941 … or the California State Legislature, 2017?
California is a beautiful state, but why is it so intent on ruining itself? The state is keen on making a sequel to Havana-care. Government-run healthcare is in the offing for most every soul in the state if SB562 is released from the asylum.
State Senators Toni Atkins (l) and Ricardo Lara (r) before their adoring fans.
The bill, midwifed by State Senators Ricardo Lara and Toni Atkins (of course, both Dems), would saddle the state’s residents with a $400 billion tab according to the legislature’s auditors – 3x’s the entire state budget for next year. In a fit of hallucinogenic wish-fulfillment, Lara spewed the line that the bill would “clamp down” on costs because it would eliminate “the need for insurance companies and their administrative costs and profits”. (source: see below)
What?! Has this guy lost his mind?
Did it occur to the would-be Socrates of the state legislature that the insurance companies would be replaced by … government? You know, the thing that has given you some of the worst roads in the nation, schools maimed with heroin-induced political correctness, sky high taxes and energy rates, one of the nation’s worst poverty (ranked 35) and violent crime rates (ranked 38), and a bullet train to Shangri-la.
Such thinking makes Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole seem like a dose of reality.
RogerG
Source:
“Healthy California Act annual price tag: $400 billion”, Tracy Seipel, The Mercury News, 5/23/17, http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/22/healthy-california-act-annual-price-tag-400-billion/
In Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, the cities are London and Paris. London is stable and relatively safe and prosperous. Paris is embroiled in violence and mob rule. The contrast is the backdrop for the meat of the story.
The technique of juxtaposing opposing things sheds light on the consequences of divergent courses of action. One thing is commonly a formula for disaster while the other, even as it may be heartily resisted in real time, is the only path to betterment. For example, let’s take two people who are known for their ideas: Bernie Sanders, U.S. senator from Vermont, and Jose Pinera, Chilean economist.
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. speaks at a campaign stop, Wednesday, March 30, 2016, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)Jose Pinera, Ph.D. in Economics, Harvard, Chilean Secretary of Labor (1978-80), Secretary of Mining (1980-1), now of the Cato Institute.
I cling to the notion that the ideas rolling around in a person’s head is far more important for governance than personality traits like affability. A person may be pleasant and genial but horribly disastrous if their ideo-philosophy was ever put into practice. Conversely, the irascible and altogether disagreeable sort may be spot-on with their ideas and beliefs. Not to say that these archetypes of the psyche apply to Sanders or Pinera, but it makes clear the preeminence of ideas over the window dressing of personality.
What is it about the ideas and beliefs of these two people that makes such a clear contrast? Well, Sanders is an intellectual fossil from the fellow-traveler collectivism of the 1930s or the SDS activism of the 1960s. The guy is stuck in a time warp. Pinera represents the renaissance of the liberty-loving economics of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek from the 1970s to the present. The Sanders path is the socialist road to “immanentizing the eschaton” (heaven-on-earth wish fufillment), as Eric Voegelin or William F. Buckley would have said. Pinera presents a different fork in the road.
The gallery of contrasts:
The fist of revolution: The conferees of the left’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) after the signing of their manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, June 15, 1962. Tom Hayden stands in the front far left.A young Bernie Sanders from the 1970s.
Watch Bernie Sanders, in a 1985 radio interview, expound as an apologist of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas as the Sandinistas worked to build a Central American sequel to Castro’s Cuba.
Milton Friedman receives the Nobel Prize for economics, 1976.
Watch Milton Friedman get heckled by a left wing activist at his 1976 Nobel ceremony, an all-too-familiar scene on today’s college campuses.
Ludwig von Mises, Austrian economist, advocate of free markets, and professor to Friedrich Hayek.Friedrich Hayek, 1950, free market economist and Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1974.
Sanders came onto his socialism honestly. He wasn’t a late bloomer. At the University of Chicago as a student in the early 1960s, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. It’s a commitment that he’d carry into doddering old age and a near miss for the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2016.
As mayor of Burlington, Vt., 1981-1989, Sanders was running a small New England town with its own foreign policy. It’s hotly debated whether he actually “honeymooned” in Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union in 1988. No doubt he wedded in 1988 and, with his new bride, jetted off to the Soviet Union as part of a delegation. The sequence is enticing: he wedded, flew off to Yaroslavl the next day, and vacationed while there. Sounds like a “honeymoon” to me. Call it a “working” honeymoon.
Bernie Sanders in Yaroslavl, the Soviet Union, 1988.
The infatuation with “workers’ paradises” extended to an attempt at establishing a Burlington embassy in Havana (I’m kidding … I think). One’s activities can be expected to follow one’s beliefs, I suppose.
In the run-up to the Democratic Convention in June of 2016, Bernie Sanders refused to endorse Hillary while regurgitating through a scroll of freebies for every conceivable victims’ group and a limitless demand for crusades against almost any and all disparities that may rear their heads in the course of human existence. It’s the stock and trade of all leftists going back to Karl Marx brooding away in the British Museum in 1873. Read the speech for yourself. The transcript source is below in the Bibliography.
The first paragraph sets the tone and the rest is the laundry list.
“Election days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end. They continue every day, every week and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice. That’s what the trade union movement is about. That’s what the civil rights movement is about. That’s what the women’s movement is about. That’s what the gay rights movement is about. That’s what the environmental movement is about.”
For Sanders, government is super mommy. Leaving aside it’s a gas chamber to prosperity, it stands in stark contrast to the ideas of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile, of whom Jose Pinera was considered a member, even though he was from Harvard and not the University of Chicago.
The story begins with the coup to remove Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.
Chile’s military overthrows the Marxist presidency of Salvador Allende, 1973. Allende’s defenders are detained face down outside the presidential palace. Earlier, Allende committed suicide rather than face arrest and exile.
The country was facing economic collapse and opposition intensified, particularly in the Chamber of Deputies, the country’s legislature. In August of 1973, the Chamber of Deputies invited the military to remove Allende. In a resolution they asked all responsible leaders, including the military, “… to put an immediate end to all situations herein … that breach the Constitution and the laws of the land …”.
Chile’s national legislature, the Chamber of Deputies.
Allende was cornered in the presidential palace. Rather than face arrest and exile, he shot himself with the AK-47 that was a gift from Castro.
Of the coup leaders, Augusto Pinochet emerged as the new president.
Augusto Pinochet, center, the day after the coup.
In the beginning, the junta seemed just as incapable of dealing with the country’s economic problems as Allende. Inflation reached an annual rate of 900%. Long before the coup there existed a pipeline for bright Chilean students to the University of Chicago, including its Economics Department. Milton Friedman had many of those students. They would prove to be the ones to show the way out of the morass.
The Chicago Boys, as they were called, were University of Chicago trained economists who were associated with the various governmental ministries in the new Pinochet regime. They invited Friedman to Chile and a short audience with Pinochet in 1975.
