Washington invokes "domestic terrorism" to justify police
state rule
Behind the backs of the
population, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers, military leaders and
intelligence agents are engaged in a secret operation to endow the executive
branch with dictatorial powers to suppress social opposition in the United
States.
On July 27, Donald
Trump offered a glimpse of this movement within the state apparatus, tweeting,
“Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA … a major Organization of
Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do
their job!” On August 17, Trump repeated the same threat.
Trump has seized upon
the actions identified with ANTIFA, a loose amalgam that includes middle class
protesters and, no doubt, police provocateurs, in order to label any form of
left-wing opposition to fascism “terrorism,” a hallmark of police-state
dictatorships from Hitler’s Third Reich to Pinochet’s Chile.
A
US Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle waits to be driven into place in front of the
Lincoln Memorial for President Donald Trump's 'Salute to America' Fourth of
July event. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Trump is not merely
expressing a personal opinion. In the face of growing strikes and protests and
mounting social unrest internationally, the American ruling class is
acknowledging that maintaining the flow of corporate profits and defending
unprecedented levels of social inequality against the opposition of the broad
masses of people requires dictatorial forms of rule. Under conditions in which
three US billionaires control as much wealth as half the US population, even
the worn-out forms of democratic rule have become untenable.
Trump increasingly
legislates by “national emergency,” deploying troops on US soil, diverting
Pentagon funds to build a border wall, threatening to end due process and
constructing a network of concentration camps presently filled with desperate
asylum seekers.
The next
steps—including for martial law, mass arrests of left-wing dissidents, and
shutting off the Internet—are being developed out of the public view.
For example, Brennan
Center co-director Elizabeth Goitein wrote in theAtlantic in
February that the military-intelligence agencies now interpret a section of the
1934 Communications Act as granting the executive branch the power to “seize
control of US internet traffic, impeding access to certain websites” as well as
to shut down the internet, block the delivery of email and manipulate smart
speakers like Amazon Alexa upon the president’s proclamation “that there exists
a state or threat of war involving the United States.”
The government is also
developing plans to abolish the Constitution and carry out mass arrests.
Since 2012, Congress
has granted the Justice Department’s requests for funds to update secret
executive directives called Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADS)
used to plan “continuity of government” operations in case of national
emergencies including mass social unrest, strikes and protests.
Perhaps the most
well-known PEAD was the directive that authorized Lt. Col. Oliver North and the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to establish a contingency plan
authorizing “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States
over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local
governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis,” as The
Miami Herald reported in its 1987 exposure of the program, known as
“Rex 84.”
Goitein notes that such
plans are far from dormant:
“A 2007 Department of
Homeland Security report lists ‘martial law’ and ‘curfew declarations’ as
‘critical tasks’ that local, state, and federal government should be able to
perform in emergencies. In 2008, government sources told a reporter for Radar magazine
that a version of the Security Index [the mass arrest list of the mid 20th
century] still existed under the code name Main Core, allowing for the
apprehension and detention of Americans tagged as security threats.”
Trump’s July 27 and
August 17 tweets to label Antifa a “major terrorist organization” are an
expression of these police state plans, which can only be implemented through
massive censorship and the silencing of dissent. These plans lie behind the
international imperialist campaign to imprison and vilify WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, both of whom remain locked up
for the “crime” of exposing such crimes to the world.
These plans are
bipartisan.
Democratic Chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff recently introduced the
“Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act.” This bill, which has a high
chance of passage, would allow the Attorney General to prosecute people or
groups as “domestic terrorists” if they engage in or conspire to
engage in activity that seeks to “influence the policy of a
government by intimidation or coercion” if that activity impacts “interstate or
foreign commerce,” which by nature any workers’ strike would do. The
“conspiracy” clause will facilitate the prosecution of individuals based on
political opinion alone.
The Democrats and the
Democratic-linked press present this initiative as aimed against right-wing
mass shooters. But because shootings, bombings and other acts of terrorist
violence are already illegal in every state, the only purpose for the proposed
law is to criminalize free association with those who will be listed as
“domestic terrorists,” as well as to apply anti-foreign terrorist laws like the
PATRIOT Act against US citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected speech and
activity. This is directed ultimately against the working class.
As law professor and
former Justice Department attorney Robert Chesney enthusiastically explains, a
domestic terrorism statute would allow the government to compile “a list of
proscribed organization to which it becomes a crime to provide, knowingly, any
form of support (including becoming a person subject to the group’s orders).”
