Summary: As American politics heats up, preparing for the quadrennial hysteria in 2020, let’s step back and look at our choices. Left and Right are clear about their intentions. Only a mad people would trust either.
“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder – and nearly always from the former….”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History.
Congratulations, America. The Left has volunteered you, your family, and your nation as lab rats in one of history’s largest social engineering projects. If allowed to run, in a generation or two it will drastically and irreversibly reshape America. Rest assured, Leftists do this with full confidence that their ideology guarantees a happy ending. Just like their confidence that communism would bring unprecedented peace, prosperity, and social justice to Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and the other nations testing this radical new social system. They are sorry about the results.
And of course there were the Great Society experiments that inadvertently damaged African-American families and turned inner cities from poor zones into third-world-like disaster areas. Voices suggesting cautious action (such as sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan in “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action“) were attacked and drowned out. Sometimes the experiments end poorly.
But all that history has gone down the memory hole. The Left wants us to focus instead on the wonderful new projects that lie ahead!
Open borders.
While the Left has long sought this, the obvious risk led them to disguise their intent. As in the NY Times “Fact Check of the day” on 27 June 2018: “No, Democrats Don’t Want ‘Open Borders’.” This year they have gone public. ICE is denounced as just like the Gestapo. Any methods to deal with the flood of migrants, legal and illegal, are declared illegitimate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “28-Year-Old Democratic Giant Slayer“, condemns any attempts to slow the flow into America. NY Times columnist Farhad Manjoo confidently tells us that “There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders.”
No worries about the flood of unskilled labor crushing wages for those on the bottom rungs of the ladders, overwhelming our ability to assimilate immigrants, development of an underclass from their descendants (see the giant ring cities around Paris), changes to our culture (see the rise in antisemitism and crimes against women in Europe), etc. Imagine the wonderful possible benefits instead.
Massive change in gender relations.
Rapid change of gender roles and relations that are fundamental to society. Definitions of men and women, marriage, homosexuals, transgenders, etc. It is an ever-lengthening list. What can only be imagined today becomes subject of massive propaganda campaigns followed by legal action followed by action against those who oppose it. Wave after wave of change.
Radical social engineering, massive spending, boondoggles galore …
It’s a Green New Deal! Nobody does marketing as well as the Left! The New Deal put unemployed people to work during a depression, when deficit spending provided necessary stimulus to the economy. A Green New Deal will generate massive deficits during an expansion – when Keynes said that we should be paying down the debt. It is a grab bag of unrelated Leftist wishes with a catchy label.
It might leave just wreckage behind, but the debt will be forever.
Trust me!
Another perspective.
Imagine a troop of monkeys let loose in the control room of a nuclear power plant. Spinning dials. Moving levers. Pushing buttons. All the while laughing. It won’t end well.
And if we instead turn to the Right?
Two years of Trump and a GOP-run Congress shows that the Right does not see us as lab rats – but as sheep to be sheared.
Tax cuts for the rich. Attacks on unions, to boost corporate profits. Reduced environmental and job safety regulation, to boost corporate profits. Reduced enforcement of anti-trust regulations, allowing mega-mergers to build cartels to boost corporate profits. Massive expansion of military spending, irrelevant to actual threats we face, to boost corporate profits. Cuts to vital social spending, such as education.
If the far-Right gets their dreams, there will be drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They seek to rollback the New Deal. After all …
“What did that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like FDR stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas.”
–- Henry F. Potter, leading banker and first citizen of Bedford Falls. From It’s A Wonderful Life
. Slightly paraphrased.
. Slightly paraphrased.Perhaps we should be bearish on America
Bill Bonner writes about finance at The Daily Reckoning (he is a founder of the conservative phenomenon The Agora; see this article about it). A doomster and perma-bear, he gives a sobering perspective on our situation in “Corrections”.
“Men do stupid things regularly and mad things occasionally. And sometimes, the impulse to self-destruction is so overwhelming it overtakes an entire nation. …The best a person can hope for when he goes mad is that he runs into a brick wall quickly …before he has a chance to build up speed. That is why success, in war and investing, is often a greater menace than failure.
“…people seem to make such obvious and moronic errors that it seems as if they were driven to it by some instinct of self-destruction — like lemmings periodically exterminating themselves in a march off the cliffs. What’s more, this diabolical instinct seems to report for duty at the very moment when the future seems the brightest – that is, when it is most needed! Just when men are most proud, most confident, most expansive in their ambitions and hopes …that is when they make the most lunkheaded judgments.”