Milton Friedman with Augusto Pinochet, 1975. When asked later why he met with Pinochet, he responded by saying, “…for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean government [was like] a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean government to help end a medical plague”.Shortly after his return to Chicago, Friedman wrote a letter to Pinochet to state that Chile’s inflation problem arose “from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical – and terrible – climax in the Allende regime”. Shortly following he would say, “… their difficulties were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism, and the welfare state.”
Substitute Sanders for Allende, at least for the economic theory. The shoe fits.
A lesson that never caught on with Bernie was apparent to the young minds in the Chilean ministries having to grapple with the scree of Allende’s concoction of public-treasury giveaways and the attempt at government directorship of everything under the sun – Marx’s favorite nostrum. Jose Pinera was one of those university-trained economists who served as minister of Labor and Social Security(1978-1980) and later as minister of Mining (1980-1) in the Pinochet government.
Pinochet meeting with Pinera as Pinera submits his labor union plan to Pinochet, 1979.
As minister of Labor, he moved to guarantee the right to collective bargaining without giving the unions carte blanche to cripple the country. But he is best known for rescuing Chile’s retirement system with a hybrid of public and private pensions. What we call “social security”.
Nothing could be further distinct in public policy from Bernie’s desire for government to do most everything through ownership, control, and the forced extractions of taxation. Pinera’s idea, first implemented in 1980, was to expand personal freedom with individual ownership. A person could actually own their pension, rather than be at the mercy of a government-run system like our Social Security’s old age pensions. 10% of wages, instead of going to the government, went into an individual’s private investment account. Older workers could opt to remain in the old government system. Low and behold, the savings rate ballooned and so did the extent of private ownership of the economy. It’s a far cry from Bernie’s super mommy.
The reforms helped ignite Chile’s economic miracle. Democracy was restored in 1990. The personal retirement accounts have given to workers an annual rate of return of over 10%. While the poverty rate for Latin America is 40%, it is 15% in Chile.
Charles Dickens begins A Tale of Two Cities with,
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Similarly, we are in a period of both foolishness and wisdom. The reality of Bernie’s vision is currently playing out on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. Shortages, hunger, riots, and repression are the order of the day, as in late-eighteenth century Paris.
CARACAS, VENEZUELA – JANUARY 13, 2015: A shopper walks past nearly empty shelves at a supermarket due to a long term shortage in Caracas, Venezuela on January 13, 2015. (Photo by Carlos Becerra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)Opponents of the government of Nicholas Maduro protest in Caracas, Venzuela, April 8, 2017.More protests against the government of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro in Caracas, April 20, 2017.
For Bernie, no-one should face any risk so the government should insure against all the vicissitudes of life. The problem is, risk isn’t eliminated; it’s transmogrified into misery. Bernie refuses to learn from the Soviet Union, the whole eastern bloc behind the ol’ Iron Curtain, Havana, and today’s Caracas. The production of refugees is the only surplus in such places.
In a choice between an unreconstructed old leftist like Bernie Sanders and a young Jose Pinera (age 24 at the time of his pension proposal), take the young dude.
“Castro Foil: A quote from a fake news article is frequently circulated as a genuine quote from the Democratic presidential candidate.”, Snopes, http://www.snopes.com/sanders-america-embrace-socialism/
“The Daily Mail Snopes Story And Fact Checking The Fact Checkers”, Kalev Leetaru, Forbes, 12/22/2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#6120637a227f. I was drawn to this article because of my growing recognition that the fact-checkers need fact-checking.
“EXCLUSIVE: Facebook ‘fact checker’ who will arbitrate on ‘fake news’ is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes – and its staff includes an escort-porn star and ‘Vice Vixen domme'”, Daily Mail, . I was drawn to this article as I was reading the Forbes article above. While I am not able to determine the veracity of this report, it is inescapable that we must be on our guard to fact-check the fact-checkers.
“Transcript: Bernie Sanders speech in Burlington, Vermont”, Politico, 6/16/16, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/transcript-bernie-sanders-speech-in-burlington-vermont-224465. The speech is about Bernie’s intentions in the run-up to the Democratic Convention in July of 2016. There was no endorsement for Hillary Clinton.
“Sanders not ending campaign in Thursday’s video speech: spokesman”, John Whitesides, Reuters, 6/15/16, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-sanders-idUSKCN0Z126B
A backgrounder on Bernie Sanders can be found in Wikipedia under “Bernie Sanders”.
“George Will describes Bernie Sanders’ Soviet Union honeymoon”, Punditfact, 8/12/15, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/12/george-will/george-will-reminds-readers-about-bernie-sanders-u/. This is a discussion about whether Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, Penguin Books, 2008. An account of the coup against the Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile and the influence of the American economists from the University of Chicago and Harvard on the Pinochet regime can be found on pp. 212-220, “The Big Chill”.
A further account of the coup is available in Wikipedia under “1973 Chilean coup d’état”.
The invitation of the Chamber of Deputies for the military to remove Allende can be found here: “Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile”, August 22, 1973, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Agreement_of_the_Chamber_of_Deputies_of_Chile
“The Chicago Boys now and then”, Rebecca Liu, King’s Review, 9/27/16, http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/chicago-boys-now/
Watch Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel interview one of the student leaders, Keeley Mullen, of the Million Student March in November of 2015. Pay attention to her list of demands and her reasoning … for what there was of it.
There’s the familiar clamor for money: $15/hr. student minimum wage, free college education, and vanquishing all student loan debt. When asked who’s going to pay for the largesse, Keeley’s train of logic goes off the tracks. She clearly sets her sites on the usual suspects of the “1%” and the “corporate model” of education. The rich and an abstraction are either at fault or to be looted. The incoherency is astounding.
Next, look at the furor faced by Yale’s Prof. Nicholas Christakis in November 2015 for asking students to lighten up and accept some semblance of free speech on campus (see Sources for a full account). Look for the crowd’s regimented mannerisms of finger clicking and turning one’s back with arms elevated and crossed above the head. And, of course, listen for the self-anointed victim’s insistence of an apology for ethereal hurts and accommodations to recover from the hard-to-pin-down harms.
The screams and assertions-without-proof come from an assumption that the power to control lies with the self-identified victim. The fingered and generalized “perp” is to have no defense. Those who disagree with the mob enter into discourse at great peril.
Speaking of mobs, view this scene at UC Berkeley in October of 2016 as student activists blocked white students from entering Sather Gate. Prominent on the barricades were LGBTQ firebrands.
The chant “Go Around” was aimed at white students for their purported “privilege”. Again, the stench of victimhood surrounds the event.
Or, rocket forward to January 2017 and the Women’s March. Here Ashley Judd strays into the Hitler cliché in a Trump diatribe along with the laundry list of bogeymen including a variety of “isms” and misogyny.
