The American spirit is defined by and thrives in adversity. Rugged, individualist, and pioneering, our forebears forged ahead regardless of the obstacles. Despite hardship, disease, starvation, revolution, civil conflict, and war, the heart of freedom beat on. The nation's founders opposed all those who sought to thwart their spiritual mission to live free or die trying.
That legacy is now threatened. An American generation is now thrust into the crucible of divine fire, testing the mettle of the citizenry to overcome a growing enemy - one that uses fear and lies to turn the state against the people. While the fate of the nation remains dim, the light of truth yet shines brightly. As a people, we must recognize that we have faced dark times before and triumphed over the fiercest of enemies. And God willing, we shall prevail again.
In the year 1620, Captain John Smith presided over a ragged band of settlers who forged a swampy countryside in the midst of heat and relentless mosquitoes to found a colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The ghosts of Roanoke provided sober lesson as to the monumental nature of the task. Savage natives, unclean drinking water, plague, and starvation were the initial rewards for the hardy settlers. But hardship gave way to fortune as the introduction of tobacco marked the beginning of a promising new enterprise; one that would establish a trade so vital for the preservation of life in the colonies. Americans find a way to survive.
Meanwhile, at Plymouth Plantation in later-day Massachusetts, William Bradford lead an exhausted but grateful party onto the shores of America. A devout and pious group, the English separatists known as the Puritans would increase their numerous troubles by adopting common property. The deadly effects of this undertaking are well worth noting:
The experience that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince they [the] vanitie of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property, and bringing in community into a common wealth, would make them happy and florishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comforte.
The settlement was racked by starvation as long as the socialistic measures reigned. After the adoption of private property, the former year's starvation gave way to bounty. The cornucopia of the first Thanksgiving was replenished for years afterward, a tradition that taught men foresight and humble graciousness. Americans are unafraid to adapt and learn from their mistakes using commonsense and good judgment.
The successes of the colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth would be followed by others, such as those of Providence and Pennsylvania. The trials in the wilderness would prove formative as increasingly better armed adversaries would seek to deprive the settlers of their hard-fought gains. Predatory powers from abroad jostled in the New World to elbow out the resilient upstarts, who had prepared the way for potentially easy-won empire. Americans are not imperialist; they expand liberty at the expense of tyranny.
At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, near present day Pittsburgh, began the dispute that the Quebecois would call the La guerre de la Conquête or "The War of Conquest." Americans and Brits would refer to this theater of "The Seven Years' War" as "The French and Indian War." Pitting the French and native American tribes such as the Algonquin, the Ottawa, and the Shawnee against the Brits, their American subjects, and the Iroquois league, the war would rage in sporadic conflict from Virginia to Nova Scotia from 1756-1763. The conflict would leave a deep impression in the minds of many of the United States' founding fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and would be marked among the "long train of abuses" in Thomas Jefferson's draft of The Declaration of Independence.
And indeed this declaration was a shot across the bough to tyrants across the world. It would proceed with principled opposition to tyranny, as opposed to the aimless anarchy of today's left, who fancy their opposition to liberty as a continuance of the American tradition. It is not.
In light of the grievances listed in The Declaration of Independence, the British taxes of Americans exemplified by the Stamp Act, the Townshend Act, and of course, the Tea Act, and the imposing fighting force of the British Empire, we can only imagine how uncertain the cause of liberty seemed to those men and women courageous enough to take it up. Their story is one of dedication and inspiration throughout, one best illustrated by George Washington's perseverance at Valley Forge.
Near Mount Misery and Mount Joy, the barefoot and ragged soldiers under Washington's command dug in on the frozen terrain of Valley Forge. It was the winter of 1777. Starving and diseased, the sole comfort these men received came from the scores of camp followers, women and children who provided rations and affection to their brave defenders. Washington's men would fight one of the key battles of the revolutionary campaign; not against the British and their Hessian mercenaries, but against themselves. Their steely resolution to continue on, in the dead of winter and despite interminable hardship, proved the pivotal moment in American history. In this fateful hour, the Continental Army was forged, and the spirit of a nation embodied.
No less a miracle occurred after the Revolutionary War, than the series of improbable victories that defined it throughout. The Constitutional Convention was marked by innumerable compromises, reached after prolonged wrangling, not only over the interests of the thirteen colonies, but over the key questions of American history: The institution of slavery and the power of the national government.
Northern and southern colonies sowed the seeds of future enmity by compromising on the status of slaves; though rightly the Constitution banned the importation of slaves, the ratifiers as a whole would not allow the document to declare in full voice the citizenship of all men. Those who came to be called the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists struggled over the crucial question of the relative power of the national government vis-a-vis the states. Both dilemmas would be resolved in the bloody affair known as the War Between the States.
Yet the climax that would settle those contradictions would be forestalled by more immediate considerations. Most pressing was the raging Napoleonic Wars in Europe, which would engulf the United States due to its close relationship with France. The dethroned Great Britain would seek vengeance in America, as well as the reestablishment of its lost trade, as France embarked upon an expedition to embroil Europe in flames.
Truly, Washington and Jefferson foresaw the danger of foreign entanglements, though practical considerations made them impossible to avoid. Trade proved a more troublesome matter than anticipated as warring powers viewed any assistance to their adversaries with hostility.
The period between the Constitution's ratification and the War of 1812 was one of lost innocence and the disabuse of naivete. The suppression of Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the establishment of a central bank by the Federalists, threw down the gauntlet to the heroes of the American Revolution who fought to remove oppression from our shores. Creeping tyranny had been established in the shadow of the glorious Founding.
The War of 1812 would expose the soft underbelly of the American experiment, as the lack of a standing national army made it vulnerable to attack. The British would send the ragtag outfits of the states into a scramble as it invaded and proceeded to cut a swathe to the nation's capital. In August of 1814, the country's defenders embarrassed and fleeing, the British occupied Washington and burned down the public buildings in a pretentious and vindictive orgy.
Yet their vainglorious display of renewed dominance would prove short-lived. General Andrew Jackson, earning his nickname of Old Hickory, would lead a campaign to return the British menace to their foreign shores. Harassing the red coats interminably, the American troops would push the invaders down the Mississippi river to the Brits' demise at The Battle of New Orleans. Other nations pick fights with the United States. Americans end them.
As the British were driven south and out of the states, settlers were heading westward into the wild frontier. Following the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark led the way for Americans to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of a country straddling the earth between the shining seas. Along with the intrepid souls seeking land and fortune in the West, came cattle, ox, and horse-driven carriages. The harsh terrain claimed many victims from exposure and disease, but in the course of two generations, all foreign powers were either pushed out or their territories annexed. The power vacuum that attracted imperialist ambition from Europe had been filled, at the tragic price of the loss of many Native Americans' and settlers' lives. But Americans moved forward.
The haul by land of supplies from east to west proved slow and exhausting, spurring innovations in transportation like the steam locomotive, which was put into service in America in the 1820s. Within fifty years a railway line would be built predominantly by Americans and Chinese immigrants that spanned from New York to San Francisco. The golden spike marrying the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad was driven home at Promontory Point in Utah on May 10, 1869. Coast-to-coast travel in a matter of days, rather than months, was now a reality. Americans see through their visions to the end.
Industrial forces transformed America further, accentuating the cultural divide between north and south. While the southern states remained agrarian and slave-owning, the northern states grew urban, cosmopolitan, and liberal. Abolitionists struggled fiercely to see the establishment of rights for all Americans come to fruition. The Underground Railroad provided a passage to freedom for those blacks willing and able to escape. All Americans yearn to breathe free.
Resentment of the North grew, and every compromise, including laws that sought to cordon off the institution of slavery, seemed to delay the inevitable clash. Secession had been a watchword in the air since the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798-99, which were a response to federal overreach. Written secretly by Jefferson and Madison, they provided legal and principled rationale for state oversight of federal law and the non-enforcement of unconstitutional laws known as "nullification." Slavery was far from the only wedge that divided the northern and southern states.
The election of 1860 brought to power Abraham Lincoln of the newly formed Republican Party, which had split from the Whigs over the issue of slavery (but not much else) and had combined with "Free Soil" Democrats. By Lincoln's inauguration, seven states had already declared secession. The divorce would not be amicable.
Lincoln declared the secessions "legally void," invoking the familiar rationale of forming a more "perfect union." Though he stated that he would not invade the South, or end slavery, he would rightfully reclaim "federal property" if necessary. Needless to say, southerners bristled.
Years of miserable war wracked the conscience of a nation; children orphaned, fathers killed and maimed, and families torn apart. Sherman burned his way through the South, slaughtering thousands, while southern dispatches scrambled to re-form into a cohesive army. The moment of truth for a nation, entailing southern submission or the freedom of the slaves, was fast approaching.
On July 1, 1863, Confederate troops approached Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to seize much-needed supplies, including shoes for their bare and aching feet. Because Gettysburg was an important thoroughfare for supply lines, the Union troops under General Mead moved hastily to cut off the Confederacy. The armies would collide, sparking the pivotal battle of the Civil War.
After two days of intense fighting, the fate of a nation hanging in the balance, Lee gambled on a desperate maneuver to collapse the middle of the Union army. One account sums the last push for the South:
Thinking the Union center had weakened from these attacks, Lee decided the next day to hit it first with artillery, and then an infantry charge led by George Pickett's division. Stuart's late-arriving cavalry was to come in behind the Union center at the same time, but they were held off by Union cavalry led by a young General George Custer. After an hour's duel, Union artillery deceived the Confederates into thinking their guns were knocked out. Then 13,000 Rebels marched across the field in front of Cemetery Hill, only to have the Union artillery open up on them, followed by deadly Federal infantry firepower. Scarcely half made it back to their own lines. In all, Lee lost more than a third of his men before retreating to Virginia. Meade, a naturally cautious man, decided the loss of one-quarter of his men had been enough, and only feebly tried to pursue Lee, missing an opportunity to crush him.
The Confederacy would fight on, surrendering nearly two years later on April 9, 1865. A war that had been in doubt for the Union prior to Gettysburg, had become a triumph. Five days later, an American president would die along with the South's cause. Americans fight to the end.
Though the South's defeat was a consequential day for the freedom of slaves, it gave the North nearly unlimited powers to dictate terms to the defeated. Reconstruction would be marked not only by the prodding of the South to turn slaves into freemen, but by the placement of a national yoke on all states who sought escape from the Union. The United States had become a nation, for better and for worse.
