CIVIL WAR?
TRULY YOU DON’T THINK THE POLS WILL STOP SUCKING OFF THE BRIBES, AND BANKSTERS
STOP LOOTING, AND WALL STREET STOP PLUNDERING AND MEXICO STOP INVADING AND VOTING
DEMOCRAT FOR MORE WITHOUT CIVIL WAR II.
If we’re really worried about civil violence coming to our streets, let’s do something about the economic dysfunctions that are insidiously making possible the conditions for such violence.
“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?”
If we’re really worried about civil violence coming to our streets, let’s do something about the economic dysfunctions that are insidiously making possible the conditions for such violence.
“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?”
"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
nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s
population."
Are We Heading Toward
Civil War? A New Poll Shows Voters Think We’re on The Edge
The American Civil War was brutal. It
remains the bloodiest conflict we have ever fought. It defined the nation and
left an imprint that remains to this day, but it was for the better. For
starters, the rigid regionalism that was heavily entrenched was washed away.
Americans viewed themselves as…Americans, not Virginians, Alabamans, Georgians,
or New Yorkers first. The U.S. as national identity was forged out of the ashes
of this conflict. The United States was 34
states at the outbreak of the war. Its conclusion saw it become one nation. The
notion of military officers resigning their commissions to join their state’s
secession efforts is alien today. It was not back then. We share common
principles; we’re also a country where folks move more frequently. There is
mobility. But that doesn’t mean that a sizeable slice of the population that
wants to annihilate the other won’t be any less destructive.
The ties that bind us together, the notion that we’re one country
united, has been a buffer for the vicious divisions that led to our civil war.
Yes, there were many other issues as well, but you can discuss that among
yourselves. With recent surveys showing how liberals and conservatives value
different cultural norms and view the other as alien, are we on the path toward
another destructive conflict between the states? The lines would be different.
It would probably be the coasts versus the rural interior instead of north
versus south, but I digress.
Oftentimes, people roll their eyes when others spout new civil war talk or
armed rebellion against the government, but nearly 70 percent of Americans
think we could be reaching that point according to a new poll.
The Washington Examiner has more:
Partisan political division and the
resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67% believing that the
nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey.
“The majority of Americans believe that
we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a
very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of
Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.
And
worse, he said in announcing the results of the institute’s Battleground Poll,
the political division is likely to make the upcoming 2020 presidential race
the nastiest in modern history.
In June of 2018,
Rasmussen found that 31
percent of voters felt a civil war was possible within the next
five years. Maybe this thing is being overblown. It’s a highly divisive time.
Tensions and emotions are running high. Will cooler heads prevail? I don’t
know. All I know is that this nation became after our first civil war. Slavery
was abolished, and the national identity we know today emerged from one of the
most brutal moments in our history.
WILL OUR CURRENT POLITICAL CONFLICTS
TURN VIOLENT?
Do
today's "woke" leftists really have the guts?
July 6, 2018
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism
Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
President
Trump’s recent string of wins ––especially the victories in the Supreme Court
decisions and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy–– has incited the
Democrat “resistance” to even loonier excesses of rhetoric and rudeness.
Celebrities indulging juvenile vulgarities, boorish protestors harassing
cabinet members in public spaces, the twitterverse smoldering with calls for
violence and a “summer of rage,” and the buffoonish Representative from
California Maxine Waters calling for even more public harassment: all have some
people worrying that we are on the track of escalating violence that will turn
the “cold civil war” hot.
Count me as
skeptical for now. As bad as today’s political discord may seem, American
history from its beginnings has been filled with worse political conflict and
violence, from Shays’ Rebellion to Bleeding Kansas, from the Wall Street
bombing to the Haymarket Riot. And having spent more than forty years in the
university, the nursery of leftism and today’s parlor pinks, I see few people
with the gumption to actually back their blustering threats with risky action.