In addition, if
“domestic terrorism” is made a legal category, then Sections 1021 and 1022 of
the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) may give the executive branch the
power to arrest and indefinitely detain without charge or trial anyone labeled
a “suspected terrorist” based on “extreme” political views.
The introduction of the
war on terror into domestic law has more than legal significance. For nearly
two decades, US imperialism has used the most brutal and criminal methods
against the international working class in a desperate bid to maintain the
hegemonic position it enjoyed in the post-war period.
To this end, the US has
killed millions in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia
and elsewhere. Under the pretext of fighting “terrorism,” the US has fought to
control the world’s geopolitical chokepoints and natural resources. But these
wars have solved nothing. They have engendered massive opposition at home and
have only metastasized the historical crisis confronting American imperialism.
Now, methods of equal
or greater ruthlessness and criminality are being planned within the US itself,
both in an attempt to maximize the level of exploitation of the working class
and to terrorize the population into submission, ensuring the ruling
oligarchy’s monopoly of political power.
Congressional Democrats
have been key participants in creating the powers Trump is now wielding, voting
overwhelmingly for the PATRIOT act, supporting the Obama administration’s
assertion of the right to kill American citizens without trial, and now,
acquiescing to even the most flagrantly dictatorial actions by the would-be
tyrant in the White House.
The Democrats’ role in
creating the framework for dictatorship reflects the fact that they, like
Trump’s Republicans, express the social interests of the financial oligarchy
and the affluent upper middle class, both of which look with horror at the
growing movement of the working class.
The threat of
dictatorship in the US is part of an international process. Across the world,
governments are creating the legal and physical framework for mass repression.
But these
conspiratorial cabals of financiers, generals and spooks will not be able to
implement their plans for dictatorship without arousing the profound social
opposition of billions of workers and young people worldwide. That opposition
must be politically mobilized in a conscious struggle to tear control of
society out of the hands of the capitalist class, dismantle the
military-intelligence agencies and reorganize the world’s productive forces on
an egalitarian socialist basis.
The
judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret
speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative,
were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American
electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties
in the United States during a presidential election.”
“Clinton
also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after
his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in
part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street
bankers.”
Democrats Move Towards
‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin
Associated Press
Left-wing
progressives are embracing a political alliance with Silicon Valley
oligarchs who would trap Americans in a cramped future without hope of
upward mobility for themselves or their children, says a left-wing political
analyst in California.
Under the headline “America is moving toward an oligarchical
socialism,” Joel Kotkin writes :
Historically, liberals advocated helping the middle class
achieve greater independence, notably by owning houses and starting companies.
But the tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on
Wall Street — have a far less egalitarian vision. Greg Fehrenstein, who
interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an
increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller
slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly
subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and
government aid.”
Numerous oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, founder of
eBay, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator — have embraced
this vision including a “guaranteed wage,” usually $500 or a $1,000 monthly.
Our new economic overlords are not typical anti-tax billionaires in the
traditional mode; they see government spending as a means of keeping the
populist pitchforks away. This may be the only politically sustainable way to
expand “the gig economy,” which grew to 7 million workers this year, 26 percent
above the year before.
Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the
next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest
apartments. Unable to grow into property-owning adults, they will subsist while
playing with their phones, video games and virtual reality in what Google calls
“immersive computing.”
This plan, however, is being challenged by the return of
populism and nationalism when President Donald Trump defeated the GOP’s
corporatist candidates and the progressives’ candidate in 2016. In his 2017
inauguration, Trump declared:
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital
has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the
cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its
wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories
closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our
country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not
been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there
was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.
That all changes starting right here and right now because this
moment is your moment, it belongs to you …
What truly matters is not which party controls our government,
but whether our government is controlled by the people.
For several years, Kotkin has been dissecting the Democrats’
shift from working-class politics toward a tacit alliance with the billionaires
in the new information-technology industries that are centralizing wealth and
power through the United States. In 2013, for example, he argued that
California’s politics were increasingly “ feudal “:
As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental
sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent
of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of
opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census
estimates, the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some
estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as the Dominican
Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.
At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level
of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse
than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to
roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare
recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.
Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are
downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos
actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one
recent report . Nor are things expected to get
better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey , most Californians expect their
incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the
young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.
Read Kotkin’s “oligarchal socialism” article here .
*
“Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels?”
“By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such
credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession.”
“Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the
country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s
anything-goes immigration stance.”
WHY ARE
VOTERS SO FUCKING MAD?
CITY
JOURNAL
MYRON
MAGNET
Haunting
this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no
longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy
feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.