The second founding of the United States would concentrate the power that most of the original founders thought so dangerous. The ambitious and power-hungry flocked to the epicenter of politics and economy, seeking to wield influence over their presumed inferiors, as the vanquished Anti-Federalists had predicted. Freedom was on the run, though American power was on the rise.
The United States weathered a series of painful global depressions ranging from 1873 to 1896. By the turn of the century, the crucial elements of the modern state as we now know it were present. The South now consolidated, the intellectual opposition to statism eroded under governmental control of education. Powerful trusts forged ties with corrupt politicians for both influence and protection, pulling the strings for tariffs, subsidies, and even adventurism. The Progressives would develop the intellectual and moral justification for unlimited state intervention; indeed, under the rubric of protecting the consumer, particular monopolies developed and a central bank was formed. And then came World War I.
President Woodrow Wilson had promised not to enter the European war to Americans as one of many campaign pledges he would break. After stalling for three years, the U.S. was pulled into the fray in 1917 by a combination of understandable German hostility to U.S. trade with Britain and an elaborate propaganda campaign undertaken by the Wilson administration. American sailors and doughboys would charge off to foreign shores, striking decisively against the Germans and Austrians and helping to end the bloodiest war in world history. The victory would establish America as a great power for the next century.
Despite an immediate depression upon the termination of the war, America quickly recovered and a post-war boom ensued. Fueled by fantastic technological innovation and an easy money policy, the 1920s would roar towards a devastating crash in 1929. State interventionists like Hoover and FDR were quick to seize upon the opportunity to orchestrate the economy's "recovery," which would not come for another decade. Americans suffered famine, drought, and rampant unemployment, ending only with a catastrophic war foisted upon them by the imperialist Japanese.
The Great Depression was the proving grounds for innumerable social and economic engineering schemes, which exacerbated America's problems. The Alphabet Soup became the alphabet soup kitchen, conditioning Americans to become accustomed to paternalistic government. And re-elect the first father of the country, FDR, is what they did time and time again, apparently not knowing any better. There was not the example of the demise of a Hitler or a Mussolini or a Stalin to teach Americans the danger of concentrated state power. But fortunately for the nation, World War II would acquaint millions of Americans with the hard reality of fascism; the defeat of the Nazis, the fascists in Italy, and the imperial Japanese developed American patriotism as well as an antipathy for virulent nationalism and socialism. Americans oppose tyranny when they see it.
The statists, not dissuaded in the least by the experience, would nonetheless have to conceal their designs on America. Keynesianism, a brand of Fabian socialism, was taken worldwide as a result of the Bretton Woods conference. The Marshall Plan not only helped millions of Europeans, it locked them into dependency on America for aid and security. The rise of the USSR would provide a bi-polar foil to the freedom-loving USA that would rule out the promulgation of naked socialism out-of-hand.
The sacrifice of heroic Americans for the sake of themselves and their European allies would not be appreciated for long overseas. The "greatest generation" had shown tremendous heart and determination, and inspired countless other countrymen; but in Europe, they were all but taken for granted. America stood for freedom in the world, even as the Europeans turned its shoulder on the notion.
In addition, the U.S. faced the task of rebuilding war-ravaged Japan, which it had bombed into submission. The examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seared into the minds of America's adversaries, and deterred others from utilizing the unconscionable weapons. The nation felt that the least it could do was get the mostly brave country back on track, even in light of the cowardly act at Pearl Harbor. After America kicks an enemy down, it offers a hand back up.
When the communist armies of the northern territory of Korea invaded the south, a U.N. resolution was quickly dispatched; but it was assumed that America would do the bulk of the fighting. And fight it did. For three long years, Americans fought on a strategically irrelevant peninsula for the freedom of millions. When the North Koreans pushed, Americans fought on. When the Red Chinese entered the war, Americans fought on. And having pushed back the combined armies to the 38th parallel, America drew a line in the sand and made a promise to defend it. It does to this very day. When Americans came back from this "Forgotten War," they didn't speak of it again. Not only are Americans brave, they are humble.
The height of the Cold War brought fierce competition between America and the communists; a deadly arms race and an equally significant space race was launched in the 1950s. The Soviets had shocked Americans not only with its first nuclear bomb test in 1949, but by beating them to space with Sputnik in 1958. It would take an endeavor of immense proportions, entailing dedication, imagination, and courage for an American to reach space with Apollo 8 in 1968. In the face of numerous setbacks and even a number of astronaut deaths, the U.S. would land a man on the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969. America's pioneering spirit had reached a new zenith.
But along with this unbeatable high came unremitting lows. The Vietnam Conflict would become one of the longest gut-wrenching episodes in American history. Pulled in by a combination of French weakness and principled opposition to communist expansion, America was entrenched over the course of years in highly intense pitched guerrilla warfare. Tens of thousands of soldiers would face nauseating heat, stifling humidity, and relentless insects, even when not fighting the merciless Vietnamese. After twenty years of escalating warfare, without the forceful impetus from the political elite to win the war decisively, the United States withdrew. Vietnam War vets came home without parades or fanfare. In light of America's history of victory at all costs, this must have sown undeserved shame and guilt in the steely veterans' hearts. The determination of the troops was not matched by the resolution of the establishment. The heart of America was being severed from its political head; the fortitude of the citizenry was unmatched by political courage from its nominal leadership.
The 1970s was a time of tremendous uncertainty and anxiety. The oil embargo, stagflation, and the prostrate regime of Jimmy Carter would culminate in humiliation at the hands of Iranians and the growing scourge of international terrorism. It would take a return to principle to steady the nation, and that is exactly what a former actor and governor of California named Ronald Reagan did.
For the first time in three generations, an American president spoke of freedom and actually meant it. Reagan was thus loved by the heart of the country and despised by the head. The Great Communicator spoke to the nation's passions and identity in a way that few presidents did. Americans see themselves as capable and resilient, the political leadership had grown used to defining them as dependent and obeisant. President Reagan breathed fresh air into stale politics and made Americans feel good to be themselves again. When America was given the latitude to get back to work, the greatest economic boom in the nation's history developed.
But Reagan would mark his place in history not only for his wisdom in unleashing the American spirit to create and build, but for engaging a long-time adversary - not just with weapons but with morality itself. The "Evil Empire" in a rotten, decaying state, President Reagan knew that a combination of military-economic pressure and moral challenge would accelerate the communist union's demise.
On June 12, 1987, after two terms of vigorous and principled opposition to socialism at home and abroad, Reagan issued a moral demand:
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Gorbachev would not need to tear down the wall, the Berlinners would do it for him. Reagan had struck a great blow for freedom. The political elite shrugged and planned its next subterfuge. Americans rejoiced, for they had helped to liberate their fellow men.
Reagan's principled opposition to statism would not last for long. Although President George H.W. Bush served under Reagan, he was not a fan. Initiation of the First Gulf War would become Bush's most memorable decision, and a tremendous victory for the country's fighting forces abroad. Millions were spared death, mutilation, or rape at the hands of the genocidal Saddam Hussein. But again political courage failed to resolve the matter while the capability of the American military was demonstrably sufficient to do so. Afraid to upset regional powers, Hussein remained dictator and was allowed to flaunt peace terms for another decade. It would take a national emergency of unprecedented proportions to cast new light on the lingering danger of the Iraqi regime.
September 11th, 2001 is quite possibly the darkest day in American history. The nation's psyche was so shaken that a profound sense of unease penetrated all spheres of life for several years. But the country would struggle not only with an invisible menace named terrorism, but with the precarious nature of freedom itself. The War in Afghanistan brought a pledge from George Bush to bring the evildoers to justice, providing some salve to the injury. Yet this just war combined with a war that would sully the image of America in the minds of the citizens. The Iraq War, for better or for worse, would test the limits of people's patience.
The U.S. military was thus under assault not only by ruthless enemies overseas, but by hostile press at home. They fought in unimaginable conditions with less than first-rate equipment. In sand, wind, and heat they continued on. They hunted down the most despicable and cruel of men and brought them to justice. They protected women and children, helped build schools, provided food and medicine, and no doubt comforted as many as practicable. The living hell of war was made that much more unbearable by scorn and ridicule of their very mission. Liberation was no longer a worthy cause for the elite, belying their own shallow valuation of freedom.
Yet American troops fought on, plugging away in the face of daily casualties. The picture in Iraq appeared bleak, by all media accounts. When President Bush proposed a surge to quell the stubborn insurgency, the left balked. Future president Obama would question the wisdom of the plan, and voted against it. Bush deprived the Democrats of a quagmire along the lines of Vietnam, which had given the left so much political capital. The success of the surge demonstrated that when Americans are allowed the freedom to take action, they win, regardless of the odds. If the Democrats allow the troops in Afghanistan to win, they will.
The challenges that our country faces today are immense. Massive debt, intrusive government, and an openly seditious president are among the obstacles that are placed before us. The Roman senator Cicero, who lived during the collapse of the Roman Republic, and who opposed the rise of Caesar, describes the nature of the traitor, in terms vividly appropriate for President Barack Obama:
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
But President Obama is just one man. Removing him from office would be a resounding success, but would signal only a long and arduous process to restore freedom. A powerful cadre has infiltrated the halls of government to establish itself as a ruling elite who will dictate terms to a permanent underclass, in flagrant disregard of our Constitution. We must fight to preserve America's place in history; we must act like historic men.
Will we be so cowardly to cede the lamp of liberty to those who would snuff it out, casting the world into darkness for a thousand years? This is surely our fate should today's political elites prevail. It is time to take up the mantle of our forefathers and become the champions of liberty. After all, we are Americans. It is our job to overcome the odds.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Leftism for Dummies
1. Make up your perfect fantasy land
2. Trash anything that does not match said fantasy land
3. Work to destroy anything that is not in your fantasy land
4. Villainize all who tell you your fantasy land isn't real
5. Support leaders who promise you your fantasy land
6. When things get worse and worse, and people scream at you to stop, remain firm in belief that your fantasy land is near
7. When system collapses, act shocked when jackbooted dictators take over and fail to deliver fantasy land
8. Get locked in gulag, wonder what happened
9. Receive thanks from those who told you so
10. Apologize to the victims?
11. A bullet to the back of the head
2. Trash anything that does not match said fantasy land
3. Work to destroy anything that is not in your fantasy land
4. Villainize all who tell you your fantasy land isn't real
5. Support leaders who promise you your fantasy land
6. When things get worse and worse, and people scream at you to stop, remain firm in belief that your fantasy land is near
7. When system collapses, act shocked when jackbooted dictators take over and fail to deliver fantasy land
8. Get locked in gulag, wonder what happened
9. Receive thanks from those who told you so
10. Apologize to the victims?
11. A bullet to the back of the head
Ayn Rand on Descartes, the Founder of Modern Philosophy
Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness—which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor’s blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—then of perceptions—then of sensations.