But it is not too late. We can cast aside our apathy and passivity and retake the reins of America. The Republic has had such moments before and came out stronger than it began. If we try, it can again. We can dream new dreams and create new values. America has everything working for it, except time.
I have faith in all you – in us – so that more citizen involvement will make a better and stronger America. I suspect we cannot imagine the eventual result. Perhaps a better Second Republic (founded on the Constitution). Perhaps a Third Republic.
I do not ask you to share that faith. I ask only that you have faith in yourself and see us as the crew of America – not its passengers. Pitch in and help. For ideas about what to do, see Reforming America: Steps to New Politics.
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- The similar delusions of America’s Left and Right show our common culture – and weakness.
- Programs to reshape the American mind, run by the left and right.
- We are alone in the defense of the Republic.
- Who lies to us the most? Left or Right?
- The bad news about reforming America: time is our enemy.
- Delusions of the well-educated and intelligent on the Left and Right leave us nowhere to hide.
- Facts are the enemy of both Left and Right in our America.
- Dreams of apocalypses show the brotherhood of America’s Left & Right.
- Our Right & Left have lost their way. Saul Alinsky points to a better politics.
- Left and Right use race as a way to divide America.
- Watch the Left and Right move against America.
- DEFCON 2: both Left and Right have turned against us.
Useful books explaining what happened to America
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted
I liked bill Bonners book.
“But it is not too late. We can cast aside our apathy and passivity and retake the reins of America. The Republic has had such moments before and came out stronger than it began.”
The republic has had previous moments where we cast aside Christianity in favor of Frankfurt school Marxism?
In general, conservatives think they’re passive victims of dark forces and not willing participants. Democrats are stealing elections in California, but Republicans have had about 30 years of warning about the dangers of importing a new people. Now the Democrats are repeating this on a national scale, and the Republicans are fighting their own president. We complain about liberal churches but the good conservative ones are poorly-attended. We prefer big evangelical churches with entertaining clowns for pastors. At least half the population is unhappy with the public schools where 2/3rds of 8th graders can’t read proficiently, but no reform movement has begun and at least 85% still have their kids in public schools versus private or homeschool. We complain about divorce and destruction of the family but don’t raise our own kids any better. I see a lot of lipservice paid to conservative values but very little practice of them.
I read through your story about trying to start committees of correspondence 10 years ago. Everyone told you nothing could be done. It’s sure true if everyone believes nothing can be done.
We should begin reforms by prioritizing the things under our control. We’re so divided and atomized, perhaps cooperation is impossible at this point. But if a lot of people want real reform instead of just complaining, perhaps organization at higher levels will be possible later. The Left’s Long March began with the first step. They made very little progress through their terrorism campaigns of the 1970s but tons of progress when they non-violently subvertd the system by infiltrating it.
Bryce,
“The republic has had previous moments where we cast aside Christianity in favor of Frankfurt school Marxism?”
Wouldn’t it be nice if threats repeated, so the second time we would understand them – and how to best respond! But each new serious threat is different. So the answer to you question is, Unfortunately, no. That’s the bad news.
From where I sit, I’ve been watching the left get beat down worldwide for the last three years.
This guy Trump is something to behold.
Ron,
“I’ve been watching the left get beat down worldwide for the last three years.”
I don’t believe that global politics have been one-sided in the past 3 years. Emmanuel Macron becomes president of France in 2017. Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador becomes President of Mexico in 2018? The Dems take the House (and many governorships) in the US in 2019?
“This guy Trump is something to behold.”
Trump has governed as a standard GOP president. Ignoring his tweets – today’s opiates of the masses, entertainment – the only thing slightly unusual thing he has done was withdraw the tiny US forces from Syria (but continues the bombing). But even Obama was reluctant to intervene there, so it was not a core issue.
Larry,
I sense it more on the global warming/climate change front, maybe because that has been a thing of mine since I retired four years ago.
Push backs against the greens here, Germany, Poland, France, Australia, and maybe others.
It’s hard to ignore Trump’s tweets. With the lying press and hostile politicians trying to take him down on TV, I don’t think he has any other way of communicating and surviving.
I’m hoping he gets out of Syria soon, like within a month. We shall see.
Ron,
True, lots of push-back on the climate change policy. But that’s because the weather has not cooperated. A spell of extreme weather might panic Americans into adopting the green agenda. We panic easily. But that one failure has not stopped their massive success with gay rights, fourth wave feminism (the push for supremacy), transgender advocacy, open borders, etc. Those add up to far more fundamental and irreversible changes to society than a carbon tax.