We have
lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic
election of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the
president vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them
unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders
designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All
its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old
functions.
But in fact, a new kind of
government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched
in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the
adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an
evolution but a usurpation.
What has
now largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the
Administrative State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect,
Woodrow Wilson. The thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president,
who thought himself enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the
Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded
“nonsense,” and he rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as
obsolete. (See “ It’s
Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More, ” Summer 2014.) What a modern country
needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep pace with the
fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he called it,
effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional convention.
M odernity, Wilson thought,
demanded efficient government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent,
hyper-educated experts, applying the latest scientific, economic, and
sociological knowledge to industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too
complex for self-governing free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress
to create executive-branch administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade
Commission, to do the job. During the Great Depression, President Franklin
Roosevelt proliferated such agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board
and the Federal Housing Administration to the Federal Communications Commission
and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect.
Before they could do so, though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching
the Constitution’s Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal
government in charge of all economic activity, not just interstate
transactions. He also had to pressure the justices to allow Congress to
delegate legislative power—which is, in effect, what the lawmakers did by
setting up agencies with the power to make binding rules. The Constitution, of
course, vests all legislative power in
Congress, empowering it to make laws, not to make legislators.
But the
Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If
Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate
judicial powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary.
Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a
legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting
violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as
fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they
also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart
of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought),
as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth
Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and
tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private
papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search
warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue
waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and
companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully
remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked
constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of
the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal
conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
Adding
insult to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call
themselves “progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the
embodiments and chosen instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving,
irresistible future. In tune with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson and
his circle studied, they claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized goal
of human perfection. But that perfection, the German philosophers believed,
would look something like Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For Americans to
think that it is progress to move from the Founders’ revolutionary
achievement—a nation of free citizens, endowed with natural rights, living
under laws that they themselves have made, pursuing their own vision of
happiness in their own way and free to develop as fully as they can whatever
talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in which individuals derive such
rights as they have from a government superior to them is contemptible. How is
a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No lover of liberty should ever
call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In historical terms, this elevation
of state power over individual freedom is not even “liberal” but quite the
reverse.
A s these agencies have
metastasized, they have borne out not a single premise that justified their
creation, and their increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry
attention to them. Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized
with shock, many of those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just
out of law school, with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge.
Efficient? Can-do America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months
and ramped up airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to
nearly 100,000 in 1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair
a bridge or lay a pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or
even start because the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly
to navigate? Only last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under
their supervision accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater
into the Colorado River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to
downstream Colorado and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the
poisonous, fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those
who’ve fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care.
But what’s the problem? asks agency head Robert MacDonald blithely. After
all, at ever-popular Disneyland, “do they measure the number of hours you wait
in line?”
Non-political?
Ask Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service. Oh wait: she pleaded the Fifth
Amendment—and her boss, John Koskinen, simply ignores Congress’s orders, even
as more than 2,000 of his enforcement agents have acquired military-grade
weaponry, among 200,000 of such administrative-agency officers now similarly
equipped with lethal arms, presumably for coercion of the citizens they
supposedly serve. Or there’s the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal Communications
Commission, lackeys of President Obama and his ultra-partisan agenda.
Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force participation
rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women to record
levels? Moreover,
from the establishment of the first administrative agency—the Interstate
Commerce Commission in 1887, essentially designed to create shared railroad cartels—these
agencies have been key instruments of crony capitalism, which today often takes
the form of senators and congressmen pressuring agencies for rule changes or
waivers to benefit their contributors, usually at the expense of their
competitors as well as the public, as the author of the recent Confessions of Congressman X complains of his fellow legislative
“puppets.” Little wonder that today’s Americans think that such people don’t
represent them. Pollsters report that trust in government is at its lowest
level ever, with only 19 percent expecting government to do the right thing,
according to last year’s Gallup and Pew polls.
Ensuring
the citizens’ health and safety? Where is the Food and Drug Administration as
counterfeit medicines and medical supplies from China infiltrate our hospitals?
As for the infamously dysfunctional Transportation Security Administration, its
Keystone Kops’ regularly reported inability to spot journalists carrying banned
weapons onto airplanes, while they are too busy fondling travelers’ private
parts or undressing grannies, is a standing national joke—on us. We lost our
constitutional safeguards for this ?