When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.
(For the New Intellectual)
When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.
(For the New Intellectual)
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Deprogramming the Left
The Republic is being destroyed from within by a contingency of radicals set on leveling the capitalist economy and crushing the American dream. These true believers are resistant to their political opposition's declamations to cease and desist in their hostile and inhumane activities.
No exhortations succeed in deterring them.
Though a minority, these radicals wield immense influence over millions from their well-situated positions in the news media, entertainment industry, courts, schools, and universities. Those who would dare cross these activists may find themselves slurred in a "respected" newspaper or targeted by a nightly "news" host. These radicals have no respect for morality or decency, employing an Alinskyite ends-justify-the-means mentality while carrying out their strategy of political warfare.
For any insurgency, successful political warfare consists primarily of winning hearts and minds. And this is the key to understanding the left's mental guerrilla warfare.
Not having created or produced anything useful themselves, leftists have no demonstrable accomplishments for people to admire. Everything the left 'accomplishes' is predicated on the labor, creativity, and productivity of others. The left cannot point to the miraculous victory of the American revolution and the unprecedented establishment of a government based on the ideal of human freedom. They cannot point to the immense good that has proceeded from industrialism harnessed by a free market. They can only criticize the "good for being the good," as Ayn Rand put it, and this is the essence of the New Left's "Critical Theory."
To accomplish a mindset guided by the rejection of facts, reason, evidence, and reality, one must achieve two things: The instillation of an all-encompassing utopian worldview held together by sheer emotion, and the social reinforcement of the moral imperative to reject any contradicting evidence, which becomes perceived by the subject as an alien element that threatens the integrity of the utopian worldview.
The radicals' minds are thus systematically programmed from the earliest age to reject facts, evidence, logic, and reason. Abusing social trust when they ascend to authority figures in schools and universities, radicals manipulate the learning environment of students by pressuring or alienating non-conformists. Much of the indoctrination of the next generation of radicals occurs in two ways; the first manner I have to coin "compassionism," the second, is aesthetics.
The pretense that liberals are more compassionate than conservatives is the cornerstone of the leftist indoctrination process. It is what maintains the leftist's distorted mental infrastructure in light of rational argumentation and counterfactual information.
Utilizing the pretense of authority in the presence of the mentally vulnerable, radicals overwhelm any rational resistance to their program with scorn, ridicule, and if necessary, force.
Radicals are not content to indoctrinate the young, of course, They must broaden their assault on the capitalist system. The means of transmitting leftist anti-values in the public sphere tends to fall under the umbrella of aesthetics. Art, music, and film are the trojan horses for inculcating or reinforcing leftism in the masses, oftentimes without people's awareness of it.
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci realized that politics is carried out on two planes: The hegemonic cultural plane (the dominant set of ideas, values, and beliefs that support and sustain the "superstructure") and the economic base. If leftists came out and outright attacked the hegemonic culture, or "capitalism," there would be instant reaction and opposition.
Instead of carrying our this suicidal plan, neomarxists (the heirs of Marxism who acknowledged the shortcomings of its materialist doctrine) set themselves to infiltrating the cultural institutions, and from there would dictate "political correctness." Their strategy of infiltration was to diffuse the perception of threat to the capitalist system (which the great majority of people benefited from) by undertaking various seemingly innocuous but destructive "causes" like feminism, environmentalism, and black liberation theology, while hiding under the veil of "compassion." Needless to say, there is nothing "compassionate" about destroying the capitalist economy, and the human freedom that both drives it and is sustained by it.
Confident that they have captured the institutions of culture, law, and education, the radicals now feel confident that they can openly capture the economic base. Although they have eroded private property and the independence it gives rise to for over a century, at no point has their assault on the capitalist base been so brazen.
If the neomarxist plan is to fail, and there is some indication that it is struggling to win either the hearts and minds of the public (see here and here) or the enforcement apparatus of military and the police, we must wage an assault upon the leftists' ideals, which are precisely divorced from reality.
But how to implement reason in those people who have been indoctrinated to be both irrational and uncritical in regards to their own belief system? The following is a plan that will confront the irrational, and especially, the intelligent but half-rational, leftists and force them to acknowledge the premises that rationality, freedom, and capitalism are built upon.
Since open political confrontation would provoke immediate reaction from the leftist, or from those guided by leftist assumptions, we should carry out our deprogramming process on the seemingly unpolitical level of assumptions.
Those familiar with post-modernist critique will immediately understand what I am driving at. Post-modernism holds that there are "subaltern" political ideas that are manifested in the culture; including in literature, art, and "news "narratives. The leftist have used "narratives" to mask their plans to delegitimize any universalist claims to human morality and decency, thereby robbing us of our Enlightenment legacy. A perfectly anti-Gramscian counter-offensive begins by giving rise to the sublimated; by engaging in the ongoing tacit political warfare that takes place in the culture between elections.
We all have recognized a certain helpless feeling in ourselves while anticipating the elections that increasingly seem to decide the fate of our Republic. While the left carries its warfare our on a day-to-day basis, we are left breathlessly fighting at shadows or striking out at the superficial manifestations of the fundamental, deeper war taking place for our minds.
Here is something we all can do, or to integrate into our daily battles with the left, who are, for all intents and purposes, crypto-communists. It integrates and makes explicit common-sense, which is appreciated by the dwindling majority of people who work in material reality, and undercuts the irrational and unrealistic basis that leftism is erected upon.
The following is but an illustration of the kinds of assumptions that can be directly attacked while maintaining an apolitical veneer. I recommend forcing a true or false response, or a yes or no answer, from the soft leftist, and explicitly reinforcing such assumptions in our youth, who are exposed most intensely to leftist arguments:
Deprogramming the left
1. Rationality (or preferences among alternatives)
Do we have to make choices in life?
Are some options better than others?
Are all opinions equal?
Do actions have reactions?
Does behavior have consequences?
What would a life without science look like?
Is emotion sufficient for man's survival?
2. Morality
Do we make up morality?
Or is there some other source (i.e., reality) that morality derives from?
Is a man born into the world owned by others? Or is he free?
Should good behavior be rewarded?
Should bad behavior be punished?
Should feeling good be the basis for morality?
Can one have a right that imposes a demand on another's life or labor? If so, what happens to others' rights?
Who controls the expenditure of one's energy?
Who should control how one lives one's life, as long as it doesn't interfere with others' lives?
What does freedom mean? Does it mean the ability to make choices among alternatives?
What is the relationship of reality to freedom?
Can politicians be trusted to safeguard your freedom?
Do groups actually exist in reality? Or, do collectives actually exist?
Are some cultures better for human beings than others?
Should countries strive to become better or should they strive to become equal with others?
3. Economy (the most overly political and the most difficult for radicals to understand)
Should human beings have to work to live?
Is labor an assumption of human life? In other words, is your labor voluntary?
Should where you work and how you work be voluntary?
Do you control what you buy, or does what you buy control you? If so, how does it control you?
What interest does your boss have in employing you?
Are your interests and your boss's interests opposed to one another?
Are there material limits on resources?
If so, what does this imply for an economy?
How should we recognize limits on resources and how they get distributed? By what politicians want, or by what individuals want?
Are individuals similar or different? Is so, why?
Think of a random number from one to a hundred. Why don't I think the same number?
Is money different from wealth?
Does printing money increase wealth?
Should paper money represent value?
If one is paid money, should it be in trade or for adding value to the economy?
What happens when the government gives money to unproductive people?
What are the consequences of this for those who do produce goods and services?
Is debt a good or a bad thing?
Do debts have to be paid back?
These are but some illustrations of the main idea, and that is to uproot leftism by attacking its unrealistic and irrational assumptions. To force people to make prudent and wise choices, both personally and politically, this is the ultimate task that is required to re-establish and sutain a rational, free, and prosperous nation.
No exhortations succeed in deterring them.
Though a minority, these radicals wield immense influence over millions from their well-situated positions in the news media, entertainment industry, courts, schools, and universities. Those who would dare cross these activists may find themselves slurred in a "respected" newspaper or targeted by a nightly "news" host. These radicals have no respect for morality or decency, employing an Alinskyite ends-justify-the-means mentality while carrying out their strategy of political warfare.
For any insurgency, successful political warfare consists primarily of winning hearts and minds. And this is the key to understanding the left's mental guerrilla warfare.
Not having created or produced anything useful themselves, leftists have no demonstrable accomplishments for people to admire. Everything the left 'accomplishes' is predicated on the labor, creativity, and productivity of others. The left cannot point to the miraculous victory of the American revolution and the unprecedented establishment of a government based on the ideal of human freedom. They cannot point to the immense good that has proceeded from industrialism harnessed by a free market. They can only criticize the "good for being the good," as Ayn Rand put it, and this is the essence of the New Left's "Critical Theory."
To accomplish a mindset guided by the rejection of facts, reason, evidence, and reality, one must achieve two things: The instillation of an all-encompassing utopian worldview held together by sheer emotion, and the social reinforcement of the moral imperative to reject any contradicting evidence, which becomes perceived by the subject as an alien element that threatens the integrity of the utopian worldview.
The radicals' minds are thus systematically programmed from the earliest age to reject facts, evidence, logic, and reason. Abusing social trust when they ascend to authority figures in schools and universities, radicals manipulate the learning environment of students by pressuring or alienating non-conformists. Much of the indoctrination of the next generation of radicals occurs in two ways; the first manner I have to coin "compassionism," the second, is aesthetics.
The pretense that liberals are more compassionate than conservatives is the cornerstone of the leftist indoctrination process. It is what maintains the leftist's distorted mental infrastructure in light of rational argumentation and counterfactual information.
Utilizing the pretense of authority in the presence of the mentally vulnerable, radicals overwhelm any rational resistance to their program with scorn, ridicule, and if necessary, force.
Radicals are not content to indoctrinate the young, of course, They must broaden their assault on the capitalist system. The means of transmitting leftist anti-values in the public sphere tends to fall under the umbrella of aesthetics. Art, music, and film are the trojan horses for inculcating or reinforcing leftism in the masses, oftentimes without people's awareness of it.
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci realized that politics is carried out on two planes: The hegemonic cultural plane (the dominant set of ideas, values, and beliefs that support and sustain the "superstructure") and the economic base. If leftists came out and outright attacked the hegemonic culture, or "capitalism," there would be instant reaction and opposition.
