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The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ”  — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)

One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”.  The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly.  The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive  mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy.   It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.

Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.

The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken.  It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.

“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.

On the “affective filter”

Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others?  I think not.  The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind.  The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge.  Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works.  If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.

The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.

The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.

There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs.  While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.

On materialism

So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters?  One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism.  No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed.  Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces.  Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation.  Science is focused on the physical world.  The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.

The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.

A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism

To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs.  If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age.  For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.

The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere.  Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.

In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant.  Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option.  Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved.  Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.

In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip.  God?  What god?  Morality?  Whose morality?  These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.

“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.

The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom.  While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we?  Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we?  While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we?  Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings?  Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules.  The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”.  A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.

The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards.  The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme.  The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self –  lies here.  The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.

On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self

Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded.  We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders.  We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all.  Have we entered an epochal  phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science?  If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.

This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance.  The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.

The ladies of the View, 2017.

Their arrogance is astounding.  They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it.  In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices.  For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).

While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes.  When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing.  Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement.  Efforts  to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.

In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM).  The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”.  Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.

Is this the new wisdom?

Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well.  A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).

One of their signature issues is gay marriage.  Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions.  Like, what is marriage?  Is it simply a union of adults?  Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults.  It can be about nothing else.  Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring.  So, childbearing is out of the question.  Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling.  If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).

What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children?  Are they marriages?  Most emphatically … Yes!  Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children.  As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another.  Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one.  Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.

Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”.  The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court.  Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record.  While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:

“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added)  (8)

Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.

On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”).  We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented.  Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc.  It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.

In castigating historicism  and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7)  Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.

“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.

On “climate change”

For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them.  Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance.  Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist.  A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.

If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people.  Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone.  It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.

Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.

With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people.  Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds.  Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world.  The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism.  It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.

The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate.  It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase.  What would James Madison think?

If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class.  He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.

My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity.  Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:

“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview.  Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”

“Deny climate change” as a lie?  Is it a lie or simply a disagreement?  “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains.  Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”.  Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.

The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science.  Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer.  Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor.  The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website.  And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.

Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise.  Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate.  Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth.  Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)

The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic .  It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group.  Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t.  In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.

Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues.  However, the exculpation is only limited.  At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists.  It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.

Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles?  I think that we now know the answer to that question.

Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”?  Why now?  Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time?  I suspect a political motive.  The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism.  Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.

I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science.  Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.

RogerG

Bibliography and references:

  1. “Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
  2. “Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015,   https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
  3. “The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016,   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
  4. “Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis.  The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
  5. “Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
  6. A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
  7. A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”,  Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
  8. As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“,   http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
  9. An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009,   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
  10. The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
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Ban-o-mania

A current  incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless.  Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience.  They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.

Don’t like something?  Ban it!  Why ban it?  Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate.   That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind).  Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone  not so mentally and geographically insulated.

The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map.  Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)

2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.

The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics.  The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)

New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.
Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970

I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.

Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order.  Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]).  The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”.  “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)

Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions.  The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes.  Currently, transgenderism has pride of place.  As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license.  Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state.  Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship.  Is confinement next?  Has it already started?

Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things.  If only Orwell was here to see it.

It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering.  Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo.  Examples are many.  The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags.  The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.

Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:

to this:

Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small,  not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more.  People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt.  But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.

Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485.  It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters.  In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy.  For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it.  Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac.  The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)

Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.

For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not.  The progressive fatwa against them has already begun.  With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California.  Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5)  She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said.  For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary.  She didn’t get the message.  Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego)

If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle.  For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend.  Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal.  The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?).  And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?

A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic.  Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.

The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic.  Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics.  They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times.  Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.

Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine.  It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader.  (6)  Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.

For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits.  It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.

Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.

The same is true for guns.  Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy.  Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things.  This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).

Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance.  They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them.  It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers.  The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.

Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.

Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”.  Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.

The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices.  The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them.  “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats.  Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014.  He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008.  The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.

Brendan Eich

Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink.  In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation.  Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior.  The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”.  Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.

The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich.  They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view.  James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)

James Damore and Google

He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9)   The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage.  Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.

The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine.  Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth.  They sprang in defense of Google.  At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown.  Intel has commissar Barbara Whye.  Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat.  Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants.   Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example.  All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.

Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson

The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question.  Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept.  Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement.  They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.

The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true.  Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court.  For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.

John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.

McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10)  Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz.  But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany.  The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.

Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.

Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark.  After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set.  The event attracted quite a crowd.  During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer.  He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.  The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)

Was McEnroe all that wrong?

There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world.  The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies.  In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics.  We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies.  But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater.  There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.

To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required.  All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort.  Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist.  The sad part is their push to take the campaign national.  Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.

Watch out red America.  You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster.  You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017,  https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
  2. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
  3. Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute.  “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
  4. “California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017,   http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
  5. “Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017,   http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
  6. “Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016,  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
  7. “Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014,  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
  8. “Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
  9. The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here:  “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017,  http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
  10. “John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017,   http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
  11. The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
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The Bluster of “We Need to Make Sure This Never Happens Again.”

A chant applied to the Las Vegas massacre, almost anything bad involving guns, almost anything bad involving kids, and almost anything that’ll agitate the news cycle for more than a day.

The mass shooting in Las Vegas around 10 pm, Sunday, 10/1/2017.

Lately, we’ve developed a nervous tic nearly every time an incident of mayhem invades our tranquility.  It won’t be long before a grandstanding politico trots out in front of a mike and cameras to announce, “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”  The fact is, it will.  So what is up with the nonsense declaration?  It’s the intro to the politicization of tragedy.

It begins with the unquestioning belief in the magical healing powers of legislation.  Someone demands that we “do something”, and “do something” means “write a law”.  Encapsulate the cure in a 20,000-word statute.  What’s up with that?

