Edmund Burke in the late 18th century warned of the disaster awaiting the French nation as their revolution teetered off into the Reign of Terror. Political power and political institutions are poor substitutes, he wrote, for the character forming role of traditional faith, family, and the “little platoons” of civilization reaching beyond the home in voluntary associations in the neighborhood and community. When someone’s detailed scheme bypasses the “little platoons” in order to politically engineer a better person for an imaginary better world, a calamity awaits. Past human experience proves it.
The 20th century is littered with the horrors of these political experiments of grand social engineering; a lesson that today’s Democrats have forgotten or never learned. Towed by zealous and immature minds, the party lurches to the extreme left side of the political spectrum in an embrace of a fairy-tale heaven on earth with them as the grand viziers overseeing the immense project, just like the previous students of Karl Marx: Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, and Castro before them. We are on the cusp of a replay of that sordid story.
Soviet central planning is in the offing in the form of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Higher taxes, racial reparations, and “reimagine policing” will confiscate more wealth, enforce racial group guilt leading to more wealth and property seizures, and lay the population open to the zealous and partisan mobs after law enforcement has been “reimagined”, something reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, the Bolshevik goons, and the Jacobin’s inflamed Paris hordes. Few will recognize the country once Sanders and the Squad have realized their dream.
We need look no further than our own past for additional proof of the consequences, a time before Bernie bros and the giddy AOC. In 1864, Maj. Gen. John Carleton wanted to finally solve the Navajo problem. In an earlier expedition, he looked upon the Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River at the edge of the Staked Plains in eastern New Mexico as an ideal place to ship the entire Navajo nation (the Diné), in spite of others who cautioned him of the poor soil and fetid water. He had in his mind the quick transformation of an entire nation into sedentary pastoralists and no one could dissuade him. So began the infamous 450-mile Long Walk of the Navajos from their ancestral lands in present-day northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to far eastern New Mexico.
Carleton is a case study of the zealot with great political power which was conferred upon him in the midst of the Civil War. He was an energetic, strong-willed detail man who was confident in his design for the Diné and ability to make it happen. It resulted in a four-year-long reign of misery with a Navajo death toll of around 2,400. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman put the kibosh to the whole thing in 1868 and signed a treaty which allowed the Navajos to return to a large reservation in their ancestral land.
There’s just something ominous about people with great power who claim to know what’s best for us. Today’s Democratic Party is filled with the very same arrogant half-ignorant. Unschooled in the dangers and failures of big government and utopias, they push ahead in the hope that the population will confer upon them the power to do what they promise. The promise is a devastating and hollow one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Be careful what you wish for because you will get it.”
RogerG