Instead of carrying our this suicidal plan, neomarxists (the heirs of Marxism who acknowledged the shortcomings of its materialist doctrine) set themselves to infiltrating the cultural institutions, and from there would dictate "political correctness." Their strategy of infiltration was to diffuse the perception of threat to the capitalist system (which the great majority of people benefited from) by undertaking various seemingly innocuous but destructive "causes" like feminism, environmentalism, and black liberation theology, while hiding under the veil of "compassion." Needless to say, there is nothing "compassionate" about destroying the capitalist economy, and the human freedom that both drives it and is sustained by it.
Confident that they have captured the institutions of culture, law, and education, the radicals now feel confident that they can openly capture the economic base. Although they have eroded private property and the independence it gives rise to for over a century, at no point has their assault on the capitalist base been so brazen.
If the neomarxist plan is to fail, and there is some indication that it is struggling to win either the hearts and minds of the public (see here and here) or the enforcement apparatus of military and the police, we must wage an assault upon the leftists' ideals, which are precisely divorced from reality.
But how to implement reason in those people who have been indoctrinated to be both irrational and uncritical in regards to their own belief system? The following is a plan that will confront the irrational, and especially, the intelligent but half-rational, leftists and force them to acknowledge the premises that rationality, freedom, and capitalism are built upon.
Since open political confrontation would provoke immediate reaction from the leftist, or from those guided by leftist assumptions, we should carry out our deprogramming process on the seemingly unpolitical level of assumptions.
Those familiar with post-modernist critique will immediately understand what I am driving at. Post-modernism holds that there are "subaltern" political ideas that are manifested in the culture; including in literature, art, and "news "narratives. The leftist have used "narratives" to mask their plans to delegitimize any universalist claims to human morality and decency, thereby robbing us of our Enlightenment legacy. A perfectly anti-Gramscian counter-offensive begins by giving rise to the sublimated; by engaging in the ongoing tacit political warfare that takes place in the culture between elections.
We all have recognized a certain helpless feeling in ourselves while anticipating the elections that increasingly seem to decide the fate of our Republic. While the left carries its warfare our on a day-to-day basis, we are left breathlessly fighting at shadows or striking out at the superficial manifestations of the fundamental, deeper war taking place for our minds.
Here is something we all can do, or to integrate into our daily battles with the left, who are, for all intents and purposes, crypto-communists. It integrates and makes explicit common-sense, which is appreciated by the dwindling majority of people who work in material reality, and undercuts the irrational and unrealistic basis that leftism is erected upon.
The following is but an illustration of the kinds of assumptions that can be directly attacked while maintaining an apolitical veneer. I recommend forcing a true or false response, or a yes or no answer, from the soft leftist, and explicitly reinforcing such assumptions in our youth, who are exposed most intensely to leftist arguments:
Deprogramming the left
1. Rationality (or preferences among alternatives)
Do we have to make choices in life?
Are some options better than others?
Are all opinions equal?
Do actions have reactions?
Does behavior have consequences?
What would a life without science look like?
Is emotion sufficient for man's survival?
2. Morality
Do we make up morality?
Or is there some other source (i.e., reality) that morality derives from?
Is a man born into the world owned by others? Or is he free?
Should good behavior be rewarded?
Should bad behavior be punished?
Should feeling good be the basis for morality?
Can one have a right that imposes a demand on another's life or labor? If so, what happens to others' rights?
Who controls the expenditure of one's energy?
Who should control how one lives one's life, as long as it doesn't interfere with others' lives?
What does freedom mean? Does it mean the ability to make choices among alternatives?
What is the relationship of reality to freedom?
Can politicians be trusted to safeguard your freedom?
Do groups actually exist in reality? Or, do collectives actually exist?
Are some cultures better for human beings than others?
Should countries strive to become better or should they strive to become equal with others?
3. Economy (the most overly political and the most difficult for radicals to understand)
Should human beings have to work to live?
Is labor an assumption of human life? In other words, is your labor voluntary?
Should where you work and how you work be voluntary?
Do you control what you buy, or does what you buy control you? If so, how does it control you?
What interest does your boss have in employing you?
Are your interests and your boss's interests opposed to one another?
Are there material limits on resources?
If so, what does this imply for an economy?
How should we recognize limits on resources and how they get distributed? By what politicians want, or by what individuals want?
Are individuals similar or different? Is so, why?
Think of a random number from one to a hundred. Why don't I think the same number?
Is money different from wealth?
Does printing money increase wealth?
Should paper money represent value?
If one is paid money, should it be in trade or for adding value to the economy?
What happens when the government gives money to unproductive people?
What are the consequences of this for those who do produce goods and services?
Is debt a good or a bad thing?
Do debts have to be paid back?
These are but some illustrations of the main idea, and that is to uproot leftism by attacking its unrealistic and irrational assumptions. To force people to make prudent and wise choices, both personally and politically, this is the ultimate task that is required to re-establish and sutain a rational, free, and prosperous nation.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The Need to Reform Public Education
Every year Americans are increasingly appalled by the nation's decline, but seem unwilling or unable to properly attribute the source our intellectual and moral decay: The "state-run" education system. Entrusting their childrens' education to the power-hungry, parents are amazed when politicians instrumentalize their childrens' minds as a means to preserving their own power. Yet they need not be surprised. The goal of the state is to expand the power of the state; and this includes power over the human mind.
The abysmal state of public or "state-run" education is well-documented. Sub-standard math and science education (evidenced by deteriorating international test scores), as well as skyrocketing costs and an increasingly immoral curricula (including pre-teen sex education and environmentalist indoctrination), have led to the creation of an irrational, immoral, and confused electorate. This proposes tremendous problems for American patriots, whose political ideology is explicitly predicated on history and rationality.
But it also presents a political opportunity. Many parents are disappointed and angry at the education system (but not educators) for the government's repeated failure to educate their children. High school dropout rates, especially among so-called "minorities," show that the problem is not just one of quality, but one of motivation. To quote one source to show the magnitude of the problem:
"Nationally, about 71 percent of all students graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma [29% do not], but barely half of African American and Hispanic students earn diplomas with their peers. In many states the difference between white and minority graduation rates is stunning; in several cases there is a gap of as many as 40 or 50 percentage points."
But per usual, education experts persistently miss the point. Educators blame parents, a lack of funding, but rarely, themselves. The administration's opposition to successful charter schools showed even minorities where the state stands on who should have control of the education of children. The stealth passage of student loan nationalization in the healthcare bill showed that the government is no longer content to have direct control of the education of children, but young adults as well. The confrontation between Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and the teacher's unions has led to surprising support for bringing teachers (and other "public servants") back to economic reality, while imposing on them some standards of performance. This public support also shows that education reform is a potential winning agenda item that could, if handled properly, lead to laying the foundation for a generation of more rational, more responsible, more capable, and more liberty-loving Americans.
But we shouldn't be too pollyannish in our expectation that we can overtake an overhaul of education in this country overnight. We have a dedicated and ruthless opposition that has embedded itself at every level of academia. The current education system is dominated by leftist social engineers to the point that it is nearly unbearable for any free-thinking American to bear it. They are smug, arrogant, and ruthless, and can only be exposed through focused, dedicated, and blunt opposition. We must begin the path to uprooting the would-be dictators by telling our leaders that we believe education reform to be a crucial agenda item.
Education is the key to the political power of the left, as the 1960s radical generation currently in government knows full well. William Ayers, the terrorist radical who was "transformed" by the left into a respected educator, in an interview with the tellingly-named Revolution, stated the following:
"That’s one of the things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the relationship between school and society."
As Orwell might comment on the mentality of these leftist ends-justify-the-means "revolutionaries": "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." For educators of Ayers' ilk (and we can infer the radical ideological affinity of many educators by their reverence for the bomb-thrower Ayers), state education is the means for social and therefore political transformation.
But there are two flaws in the left's program, and these are turning out to prove deadly. First, and we must only touch on it briefly, the New Left idealists disregard reality, and overestimate the power of their ideas to transform it. Essentially, to refer to the mass suicide at Jonestown, they "drink their own Kool-aid."
Second, and more to the point here, state indoctrination does not lead in the long-run to an army of lock-step true believers, but rather to apathetic human putty. When mobilizing for human action (to use Mises' term), one must appreciate that individuals control the expenditure and the direction of their energies; this is in accordance with Rose Wilder Lane's thesis in her outstanding and overlooked work "The Discovery of Freedom."
Let us briefly touch on this work to show the opposition of government and education. If we follow Lane, the essence of government is force, and "The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government." (29) In her view, the government always derives its power (to use force) from the consent of the governed" (30), a consent that the American government is perilously close to losing. Important to Lane's work is the idea that "Historically, this monopoly is always a use of force to hinder, restrict or stop the productive uses of human energy." (31) As Jefferson put it, government is "a necessary evil."
Yet the would be philosopher-kings of an imagined American "republic" (rather, a totalitarian utopian society), dismiss an ancient dictum from the proto-fascist Plato himself: "[K]nowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." The implication is that mass indoctrination does not lead to fanaticism, per se, but apathy and anomie. The aimlessness of intellectual and moral life leads wittingly or unwittingly to a totalitarian state, as Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom:
"To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of anything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader. [...] The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such and the pleasure of being obeyed and being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way. Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous." (168-169)
It is this form of "education," one that is intentionally designed to lead to the formation of "robots," and not thinking adults capable of the self-governance required to preserve liberty, described at length by education reform activist John Taylor Gatto.
Gatto, in his The Underground History of American Education (available online) and Dumbing Us Down, thoroughly documents the agenda of corporations and left-wing activists like John Dewey to transform America into a gulag-state. The results of the state-run education program? Students who are, to put it in Gatto's words, "needy, frightened, envious, bored, talentless and incomplete."
It should be pointed out briefly that Gatto misattributes the current state of education to the designs of rich industrialists more than one hundred years ago, who wanted to create worker-automatons in the Taylorist mold. Such a program, if ever there was one, is obsolete today. The consequences of Dewey's program is to turn our schools into little laboratories, ahistorical and anti-conservative in the profoundist sense, where social engeineers can perform endless experiments justified by "pragmatism," and thus without political consequence. Besides this point, America's manufacturing base has been driven out of this country by leftists since the 1970s, with high corporate taxes and stringent environmentalist and financial regulations, to be replaced by a dependent and unproductive social welfare and technocratic bureaucracy. But regardless, Gatto documents and describes our education system in exhaustive detail. For further documentation of the political censorship of though, from a supposedly "balanced" perspective, see Diane Raditch's The Language Police.