This is not one of Ashley’s finer moments.
Alicia Keys stepped to the mike with a syncopated chant of “We’re on fire”. By now, the March’s bellicosity has become quite trite (to borrow the phonetic rhythm of the Keys’ style of speechifying).
Scarlett Johanssen took her turn on stage to carry on with the misogyny angle and elevate Planned Parenthood (PP) to the Godhead. Did it occur to her that the debate about PP in public policy revolves around the question of making others pay for it? She could donate her annual salary – all tax deductible – for the next number of years to keep the thing afloat, so long as PP avoids the Auschwitz model of body parts marketing.
What do the above clips have in common, besides the fact that they’re all examples of Lefty activism? They project the alluring facade of group persecution. No single individual is responsible for anything. Groups carry a ready-made pardon for any and all conduct, if you’re so lucky as to land in the right cluster of fashionable victims. Their absolution can be reduced to the refrain, “It’s not my fault”.
Lately, the Right hasn’t been immune to the intoxicant. The manic-Right steps in it as they bemoan anything foreign, differently pigmented, and the wispy “establishment”. Railing against affirmative action has become an easy crutch to explain away a lack of industriousness by some – even though, in the case of affirmative action, it must be admitted that we have a program to benefit victims that creates victims. The effort is a walking contradiction.
Our modern fixation with blaming others has a pedigree going back to Genesis, if you’re a fundamentalist – if not, then figuratively speaking. Blaming others is first on the checklist to escape responsibility reaching back to Eve’s appetite for fruit.
We’ve become very ingenious in inventing schemes to dodge personal guilt. Our imaginations run wild in dreaming of social and political systems, and the philosophies to go with them, to circumvent individual accountability by subsuming difficulties in mysterious evildoers. Today’s campus snowflake has the same train of thought as yesterday’s Parisian mob parading around the streets with the heads of the Bastille’s guards on pikes.
The Paris mob with the heads of the guards on pikes after the guards ventured out of the fortress to negotiate their own surrender.Mostly college students in the downtown area of Los Angeles to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 8-9, 2016.
Surely there were many in the Paris crowd who found the behavior revolting, just as there probably were “safe space” activists who objected to the recent muscling of Charles Murray as goons also set about inflicting a concussion on his professorial escort at Middlebury College. Still, group guiltlessness, no matter the moment in history, provides cover for barbarity. Indeed, it’s the lubricant.
Students disrupt Charles Murray during his presentation at Middlebury College, March 2, 2017.
Denouncing others for your problems has been the principle incubator of government’s ruination of their own people. Take 2 examples from the 20th century: Argentina’s slide into Peronism and Weimar Germany’s inter-war dance with hyperinflation.
You could say that Germany’s affliction with hyper-inflation in the 1920’s was baked in the cake. Many Germans at the time liked to blame the Versailles Treaty and its reparations burden for its problems. More correctly, Germany’s government flooded the country with Treasury bills that were translated into money in order to finance the war. A money glut already existed by the time the guns fell silent on 11-11-11-1918.
Then, after the war, the monetary fire hose was yanked wide open by Germany’s elected government because it suited popular interests. Public debt shot up as spending expanded on things like generous public employee compensation while tax revenues stagnated from massive tax evasion. Inflation was welcomed by German exporters – it made German products cheaper in overseas markets – and government officials and their supporters as a way to injure the Allies and their reparations’ bill with worthless script.
The witches’ brew culminated in 4.97 x 1020 marks circulating about the country. The annual inflation rate reached its zenith at 182 billion percent by the end of 1923. Those on inflexible incomes as in salaried workers, pensioners, and depositors were wrecked.
A billion mark note, November, 1923. Large denominations were necessary to conduct transactions.Worthless marks, 1923. Sweeping them off the streets as litter and a woman lighting a fire with it.
In all of it, lurking deep in the German pscyhe, was an unwillingness to accept their defeat. As ex-Harvard and Stanford professor Niall Ferguson concludes in his The Ascent of Money (p. 105),
“… a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance – rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten – led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself.”
Germany’s cavalier treatment of fiscal and monetary matters has its tentacles in a widespread psychological predisposition to reject the war’s outcome, and in a reflex to blame others. The skids were greased for the rise of the then nascent NSDAP (Nazi Party). More about that later.
Juan Peron drinking coffee between 1945 and 1955.
It just so happens that travelling around Italy well into the rule of il Duce (Mussolini) was an Argentinian military officer, Juan Peron. On assignment by the War Ministry in 1939 to study mountain warfare in the Alps, attend the University of Turin, and perform as military observer in Europe, he became acquainted with Italian Fascism. The experience would leave an impression.
His valuable assistance in a couple of military coups, and a deepening partnership with powerful labor unions, would ensure his rise to power. The political marriage of Peron and Argentina’s mega-unions was made possible by his championing of their power, benefits, and perks in his his role as Labor Minister and later as Vice-President. The well-traveled route to ruination is programmed in the GPS: sympathies turned into extravagant giveaways to powerful special interests.
Peron as Vice President (r) and his political benefactor, Pres. Edelmiro Farrell, 1945.
The distinction in popular American conversation between fascism and the Left is more of a naked prejudice than a reality. It shows in the career of Juan Peron. In 1945, Peron is running for president as the Labor Party’s candidate, having previously established himself as the champion of their cause for years. The unions, and his wife’s (Evita) demagoguery, rescued him from jail so he could run as president. He ran as the unions’ protector and bulwark against Yanqui (U.S.) interference, a familiar leftist trope. His fascist sympathies were apparent to American officials during the war, raising concerns about Argentina’s intentions in the latter stages of the war.
His fascist connections would bear fruit in a kind of underground railroad to Argentina for Nazi war criminals. Such is the ideological mish-mash of Peronism.
So, what is Peronism? It’s a disparate collection of ideas and beliefs that can be boiled down to “It’s not my fault”. The first gambit of professed guiltlessness is to throw aspersions at the Left’s favorite foil, the rich. In 1948, Peron spelled it out in a speech.
“… economic policy which maintained that this was a permanent and perfect school of capitalist exploitation should be replaced by a doctrine of social economy under which the distribution of our wealth, which we force the earth to yield up to us and which furthermore we are elaborating, may be shared out fairly among all those who have contributed by their efforts to amass it.” [my emphasis]
This kind of thing might just as easily come out of the mouths of today’s social justice warriors. In fact, it did. I refer you to Keeley Mullen at the beginning.
Peron put a label on his gambit, “Justicialism”. Anyway, it’s the same old victim/victimizer dualism at work in a set of different geographical coordinates. Peron condensed the oppressed down to the “workers”. Point #4 of his “Twenty Truths” says, “There is only one class of men for the Perónist cause: the workers”.
