… is that it rejects high standards and the application of those standards (e.g., profitability, actual accountability, high test scores). “Liberals” purport to have high moral standards, as exemplified in the term “social justice”. But those “standards” are nothing but excuses for abysmal performance, criminality, and other socially and economically destructive acts.
Category: Leftism – Statism – Democracy
The Arrogance of Do-Gooders
They assume moral superiority.
They presume to impose their version of morality on others.
They care not that their actions are patently self-serving and destructive of the trust that binds people.
A Nation of Enemies
The title of this post is hyperbolic, but it is nearer today’s truth than was Lincoln’s assertion at the end of his first inaugural address:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The United States of 1861 was genetically and culturally close-knit by comparison to the genetically and culturally fractured nation of today. It is impossible to turn the clock back. We must accept the United States for what it is — a fractured nation dominated by a powerful, intrusive central government.
That government’s vast power, by the way, stems largely from Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. The North’s victory in that war paved the way for the demise of the constitutional order — a strictly limited central government responsible to States that still possessed most governmental power. Decentralization made it easier for citizens to control the degree to which governments could prey on them. And it made voting with one’s feet a real option, even in that age when inter-State mobility was an arduous and risky proposition.
Angry Females, White and Other
Angry white males are meek and mild by comparison. Need I add that the angry females are leftists?
“Liberalism”: Trying to Have It Both Ways
“Liberals” are loath to face realities like these:
Handouts to the homeless encourage homelessness.
Disability benefits yield more “disabled” persons.
Softer punishments mean more crime.
Higher tax rates stunt economic growth …. the list is almost endless.
The “liberal” program is the triumph of hope over common sense. It is and always has been a recipe for social and economic disaster.
“Science Is Real”
Yes, it is. But the real part of science is the never-ending search for truth about the “natural” world. Scientific “knowledge” is always provisional.
The flower children — young and old — who display “science is real” posters have it exactly backwards. They believe that science consists of provisional knowledge, and when that “knowledge” matches their prejudices the search for truth is at an end.
Provisional knowledge is valuable in some instances — building bridges and airplanes, for example. But bridges and airplanes are (or should be) built by allowing for error, and a lot of it.
Liar’s Row
Alger Hiss
The Rosenbergs
Anita Hill
Tawana Brawley
Christine Blasey Ford
Jussie Smollett
And many more … all leftists or tools of the left.
The Pretense of Knowledge
Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of science and disciplines that pretend to be scientific (e.g., economics) will appreciate the shallowness and inaccuracy of humans’ “knowledge” of nature and human nature — from the farthest galaxies to our own psyches. Anyone, that is, but a pretentious “scientist” or an over-educated ignoramus.
“Greed”
The envious whiner, know-nothing academic, mindless mediacrat, and pandering politician mistake ambition, accomplishment, and reward for “greed”. Unless, of course, it’s the ambition, accomplishment, and reward of the envious whiner, know-nothing academic, mindless mediacrat, and pandering politician.
“Democratic Socialism” and “Social Justice”
“Democratic socialism” means rule by the mob (demos) for the purpose of expropriating the wealth and earnings of others. “Social justice” — the excuse for “democratic socialism” — is a slippery slogan that appeals to the envious and ignorant. It enables the power-mad to do great harm to the social and economic fabric of the nation.
The harm to the social fabric has been done, and probably can’t be undone. The economic fabric has suffered great but not irreversible harm, which can still be undone — but not if the central government succumbs to the siren call of “social justice” and the superficial appeal of “democratic socialism”.
Not Smart Enough
So-called intellectuals tend to inhabit the left end of the political spectrum. Inasmuch as the spectrum is really a circle, it means that they are at the ultra-statist pole, in proximity to their arch-enemies of the extreme right. All that separates these supposed extremes are differences about the uses to which the state’s power should be put. They are united in their fervent belief that it should be used to force their aims on the populace.