F DR spewed out his
agencies in a “try anything” spirit to cure a Depression that his predecessor’s
misguided palliatives had worsened, and debate still surges over whether the
New Deal agencies did harm or good, putting aside their doubtful legitimacy. But
the majority of Americans at the time gave the president credit for good
intentions. By contrast, many voters
give Barack Obama no such credit for his analogous response to the Great
Recession. They see it as a cynically calculated ploy to extend government’s
power over the people, especially given the White House chief of staff’s crack
that a president should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” So on the
pretext of addressing the financial crisis, the administration partially
socialized American medicine with legislation that only Democrats voted for,
without bothering to read it, and that citizens who opposed the measure—still a
solid majority of those polled—saw as a kind of coup d’état, framed with utter
irresponsibility and ignoring the scary financial mess. As happened during the
New Deal, a timid Supreme Court found the act constitutional only by the
politically driven legerdemain frequent in that institution’s checkered
history. It struck many as flimflam, not government by consent.
The
result was a spectacular expansion of the Administrative State, with some 150
new agencies and commissions created; no one knows the exact number. And these
agencies purposely removed the Administrative State even further from
government by the people. One agency, the Independent Payment Advisory
Board—the so-called death panel—is so democratically unaccountable that
Congress can only abolish it by a three-fifths vote in both houses within a
seven-month period next year. After that, the law bars Congress from altering
any of the board’s edicts, a provision as far from democratic self-government
as you can get.
When the
administration finally confronted the financial crisis, lengthened by
Obamacare’s disincentives to hiring, its reflex response was to expand the
Administrative State still further with the Dodd-Frank Act, named for its two
legislative sponsors, both of whom had been in bed with the mortgage racket,
one figuratively and one literally. Whether it solved the problem is dubious.
What is certain is that it is as undemocratic as Obamacare, with its Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, whose budget Congress can’t control, its Financial
Stability Oversight Council, whose rulings no court may review, and its army of
regulators occupying the big banks and squeezing multimillion-dollar penalties
out of CEOs clinging to their supersize compensation, regardless of what
happens to the stockholders. Meanwhile, the opaque Federal Housing Finance
Agency, formed during the crisis to salvage the misbegotten mortgage giants Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, seems bent on nationalizing permanently this sizable chunk
of the economy, putting the government in charge of citizens’ housing as well
as their health care.
As for
the “stimulus” that was supposed to give a Keynesian boost to the economy:
since you can’t prove a negative, no one can show that if all that money had
stayed in the private economy, it would have created more jobs and economic
growth than the economically anemic Obama era has done. What unemployed or
underemployed workers saw, though, is that a good portion of stimulus money
went to protect the jobs of public employees, whose welfare evidently trumps
that of the citizens whom they supposedly serve. Coal miners saw that, even as
the administration aimed to kill their jobs, its stimulus shoveled out hundreds
of millions of dollars to now-defunct Solyndra and other nonviable,
crony-capitalist “green” energy companies, supposed solutions to a
global-warming crisis that many think a hoax, though some two dozen public officials
seem keen to suppress, Inquisition-style, the very utterance of that thought.
And voters noticed that America’s three highest-income counties are in the
Washington suburbs that house the federal government’s recession-proof
functionaries. (See “ Hail Columbia !,” Winter 2013.)
U nease over illegal
immigration also has stoked today’s fear that the government no longer belongs
to the people, and it’s important to understand the separate but mutually
reinforcing ways that it has done so. Once again, President Obama has made a
bad situation worse—this time, by his contemptuous refusal to execute the laws
faithfully. His catch-and-release policy for illegal border-crossers, as well
as his ban on deporting young aliens brought here by their illegal-immigrant
parents, are imperial, antidemocratic edicts that might have sparked
impeachment proceedings, had not Congress’s silly move to impeach Bill Clinton
for lying about his sex games with an intern tainted that weapon for years to
come. The result of Obama’s diktat, as contrary to the spirit of the Founders’
Constitution as is the Administrative State, is that law-abiding taxpayers must
pay for the kids’ welfare support, health care, and schooling—as they already
do for “anchor babies” born to mothers who have sneaked over the U.S. border
for the purpose of having a child eligible for “child-only” welfare benefits,
scarcely less than ordinary welfare payments and vastly more than the income of
Central American peasant families. No American voted to incur these costs,
which, if current trends continue, are likely to persist for several
generations of such families, so they amount to taxation without representation
as naked as George III’s.
As for the illegals who work, often for long
hours at low pay, off the books: because immigrants, 13 percent of the
population, hold 17 percent of the jobs—and no one knows the percentage of
workers who are here illegally—jobless working-class citizens have
understandably concluded that a lawless government, by countenancing such cheap
labor, is taking the bread out of their mouths. Should they eat cake instead?
