The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century. Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian. Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s. The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.
Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard. Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion. It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears. Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one. The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry. The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.
Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government. Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings. The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.
Vincent Colyer
Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary. In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned. They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest. Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes. He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.
Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.
“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom. It is the blind spot of the Progressive. Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit. Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.
What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification. Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”. In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.
Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.
It didn’t last 20 years. By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore. Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”. The thing was demolished in 1972.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.
If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):
Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC. It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il. In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca. Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La. Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC. Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere. Need I say more?
Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il. No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen. Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”
The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing. They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”. A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6). Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility. This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.
Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape. Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence. Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.
California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives. “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class. Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant. Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.
The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home. Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience. Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district. Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.
And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking. No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.
The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”. In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class. If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016, http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition, http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
“The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone, https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
Sonam Sheth, politics and national security reporter at Business Insider, from her Twitter page.
While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”. What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment. The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso. Journalism isn’t journalism any longer. It’s fevered imaginations run wild.
To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile. It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious – mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization. This will be brief.
Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper. While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York. Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance. Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:
“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”
“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack! While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism? Hmmmm.
Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider. I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations. They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape. It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.
Salvador Dali
Now to the article. The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”. A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.
The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.
First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”. “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee. It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black assailant.
Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan. In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so. Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade. Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.
Illegal immigrants sit in a group after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. (Associated Press).
For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same. It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States. But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.
From the pardon, she builds the edifice. In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”. The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”. Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons. If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich. There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.
President Bill Clinton and Denise Rich attend a funraiser for ‘The G & P Charitable Foundation for Cancer Research’ in October 1998, in New York City. (DIANA WALKER/LIAISON)
As for Sheth’s insinuation of “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime? You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide. For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC. For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn. Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so. She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.
I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late. Certainly they felt “pressure”. Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied? Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.
Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results. There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now. But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now. I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.
Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality. First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer. In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government. He can inquire into any investigation under his purview. It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election. Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).
Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute. If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system. He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around. It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.
Sheth’s story is a mess. It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism. It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper. As per the old cliché, there’s no there there. For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system. The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”, Sonam Sheth, Business Insider, 8/27/17, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-decision-pardon-joe-arpaio-160000939.html
Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
“Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318
In the article, she outlines the conflicting demands facing the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the party needs to recapture the middle-America working class. On the other, they are the party of coastal, urban, media, and academic populations for an obvious reason: it is the social orientation of the activist base and party elites. The people that man the phone banks, attend the rallies, donate money, and run the party are socially so far removed from the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. The core of the party has views to match the obsessions from these quarters. Which way to go – reach out to the neglected and despised, or stay glued to the base?
Some want the party to become more appealing to the working-class-without-college-degrees. Others, like Frank Rich, the party’s chief apologist and favorite economist, say, “Forget about ’em”. Read his piece “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/…/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly… .
I don’t know how the Democrats can square this circle. There’s no way to make transgender bathrooms, the drumbeat of rampant misogyny and racism, climate-change hysteria, unrestrained immigration, a bullying multiculturalism, and socialism here/there/everywhere the key to an outreach program to anyone outside the Dems’ isolated demographic echo chambers.
They’ve got the wrong message and reputation for the wrong crowd. Good luck in reversing that.
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
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.
Politics can exhibit “Eusociability”. The term refers to the highest level of community-building among some animals, such as the hives of the hymenoptera class of insects – wasps, bees, etc. Political eusociability is becoming increasingly evident among the Left since the election of Trump.
As in a wasps’ hive in an agitated state, the activists of the Left are swarming. The Left’s fury isn’t the spontaneous activity of scattered individuals – or “organic” as some would say – but behave as a horde neurally connected through the bio-chemicals of past activism and social media, triggered with the seed money of donors.
Consider the financial backers to be the “angel investors” of the hive. An example would be Democracy Alliance.
An example of today’s left-wing angel investors: the “Democracy Alliance”Prominent donors to the “Democracy Alliance” are George Soros (l) and Tom Steyer (r)
Hive-funding can go through a circuitous route, almost like money-laundering. One such example would be Alliance for Global Justice, headquartered in Tucson, Az. An examination of its 503(c) IRS form 990 reveals a list of wealthy donors that includes The Bridgewater Fund, The Tides Foundation, Ben & Jerry Foundation, etc. It, in turn, ladles the money out. Crowdrise’s page for a fundraiser for Alliance for Global Justice (AGJ) describes refusefascism.org as a project of AGJ. Money moves about.
The phenomena of hive-building can be traced back to the early labor organizing of the late 18th century into the more sophisticated 19th/20th century efforts of Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, and Marry Harris Jones (“Mother Jones”).
From “Solidarity”, publication of the IWW, 1917
Modern iterations of the activity include “Occupy….(fill in the blank)”, “the Resistance” (to Trump), “Fight Fascism”, and “Indivisible”.
“Occupy Wall Street” protest, Zuccotti Park, 2011“The Resistance”, a collection of groups for defeating Trump, 2017“Fight Fascism” in one of its forms, San Diego protest, 2017‘Indivisible’ movement grips St. Johns County, Fla., January 2017.
It’s simply hive activity, without splitting academic hairs over the fine distinctions between “community organizing”, mere “activism”, or “mobilizing”. It’s also not a conspiracy in the same vein as the Comintern (Communist International), which had a Moscow address. The organization’s constituent national communist parties were appendages of the Soviet Politburo.