Why do so-called intellectuals adhere to statism? Because they believe (often without justification) that they are smarter than the rest of us. That belief breeds arrogance. Arrogance begets the belief that the details of social and economic intercourse can and should be centrally directed, according to master plans that so-called intellectuals concoct. They concoct those plans in the badly mistaken belief that such produce better outcomes than those tested in the acid of voluntary social and economic intercourse.
“Intellectuals” aren’t smart enough to make the rest of us better off. They are only “smart” enough — and arrogant enough — to make the rest of us worse off.
Crying “Hitler”
Conservatives (or some of them) correctly invoke Hitler when referring to leftists because leftism is fascism.
Leftists wrongly invoke Hitler when referring to conservatives because they (leftists) are deluded about the nature of conservatism. Further, they (leftists), in a bizarre twist of reality, identify resistance to their fascistic program as fascistic. Leftism, in sum, is delusional cynicism.
The Deep Inroads of Dependency on Government
Roughly in chronological order.
Protective tariffs and regulations
Welfare
Municipal transit authorities
Crop subsidies
Social Security
Medicare
Medicaid
Affirmative action
Disability and veterans’ preferences
Student loan subsidies
Subsidies for sports facilities, industrial relocation, housing developments
Low-income mortgage subsidies
Earned-income tax credit
Prescription drug coverage (Medicare Part D)
Obamacare (i.e., Medicare/Medicaid expansion)
Bank bailouts
There’s a lot more, but you get the idea.
Privacy, Facebook, and Abortion
The “right” to an abortion is grounded in a “right” to privacy. I would bet a fairly good sum of money that major violators of privacy — Zuckerberg, the Google gang, etc. — are big supporters of the “right” to an abortion. The left’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Not with a Bang
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men
It’s also the way that America is ending. Yes, there are verbal fireworks aplenty, but there will not be a “hot” civil war. The country that my parents and grandparents knew and loved — the country of my youth in the 1940s and 1950s — is just fading away.
This would not necessarily be a bad thing if the remaking of America were a gradual, voluntary process, leading to time-tested changes for the better. But that isn’t the case. The very soul of America has been and is being ripped out by the government that was meant to protect that soul, and by movements that government not only tolerates but fosters.
Before I go further, I should explain what I mean by America, which is not the same thing as the geopolitical entity known as the United States, though the two were tightly linked for a long time.
America was a relatively homogeneous cultural order that fostered mutual respect, mutual trust, and mutual forbearance — or far more of those things than one might expect in a nation as populous and far-flung as the United States. Those things — conjoined with a Constitution that has been under assault since the New Deal — made America a land of liberty. That is to say, they fostered real liberty, which isn’t an unattainable state of bliss but an actual (and imperfect) condition of peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior.
The attainment of this condition depends on social comity, which depends in turn on (a) genetic kinship and (b) the inculcation and enforcement of social norms, especially the norms that define harm.
All of that is going by the boards because the emerging cultural order is almost diametrically opposite that which prevailed in America. The new dispensation includes:
- casual sex
- serial cohabitation
- subsidized illegitimacy
- abortion on demand
- easy divorce
- legions of non-mothering mothers
- concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males
- gender-confusion as a burgeoning norm
- “alternative lifestyles” that foster disease, promiscuity, and familial instability
- normalization of drug abuse
- forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights)
- suppression of religion
- rampant obscenity
- identity politics on steroids
- illegal immigration as a “right”
- “free stuff” from government (Social Security was meant to be self-supporting)
- America as the enemy
- all of this (and more) as gospel to influential elites whose own lives are modeled mostly on old America.
As the culture has rotted, so have the ties that bound America.
The rot has occurred to the accompaniment of cacophony. Cultural coarsening begets loud and inconsiderate vulgarity. Worse than that is the cluttering of the ether with the vehement and belligerent propaganda, most of it aimed at taking down America.