Ron,
“It’s hard to ignore Trump’s tweets.”
It’s easy to ignore Trump’s tweets. They’re meaningless noise, opiates to entertain his followers and troll his foes. They are a substitute for governing, something Trump has little interest in doing.
I’m reminded of a game we used to play as kids. One would say, “what would you choose, to have your eye poked out with a sharp stick or your hand cut off with a blunt saw”. You *had* to choose. Then you’d got to find two equally grisly things to happen to you and your opponent had to pick. Then there were arguments on the quality of choices and and more over who chose what.
All light hearted fun to idle away a few minutes waiting for something more exciting.
Who thought that would be politics today???
I’m all for people rising up, getting involved and trying to change things, the big problem is that both the left and right have become adept and cloaking themselves in other people’s causes. The yellow vest protests in France and demonstrators (for and against) Brexit being a case in point. A tour round any climate change rally soon leads you to believe that the hard left have colonised that space to further their revolutionary ambitions.
You start something good, and then, gradually, it’s taken away from you or completely discredited by the nutters at both ends of the political spectrum.
Steve,
Your framing of the problem is the problem. America’s citizens are not customers in a restaturant, compelled to choose from the menu and whining that the selection doesn’t match our awesomeness.
We are the crew of America, not its passengers. We can create our own options. That means work, but we shouldn’t complain. It does not (yet) require risking our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
It’s not the point I was making. Not that change isn’t possible, or that it’s not worthwhile, but that the extremes have become adept at hijacking causes. In part at least, it’s how they’ve got into the position of control that they have.
The point mentioning the game was to say that the choices are false. They don’t have to be made, that the alternative is not to play the game, but that, as you point out in your reply, we’re led to believe that we *do* have to choose from that restaurant menu.
My mum always used to point out to people who’d complain and say “Someone should do something…” that, *they* could do something. Often the reply was “What’s the point, no-one would listen to me”.
@FM
Do you think Americans would be more likely to survive the turn to the Left or to the Right?
info,
America will survive either way, in some form. Neither looks promising for continuation of the Republic. Remember the key fact: if the Republic dies, we killed it. America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. It’s falling like Rome’s Republic.
I think in a moral sense they are a bane.
As to taxes. When I hear the phrase “tax the rich” I am quite skeptical and think that it will actually end up taxing the middle class. The richest will always seem to get away with not paying taxes.
I don’t see inequality as a problem in itself.
But the extremity of it indicates that there is something nefarious going on. People don’t get super-rich as being the 0.01% of the top by honest means in my opinion through being good inventors,innovators and entrepreneurs.
I would surmise that most of them would be of the financial sector.
info,
“I am quite skeptical and think that it will actually end up taxing the middle class.”
Predicting the future is easy. I’ve met nobody who can successfully do it often.
“I don’t see inequality as a problem in itself.”
Lots of us disagree with you.
“People don’t get super-rich as being the 0.01% of the top by honest means in my opinion through being good inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs.”
That’s pretty obviously false. Many legally inherit it. Most are in legal businesses, doing legal things.
“I would surmise that most of them would be of the financial sector.”
That’s quite false. Estimates vary, but range about one-fifth to one-quarter of the top 0.01% get their wealth from finance. Here is a confusing but useful article about this (it hops between discussion of income and wealth inequality).
Oh okay. So what’s the problem with inequality that doesn’t arise from actual injustice?
Info,
I don’t know about injustice – no gods talk to me about such abstract things. But rising inequality is incompatible with any form old democracy – and all the benefits it produces.
That’s been clear since Solon the Lawgiver laid the foundation for Athenian democracy. But it appears to be a lesson that must be relearned every few generations.
As to democracy. What’s your thoughts on how the Swiss do their direct democracy?
Info,
The Swiss have a hybrid system, three branches plus elements of direct democracy. It works well for them, in their small (8 million people), stable, and extremely homogenous nation.
California has a roughly similar system. But it has 40 million people, is rapidly changing, and is quite heterogeneous. It doesn’t work well.
My guess is that is that elements of direct democracy work less as size, instability, and diversity each increase.
Trying this with America would be an good test case. It’s probable rapid disintegration would settle the question.
”Tax cuts for the rich. Attacks on unions, to boost corporate profits. Reduced environmental and job safety regulation, to boost corporate profits. Reduced enforcement of anti-trust regulations, allowing mega-mergers to build cartels to boost corporate profits. Massive expansion of military spending, irrelevant to actual threats we face, to boost corporate profits. Cuts to vital social spending, such as education.”