No central commissariat exists for the hive. It is a web of scattered individuals and groups, united by compatible beliefs, a tendency to activism, most lacking permanence, and interconnected by social media and loose funding streams. They spring up as events warrant and vary to local circumstances. They can appear spasmodic, and frequently are.
The tie that binds is a remarkably consistent set of beliefs. You know, the litany of “isms” and “phobias” are prominent: racism, sexism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, etc., etc., etc. The list is notably fungible according to the fads-of-thought of the moment. For them, America is reduced to a collection of group victims. Their cure is Fabianism-with-an-edge.
Fabianism is a form of socialism without the violent overthrow of Marx and Lenin. It’s socialism with a human face – i.e., democracy. This form has been called “social democracy”. It favors human rights broadly defined and greater government control of the “commanding heights” of society, to borrow from Lenin. In Britain, it led to the formation of the Labour Party. In Europe, many national social democratic parties sprang up. In today’s America, it has found a home in the Democratic Party.
Early logo of Britain’s Fabian Society as a turtle. It displays the group’s desire for gradualism in bringing about a socialist country.Another common emblem of the Fabian Society as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as seen in a stained glass window. It would later be dropped for its negative connotation.
The modern Democratic Party has given the movement an institutional form. However, the plodding nature of a national political party is ill-suited to a base agitated by immediate events. The desire for respectability of a national party restrains the emotional explosion which has led some partisans to break away seeking the “Bern”, or “StopFascism”, or “Black Lives Matter”, or “Occupy” (the universe?), or …….. That’s the “edge” part of Fabianism-with-an-edge. Yet, party activists are still littered throughout the constellation of groups.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow holding up a copy of Indivisible’s Practical Guide to organizing against Trump
Taking a closer look into one these groups, Indivisible, will bring to light the interconnected nature of the hive. From their “Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”, the authors parrot the hive’s party line on the threat posed by Trump:
“…[Trump] will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image.”
Three of the four individuals listed as authors of the “Guide” – Ezra Levin, Adam Padilla, and Jeremy Haile – were ex-staffers of Democrat representatives. Levin and Haile were staffers for Lloyd Doggett (D-Tx). Padilla was a legislative assistant for Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). The fourth, Leah Greenberg, wife of Ezra Levin, is listed as the young policy director for the Tom Perriello gubernatorial campaign along with involvement in various “social justice” private and non-profit organizations according to her LinkedIn page.
Perriello is another interesting specimen. He served as representative in Virginia’s 5th congressional district from 2009-11, but was defeated in 2010 by Republican Robert Hurt. He is mentioned as the founder of Avaaz, ” a U.S. based civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict.” It’s a mission statement for the “social justice warrior” (SJW).
The “Guide” asserts that they are emulating the Tea Party circa 2009. But the Tea Party wasn’t organized by Hill staffers, or anyone representing the “establishment”. More believably, the kinship of the “the resistance” points to the “Occupy” factions of 2011 and the more recent campus SJW outbursts, not the Tea Party.
Below is an “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration from October 2011. It’s 6:46 in length.
Compare the above to the disruption of Charles Murray’s attempt to speak to students at Middlebury College.
When the above attempt at a lecture failed, Murray and Prof. Allison Stanger, professor of International Politics and Economics, went to a room to live stream their conversation. The disruptions continued in the auditorium, and when Murray and Prof. Stanger attempted to exit to her car, they were assaulted. Stanger required hospitalization.
Now, let’s take a look at a congressional townhall, the kind of thing that Greenberg, et al, are encouraging.
Or this one.
Or the harassment of Tom McClintock after leaving his townhall.
The townhall crowds appear to be older versions of the campus SJW’s . Five decades ago many of them might have been at home on Haight-Ashbury – at least spiritually.
The outbursts, cries, and incriminations aren’t spontaneous in the literal meaning of the word. I suspect that the swarms are people – local and transported – already active in the party, agitated by the election’s results, neurally connected by social media, loosely directed by certain websites, and reflective of blue-America, even if they might live in red-America. Rather than an inter-cultural phenomena spanning the cultural divide, quite the opposite, they emulate the deep cultural division in the country. The hive’s views have no home in red-America.
What does this portend for the country? Blue-America is still geographically stuck in blue-America. Their behavior has just become more rabid. The beliefs of identity politics, assaults on traditional Christianity, the blind faith in the omni-competent state, and hyper-environmentalism has no more credence today in “fly-over” country than it did before the election.
The danger for Republicans lies in the appearance of a groundswell. Such a thing could have an effect on impressionable “independents” and lukewarm Republicans. The Republicans could experience a dip in passion while independents fall away leaving the field open for the Fabians-with-an-edge in the Democratic Party.
If Republicans don’t counter-organize, the next couple of election cycles could pave the way for boys-in-dresses in the girls’ lockeroom and on the girls’ field hockey team. Be prepared for a sovietized EPA. The professions of Christian faith in the economy will be criminalized. Just take the California template and press it onto the country.
It’s time for red-America to get organized to challenge the hive. You might call it red-America’s “counter-swarm”.
“Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda – Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.”, https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
“Soros, Steyer, and Democracy Alliance Work to Retake Colorado: Left-wing donor club returns to its birthplace to win back state senate for Dems”, Lachlan Markey, The Washington Free Beacon, 8/5/16, http://freebeacon.com/politics/soros-steyer-and-democracy-alliance-work-to-retake-colorado/