Practically speaking, what did this secular sermonizing mean for the fortunes of the country? The economy was politicized and the nation became a basket case of bailouts, national defaults, and international financial interventions. Per capita (per person) GDP was the same in 1988 as it was 1959. The economy didn’t grow – a complete reversal of the situation from around the turn of the century (1870-1913). Argentina would be overtaken by the “Asian tigers” (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea).
Inflation, that ‘ol government-engineered bugaboo, would flair up in double digits between 1945-1952, 1956-1968, 1970-1974; and reach new heights of ferocity by trebling and quadrupling in 1975-1990. The crescendo was 5,000% in 1989.
In 1989, the country couldn’t even turn on the lights with daily blackouts averaging 5 hours. The government ran out of money – not because it spent it, but because it ran out of paper and the printers went on strike. A riot erupted in a Buenos Aires supermarket when a 30% on-the-spot price increase was announced over the store’s loudspeaker. Pandering to self-anointed victims with the usual blame in tow has very unpleasant side-effects.
It hasn’t gotten much better: 2002 “Price Watch” price increase in a Buenos Aires supermarket. It could occur hourly.
Where inflation leads, default follows. It happened in 1982, 1989, 2002, and 2004. If victim/victimizer blame-game mythology was a drug awaiting FDA approval, it would not only be proven to be not efficacious (the legal approval standard), but found poisonous. There’d be a run on law firm ads on cable tv if it got past the regulators.
Peron certainly wasn’t running the show during the whole period of Argentina’s slide into insolvency. His main contribution was showing the country how to do it. Thanks Juan and Evita.
Juan and Evita waving to the crowd in 1950.
Entire political groups are wallowing in a blame-game belief system. These ideological movements are nothing but outsized masquerade balls for “It’s not my fault”. Many would turn out to be e quite lethal. Reaching down into history’s nightmares we find Mussolini’s Fascist Party, the inspiration for Peronism.
Mussolini next to a bronze Caesar outside Fascist Party headquarters, 1943.
If one didn’t know better, Mussolini could be easily confused with Lenin if a stranger was limited to listening to him on the radio. His political dogma was a grab bag of international socialism’s platitudes with “international” replaced by “national”. We’d hear the same worn out pronouncements of “exploitation” and sympathy for the “oppressed”. Naturally, the victim requires a victimizer, or some such sort. It’s a necessary ingredient for the “exploitation” gambit. Often, cast for the role are the “privileged” or, better yet, the “rich”.
It’s too easy to prove the point. Take a look at these samples, in chronological order:
In 1910, still in his old incarnation as an “international” socialist, he said, “There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters”.
Jump forward to 1919, now as full-fledged socialist of the “national” variety – a Fascist – he blathers, “This is what we propose now to the Treasury: either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them”. The list of “victims” is expanded to war veterans.
In 1921, he announced, “When the war is over, in the world’s social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth’s riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”
In 1933 he declares war on “laissez-faire” and “capitalism”: “To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.”
As an aside, in the 1930’s, after FDR’s ascendancy in the U.S., Mussolini recognized his affinity with the New Deal and its intellectual godfather, John Maynard Keynes: “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”
Further, “Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”
I could go on, if one was convinced that the quotes were out of context. They aren’t. They were typical and commonplace for him. Our social justice warriors of today should be careful when they throw about the charge of “fascist”. They unknowingly have a more intense fondness for Mussolini’s beliefs than the Federalist Society.
And while I’m at it, what about that frothy, toxic brew fermenting in Germany at the time of Mussolini’s heyday? Once again, those old stalking horses of “exploitation” and “oppression” appear under the guise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) doctrines. For these folks, the Allies, their degenerate and corrupting civilization (in their words), the Jews, Jewry’s capitalist lapdogs (in their words), and opposing street-gang socialists of the “international” variety fulfill the role of victimizer or oppressor.
Hitler in the early 1920s.
Sometimes a catchy slogan can encapsulate all of the purported horribles. For many Germans at the time, it was the “stab-in-the-back” myth. Germany’s war effort, it was said, was undermined by traitorous acts at home. The zeal to blame others will be injected with too much caffeine.
The origin of the fable could be traced to a 1919 conversation between German Gen. Erich Ludendorff and British Gen. sir Neill Malcom.
Sir Neill Malcolm, 1931Gen. Erich Ludendorff
Malcolm asked Ludendorff for his opinion of the major reason for Germany’s defeat. Ludendorff responded with the lack of home front support for the war. Malcolm clarified with the question: “Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?” Ludendorff jumped at the suggestion, “Stabbed in the back? Yes, that’s it, exactly; we were stabbed in the back”. Thus was born a rationale to blame others rather than Germany’s reckless prosecution of the war … authored by people like Ludendorff.
Subsequently, Jews became an easy target to assign blame. Alfred Rosenberg – NSDAP ideologist and later to be hung as a war criminal – spelled it out: “In theory the majority decides, but in reality it is the international Jew that stands behind it [all the evils that befell Germany].”
Alfred Rosenberg in London, 1933.Alfred Rosenberg, on the left with hands crossed, at a party meeting in Munich, 1925.
To give a flavor of this version of the noxious scapegoat, here’s a quote from a pamphlet, “The Jew as World Parasite”:
“In this war for the very existence of the German people, we must daily remind ourselves that Jewry unleashed this war against us. It makes no difference if the Jew conceals himself as a Bolshevist or a plutocrat, a Freemason or uses some other form of concealment, or even appears without any mask at all: he always remains the same. He is the one who so agitated and spiritually influenced the peoples that stand against us today such that they have become more or less spineless tools of International Jewry.”
The comment could be penned by any of the Nazi usual suspects. Regardless, it’s a replay of the same old monotonous blame-game.
The Jew in Nazi propaganda as an evil force lurking behind the Allies.
Need I go into Marx and Lenin’s overwrought costuming of blame as elaborate political theory? The oppressed/oppressor jig is the heart of the program. Focusing on Lenin for brevity’s sake, he castigates the “bourgeois” (i.e. capitalist) state as “the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class”. Marx’s dull verbosity is of the same vein.
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao during Labor Day demonstration, 2016, the Philippines.
“It’s Not My Fault”, if history is any guide, is a real crowd-pleaser. All-too-often, it’s a scheme to bilk others – usually a select few – and gravitate power to a politically enterprising cadre. The scenario is a zombie that won’t stay down. We are seeing it play before our eyes.
As was stated before, the so-called “alt-right” has fashioned for itself a nice little corner in the who’s who of oppressors. They like to talk of the predations of the “establishment”. Like all such iterations, the more airy and vague the oppressor, the better and more useful. Lenin would be comfortable with the language. The term was a favorite of some rallying to the Trump bandwagon.