For a deeper, philosophical analysis we can turn to Professor Alan Bloom, who wrote the pathbreaking work on the state of education in our country The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Bloom deconstructed the modern American psyche and served notice for our nation's perilous road. His insights are shrewd and many, and worth recounting here - but I will proffer the most direct and relevant.
The key to Bloom's analysis is that a certain kind of "openness" and even "indiscriminateness" are the virtues, indeed the "moral imperatives," of our time. As Bloom writes:
Openness - and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings - is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and this led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. (26)
In an an unattributed reference to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (or perhaps the nouveau derivation Harry Eckstein's "congruence theory") Bloom then postulates:
Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle...We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family...Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man's reason, was the goal of the education of the democratic man. (26-27) (emphasis my own)
Then, for implications providing for the disconnect between the 1960s generation and their progeny, and that of the prior generations:
The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward looking. (27)
The crux of this progressive worldview is the ingrained attitude of openness. Professor Bloom clarifies:
Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power (38)...there are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference - promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers - and the openness that invites us to quest for knowledge and certitude for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. This second kind of openness encourages the desire..."I want to know what is good for me, what will make me happy" - while the former stunts that desire. (41)
Bloom's prognosis is disconcerting, and indicates that we must rectify our fallacious philosophical delusions with haste. As he writes:
Unfortunately the West is defined by its need for justification of its ways and values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, it will collapse. The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. (39)
Bloom, who appreciates Frederic Nietzsche's insights into the decay of Western Civilization, nonetheless misses a Nietzschean implication of the above-mentioned "education of the democratic man."
We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? (…) The democratizing of Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for SLAVERY in the most subtle sense of the term. (…) I meant to say that the democratising of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of TYRANTS.
Evan Sayet, with explicit reference to Alan Bloom, expands on Bloom's discussion of the "indiscriminateness" of modern liberals in a provocative and accessible lecture, and how it leads to a failure of moral, social, and political judgment.
The state of mind among many in our citizenry described by Hayek, Gatto, Bloom, and Sayet above poses nearly endless problems for the country, and numerous obstacles for tea party activists. The inability of many to exercise judgment makes appeals to reasoned argument almost fruitless. Appeals to emotion in some cases must necessarily be employed until a comprehensive reform of education, including the defederalization of the education system, can be undertaken. In other words, we must state the need for reform in the most compelling moral terms.
But any impetus for reform, as Americans saw in Texas, will be met with swift and fierce opposition. Leftists will often cite Thomas Jefferson as an early advocate of public education (and the next breath, a bigoted white slaveowner and nothing more, to boot). Jefferson, whose mind demonstrates the faith in universal education emblematic of The Enlightenment, was indeed a proponent of public education for all citizens. But as he was an Anti-Federalist, he was not a supporter of federal government-run education.
To quote just one of Jefferson's many statements on public education:
"If twelve or fifteen hundred schools are to be placed under one general administration, an attention so divided will amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is surely better, then, to place each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct."
Thus even by Jeffersonian standards a reform of "public" education would entail deconstructing the national infrastructure, and thus defusing elitists' control, of education.
But in the long-run, more radical steps are required. We must ensure that there is a marketplace in education and alternatives for parents whose childrens' schools are failing them, including home-schooling and tax-credits (at least until a fair tax can be enacted). [For more on this perspective one can watch the Sheldon Richman speech "Education and The State" available at the Foundation for Economic Education site. For the most radical ideal scenario, and the one most conducive to sustaining liberty, one can listen to Ayn Rand's "Issues in Education" speech or read her amazing collection of essays The Return of the Primitive.]
Ayn Rand pointed out more than fifty years that the ultimate source of the radicals power is the schools and universities. This is confirmed by the experience of those who have attended public education at all levels, and have seen the left's explicitly Deweyan-Gramscian program put into action. We must be at least as serious and determined as our opponents if we expect to win the political war for our republic taking place. And the first step towards victory comes with recognizing that the political battlefield is the human mind itself. We must, with Jefferson, swear "upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
The abysmal state of public or "state-run" education is well-documented. Sub-standard math and science education (evidenced by deteriorating international test scores), as well as skyrocketing costs and an increasingly immoral curricula (including pre-teen sex education and environmentalist indoctrination), have led to the creation of an irrational, immoral, and confused electorate. This proposes tremendous problems for American patriots, whose political ideology is explicitly predicated on history and rationality.
But it also presents a political opportunity. Many parents are disappointed and angry at the education system (but not educators) for the government's repeated failure to educate their children. High school dropout rates, especially among so-called "minorities," show that the problem is not just one of quality, but one of motivation. To quote one source to show the magnitude of the problem:
"Nationally, about 71 percent of all students graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma [29% do not], but barely half of African American and Hispanic students earn diplomas with their peers. In many states the difference between white and minority graduation rates is stunning; in several cases there is a gap of as many as 40 or 50 percentage points."
But per usual, education experts persistently miss the point. Educators blame parents, a lack of funding, but rarely, themselves. The administration's opposition to successful charter schools showed even minorities where the state stands on who should have control of the education of children. The stealth passage of student loan nationalization in the healthcare bill showed that the government is no longer content to have direct control of the education of children, but young adults as well. The confrontation between Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and the teacher's unions has led to surprising support for bringing teachers (and other "public servants") back to economic reality, while imposing on them some standards of performance. This public support also shows that education reform is a potential winning agenda item that could, if handled properly, lead to laying the foundation for a generation of more rational, more responsible, more capable, and more liberty-loving Americans.
But we shouldn't be too pollyannish in our expectation that we can overtake an overhaul of education in this country overnight. We have a dedicated and ruthless opposition that has embedded itself at every level of academia. The current education system is dominated by leftist social engineers to the point that it is nearly unbearable for any free-thinking American to bear it. They are smug, arrogant, and ruthless, and can only be exposed through focused, dedicated, and blunt opposition. We must begin the path to uprooting the would-be dictators by telling our leaders that we believe education reform to be a crucial agenda item.
Education is the key to the political power of the left, as the 1960s radical generation currently in government knows full well. William Ayers, the terrorist radical who was "transformed" by the left into a respected educator, in an interview with the tellingly-named Revolution, stated the following:
"That’s one of the things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them…and this is a contradiction, incidentally, that goes all the way back to the beginning of progressive education and really the beginning of the conversations about the relationship between school and society."
As Orwell might comment on the mentality of these leftist ends-justify-the-means "revolutionaries": "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." For educators of Ayers' ilk (and we can infer the radical ideological affinity of many educators by their reverence for the bomb-thrower Ayers), state education is the means for social and therefore political transformation.
But there are two flaws in the left's program, and these are turning out to prove deadly. First, and we must only touch on it briefly, the New Left idealists disregard reality, and overestimate the power of their ideas to transform it. Essentially, to refer to the mass suicide at Jonestown, they "drink their own Kool-aid."
Second, and more to the point here, state indoctrination does not lead in the long-run to an army of lock-step true believers, but rather to apathetic human putty. When mobilizing for human action (to use Mises' term), one must appreciate that individuals control the expenditure and the direction of their energies; this is in accordance with Rose Wilder Lane's thesis in her outstanding and overlooked work "The Discovery of Freedom."
Let us briefly touch on this work to show the opposition of government and education. If we follow Lane, the essence of government is force, and "The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government." (29) In her view, the government always derives its power (to use force) from the consent of the governed" (30), a consent that the American government is perilously close to losing. Important to Lane's work is the idea that "Historically, this monopoly is always a use of force to hinder, restrict or stop the productive uses of human energy." (31) As Jefferson put it, government is "a necessary evil."
Yet the would be philosopher-kings of an imagined American "republic" (rather, a totalitarian utopian society), dismiss an ancient dictum from the proto-fascist Plato himself: "[K]nowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." The implication is that mass indoctrination does not lead to fanaticism, per se, but apathy and anomie. The aimlessness of intellectual and moral life leads wittingly or unwittingly to a totalitarian state, as Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom:
"To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of anything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader. [...] The only tastes which are satisfied are the taste for power as such and the pleasure of being obeyed and being part of a well-functioning and immensely powerful machine to which everything else must give way. Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous." (168-169)
It is this form of "education," one that is intentionally designed to lead to the formation of "robots," and not thinking adults capable of the self-governance required to preserve liberty, described at length by education reform activist John Taylor Gatto.
Gatto, in his The Underground History of American Education (available online) and Dumbing Us Down, thoroughly documents the agenda of corporations and left-wing activists like John Dewey to transform America into a gulag-state. The results of the state-run education program? Students who are, to put it in Gatto's words, "needy, frightened, envious, bored, talentless and incomplete."
It should be pointed out briefly that Gatto misattributes the current state of education to the designs of rich industrialists more than one hundred years ago, who wanted to create worker-automatons in the Taylorist mold. Such a program, if ever there was one, is obsolete today. The consequences of Dewey's program is to turn our schools into little laboratories, ahistorical and anti-conservative in the profoundist sense, where social engeineers can perform endless experiments justified by "pragmatism," and thus without political consequence. Besides this point, America's manufacturing base has been driven out of this country by leftists since the 1970s, with high corporate taxes and stringent environmentalist and financial regulations, to be replaced by a dependent and unproductive social welfare and technocratic bureaucracy. But regardless, Gatto documents and describes our education system in exhaustive detail. For further documentation of the political censorship of though, from a supposedly "balanced" perspective, see Diane Raditch's The Language Police.
For a deeper, philosophical analysis we can turn to Professor Alan Bloom, who wrote the pathbreaking work on the state of education in our country The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Bloom deconstructed the modern American psyche and served notice for our nation's perilous road. His insights are shrewd and many, and worth recounting here - but I will proffer the most direct and relevant.
The key to Bloom's analysis is that a certain kind of "openness" and even "indiscriminateness" are the virtues, indeed the "moral imperatives," of our time. As Bloom writes:
Openness - and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings - is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and this led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. (26)
In an an unattributed reference to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (or perhaps the nouveau derivation Harry Eckstein's "congruence theory") Bloom then postulates:
Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle...We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family...Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man's reason, was the goal of the education of the democratic man. (26-27) (emphasis my own)
Then, for implications providing for the disconnect between the 1960s generation and their progeny, and that of the prior generations:
The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward looking. (27)
The crux of this progressive worldview is the ingrained attitude of openness. Professor Bloom clarifies:
Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power (38)...there are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference - promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers - and the openness that invites us to quest for knowledge and certitude for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. This second kind of openness encourages the desire..."I want to know what is good for me, what will make me happy" - while the former stunts that desire. (41)
Bloom's prognosis is disconcerting, and indicates that we must rectify our fallacious philosophical delusions with haste. As he writes:
Unfortunately the West is defined by its need for justification of its ways and values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, it will collapse. The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. (39)
Bloom, who appreciates Frederic Nietzsche's insights into the decay of Western Civilization, nonetheless misses a Nietzschean implication of the above-mentioned "education of the democratic man."