Neo-con’s are the bane of the Right. If right is to increase their viability they would have to be replaced with more populist Right-Wing Politicians eg. Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini.
info,
America’s major parties are coalitions. That’s why they are so much larger than those in Europe. In Europe people vote for the party that closely matches their preferences. Then the party leaders form coalitions, making choices the votes might not like. In America, they form the coalitions that will govern – and we vote on those.
“Neo-con’s are the bane of the Right.”
That’s not even remotely correct. Neo-cons are just one component of the GOP coalition. Their partners work with them, which is all that counts. Political partners need not like each other.
Lol, the deficit hawk arguments are already beginning.
You should look up the terms “progressive taxation” and “net outflow of undocumented immigrants” since you don’t seem to have any grasp of their relavence.
Bomba,
You are zero for three. That’s the usual for your comments.
(1) “the deficit hawk arguments are already beginning.”
It’s called economics. If you have a refutation to Keynes, I suggest you publish it.
(2) “You should look up the terms “progressive taxation””
Taxes are not mentioned in this post.
(3) “net outflow of undocumented immigrants”
That is a result of changes in public policy and enforcement. The Left wants to reverse those, so the flow resumes – and increases beyond previous peak rates.
I didn’t see any mention of the big industrial complexes; namely the military one and the climate change one. There’s a lot of money and power tied up in those.
Mpcraig,
No mention of the MIC, since that has deep bipartisan support extending back to the early Cold War.
No mention of any “climate change complex”, since the money involved is tiny at present. Of course, that might change if the Left gets its way.
Larry
CA’s decarburization plan (a version of a green new deal) is under stress. I am not sure what a bankruptcy judge – or an administrative law judge at the PUC – will have to say about various debts, future liabilities and/or existing contracts that PG&E has over the next couple of years.
“California Renewables to Lose PG&E $$$” by Ron Clutz at his website, Science Matters.
kakatoa,
I agree. Despite California’s large hydropower resources, it has some of the most expensive electricity in the continental US. And its far-left legislature has big plans to boost the cost even more. To radical greens, boosting the price to reduce consumption is a good thing (most have high incomes, so they need not change their lifestyle).
We can only guess how the probable bankruptcy of PG&E (poorly managed even as US electric utilities go) affects. It won’t make private investment in California electricity more attractive. And upgrading the transmission grid to reduce the number of wildfires will take a lot of cash.
A great example of the Left’s confidence was in RD Laing’s idea that Schizophrenia was because of “Bad Family Dynamics”. They rushed (starting in California as always) to change the laws about mandatory hospitalization of the severely mentally ill using a handful of mistakes as justification, and the “Science” of “Bad Family Dynamics”. After tens of thousands of the severely mentally ill had been released – and as frequently seen, by cooperation by Cheapskate Establishment Conservaitves looking to cut budgets – just a few years later, Science, using a new discovery, showed conclusively that it ran in families because of… Genetics.
Lashkar,
Thank you for giving the background to the mess that is mental health treatment in California. They’re living on the street, suffering and harassing others. The Leftist establishment can’t even imagine any way to solve this. So their police keep these ill people out of the upper middle class’ enclaves. Problem solved!
“Deinstitutionalization” was literally spearheaded by Reagan, first in California then federally. The idea Reagan pushed deinstitutionalization because of an obscure psychologist and not because of his neoliberal ideology is, pardon the pun, insane.
George,
“Deinstitutionalization was literally spearheaded by Reagan, first in California then federally.”
Like most of your comments, that is totally false.
In 1955, Congress passed the Mental Health Study Act, which lead to the establishment of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Mental Health. That Commission issued a report in 1961, which would become the basis of the 1963 Community Mental Health Act – the first major legislative push for deinstitutionalization (there had already been action by courts). This was also known as the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act.
This movement was supported in the 1960s by a large body of research. Such as Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, a 1961 book by sociologist Erving Goffman. The book is one of the first sociological examinations of the social situation of mental patients in asylums.
Support for deinstitutionalization grew in both the US and western Europe during the 1960s and gained decisive support among both US major parties (for different reasons) in the early 1970s.
See the Wikipedia entry on Deinstitutionalisation. It doesn’t even mention Reagan or California.
For more detail see “Deinstitutionalization of People with Mental Illness: Causes and Consequences” by Dr. Daniel Yohanna in the AMA Journal of Ethics, Oct 2013. It doesn’t even mention Reagan or California.
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