Not to be outdone, the modern Left in its post-election incarnation is targeting Republican lawmakers as the corporeal symbol of their laundry list of oppressors. Their recent behavior at townhalls isn’t bi-partisan, directed at both Republicans and Democrats. It targets Republicans. It is not reflective of the general American electorate. It’s a coordinated, well-financed operation … of the Left.
What unites the Left’s partisans is an ideology rooted in a view of the world of those without “privilege” in need of a powerful state to even out the results of an unfair existence. The rationale is tailored to demand the creation and expansion of entitlements, like Obama’s ACA. The environment-as-victim, with its climate change dogma hitched, is ready-made for use on the barricades. Any attempts to roll back the administrative state – except when it comes to restraint on sexual license – is a carte blanche excuse to gin up the hive. Efforts to lower taxes on the upper-income brackets is always and forever seen as an assault on government’s sacred duty to equalize life’s results.
It’s like a video on perpetual rewind. More correctly, it’s like those present-day renditions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern garb. The stage set and costumes may be different, but it is still the play, “It’s Not My Fault!”
The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, 2008. Weimar Germany’s hyper-inflationary crisis is described in pp. 101-107; Argentina’s economic collapse under Peron is described in pp. 109-116.
The conversation between Sir Neill Malcolm and Erich Ludendorff can be found in Wheeler-Bennett, John W. (Spring 1938), “Ludendorff: The Soldier and the Politician”, Virginia Quarterly Review. 14 (2): 187–202.
Riots at UC Berkeley, Feb. 2, 2017, to protest the campus appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos.Gorsuch before the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 2017. (NBC News)
The Gorsuch nomination is a barometer of the condition of our politics. It’s a toxic environment of a lack of candor and a surplus of self-serving hyperbole. The very definition of a party partisan has gone through a transformation from party loyalty to ideological conformity. Heterodoxy in the parties has given way to orthodoxy. The fever is aggravated by the dramatic rise in the stakes. The breathtaking expansion of government power has exponentially increased the consequences and opportunities for those who wish to monopolize it. So much at stake and so many true-believers. No wonder Court nominations threaten to rip the republic apart. And, by gauging the reaction of Democratic Party activists to Trump’s victory, now the same is true of presidential elections.
“The Resistance” takes to the streets in – where else? – Berkeley, Ca.
How did we get to this sad state of affairs? For one, let’s consider the main legacy of Progressivism: the omni-competent state, or a government of virtuosos and unlimited possibilities. The Progressives’ faith in the “expert” means the deliberations of representative assemblies are more and more replaced by the deliberations of panels of hypothetical geniuses. The assumption is that the fortunes of humanity should not be left to the petty whims of politicos not in tune with the academic zeitgeist. The most undemocratic features of our constitutional order – the administrative agencies and courts – have feasted on this prejudice. Today, regulations govern more than laws, and judges have extracted prerogatives that were previously left to state legislatures and city councils.
Their legitimacy to rule doesn’t rest on the franchise but on their self-proclaimed knowledge and wisdom. When they or their politician advance-men lose an election, intelligence is said to be thwarted.
C.S. Lewis
The danger posed by such a narrow caste with pretensions to power was obvious to some. C.S. Lewis – writing at a time (1943) when Fascism was one of the popular versions of caste-rule, just as it was reified into a Luftwaffe bombing British cities – fingered the error in his essay, “The Poison of Subjectivism”. He wrote,
Many a popular “planner” on a democratic platform, many a mild-eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes that ‘good’ means whatever men are conditioned to approve. He believes that it is the function of him and his kind to condition men; to create consciences by eugenics, psychological manipulation of infants, state education and mass propaganda.
The rule of “experts” is the rule of perpetual busybodies, a class of people without second-thoughts. Humility doesn’t appear as a defining characteristic. Leave it to Friedrich Hayek, though, to bring them down to
Friedrich A. Hayek
earth when he stated, “No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society”. Expanding the field from a single person to a small group doesn’t much improve matters. Hayek asserts that markets, as large aggregates of individuals, know more than a small cohort of self-ordained wise-men. Failure results when power follows the false assumption that all pertinent knowledge is concentrated in a few.
Hayek’s lesson never caught on with our modern Progressives. The power of the centralized authority in the federal government, as gauged in 20th century federal outlays through Republican and Democratic administrations, resembles a ski slope — or, as Bob Hope would have said, his nose. It’s proof, once you start this kind of thing, that the government becomes a perpetual-motion-machine almost immune even to the best of intentions of those wishing to restrain it.
Stephen Moore, “The Growth of Government in America”, April 1, 1993, https://fee.org/articles/the-growth-of-government-in-america/. In inflation-adjusted 1990 dollars.
The incline continues into the new millennium in federal spending per household. The dip in 2009 was due to the end of many TARP bailouts.
Veronique de Rugy, “The Rapid Expansion of Federal Spending Per Household”, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Nov. 1, 2010, https://www.mercatus.org/publication/rapid-expansion-federal-spending-household. In Inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars.
The federal government’s hyperactivity has distracted it away from its core Constitutional responsibilities like defense and managing immigration in favor of crusades like inflating our energy bills, directing our choice of light bulbs, a national sanctioning of sodomy as the basis for marriage, imposing a national license to take prenatal life, and dictating your elementary school’s bathroom policy. It’s so ludicrous, but nonetheless a sign of the times. Increasing federal power has intensified the battle over who’s to man (or woman) the federal parapets. Every election and Supreme Court appointment is freighted with dire potentialities.
The intensity of modern political battle has weeded out the faint-hearted and those lacking the zeal of the true-believer. A 2014 Pew Research Center study of party registrants illustrates the growing ideological polarization of the two parties. As they found,
The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past.
Distribution of Democrats and Republicans on a 10-item scale of political values. Pew Research Center, 2014.
The chart shows a widening rift in 2014 in ideological purity among the parties’ rank-and-file.
Or, take a look at this chart from the same study. The mountain peaks for the Democrats (blue) shift to the left as the peaks for the Republicans (red) move right.
The same phenomena shows up in the halls of Congress (below). In the 93rd Congress (1973-4), there existed liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. By the 112th Congress (last bar graph below), they’re as extinct as woolly mammoths.
The party bases are uniformly polar opposites, and its reflected in the two Congressional caucuses. The leavening of other voices is gone. For nominees like Gorsuch, the Democrats’ howling base will push any Senator with a “D” after their name into rabid opposition.
Even the definition of “moderate” has shifted. Today’s moderate Democrat is only interested in some restraint in the party’s abortion blank check. Other than that, the vast majority are in lock-step with Mother Jones and the rest of the left-wing hive. Not good for any Republican Court nominee … unless a Republican president commits political suicide by presenting a choice who’ll gain the editorial board endorsements of Mother Jones and The Nation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not decrying the vanishing “moderate” in both parties. It’s one thing to to be moderate in temperament, quite another to be moderate in your thinking. All-too-often the moderate thinker has a mind that resembles an attic. In it one finds a collection of mental bric-a-brac. Lying around is the anachronistic foolishness of grandma’s time alongside some of more recent vintage – all thrown up there to be accessed for the production of inane pronouncements.