Any claims that
we are living on the brink of civil conflict inflamed by violent political
rhetoric must answer the question, compared to when? The Sixties and Seventies
saw urban riots that killed hundreds, wounded thousands, and caused millions of
dollars in damages. Politically motivated kidnappings and shootouts were
endemic. The 1968 protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
featured televised vicious battles between the police on one side, and antiwar
protestors and left-wing groups like the Yippies and Students for a Democratic
Society on the other. A jumpy national guard contingent killed four student
protestors at Kent State. During this same period, thousands of bombings from a
plethora of radical groups took place ––according to a 1970 Senate
investigation, more than 4,300 just between January 1969 and April 1970,
killing 43 and inflicting $22 billion in damage. And presidential primary
candidate Robert Kennedy and civil rights icon Martin Luther King were
assassinated.
And what are we
fretting over? Vulgar insults on late-night television, a rhetoric of violence
used by people who have never fired a weapon, public rudeness to politicians,
anonymous threats and virtual stalking, and other forms of bullying perpetrated
mostly by well-fed people of leisure who have no intention of risking their
lives and possessions for their zombie leftism. Of course, these sorts of
attacks can be disturbing to the victims, and any credible threat of violence
should be taken seriously by the authorities and investigated. But the worst of
what we’re seeing is still light-years from the assassinations and bombings of
50 years ago. And don’t forget, that leftist violence of the Sixties and
Seventies created a backlash that helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Our dearth of
that sort of genuine violence may be why we try to elevate murders by
psychopaths––like the ones who fired on the Republican congressional baseball
team last year, or more recently a Baltimore newsroom––into acts of political
violence stoked by ideological conflicts. In reality they’re no more political
than was the paranoid loser Travis Bickle’s rampage in the movie Taxi
Driver. In contrast, the violence of the Sixties was perpetrated by
self-styled revolutionaries whose acts were the consequence of their conscious
beliefs in revolutionary violence as the justified means to an ideological end.
They were psychopaths with seemingly rational and respected arguments,
infinitely more dangerous than your typical school-shooter egged on by his
private demons and paranoid hallucinations.
Compared to the
Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, or the SDS of the Sixties and
Seventies, our violent “resistance” comprises mostly posers and day-trippers
like Antifa. The level of their violence, mostly against property, does not
reach that of soccer hooligans, let alone the daily mayhem in inner-city
hell-holes. And unlike the ’68 protestors in Chicago, who faced beat-downs from
the police, these days protestors know the police don’t want to risk their jobs
by using the force necessary to deter such antics. They also know that most of
those arrested don’t face serious legal consequences. Their “resistance” is
more like theater for iPhone and news cameras, rather than the serious violence
that radicals in the Sixties committed.
Today’s
“activists,” then, are performing in a revolutionary operetta that isn’t really
about radical change, but about making a fashion statement and preening
morally. Of course, they may seem “passionate” about their beliefs, and even
believe they really are, but the true test of commitment is not attending a
demonstration to provide selfies for your Facebook page, nor blustering
comments and threats on an online site, nor browbeating your MAGA-hatted aunt
at Thanksgiving, nor verbally bullying a cabinet member out for a meal. This is
not Yeats’ “passionate intensity” that he saw in the political religions and
their violence in the Thirties, but a cheap knock-off that substitutes a
“revolutionary” pose and attitude for the real deal. It’s revolution in the
virtual world, where flourish the images and rhetoric that make us think a
violent civil war is looming. Meaningful commitment is the willingness to get
blood on your hands.
Typical of this
symbolic and gestural “radicalism” is the latest mascot of the “woke”
resistance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat the fourth ranking Democrat in
the House in a New York district primary. This daughter of an architect, denizen
of tony Westchester County, and Boston University grad styles herself as a
“working class girl from the Bronx” and a committed socialist. But she’s really
what the Mexican kids I grew up with called a gringada, a Latina
culturally indistinguishable from a white girl. Her ethnicity is a costume she
uses to make herself attractive to her half-Latino district. As Daniel
Greenfield writes, she’s “an upscale
lefty hipster drifting after college from one activist gig to another,
developing the contacts that put her in the right place at the right time.
These are the bios of ten thousand professional lefties who infest the
non-profit sector. They’re all angry, self-righteous and
interchangeable.”