We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? (…) The democratizing of Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for SLAVERY in the most subtle sense of the term. (…) I meant to say that the democratising of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of TYRANTS.
Evan Sayet, with explicit reference to Alan Bloom, expands on Bloom's discussion of the "indiscriminateness" of modern liberals in a provocative and accessible lecture, and how it leads to a failure of moral, social, and political judgment.
The state of mind among many in our citizenry described by Hayek, Gatto, Bloom, and Sayet above poses nearly endless problems for the country, and numerous obstacles for tea party activists. The inability of many to exercise judgment makes appeals to reasoned argument almost fruitless. Appeals to emotion in some cases must necessarily be employed until a comprehensive reform of education, including the defederalization of the education system, can be undertaken. In other words, we must state the need for reform in the most compelling moral terms.
But any impetus for reform, as Americans saw in Texas, will be met with swift and fierce opposition. Leftists will often cite Thomas Jefferson as an early advocate of public education (and the next breath, a bigoted white slaveowner and nothing more, to boot). Jefferson, whose mind demonstrates the faith in universal education emblematic of The Enlightenment, was indeed a proponent of public education for all citizens. But as he was an Anti-Federalist, he was not a supporter of federal government-run education.
To quote just one of Jefferson's many statements on public education:
"If twelve or fifteen hundred schools are to be placed under one general administration, an attention so divided will amount to a dereliction of them to themselves. It is surely better, then, to place each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct."
Thus even by Jeffersonian standards a reform of "public" education would entail deconstructing the national infrastructure, and thus defusing elitists' control, of education.
But in the long-run, more radical steps are required. We must ensure that there is a marketplace in education and alternatives for parents whose childrens' schools are failing them, including home-schooling and tax-credits (at least until a fair tax can be enacted). [For more on this perspective one can watch the Sheldon Richman speech "Education and The State" available at the Foundation for Economic Education site. For the most radical ideal scenario, and the one most conducive to sustaining liberty, one can listen to Ayn Rand's "Issues in Education" speech or read her amazing collection of essays The Return of the Primitive.]
Ayn Rand pointed out more than fifty years that the ultimate source of the radicals power is the schools and universities. This is confirmed by the experience of those who have attended public education at all levels, and have seen the left's explicitly Deweyan-Gramscian program put into action. We must be at least as serious and determined as our opponents if we expect to win the political war for our republic taking place. And the first step towards victory comes with recognizing that the political battlefield is the human mind itself. We must, with Jefferson, swear "upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Why the Dems' Putsch Will Ultimately Fail
Why the Democrats' putsch* will ultimately fail:
1. The economy will not recover before November 2010 or 2012.
2. The Democrats have not successfully dehumanized their opposition or smeared the tea party.
3. The Supreme Court has upheld free speech, for now, and truth has had a chance to get its pants on to catch up with Democrat lies.
4. The Democrats "hope and change" mantra is next to dead, along with the "post-racial presidency" narrative.
5. The mainstream media continues to shrink in size and influence.
6. People are noticing how our schools are dumbing our kids down, through incompetence and a corrupt curriculum. This leads to parental distrust of the schools and universities and mentally preparing children to deal with the lies.
7. The military enlisted men are not sympathetic to the socialist agenda.
8. Emergency personnel and police tend not to be sympathetic to the socialist agenda, and have no interest in committing violence against Americans.
9. Infighting among power elites (such as at Copenhagen).
10. Once the American people see the enemy, they defeat it.
* Due to inaccurate definitions on the web, the term "putsch" must be defined here. A putsch is not "the sudden overthrow of a government,"which is a romanticization of the term. It is most accurately the sudden and illegitimate seizure of power by a minority group, typically one that has infiltrated the government.
1. The economy will not recover before November 2010 or 2012.
2. The Democrats have not successfully dehumanized their opposition or smeared the tea party.
3. The Supreme Court has upheld free speech, for now, and truth has had a chance to get its pants on to catch up with Democrat lies.
4. The Democrats "hope and change" mantra is next to dead, along with the "post-racial presidency" narrative.
5. The mainstream media continues to shrink in size and influence.
6. People are noticing how our schools are dumbing our kids down, through incompetence and a corrupt curriculum. This leads to parental distrust of the schools and universities and mentally preparing children to deal with the lies.
7. The military enlisted men are not sympathetic to the socialist agenda.
8. Emergency personnel and police tend not to be sympathetic to the socialist agenda, and have no interest in committing violence against Americans.
9. Infighting among power elites (such as at Copenhagen).
10. Once the American people see the enemy, they defeat it.
* Due to inaccurate definitions on the web, the term "putsch" must be defined here. A putsch is not "the sudden overthrow of a government,"which is a romanticization of the term. It is most accurately the sudden and illegitimate seizure of power by a minority group, typically one that has infiltrated the government.
Monday, August 9, 2010
The Founding Fathers' Vision
After six years of dragging out a war that was ended at last by foreign help, and six more years of confusion and discouragement, when Washington no longer had even as much hope as he had felt at Valley Forge, they made one last effort to save the Revolution, and wrote the Federal Constitution.
With sound common sense, they did not debate it publicly.
They opened the convention by shutting its doors and pledging their honor to keep their discussion secret. That handful of veterans, and the assembly of young men in their thirties, were hard-headed realists. They knew that nothing but rockbottom honesty and plain speaking could save the existence of the Revolution and no public man but Thomas Paine had ever risked telling the truth in public.
They had no fantastic faith in The People; no more notion of consulting or obeying public opinion than Wilbur Wright had when he was trying to invent an airplane. They knew that every man's real responsibility is to his own moral standard.
As
For weeks they struggled, with argument and compromise and bargain, to construct a new kind of Government. They disagreed so profoundly that the job seemed impossible; they adjourned for three days, agreeing to spend that time not with their supporters, but in the company of their opponents.
The Constitution was not their ideal; it was the practical best that they could get. It was a compromise, it was an effort.
It was a desperate hope.
Then they went out and fought, for two years more, with every political weapon they had, against the powerful pressure group that was demanding the one-man responsibility of monarchy.
They fought, with argument, with speeches, with appeals to logic and justice and common sense, with pamphlets and newspapers and books, and political deals, with every weapon they had they fought against the rioting mobs that were demanding democracy, the majority-rule that always creates an irresponsible tyrant.
And when they won, when they got nine States to accept the Constitution as amended with ten additional prohibitions of Government, when at least they had saved the existence of the Revolution through that crisis,
The future, he said, must show the results. Whatever the results might be, they depended upon individuals, since every individual is self-governing.
American Constitutional Government is now the oldest existing Government. It is the only form of Government now on earth that has been flexible enough, well enough adjusted to reality, to survive the strains of one century and a half.
All other Governments have been shattered during that time, either by war or by the conflict between human energy and the Government's coercive force.
The men who invented this kind of Government were not enthusiasts. They worked out no plan for a better world; they had no illusions and no dreams of any Utopia. You can see their realism in the Constitutions they wrote. They designed the Federal Constitution with the firm intention of preventing any man in public office from using Government's monopoly of force, to seize, torture and arbitrarily kill ordinary Americans.
(Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane)
Universal Suffrage vs Universal Liberty
When American politicians took the election of the President of the
Today, voting is an American superstition. Hardly anyone ever thinks about it. Americans take it for granted that every human being has a natural right to vote.
Of course this is not true. No one has a natural right to vote. Everyone is born with inalienable liberty, but nobody is born with an inalienable ballot. (…)
For why does anyone suppose that a majority of citizens should control their Government?
No one imagines that a majority of passengers should control a plane. No one assumes that, by majority vote, the patients, nurses, elevator boys and cooks and ambulance drivers and interns and telephone operators and students and scrubwomen in a hospital should control the hospital. Would you ever ride on a train if all passengers stepped into booths in the waiting-room and elected the train crews by majority vote, as intelligently as you elect the men whose names appear in lists before you in a voting booth?
Then why is it taken for granted that every person is endowed on his twenty-first birthday with a God-given right and ability to elect the men who decide questions of political philosophy and international diplomacy?
This fantastic belief is no part of the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, Madison, Monroe,
The Old World belief is this: Individuals are cells in a greater organism. All men are naturally dependent, obedient, controlled by Authority. (Communists, Fascists and Nazis say this in a cliche, "The individual is nothing.") Government is Authority, controlling the masses and responsible for their welfare. Therefore, the stronger the Government, the better for the masses. Liberty is the right of the masses to choose the men who control the masses. It is doubtful whether it is advisable to grant the masses this liberty; but, if it is granted, it is a right to vote.
(…) Thus, the largest possible number of persons will control the Government that controls them. Then what becomes of the exercise of freedom by the individuals in the minority? Why, they must submit to control by the majority. Everyone should be happy to sacrifice himself (the Greeks did) to the pagan god Demos, The Greatest Number. The voice of the Greatest Number is the voice of God. If anyone is not willing to obey the Greatest Number; why, this is outrageous, this is anti-social; make him submit and obey. (…)
This is not the reasoning of the Americans who wrote the Constitutions that protect individual freedom. It is not the reasoning of many Americans now. But it is the reasoning that has been extending the vote in these States for half a century.
Small groups of reformers, fiercely determined to do good to others, have made these extensions by using the threat of the vote upon office-holders. A few crooked politicians and ward-heelers have aided them. They have worked against the vast indifference of most Americans. For instance: American women did not want to vote; Miss Alice Paul forced woman's suffrage through Congress and the State legislatures. These extensions of the vote are in two directions; they take in increasing numbers of the population, and they throw more office-holders to the wolves of "a common passion or interest felt by the majority." (…)
Average Americans have common sense. They know that there are always enough stupid, ignorant, dishonest voters to carry any election; they know that demagogues, liars, hillbilly bands, popular actors and orators, free picnics and votebuying can always corral enough voters. They know that these extensions of the franchise have broken down the moral standards of American politics, and have so overcome the moral character of American politicians that both parties use these methods of getting votes. And that therefore an election is merely a sporting event, like a ball game, its outcome depending on luck as well as on skill, and its object being no more than to get ballots into boxes, and men into office. Unquestionably, these extensions of the franchise are dangerous to individual liberty and human rights.