But these “moderates” serve the purpose of forcing the core of both parties to come together to make political sausage. Their presence makes the art of governing easier, even if, as is more likely, the result is a continuation of the non-stop march to social and fiscal ruin. Remember the old adage of Republicans as caretakers of the Democrat-engineered welfare state?
Sen. Joseph Biden (left) leaning and talking to Robert Bork during Bork’s confirmation hearings, 1987. (The New Yorker)
Yet, the consequence of the disappearance of the muddled middle is no-holds-barred political war on nearly everything and in nearly every venue, including Supreme Court nominees before the Senate. The writing was on the wall when Robert Bork’s name came up in 1987. Ted Kennedy manufactured party opposition with the now-familiar chant, “He’s out of the mainstream”. Honestly, the “mainstream” for Ted is the blue hump in the previous chart’s last bar graph. Qualifications be damned; for the true blue like Kennedy, the ramifications are too important to be left to quaint considerations like “qualifications” and “bi-partisanship”.
After pioneering ideological reasons for blocking a Supreme Court nominee, the Democrats didn’t want to push their luck and swiftly approved Bork’s replacement, Anthony Kennedy, shortly thereafter.
In today’s political total war, everything is enlisted for the cause. The older self-restraint became the first casualty. Take for instance the filibuster. Talking a bill to death ended in the House in 1842 when the House became too large a herd to corral for meaningful work. It persists in the Senate, but rarely used for federal judicial nominations.
Here’s where it gets tricky for the Senate. There’s two types of Senate filibusters with different cloture (end debate and go to a vote on the issue at hand) requirements. To end a “legislative” filibuster, a three-fifths (60) vote is required by Rule 22. Ending a rules-change filibuster demands a higher threshold of two-thirds (66) … until Harry Reid in 2013.
To clarify, the old claim that it takes a vote of 60 to approve a nomination is inaccurate. A majority is required to approve a nomination. It’s just getting to the consenting vote that presents the problem. 60 votes are required to end debate (cloture) and proceed with the vote on the fate of the nominee.
As majority leader, Reid sidestepped the rules for ending debate (cloture) by motioning that Rule 22 requires a majority vote for cloture. Of course, Rule 22 says no such thing. The presiding officer rejected Reid’s intentional misreading of Rule 22. Having worked all this out beforehand in the Democratic caucus, Reid appealed to the whole Senate who voted to accepted his interpretation of Rule 22. A majority of Senators – all Democrats – voted to accept his reading of the rule in spite of its plain language. This is the “Reid Rule”, a method to change the rules of the Senate with only a majority vote.
Watch Senators Reid and the Republican leader McConnell speak to the matter in 2013.
Prior to the Reid Rule – or maneuver if you will – it was next to impossible to alter the operations of the Senate by changing the rules. Tooth fairies were more real than a 66-vote for cloture. Hellbent on getting Pres. Obama’s judicial choices past Republican opposition, Reid paved an interstate through any road blocks to his desired end: Pres. Obama’s goal to pack the courts with “living Constitution” wunderkinds.
A Progressive in a black robe is a dangerous person – dangerous only in a political sense, that is. A Progressive is impatient to change things and regards the Constitution, laws, and any stricture as wet clay to be molded to that end. One wonders why we should even bother to publish or put anything in writing. Separation of powers? What separation of powers? The delineation of powers in Articles I, II, III was made pointless. Applying the law in cases morphed into boundless interpretation following a witch’s brew of allegedly modern circumstances. The courts became super legislatures following penumbras rather than law. The possibilities are only as limited as a judge’s imagination.
Control of the courts, all of a sudden, became a high-stakes game. Everyone knows it. A state’s plebiscite to define marriage in a manner familiar to anyone going back to Emperor Justinian and further to Hammurabi – and maybe even to Lucy, our prehistoric ancestor in East Africa – could now be interpreted by jurists as something akin to the Nuremberg Laws. The beginning of life is not be defined by the people’s elected representatives but rather a majority of nine life-time appointees on a judicial panel in Washington, D.C. Conceivably, nothing is outside the purview of the judiciary.
With so much at stake, the days were numbered for the filibuster, especially in light of the gathering around opposing ideological poles in both parties. The only modern use of the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments prior to the new millennium was Abe Fortas’s attempted elevation from Associate Justice to Chief Justice in 1968 by Pres. Johnson. It occurred at a time when liberal R’s and conservative D’s still existed. As it turned out, opposition was truly bi-partisan and Fortas had a darker side of corruption. Not only did Fortas fail in winning his Chief Justice appointment, he was forced to resign his Associate Justice seat to avoid impeachment.
Pres. Johnson presenting Assoc. Justice Abe Fortas (r) as his nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, June 1968.
The Fortas mess was an extremely rare occurrence in the history of the Senate filibuster for Court nominees. Even Clarence Thomas didn’t face one. We’d have to wait the dawn of the new millennium, after party orthodox purity was well under way, and judicial powers have raised the stakes so high, before the filibuster became a reliable weapon in ideological warfare.
The election of George W. Bush in 2000 incensed Democrats. He was considered by them to be a usurper after the hotly contested election. Immediately following the inauguration, the liberal hive was all abuzz. In January 2001, Bruce Ackerman, Yale law professor writing in The American Prospect, fearing a wave of conservative jurists, favored the Democrats’ use of the filibuster to block Bush’s judicial appointments. The judicial filibuster ball really started rolling after that.
Bush’s first 11 courts of appeal nominees never made it out of the Democrat-controlled Judiciary Committee from 2001 to 2003. To be fair, Republican majorities did the same to Clinton’s choices by 2000. Yet, widespread filibustering didn’t begin till 2003 and a slim 51-49 Republican majority. 10 appeals court choices were then blocked by Democrats with a filibuster threat. Bill Frist, the Republican Majority Leader, began to publicly talk of the “nuclear option” – ending the filibuster for judicial nominations – as Democrats’ use of the filibuster promised to be a frequent tactic.
The threat of the “nuclear option” faded after a compromise got the bulk of Bush’s nominees through in 2005. But blocking tactics without the need for filibusters continued through Bush’s second term as Democrats assumed control of the Senate in 2007.
When Republicans objected to Obama’s nominees in 2013, prior advocates of the judicial filibuster turned into vehement critics. Politics produces a bumper crop of hypocrites, and ideological zealotry sanctions a scythe to cut through anyone and anything to achieve a secular eschaton. What was done by the Democrats – invent a way to change the Senate’s rules with a simple majority and use it to end the filibuster for judicial nominations – will be picked up by the Republicans to approve an originalist on the bench.