Has anyone ever taken a look at the “geniuses” who’ll craft the cure?  Sorry, high-wattage thinkers don’t heavily populate the upper rungs of those who play the game of politics (i.e. acquiring power, or getting elected), especially on the lefty side of the political spectrum.  They may know the art of gaining power, but once in power we quickly learn that they really don’t know or understand much.  They’re fumbling, and sometimes dangerous, empty suits.

Nancy Pelosi, (D) San Francisco, Democrat majority leader.

They normally trot out their ready-made, off-the-shelf nostrums.  They don’t even have to be relevant to the issue at hand.  Just plug ’em in anyway.  In a recent CNN townhall after the Las Vegas shooting, Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco) quickly pivoted to her current favorite: background checks.  The question directed to her was about actions to prevent the Las Vegas shooting.  Her answer was nonsense.  Do we have background checks?  Yes.  Would of any of their proposed changes to them make any difference?  No.

Simply put, she didn’t answer the question.  Besides, her response wasn’t pertinent.  The killer, Stephen Paddock, passed background checks as he went about building his arsenal.  It’s not that he didn’t go through any.  The guy simply flew way under everyone’s radar, including his family’s.

On those “background checks”, all relevant records to a gun purchase are digitized with instant access for any government agent sitting time zones away from the site of the purchase.  It doesn’t take long to do a check.  States don’t vary that much in doing the look-see, only in the amount of arbitrary inconvenience for the buyer with their waiting periods.  Nothing much is accomplished with waiting periods; much is accomplished in irritation.

Still, even with the Democrats’ background enhancements, Paddock would fly under those too.

And with Pelosi and her gang’s proposals, she’d effectively put “dead” to due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments for gun buyers.  The Constitution is quite inconvenient for those in a hurry to win the political brass ring.

So, what’s she up to?  She’s up to politics, gaining the majority in Congress, and impatient in imposing blue America’s values on the rest of the country.

I could bore you to tears with examples of politicos and their love affair with silliness.  Here’s congresswomen Carolyn McCarthy, (D) New York, back in 2013 unable to describe a gun item (barrel shroud) mentioned in a bill that she supported.

You think that she’s the only one?  Here’s 2 New York state politicos intent on their own bans.

Incendiary bullets are “heat-seeking”?

The confusion among the left about semi-automatic and automatic guns is rampant.  The mixup extends to the progressive punditry.  CNN’s Don Lemmon steps into it.

The ignorance is pervasive.  The bulk of these people don’t own guns, haven’t really lived among them, and have SNL skits running around in their heads about rednecks and working stiffs.  Their’s is the world of gentrified neighborhoods, bistros, smartphone-saturation, and the college bubble.  Yet, they want to legislate for the rest of us.  When they get their hands on the levers of power, the result is absurdity.

From where do we get get this tic to legislate our way to nirvana?  It’s built into the progressive worldview.  Progressives are intoxicated with the idea of using state power to manufacture a new world, and new human beings to go in it.  That means legislation, laws, rules, decrees, and other such commands.  Out goes anything not familiar to them in their cloistered existence.

Maybe something can be done about “bump stocks”, but don’t expect it to change the dynamic of fevered imaginations intent on killing large numbers of people.  If the desire is there, a means will be found.  In other words, it will happen again.

Evil resides in the souls of some men and women … but, first, you have to recognize the existence of evil.  Now that’s something to scoff for your average run-of-the-mill urban sophisticate.

RogerG

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Substituting Their Judgment: Lesson 2 from “The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West”

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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/
  3. More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
  4. 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/
  5. 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
  6. More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition,  http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
  7. “The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone,  https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
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Journalism as Wish-Fulfillment

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:

  3. Sonam Sheth Twitter page, https://twitter.com/sonamsays
  4. Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
  5. Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
  6. “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
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The Democrats’ “Deplorable” Conundrum

Please read this article by Kay S. Hymowitz, contributing editor for City Journal: “Can Democrats Make Nice with Deplorables?”, https://www.city-journal.org/…/can-democrats-make-nice-depl… .

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.

RogerG

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The Left’s Raqqa Moment

Islamic State fighters in a show of force in the Syrian city of Raqqah, 2013. Picture: AP
Antifa 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

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Arrogance, Arrogance, Arrogance

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):

  • X is an expert on subject Y,
  • X claims A. (A is within subject Y.)
  • Therefore, A is probably true.

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).

11. 1942-, Walton, Douglas (Douglas Neil), (2008-01-01). Informal logic : a pragmatic approach. Cambridge University Press.

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

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A Tale of … Two People

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.

RogerG

 

Bibliography and sources:

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

“Jose Pinera”, Sneha Girap, Ed., Alchetron, https://alchetron.com/Jose-Pinera-330673-W

“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/

 

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It’s Not My Fault!

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, 1931
Gen. 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!”

RogerG

 

Sources:

“The moment Yale students encircled and shouted down professor who told them to just ‘look away’ if they were offended by Halloween costumes”, The Daily Mail, Nov. 7, 2015,  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3308422/Students-rage-professor-sent-email-telling-students-just-look-away-offended-Halloween-costumes.html#ixzz4fITFzT6l

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.

“Document #24: “What is Peronism?” by Juan Domingo Perón (1948) || “The Twenty Truths of the Perónist Justicialism,” Juan Domingo Perón (1950)”, Brown Univ. Library,  https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-9-argentina/primary-documents-w-accompanying-discussion-questions/what-is-peronism-by-juan-domingo-peron-1948-the-twenty-truths-of-the-peronist-justicialism-juan-domingo-peron-1950/

A variety of Mussolini quotes are available at “Benito Mussolini”, wikiquote.org,  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

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.