America’s highest-income counties are in the suburbs that house
Washington’s recession-proof functionaries.
What
citizens want to know is that, of all the world’s people who seek to live in
America, our government will admit those who come legally, whose families will
not harm us, and who will add to the wealth of the nation, not reap where they
have not sown. After all, public safety—not clean energy or national health
care—is government’s purpose. Nevertheless, Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the country and really have
killed Americans, inevitably, under the administration’s anything-goes
immigration stance. Further, it’s no comfort to any American who has
suffered loss from an Islamist terror attack within our borders—from Ground
Zero and Fort Hood to San Bernardino and Orlando—that such incidents pose no
threat to our existence as a nation, as the president has said by way of
reassurance, while refusing to call such outrages by their right name. How many
citizens would have to die in a dirty-bomb attack in Grand Central Terminal for
such events to strike him as a threat to the nation’s existence?
The
question of providing a path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal aliens
already here is also germane to the debate about whom the U.S. government
serves and to whom it belongs. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh jokes that “illegal
aliens” is a politically incorrect term; we must say “undocumented Democrats”
instead. But it’s a joke with a barb,
for no one can doubt that these 12 million, if they could vote, would vote for
the Democratic program of an ever-larger, richly paid government extracting
ever-larger transfer payments from productive workers to the dependent
poor—James Madison’s definition of the tyranny of the majority in Federalist 10. With black poverty and exclusion steadily ameliorating,
thanks to decades of striving by well-intentioned Americans of all races—even
though Obama’s ex–attorney general Eric
Holder devoted his tenure to denying this plain truth—the Democratic Party
needs a new class of victims to justify its “helping” agenda and its immense
cadre of well-paid government “helpers.” Central American peasants fill the
bill.
Formerly,
our open economy drew the enterprising and energetic to these shores, and our
lack of a public safety net, with only private ethnic and religious charities
to help the unfortunate, meant that those who couldn’t contribute to the U.S.
economy went home. But today, when we
have a vast welfare state that didn’t exist during earlier waves of immigration,
the mothers of anchor babies come for handouts, and even the children of
hardworking legal Hispanic immigrants end up on the welfare rolls at
troublesomely high rates. In addition, our showering of self-proclaimed
refugees with welfare benefits, which attracts the shiftless rather than the
enterprising, only compounds the government-sustained dependency
problem—dependency upon taxpayers who didn’t choose this particular
philanthropy.
T he phalanx of privately
supported settlement houses and other institutions that met the great
immigration wave around the turn of the twentieth century, along with the
public school system, aimed to “Americanize” the new arrivals—teaching them our
language, manners, and customs, and especially our republican civic ethic.
Culture, after all, is as important an element of national identity as
political institutions. To become an American in those days meant little more
than learning English and subscribing to a broadly shared creed of
self-reliance, self-government, self-improvement, and allegiance to a tolerant
nation that most people agreed was unique in the freedom and opportunity it
afforded—as well as in its readiness to confer citizenship on newcomers who
almost universally desired it. But
today’s legal Hispanic immigrants often don’t apply for American citizenship,
or retain dual nationalities: Americanization often is not high on their
agendas.
Moreover,
our new doctrine of multiculturalism gives today’s immigrants nothing to
assimilate to, since current intellectual fashion—set by the universities,
Hollywood, and the mainstream media—celebrates everything that makes us
different rather than the creed that once made one nation out of many
individuals. And multiculturalism’s accompanying creed of victimology encourages
dependency rather than self-reliance. Who are the victimizers of illegal
Hispanic aliens? According to today’s politically correct “progressivism,” it
is the neocolonial United States that has exploited the Third World’s natural
resources, shored up its ruling oligarchies, and subverted its incipient
democratic governments. And then it further victimizes them with racism when
they try to escape to this country.
Deference
to the greater wisdom of government, which Wilsonian progressivism deems a
better judge of what the era needs and what the people “really” want than the
people themselves, has been silently eroding our unique culture of enterprise,
self-reliance, enlightenment, and love of liberty for decades. But if we cease
to enshrine American exceptionalism at the heart of our culture—if we set equal
value on such Third World cultural tendencies as passive resignation, fatalism,
superstition, devaluation of learning, resentment of imaginary plots by the
powerful, and a belief that gratification deferred is gratification forgone—the
exceptionalism of our institutions becomes all the more precarious.