They are dangerous because, by amending the Constitutions, they destroy representative government and increase the danger of democracy—which always creates an irresponsible tyrant.
And they are dangerous because they are made in the superstitious belief that individuals can control a Government that can control individuals, and therefore they tend to increase the false, counter-revolutionary belief that Government is an Authority controlling men and responsible for their welfare.
More and more, the multitudes who vote are believing this, and demanding that Government be responsible for their living conditions. (…)
The increasing belief that everyone has a natural right to vote because voting is mass-control of a Government that controls individuals, is counter-revolutionary in these States. It is a revival of the ancient Old World superstition. It threatens every American's home and liberty and life; it threatens the existence of the Republic and the survival of the Revolution.
(Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane)
The American World Revolution
What is the meaning of this Republic in history, but an unprecedented fury of human energy, attacking the non-human world, and making this earth more habitable for human beings?
Swiftly, in seventy years, Americans have built defenses against darkness—from pine-knots and candles to kerosene lamps, gas jets, electric bulbs, neon lights, fluorescent tubes.
In my lifetime, Americans have created astounding defenses against weather—from fireplace and stove to furnaces, radiators, automatic oil-burners, insulation, air-conditioning.
Americans make the stupendous attack on Space: steamboats, railroads, subways, automobiles, planes, stratosphere flying, inter-planetary rockets. And on Time: telegraph, transoceanic cables, telephones, radio, television.
In less than one century, human energy—only in these States and on the western rim of
Why was such an attack never made before?
For sixty known centuries, multitudes of men have lived on this earth. Their situation has been the everlasting human situation. Their desire to live has been as strong as ours. Their energy has always been enough to make this earth at least habitable for human beings. Their intelligence has been great.
Yet for six thousand years, most men have been hungry.
Famines have always killed multitudes, and still do over most of this earth. Ninety-five years ago, the Irish were starving to death; no one was surprised. Europeans had never expected to get from this earth enough food to keep them all alive.
Why did men die of hunger, for six thousand years?
Why did they walk, and carry goods and other men on their backs, for six thousand years, and suddenly, in one century, only on a sixth of this earth's surface, they make steamships, railroads, motors, airplanes, and now are flying around the earth in its utmost heights of air?
Why did families live six thousand years in floorless hovels, without windows or chimneys, then, in eighty years and only in these United States, they are taking floors, chimneys, glass windows for granted, and regarding electric lights, porcelain toilets, and window screens as minimum necessities?
Why did workers walk barefoot, in rags, with lousy hair and unwashed teeth, and workingmen wear no pants, for six thousand years, and here, in less than a century—silk stockings, lip sticks, permanent waves, sweaters, overcoats, shaving cream, safety razors. It's incredible.
For thousands of years, human beings use their energies in unsuccessful efforts to get wretched shelter and meager food.
Then on one small part of the earth, a few men use their energies so effectively that three generations create a completely new world.
What explains this? (…)
(The American constitutions), while it granted certain limited permissions to men in Government, also definitely prohibited their using force as Governments always had used force.
These prohibitions are called the Bills of Rights.
The name is not a good one, because it is not accurate.
It confuses a careless mind.
The name, "Bill of Rights," is English. It is accurate in
England. The English Bill of Rights is a statement of certain freedoms which British Government permits to its subjects.
An American Bill of Rights is the exact reverse of the
English one. The "Bill of Rights" in American Constitutions is a statement of the uses of force which American citizens do not permit to men in American Government.
This difference is of the utmost importance. It is the essence of this World Revolution. This difference is the whole difference between American revolutionary Government and all other Governments in past history or on earth now.
(Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane)
Sunday, August 8, 2010
On Government Monopoly
This passage struck me as extremely prescient in light of America's self-inflicted wound of Obamacare. From Rose Wilder Lane's magisterial The Discovery of Freedom:
The effects of the American Revolution have been disrupting the old planned economies of western Europe for a century. But remnants of these Government monopolies everywhere survive, and European belief in Authority has extended Government monopoly over many products of the industrial revolution.
Railroads, telegraph, telephone, radio, are Government monopolies everywhere outside this Republic. Salt and tobacco remain Government monopolies in many places. All Europeans and Asiatics take these monopolies for granted. It no more occurs to them that salt, tobacco, railroads, telegraph, telephones, radio, need not be owned by Government, than it occurs to Americans that the postal service need not be.
So an American abroad discovered at once that Government monopoly is absolute, and that therefore it operates under difficulties that make it destructive to the Government.
Being absolute, and maintained by police force, a Government monopoly need not please its customers.
A traveler in Europe obeys the railway officials and takes the service they provide, or he does not travel by train. He can not, so to speak, get mad at the New York Central and give his patronage to the B. and O., or vice versa, because Government monopoly has no competitor. The passenger who pays for his ticket has no effect upon that monopoly; it need not fear his displeasure, not lure him with club cars and Idaho baked potatoes. And it doesn't.
Government monopoly need not make a profit; it can run indefinitely on a deficit, as the American postal service does. Taxes make up the deficit; the Government collects them. (42)
The effects of the American Revolution have been disrupting the old planned economies of western Europe for a century. But remnants of these Government monopolies everywhere survive, and European belief in Authority has extended Government monopoly over many products of the industrial revolution.
Railroads, telegraph, telephone, radio, are Government monopolies everywhere outside this Republic. Salt and tobacco remain Government monopolies in many places. All Europeans and Asiatics take these monopolies for granted. It no more occurs to them that salt, tobacco, railroads, telegraph, telephones, radio, need not be owned by Government, than it occurs to Americans that the postal service need not be.
So an American abroad discovered at once that Government monopoly is absolute, and that therefore it operates under difficulties that make it destructive to the Government.
Being absolute, and maintained by police force, a Government monopoly need not please its customers.
A traveler in Europe obeys the railway officials and takes the service they provide, or he does not travel by train. He can not, so to speak, get mad at the New York Central and give his patronage to the B. and O., or vice versa, because Government monopoly has no competitor. The passenger who pays for his ticket has no effect upon that monopoly; it need not fear his displeasure, not lure him with club cars and Idaho baked potatoes. And it doesn't.
Government monopoly need not make a profit; it can run indefinitely on a deficit, as the American postal service does. Taxes make up the deficit; the Government collects them. (42)
Fortune Cookie Philosophy
Philosophy that can fit on the space of a fortune cookie wrapper:
Communism is the glorification of the herd mentality.
Socialism justifies avoiding personal responsibility.
Existentialism is the codification of hatred for human existence.
Pragmatism - for those who never want to have to say I'm sorry.
Marxism is for those who desire to live like sheep.
Leninism is for those who want to be the sheepherders.
Maoism is for those who think we should all live like peasants.
Stalinism is for those who think we should turn the world into a bloody sweatshop.
Utilitarianism is for those who want to sacrifice the happiness of individuals to the happiness of an abstract idea.
Environmentalism is for those who think it would be grand if we camped year round.
Feminism is for those who think masculinity is a crime against humanity.
Racism is the idea that skin pigmentation is a relevant way to judge someone's worth.
Conservatism means traditions have value in and of themselves.
Individualism is the crazy idea that people should live their own lives.
Constitutionalism means that there are some things the politicians aren't allowed to do.
Capitalism is the idea that you should earn your keep, and keep what you earn.
Libertarianism is for those who think everyone should mind their own business.
Communism is the glorification of the herd mentality.
Socialism justifies avoiding personal responsibility.
Existentialism is the codification of hatred for human existence.
Pragmatism - for those who never want to have to say I'm sorry.
Marxism is for those who desire to live like sheep.
Leninism is for those who want to be the sheepherders.
Maoism is for those who think we should all live like peasants.
Stalinism is for those who think we should turn the world into a bloody sweatshop.
Utilitarianism is for those who want to sacrifice the happiness of individuals to the happiness of an abstract idea.
Environmentalism is for those who think it would be grand if we camped year round.
Feminism is for those who think masculinity is a crime against humanity.
Racism is the idea that skin pigmentation is a relevant way to judge someone's worth.
Conservatism means traditions have value in and of themselves.
Individualism is the crazy idea that people should live their own lives.
Constitutionalism means that there are some things the politicians aren't allowed to do.
Capitalism is the idea that you should earn your keep, and keep what you earn.
Libertarianism is for those who think everyone should mind their own business.
Rose Wilder Lane on Democracy
A compelling reason for the long hesitation of these men—
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Madison, Monroe—
was their fear of democracy.
They were educated men. Excepting Franklin (self-educated),
each one had the education of an English gentleman.
That is, the philosophy and the history of the whole European
past had been pounded into his head before he was twelve
years old. Therefore, when he was old enough to think for
himself, he had thousands of years of human experience with
every form of Government, to think about.
This knowledge was then regarded as necessary to every
man whose birth entitled him to take any part in the government
of his country.
They also knew the meaning of every word they used;
they knew its Greek, Latin, or Anglo-Saxon root. Until forty
years ago, this knowledge was still considered of first importance
in American schools. Every pupil, at thirteen and
fourteen, learned etymology as he had learned spelling since
the age of six, by dogged repetition until the facts were fixed
in his mind.
Today the confusion of the meaning of words in these
United States is a danger to the whole world. Few American
schools any longer require a pupil to dissect his words to their
roots, and to know what he means when he speaks. And
for twenty years the disciplined members of the Communist
Party in these States have been deliberately following Lenin's
instruction, "First confuse the vocabulary."
Thinking can be done only in words. Accurate thinking
requires words of precise meaning. Communication between
human beings is impossible without words whose precise
meaning is generally understood.
Confuse the vocabulary, and people do not know what is
happening; they can not communicate an alarm; they can
not achieve any common purpose. Confuse the vocabulary,
and millions are helpless against a small, disciplined number
who know what they mean when they speak. Lenin had
brains.
Today, when you hear the word "democracy," what does
it mean?
These United States, of course; and England, the British
Commonwealth, the British Empire, Norway, Sweden, Denmark
and Belgium, part of France, Finland when Russians
attack the Finns but not when Finns attack Russia; Russia
when Russians fight Germans but not when Stalin signs a
pact with Hitler; the kingdoms and dictatorships of the
Balkans; and economic security and compulsory insurance
and the check-off system of collecting labor union dues; and
friendliness and neighborliness and the unique American
sense of human equality, and a vote for everybody, and
socialism and communism and the Spanish cause for which
republicans, democrats, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists and
Russian and American communists fought, and freedom and
human rights and human dignity and common decency.