Watch Senate Majority Leader McConnell exactly repeat Harry Reid’s 2013 maneuver to change the 60-vote threshold for cloture (end debate and vote on the nominee) in advance of the Gorsuch vote.
After this, the vote to approve the nominee follows the historical precedent of a majority to approve the nomination. The fate of Neil Gorsuch could have been decided on a simple majority vote if the Democrats eschewed the filibuster, as what happened to Clarence Thomas’s nomination in 1991. Now it’s kaput for the judicial filibuster.
One of the arguments against ending the filibuster was that the loss would put the last nails in the coffin of bi-partisan comity. News flash: comity was well on its way out since the Florida recount imbroglio of 2000.
We would see the increasing reliance on ad hominem politics occurring as credal purity came to characterize the parties. How many adherents of Hayek and Friedman still exist in the Democratic Party? Conversely, what about the standing of Keynes in the Republican Party?
The fate of ex-Democrat Phil Gramm of Texas is instructive. Gramm was a Democrat and a believer in the Laffer curve, two things that don’t comport in today’s Democratic Party. Like many such Democrats, their party’s hostility to anyone challenging the reigning statist orthodoxy drove people like them out. They became Republicans. It was a harbinger of things to come.
The Gorsuch nomination got caught up in this new political ecosystem. It’s a jungle with the courts as the new Tyrannosaurus Rex, with the administrative state in tow as clones. Their presence draws the attention of everyone.
The temperature once had a chance to cool when the state didn’t have such a large apetite. It’s different today. Control of the state is on everybody’s radar screen because the cost of playing blind and deaf may make you the meal. The stakes are too high for quaint niceties.
Maybe our chances for civility would improve if we scaled back the monster. But that would require the defeat of the Democrats’ statism. If true, a return of the Democratic Party to a more heterogeneous composition would be more therapeutic than a revival of RINO’s (Republicans In Name Only) in the GOP. Something to consider.
RogerG
Sources:
“Scalia’s Supreme Court Seat Has Been Vacant For More Than 400 Days”, The New York Times, March 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/15/us/supreme-court-nominations-election-year-scalia.html?_r=0
“The Poison of Subjectivism”, C.S. Lewis, 1943 essay. It can be obtained in Microsoft Word format here: https://calvin.edu/search/?q=the+poison+of+subjectivism&btnG=&site=calvin&client=calvin&proxystylesheet=calvin&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=the%20poison%20of%20subjectivism&gsc.page=1
“Lewis & the Omnicompetent State (Part 1)”, Dr. Alan Snyder, professor of History, Southeastern University, Pondering Principles, Nov. 7, 2015, http://ponderingprinciples.com/2015/11/lewis-the-omnicompetent-state-part-1/
For a fuller treatment of Hayek’s knowledge problem see “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, Friedrich A. Hayek, The American Economic Review, Sept. 1945. A free copy can obtained here: https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/
“The State of Disunion”, Lucas Rodriguez and Spencer Segal, Stanford Political Journal, Nov. 2, 2016, https://stanfordpolitics.com/the-state-of-disunion-901513b6b356
“Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life”, Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
“Polarization in Congress has risen sharply. Where is it going next?”, Christopher Hare, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, The Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/13/polarization-in-congress-has-risen-sharply-where-is-it-going-next/?utm_term=.e7cc91347bef
“A Filibuster on a Supreme Court Nomination Is So Rare It’s Only Worked Once”, Elizabeth King, Time, 2/8/17, http://time.com/4659403/neil-gorsuch-filibuster-abe-fortas/
“Filibuster and Cloture”, U.S. Senate website, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm
“George W. Bush judicial appointment controversies”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_judicial_appointment_controversies
“How Schumer turned against a filibuster he once tried to save”, Reid Pillifant, Politico, http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/11/how-schumer-turned-against-a-filibuster-he-once-tried-to-save-009838
“How 52 Senators Made 60 = 51”, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Stanford Law & Policy Review, March 19, 2014, https://journals.law.stanford.edu/stanford-law-policy-review/online/how-52-senators-made-60-51
Regrettably, I have been fooled by manufactured news (“fake news”) on a couple of occasions. It can come at you from many different directions for many different reasons – Left, Right, Center, foreign entities, scam artists, and those in it for the thrill. Today’s digital media world is the equivalent of the frontier. It’s the wild west as Hollywood made the West out to be. This is not a call for government to police it, beyond clear instances of threats to safety, fraud, larceny, and acts of a similar sort. Government meddling produces way too many bad spin-offs.
The pattern was set by the tabloids.
The record of government regulation is a mixed bag. Many efforts to manage a market from the Civil Aeronautics Board of 1938 (Civil Aeronautics Authority Act of 1938) to Dodd-Frank of 2010 (Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) has unnecessarily distorted entire industries and raised prices.
Two blasts from the past should make this abundantly clear. Remember the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)? Well, many millennials probably wouldn’t. It was abolished in 1995. It was captured by the very freight carrier interests it was regulating. Eventually, bye, bye was Congress’s response.
Remember the previously mentioned Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB)? Once again, our hipster millennials would be scratching their heads. The whole airline industry was part of its fiefdom. For the sake of “stability”, everything from ticket prices to the size of on-board sandwiches was determined in agency boardrooms. The whole gargantuan regulatory maze simply made air travel the province of the rich. Flying used to be a sign that you “made it”. The CAB beat the ICC to the grave when Congress gave the CAB’s air travel whiz-kids the boot in 1978.
Pres. Carter signs the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.
Before we leverage “fake news” into the new “stability” excuse, think again. There’s no substitute for the web user to double-source – maybe triple – their information. Government won’t do anything but create an oligopoly and a “new normal” of higher fees as birthed by some mathematical flim-flammery.
While reading Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money, I came across evidence of a pervasive ignorance about economic matters among 2008 high school seniors. It didn’t strike me as surprising. I suspect the economic illiteracy transcends ’08 high school seniors. I don’t recall my parents’ generation showing any dazzling financial acumen either. I wouldn’t be shocked at discovering the paucity of understanding extending to the bulk of today’s college graduates. The only difference between the older generations and our youngsters is the mountains of cash poured into our schools to get the same outcome.
First, the evidence. In 2008, the University of Buffalo’s School of Management surveyed a typical group of high school seniors on basic personal finance and economic matters. They discovered, among other things:
* an average grade of “F” (52%) to a set of basic economic questions.
* only 14% grasped the fact that stocks earn a greater rate of return than a US government bond over an 18-year period.
* 23% knew that the income tax is assessed on interest earned from a savings account if personal income is high enough.
* 59% didn’t know the difference between a company pension, Social Security, and a 401(k).
Another 2008 survey of over-all Americans showed that two-thirds didn’t know how compound interest worked. Good luck in getting these people to invest for the golden years.