The advocates of the new dispensation haven’t quite finished the job of dismantling America. But that day isn’t far off. Complete victory for the enemies of America is only a few election cycles away. The squishy center of the electorate — as is its wont — will swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court (of the packing of it), the dogmas of the anti-American culture will become the law of the land; for example:
Billions and trillions of dollars will be wasted on various “green” projects, including but far from limited to the complete replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables”, with the resulting impoverishment of most Americans, except for comfortable elites who press such policies).
It will be illegal to criticize, even by implication, such things as abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, or the confiscation of firearms. These cherished beliefs will be mandated for school and college curricula, and enforced by huge fines and draconian prison sentences (sometimes in the guise of “re-education”).
Any hint of Christianity and Judaism will be barred from public discourse, and similarly punished. Islam will be held up as a model of unity and tolerance.
Reverse discrimination in favor of females, blacks, Hispanics, gender-confused persons, and other “protected” groups will be required and enforced with a vengeance. But “protections” will not apply to members of such groups who are suspected of harboring libertarian or conservative impulses.
Sexual misconduct (as defined by the “victim”) will become a crime, and any male person may be found guilty of it on the uncorroborated testimony of any female who claims to have been the victim of an unwanted glance, touch (even if accidental), innuendo (as perceived by the victim), etc.
There will be parallel treatment of the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism.
All health care in the United States will be subject to review by a national, single-payer agency of the central government. Private care will be forbidden, though ready access to doctors, treatments, and medications will be provided for high officials and other favored persons. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace (like that of the UK) will be shrugged off as a residual effect of “capitalist” health care.
The regulatory regime will rebound with a vengeance, contaminating every corner of American life and regimenting all businesses except those daring to operate in an underground economy. The quality and variety of products and services will decline as their real prices rise as a fraction of incomes.
The dire economic effects of single-payer health care and regulation will be compounded by massive increases in other kinds of government spending (defense excepted). The real rate of economic growth will approach zero.
The United States will maintain token armed forces, mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Given its economically destructive independence from foreign oil and its depressed economy, it will become a simulacrum of the USSR and Mao’s China — and not a rival to the new superpowers, Russia and China, which will largely ignore it as long as it doesn’t interfere in their pillaging of respective spheres of influence. A policy of non-interference (i.e., tacit collusion) will be the order of the era in Washington.
Though it would hardly be necessary to rig elections in favor of Democrats, given the flood of illegal immigrants who will pour into the country and enjoy voting rights, a way will be found to do just that. The most likely method will be election laws requiring candidates to pass ideological purity tests by swearing fealty to the “law of the land” (i.e., abortion, unfettered immigration, same-sex marriage, freedom of gender choice for children, etc., etc., etc.). Those who fail such a test will be barred from holding any kind of public office, no matter how insignificant.
Are my fears exaggerated? I don’t think so, given what has happened in recent decades and the cultural revolutionaries’ tightening grip on the Democrat party. What I have sketched out can easily happen within a decade after Democrats seize total control of the central government.
Will the defenders of liberty rally to keep it from happening? Perhaps, but I fear that they will not have a lot of popular support, for three reasons:
First, there is the problem of asymmetrical ideological warfare, which favors the party that says “nice” things and promises “free” things.
Second, What has happened thus far — mainly since the 1960s — has happened slowly enough that it seems “natural” to too many Americans. They are like fish in water who cannot grasp the idea of life in a different medium.
Third, although change for the worse has accelerated in recent years, it has occurred mainly in forums that seem inconsequential to most Americans, for example, in academic fights about free speech, in the politically correct speeches of Hollywood stars, and in culture wars that are conducted mainly in the blogosphere. The unisex-bathroom issue seems to have faded as quickly as it arose, mainly because it really affects so few people. The latest gun-control mania may well subside — though it has reached new heights of hysteria — but it is only one battle in the broader war being waged by the left. And most Americans lack the political and historical knowledge to understand that there really is a civil war underway — just not a “hot” one.
Is a reversal possible? Possible, yes, but unlikely. The rot is too deeply entrenched. Public schools and universities are cesspools of anti-Americanism. The affluent elites of the information-entertainment-media-academic complex are in the saddle. Republican politicians, for the most part, are of no help because they are more interested on preserving their comfortable sinecures than in defending America or the Constitution.