In other words,
an aspiring race-tribune like the ancient Roman variety, the aristocrats on the
make who professed to champion the cause of the plebs in order to advance up
the cursus honorum of political power. The difference is,
many a Roman tribune fought and died in the Forum in pursuit of their
revolutionary reforms. Our race tribunes can look forward to dying in their
comfortable beds with a fat 401K or state pension, all funded by the wealth
free-market capitalism has created. Just ask Bernie Sanders, today’s
“socialist” Pied Piper whose “activism” has made him a millionaire.
Careerist
hipster “activists” like Ocasio-Cortez are not the sort of leaders who can
galvanize the masses for violent revolution, no more than are geriatric
plutocrats like Nancy Pelosi or George Soros, or political ventriloquist’s
dummies like Bill Maher or Joe Scarborough. And their “woke” ersatz-socialist
fans are just like them: well-fed court jesters for the rich and powerful of
the Acela corridor, lap-dogs who will snarl and nip but know exactly where to
sit in order to snatch the scraps dropped from the tables of the bipartisan
power elite. They know better than to risk biting the hands that feed them by
actually fighting with bombs and guns rather than safely blogging and
protesting while the police stand down, and the fellow-traveling media
advertise their “commitment” and “passion.”
Nor are today’s
“woke” millennials the budding shock-troops of the revolution. Snowflakes of
uncertain “gender” and vulnerable to verbal “microagressions” are not promising
recruits for class warfare. Guys who’ve never been punched in the face and fret
over their “toxic masculinity” won’t make it through Marxist boot-camp. The
kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in off-the-grid
rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where the businesses of drugs,
guns, and prostitution are much more lucrative than “transforming” America
along Cuban lines.
So let’s calm
down a bit with the rhetoric of impending violence. When we discover that
sizable battalions of organized, disciplined “resistance” outfits are
stockpiling guns and ammo, importing illegal armaments, spending time at the
range learning which end of the gun to point, and figuring out how to build
bombs by studying jihadist websites, then we’ll need to take them more
seriously. And do something about.
This doesn’t
mean civil violence is impossible. But if political violence returns to the
streets of America, it’s unlikely to come from aging hippies and entitled
millennials who treat politics like performance art, which is the luxury of
well-fed consumers with ample leisure time and discretionary wealth. It
will more likely come on the heels of economic dislocation and dwindling wealth
to redistribute. And while today we are fighting the rhetoric wars over
trivial “scandals” and lurid predictions of democracy’s demise, we are creating
the conditions for such economic disorder by our feckless policies of
unsustainable entitlement spending, rising deficits, and metastasizing debt.
Those fiscal chickens may be coming home to roost in just a couple of decades.
Moreover, the
social disorder of a serious economic downturn may be more extreme for us. The
greater affluence that we take for granted will make the decline in living
standards even more intolerable than in the past. Then we may painfully learn
the wisdom in Thucydides’ timeless warning about how people in times of wealth
and comfort––such as we are enjoying now with the economy booming and full
employment–– find it easier to indulge revolutionary words and gestures, rather
than take lethal revolutionary action. But when they “fall under the dominion of
imperious necessities,” whether because of war or, what is more likely in our
case, economic deprivation, the ensuing breakdown in order can “take away the
comfortable provision of daily life.” War or want becomes a “hard master and
tends to assimilate men’s characters to their conditions.” That is, in the lean
years we may find ourselves capable of brutal actions we’d never consider
during the fat years. Right now, the antics of the “resistance” are affordable
luxuries for the richest cohort of young people in human history. Let
that affluence disappear, and rhetoric indulged in times of comfort can turn to
lethal violence and the temptation of collectivist solutions that have paved
the road to tyranny in the past.
If we’re
really worried about civil violence coming to our streets, let’s do something
about the economic dysfunctions that are insidiously making possible the
conditions for such violence. That’s a more credible threat than are the social
media tantrums and potty-talk of spoiled brats.
Democrats Move Towards
‘Oligarchical Socialism,’ Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin
Associated Press
4 Sep 2018299
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.
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.
“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.
Modernity, 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.
As 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?
FDR 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.)
Unease 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.
The 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.
When 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.
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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