The mental disability on financial matters isn’t limited to America. According to Ferguson, similar results are available for the U.K.
Before we rush out to ignite another progressive heaven-on-earth crusade to correct life’s foibles, we need to ask ourselves a simple question: Would it do any good?
Currently, as of 2016, we average $156,000 per child on K-12 schooling. If the 1984-2004 period is any indication, real (inflation adjusted) spending per pupil has increased 49%. Still, by 2008, Ferguson and the University of Buffalo are unmasking massive numbers of economic ignoramuses in spite of the avalanche of cash.
The situation isn’t any better on basic Civics. Civics, you know, is about our government and political traditions. The federal Dept. of Education tries to ascertain the state of things, including basic knowledge of our political institutions, with its National Assessment of Education Progress. As of 2010, the trillions of dollars bought us … nothing. Whatever Civics progress has been made, it quickly disappears by the 12th grade. The 2014 scores showed only a quarter of seniors scored “proficient”. Be careful with man-on-the-street interviews. You could trip up a person with real stumpers like, “What is the supreme law of the land?”
I’ll leave the disappointments in Language Arts, Math, and Science to those more involved in the disciplines; though, I suspect the weather doesn’t get any sunnier.
Could it be that “no child left behind” or “every student succeeds” (the titles of our most recent efforts to “immanentize the eschaton”, as Eric Voegelin would say) violate truth-in-labeling laws? Despite the best efforts of man and woman, and much infusion of money, some kids will be left behind and some won’t succeed. So many dynamics are at work outside the purview of academic bubbles, political demagoguery, and the education Borg. Try chaotic homes; an epidemic of single parenthood; youthful expectations that don’t comport with white-collar aspirations; a decline of civil society; parental and peer influences; and the simple fact that some kids don’t care and you can’t make them care.
What we end up doing is throwing more money and government employees at the problem. Government gets bigger and more expensive … and the kids still don’t know much of anything. Adding preschool and free college to the line of matriculation just stretches out the failure.
All is not lost, though. Here’s some suggestions: return to a classical education, reboot vocational ed with an eye to internships and apprenticeships, and leave open the opportunity for the transition back to formal education for those with a change of heart later in life. And, above all, if you insist on compulsory education for all youngsters, off to boot-camp for the threatening and disruptive.
Mull it over.
RogerG
Sources:
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Niall Ferguson
“Does Spending More on Education Improve Academic Achievement?”, Dan Lips and Shanea Watkins, Heritage Foundation, Sept. 8, 2008, http://www.heritage.org/education/report/does-spending-more-education-improve-academic-achievement
“Fast Facts: Ependitures”, National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
“The Nation’s Report Card: Civics 2010”, National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011466.asp#section1
“Why Civics Is About More Than Citizenship”, Alia Wong, The Atlantic, Sept. 7, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/civic-education-citizenship-test/405889/
Could this be a typical PolitiFact.com newsroom cubicle as well?
One of the more important shifts in the sociology of professional employment is the increasing prevalence of college journalism graduates in the newsroom. And they seem to be pushing the profession to the left. Some undoubtedly will disagree but others have noticed, such as George Mason University’s Center for Media and Public Affairs. See this 2013 article from US News & World Report, “Who’s Checking the Fact Checkers?”(https://www.usnews.com/…/study-finds-fact-checkers-biased-a…).
Allison Graves, rookie PolitiFact reporter
An example of the trend is the background of the youthful Allison Graves, the rookie PolitiFact journalist who branded “false” Hugh Hewitt’s claim that the Obamacare exchanges are in a death spiral. She’s a creature of the University of Missouri-Columbia school of journalism – a 2016 graduate with a BA in journalism. She credits experience as city editor/reporter for the Journalism Department’s newspaper and padded her resume’ with “Copy editor/Nightside news editor” at “Fangirl the Magazine” (according to her LinkedIn page).
21-year-old rookies are now in charge of “acceptable” political discourse. Her involvement with PolitiFact is no act of serendipity. The school of journalism has a direct umbilical cord to PolitiFact. The school partners with PolitiFact in training young gatekeepers (see “How Mizzou Journalism Students Help Fact-Check for PolitiFact” on the mediashift.org website).
Prof. Mike Jenner and U. Of Missouri School of Journalism partnering with PolitiFact in a class session. (Stephanie Mueller/Columbia Missourian/AP)
This brings me back to my central assertion: the absence of a rich classical education among most college graduates is hampering their maturity of judgment. Therefore, their faddish leftism runs unchecked to the manifest disservice of the American public.
A contentious interview between Hugh Hewitt and Aaron Sharockman (3/28/17), executive director of PolitiFact.com, caught my attention. Apparently, differences between supportable points of view are shoe-horned into true/false judgments by PolitiFact. By so doing, sites like PolitiFact can distort the nature of the dispute and mislead the public.
Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact.comHugh Hewitt, host of the Hugh Hewitt Show, Chapman University law professor
At issue was PolitiFact’s slapping of “false” on Hewitt’s claim that the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing a “death spiral”. In fact, it’s an easily supportable point of view. Sources can be cited in support of it. Instead, the PolitiFact journalist quickly labeled it “false” after cursory digging.
Understanding a “death spiral” requires knowing the difference between “collapse” and “collapsing”. In regards to the Obamacare exchanges, the high deductibles, costly premiums, shrinking involvement by medical practitioners, and withdrawal of insurance providers from many markets has discouraged the younger and healthier to opt out of the pool making them unsustainable — thus, a death spiral. It is collapsing, but hasn’t collapsed yet. The death spiral describes a collapsing insurance market. PolitiFact’s journalist doesn’t know the difference, nor the fact that it is a defensible position.
The simplistic approach may have much to do with an inadequate educational preparation for our younger wave of journalists: people who inherently have a predilection for quick, snappy judgments.
The impetuousness of their youth isn’t tempered by a deeper understanding of the major issues of life – something a better education could offset. Instead, having never grappled with the major battles of ideas throughout history, and in many cases unaware of their existence, leads them into premature judgments.
35-year-old Aaron Sharockman, himself, is a case in point. Exploratory questions into his background and preparation would lead one to believe that he isn’t well-read in the literary classics pertinent to his college major: Political Science/Journalism. Other than “1984” – something that could have been read in high school – he’s had no exposure to anything else that might enlighten him of the totalitarian mindset.
“1984”, Big Brother, and Ingsoc (abbreviation for “English Socialism”)
The totalitarian mindset, as described in books like “Darkness at Noon”, seeks to control thought by forestalling the presence of other points of view from space in public discussion by branding them “false”, “not preferable”, “wrong”. Is PolitiFact performing the function of Gletkin in “Darkness at Noon” or the Ministry of Truth in “1984”?
The modern fact-checker seems to be stepping into the role of truth-controller.