On that note, I will take a break from blogging — perhaps forever. I urge you to read one of my early posts, “Reveries“, for a taste of what America means to me. As for my blogging legacy, please see “A Summing Up“, which links to dozens of posts and pages that amplify and support this post.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Voltaire, Candide
Related reading:
Michael Anton, “What We Still Have to Lose“, American Greatness, February 10, 2019
Rod Dreher, “Benedict Option FAQ“, The American Conservative, October 6, 2015
Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?“, Imprimis, February 2019
Joel Kotkin, “Today’s Cultural Engineers“, newgeography, January 26, 2019
Daniel Oliver, “Where Has All the Culture Gone?“, The Federalist, February 8, 2019
Malcolm Pollack, “On Civil War“, Motus Mentis, March 7, 2019
Fred Reed, “The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State“, Fred on Everything, January 17, 2019
Gilbert T. Sewall, “The Diminishing Authority of the Bourgeois Culture“, The American Conservative, February 4, 2019
Bob Unger, “Requiem for America“, The New American, January 24, 2019
A Summing Up
This post has been updated and moved to “Favorite Posts“.
Democrat Values
Virginia’s Democrat governor, Ralph Northam, is under fire from Democrats for (perhaps) having harbored racist thoughts 35 years ago, when he was 25 years old. He is not under fire from Democrats for his recent endorsement of infanticide. That’s all you need to know about today’s Democrat Party.
It’s Them or Us
Apropos the left’s unhinged and baseless attack on the Covington kids, the Audacious Epigone writes:
They [leftists] are incorrigible. There is no reformation, only destruction -– theirs or ours.
Theirs or ours. Them or us.
As Christopher Roach puts it:
The intensity of the friction has led, in recent times, to the suggestion we may be on the brink of a kind of civil war.
One solution proffered from time to time is a peaceful separation. Observers on the Right and the Left have suggested that the rift is simply too deep and serious to be resolved, and that the mutual interest of everyone concerned would benefit by a divorce, whether deemed secession or an invigoration of local autonomy or something else….
A peaceful national separation is probably a good idea. But those on the Right must face the most important obstacle: The Left would never ever let us leave.
Leftism is not simply one opinion among many. For the Left’s votaries, it’s closer to a religion. It’s not enough that one is himself a vegan, drives a Prius, doesn’t own guns, rejects the traditional family, or anything else that goes with the lifestyle. It is essential that everyone else does so. Any deviations are “backwardness” and “divisive” or worse.
… All disagreements are pathologized as moral failings and psychological defects, labeled with pseudoscientific terms like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the rest….
For all the talk of diversity and tolerance among the Left, this tolerance extends mostly to things most of us do not want to do. Most men and women do not want to change their sex or marry someone of the same sex. Most of us do not intend to leave the country our ancestors built. So the Left gives us the right to do things most of us do not want to do—gay rights, immigration—but takes away things that used to be commonplace, like supporting a family on a single income or governing our towns and cities without having to beg for the imprimatur of a hostile judiciary….
A peaceful separation requires some mutual respect and concern for the flourishing of the other. The Left, like crazed primitives engaged in honor killing, would instead exact revenge and command forced association rather than allow a divorce. The Left would be embarrassed and discredited if their ideology were rejected by the group it is supposedly benefiting with the promise of diversity, equality, and progress. Nailing shut the exits is a deliberate part of the Left’s utopian quest for uniformity and expansive labeling of all of its opinions and policies as nonnegotiable “human rights.”
Withdrawal isn’t an option either, as Bruce Frohnen observes:
[Rod] Dreher has been writing a good deal, of late, about what he calls the Benedict Option, by which he means a tactical withdrawal by people of faith from the mainstream culture into religious communities where they will seek to nurture and strengthen the faithful for reemergence and reengagement at a later date….
The problem with this view is that it underestimates the hostility of the new, non-Christian society [e.g., this and this]….