Supercharging
American anger over illegal immigration and its consequences is the politically
correct ban on openly discussing it, with even the most reasoned reservation
dismissed as racism and yahooism. And political correctness generates its own
quantum of anger among citizens, who think of freedom of speech and debate as
central to American exceptionalism. But elite culture stigmatizes plain
speaking, so that now a rapist or a murderer is a “person who committed a
crime” or an “individual who was incarcerated,” says the Obama Department of
Justice, or, according to the latest humbug from the Department of Education, a
“justice-involved individual.” Implicit in these euphemisms is the theory that
“society,” not the criminal, is to blame for crime, a long-exploded idea aimed
at blurring the distinction between right and wrong.
That’s
what makes it so disheartening to learn that the University of California has
just deemed it a politically incorrect offense to declare America a land of
opportunity, so as not to stigmatize those who’ve failed to seize it. It’s
disheartening not only because such a retreat from our traditional culture will
hold back immigrants, but also because our long cultural unraveling already has
damagingly demoralized the native-born working class in the face of economic
change. They dimly know that, and part of what makes them so angry is what they
have allowed themselves to become.
W hen Theodore Roosevelt,
who unsuccessfully ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1912 on the Progressive Party
ticket, first declared his intention to go into politics, his fellow clubmen
jeered at him for wanting to associate with the “saloon-keepers, horse-car
conductors,” and other “rough and brutal” characters running the nation’s
political parties. “I answered,” recalled TR, “that if this were so it merely
meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that
the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class.”
That’s the true voice of “progressivism” speaking. As the Founders often
cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of
America’s current predicament is that it now has such a class, and the American
people are very angry about it.
Myron Magnet , City Journal ’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a
recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The
Founders at Home .
Time for America to get through the fog and wake up
It's
harder than ever to know what's going on in today's messed up world, thanks to
the flood of misinformation and the political censorship of mainstream news and
social media. It seems at times best to shut out the noise, put in a
good day's work, and conclude with a prayer. Unfortunately, that
luxury is no longer an option in today's ruptured America.
What
comes clearest through the fog of misinformation and censorship may be
identified as a sort of table of essential requirements for today's
Americans. Americans are being made to believe that to be decent
people, they have to
renounce the
sovereignty of their country
accept illegal
migration across the Mexican border
allow instant
citizenship to illegal migrants
allow exposing
themselves to foreign terrorists
condone Islamic
jihad and accept sharia law
tolerate the
vilification of police officers
accept the export
of American jobs to other countries
denigrate
America's heritage and remove its symbols
denounce people of
white skin
reject the nature
and reality of male and female
reject freedom of
speech
Missing
from this list (admittedly incomplete) is the disclaimer that each one of these
requirements is the opposite of what decent Americans should
do.
Notice
the reversal of moral value – a major tactic of
the left to deconstruct America and groom it for socialist-communist domination
and takeover, which seems outrageously stupid, given the historic and ongoing
failure of collectivism to make life good for anyone. In language
free of academic frills, this reversal-of-moral-value tactic may be summarized
this way: take something considered evil by the opposition, recast it in
language that makes it sound good, then accuse opponents of being against what
is "right." It's a tactic also used to smear opponents
with the faults of the smearers, who, need it be said, need to take a hard look
in the mirror.
The
ceaseless broadcast of falsehood-as-truth from the mainstream media – the voice
of the left since most of us have been alive – continues to stifle the ability
of Americans to see that they are being played like pawns on a global chessboard – or learn that prominent
globalist schemers finance NGOs, lobbyists, and demonstrations against
everything and everybody standing in the way of their agenda for global hegemony , let alone be given the opportunity
to ask why these "elites" should be in charge of our lives or
question whether their "superior wisdom" is in fact superior
arrogance and power.
Moneyed
egomaniacs with an obsession to lord it over others, if it means stripping them
of their freedom, or even their right to live, were never more
active. Enemies of America, external and internal, are doubling
their efforts to destabilize America by creating discord and division and
inciting violence. The talk of "civil war" in the air
highlights the fact that the very basics of civil order and well-being are
being attacked, even in high places, a red flag indicating very bad
management by central and local government officials. The
need to wake up has never been greater.
A
full review of all that has been happening behind closed doors is not necessary
to know that the time is now for sensible people of good
will to vote out of office all who choose not to defend America against its
enemies, foreign and domestic , or choose to violate their oath to
uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States – and vote in those
whose words and deeds show a dedication to America, its core values, and its
Constitution.
Anthony J. DeBlasi is a war veteran and lifelong defender of
Western culture.
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