Leaders of this [new, non-Christian] society will not leave Christians alone if we simply surrender the public square to them. And they will deny they are persecuting anyone for simply applying the law to revoke tax exemptions, force the hiring of nonbelievers, and even jail those who fail to abide by laws they consider eminently reasonable, fair, and just.
The left simply will not abandon its desire to dictate to “the people”. It’s for their own good, you see.
Keep your powder dry.
Ben Shapiro’s Fallacy
Ben Shapiro, arguing against the use of emergency powers to fund the border wall, says this:
Proponents of President Donald Trump would like to see power centralized in the presidency; antagonists of Trump would like to see power centralized in the FBI.
Trump’s allies seem eager for Trump to declare a national emergency in order to appropriate funds for a border wall….
It’s good that the legislative branch checks the executive branch, and it’s good that the executive branch must remain in control of executive branch agencies.
Here’s the easy test: How would you feel if the situations were reversed?
I must note, first, that Shapiro badly overstates the case when he asserts that Trump’s proponents ” would like to see power centralized in the presidency,” and that “antagonists of Trump would like to see power centralized in the FBI.” Trump’s proponents would like to see power exercised responsibly, and most of the Democrats in Congress (as well as many Republicans) routinely fail to do that. Refusal to fund the border wall, merely to thwart Trump, is just a current and egregious example of that failure. Those same Democrats want the FBI to have power only when it comes to Trump; otherwise, they would prefer to emasculate the FBI. Democrats’ embrace of the FBI is a matter of political convenience, not principled conviction.
Now for the fallacy, which is implicit in Shapiro’s question, “How would you feel if the situations were reversed?” That question implies the following syllogism:
It is bad for the executive to use emergency powers.
The use of emergency powers is dictated by precedent.
Therefore, if Trump desists from using emergency powers, a future president (even a Democrat) will also desist and thereby avoid doing a bad thing.
The syllogism is logically valid, in that the conclusion follows from the premises. But the conclusion is arguably false because a Democrat — an Obama, for instance — is unlikely to be swayed by precedent in the matter of emergency powers.
Never Give In
Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston S. Churchill, October 1941
* * *
I was reminded of Churchill’s exhortation by Gregory Hood’s article about the reaction of Beltway “conservatives” to Tucker Carlson’s excoriation of Mitt Romney’s craven attack on President Trump. Hood says, among many things, that
flowery tributes to “freedom” by conservatives and libertarians sound like a modern-day Italian quoting the legal codes of the Papal States. If “freedom” means control over your own property, Americans have not been free for at least fifty years….
The distinction between Tucker Carlson and his Conservatism Inc. critics is the distinction between confrontation and collaboration.
Collaboration is also known as compromise, a word favored by faux conservatives because it connotes virtue. But there is nothing virtuous about it. Compromise between good and evil necessarily results in more evil.
A leading case in point is the vast expansion of government handouts — in which “conservatives” have been complicit — beginning with and since the New Deal. As I say here,
[t]he lack of something, if it’s truly important to a person, is an incentive for that person to find a way to afford the something. That’s what my parents’ generation did, even in the depths of the Great Depression, without going on the dole. There’s no reason why later generations can’t do it; it’s merely assumed that they can’t. But lots of people do it. I did it; my children did it; my grandchildren are doing it.
Republicans used to say such things openly and with conviction, before they became afraid of seeming “mean.” Principled conservatives should still be thinking and saying such things. When conservatives compromise their principles because they don’t want to seem “mean,” they are complicit in the country’s march down the road to serfdom — dependency on and obeisance to the central government.
Every advance in the direction of serfdom becomes harder and harder to reverse. The abolition of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is now unthinkable, even though those programs have caused hundreds of millions of Americans to become addicted to government handouts….
The best time — usually the only time — to kill a government program is before it starts. That’s why conservatives shouldn’t compromise.
Build the wall, drain the swamp, nominate justices who drive leftists crazy. Never give in.
Politics and Prosperity 