That is, the word has no meaning. Its meaning has been
destroyed.
It was once a sound word. It is a necessary word, because
no other has its real meaning. Demo-cracy means, rule by
The People; as precisely as mon-archy means, rule by one
(person).
Demos, The People, was a fantasy imagined by the ancient
Greeks, in their search for The Authority that (they imagined)
controlled men. To this fantasy they attached the meaning
of God, which always attaches to every form of Authority,
and there are still persons who believe that "the voice of The
People is the voice of God."
The People does not exist. Individual persons compose any
group of persons.
So in practice, any attempt to establish democracy is an
attempt to make a majority of persons in a group act as the
ruler of that group.
Consider this for one moment, not in fantasy, but as applied
to your own experience in groups of living persons whom you
know, and you will understand why every attempt to establish
democracy has failed.
Of course there is no reason to suppose that majority-rule
would be desirable, even if it were possible. There is no
morality or efficiency in mere numbers. Ninety-nine persons
are no more likely to be right than one person is.
In the Federalist Papers, Madison stated the reason why
every attempt to establish a democracy quickly creates a tyrant:
"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of
faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority,
and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice
the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever
been found incompatible with personal security or the rights
of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their deaths."
The gentlemen who took responsibility for saving the
American Revolution were fearful that democracy would end
it. The unknown Americans, the Ebenezer Foxes, for years
had been fighting Authority; each was determined "to do
what was right in my own eyes." But they had no Latin or
Greek, they knew nothing about all the previous efforts to
make democracy work, and they were shouting for democracy.
On the other hand, the large landholders, bankers, rich
merchants, and a thick-springing crop of rapacious grafters
and land-speculators, led by Alexander Hamilton, the illegitimate
adventurer from the West Indies who was also a genius,
were demanding an American monarchy.
The real revolutionists, when they signed the Declaration of
Independence and of individual freedom, were undertaking
not only to win a war against impossible odds, but to create
an entirely new kind of Government.
They faced the armed power of the British Empire, with
thirteen disorganized, quarreling colonies at their backs, and
two dangers threatening them: monarchy, and democracy.
They said nothing about The People. They repeated no
nonsense about Science and Natural Law and the Age of
Reason. They did not gush about the noble nature of Natural
Man. They knew men. They were realists. They had no
illusions about men, but they did know that all men are free.
They stood against both monarchy and democracy, because
they knew that when men set up an imaginary Authority
armed with force, they destroy all opportunity to exercise their
natural freedom.
Educated men, they had studied the many attempts to
establish democracy. The results were known twenty-five hundred
years ago in Greece. Democracy does not work. It can not
work, because every man is free. He can not transfer his inalienable
life and liberty to anyone or anything outside himself.
When he tries to do this, he tries to obey an Authority that
does not exist.
It makes no difference what he imagines this Authority to
be—Ra or Baal or Zeus or Jupiter; Cleopatra or the Mikado; or
Economic Necessity or the Will of the Masses or the Voice of
The People; the stubborn fact is that there is no Authority, of
any kind, that controls individuals. They control themselves.
Anyone in a free group can decide to give up his own idea
and go along with the majority. If he does not want to do this,
he can get out of the group. This is a use of freedom, an
exercise of self-controlling responsibility.
But when a large number of individuals falsely believe that
the majority is an Authority that has a right to control individuals,
they must let a majority choose one man (or a few
men) to act as Government. They will believe that the majority
has transferred to those men the Majority-Right to control
all individuals living under that Government. But Government
is not a controlling Authority; Government is a use
of force, it is the police, the army; it can not control anyone,
it can only hinder, restrict, or stop anyone's use of his energy.
As Madison says, some common passion or interest will
sway a majority. And because a majority supports the ruler
whom a majority chooses, nothing checks his use of force
against the minority. So the ruler of a democracy quickly
becomes a tyrant. And that is the swift and violent death of
the democracy.
This always occurs, invariably. It is as certain as death and
taxes. It occurred in Athens twenty-five centuries ago. It
occurred in France in 1804, when an overwhelming majority
elected the Emperor Napoleon. It occurred in Germany in
1932, when a majority of Germans—swayed by a common
passion for food and social order—elected Hitler.
Madison stated the historic fact: in democracy there is
nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.
There is no protection for liberty. Hence it is, that democracies
always destroy personal security (the Gestapo, the concentration
camps) and the rights of property (what rights of property
ownership are there in Europe, now?) and are as short in their
lives as they are violent in their deaths.
(The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane)
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Madison, Monroe—
was their fear of democracy.
They were educated men. Excepting Franklin (self-educated),
each one had the education of an English gentleman.
That is, the philosophy and the history of the whole European
past had been pounded into his head before he was twelve
years old. Therefore, when he was old enough to think for
himself, he had thousands of years of human experience with
every form of Government, to think about.
This knowledge was then regarded as necessary to every
man whose birth entitled him to take any part in the government
of his country.
They also knew the meaning of every word they used;
they knew its Greek, Latin, or Anglo-Saxon root. Until forty
years ago, this knowledge was still considered of first importance
in American schools. Every pupil, at thirteen and
fourteen, learned etymology as he had learned spelling since
the age of six, by dogged repetition until the facts were fixed
in his mind.
Today the confusion of the meaning of words in these
United States is a danger to the whole world. Few American
schools any longer require a pupil to dissect his words to their
roots, and to know what he means when he speaks. And
for twenty years the disciplined members of the Communist
Party in these States have been deliberately following Lenin's
instruction, "First confuse the vocabulary."
Thinking can be done only in words. Accurate thinking
requires words of precise meaning. Communication between
human beings is impossible without words whose precise
meaning is generally understood.
Confuse the vocabulary, and people do not know what is
happening; they can not communicate an alarm; they can
not achieve any common purpose. Confuse the vocabulary,
and millions are helpless against a small, disciplined number
who know what they mean when they speak. Lenin had
brains.
Today, when you hear the word "democracy," what does
it mean?
These United States, of course; and England, the British
Commonwealth, the British Empire, Norway, Sweden, Denmark
and Belgium, part of France, Finland when Russians
attack the Finns but not when Finns attack Russia; Russia
when Russians fight Germans but not when Stalin signs a
pact with Hitler; the kingdoms and dictatorships of the
Balkans; and economic security and compulsory insurance
and the check-off system of collecting labor union dues; and
friendliness and neighborliness and the unique American
sense of human equality, and a vote for everybody, and
socialism and communism and the Spanish cause for which
republicans, democrats, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists and
Russian and American communists fought, and freedom and
human rights and human dignity and common decency.
That is, the word has no meaning. Its meaning has been
destroyed.
It was once a sound word. It is a necessary word, because
no other has its real meaning. Demo-cracy means, rule by
The People; as precisely as mon-archy means, rule by one
(person).
Demos, The People, was a fantasy imagined by the ancient
Greeks, in their search for The Authority that (they imagined)
controlled men. To this fantasy they attached the meaning
of God, which always attaches to every form of Authority,
and there are still persons who believe that "the voice of The
People is the voice of God."
The People does not exist. Individual persons compose any
group of persons.
So in practice, any attempt to establish democracy is an
attempt to make a majority of persons in a group act as the
ruler of that group.
Consider this for one moment, not in fantasy, but as applied
to your own experience in groups of living persons whom you
know, and you will understand why every attempt to establish
democracy has failed.
Of course there is no reason to suppose that majority-rule
would be desirable, even if it were possible. There is no
morality or efficiency in mere numbers. Ninety-nine persons
are no more likely to be right than one person is.
In the Federalist Papers, Madison stated the reason why
every attempt to establish a democracy quickly creates a tyrant:
"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of
faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority,
and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice
the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever
been found incompatible with personal security or the rights
of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their deaths."
The gentlemen who took responsibility for saving the
American Revolution were fearful that democracy would end
it. The unknown Americans, the Ebenezer Foxes, for years
had been fighting Authority; each was determined "to do
what was right in my own eyes." But they had no Latin or
Greek, they knew nothing about all the previous efforts to
make democracy work, and they were shouting for democracy.
On the other hand, the large landholders, bankers, rich
merchants, and a thick-springing crop of rapacious grafters
and land-speculators, led by Alexander Hamilton, the illegitimate
adventurer from the West Indies who was also a genius,
were demanding an American monarchy.
The real revolutionists, when they signed the Declaration of
Independence and of individual freedom, were undertaking
not only to win a war against impossible odds, but to create
an entirely new kind of Government.
They faced the armed power of the British Empire, with
thirteen disorganized, quarreling colonies at their backs, and
two dangers threatening them: monarchy, and democracy.
They said nothing about The People. They repeated no
nonsense about Science and Natural Law and the Age of
Reason. They did not gush about the noble nature of Natural
Man. They knew men. They were realists. They had no
illusions about men, but they did know that all men are free.
They stood against both monarchy and democracy, because
they knew that when men set up an imaginary Authority
armed with force, they destroy all opportunity to exercise their
natural freedom.
Educated men, they had studied the many attempts to
establish democracy. The results were known twenty-five hundred
years ago in Greece. Democracy does not work. It can not
work, because every man is free. He can not transfer his inalienable
life and liberty to anyone or anything outside himself.
When he tries to do this, he tries to obey an Authority that
does not exist.
It makes no difference what he imagines this Authority to
be—Ra or Baal or Zeus or Jupiter; Cleopatra or the Mikado; or
Economic Necessity or the Will of the Masses or the Voice of
The People; the stubborn fact is that there is no Authority, of
any kind, that controls individuals. They control themselves.
Anyone in a free group can decide to give up his own idea
and go along with the majority. If he does not want to do this,
he can get out of the group. This is a use of freedom, an
exercise of self-controlling responsibility.
But when a large number of individuals falsely believe that
the majority is an Authority that has a right to control individuals,
they must let a majority choose one man (or a few
men) to act as Government. They will believe that the majority
has transferred to those men the Majority-Right to control
all individuals living under that Government. But Government
is not a controlling Authority; Government is a use
of force, it is the police, the army; it can not control anyone,
it can only hinder, restrict, or stop anyone's use of his energy.
As Madison says, some common passion or interest will
sway a majority. And because a majority supports the ruler
whom a majority chooses, nothing checks his use of force
against the minority. So the ruler of a democracy quickly
becomes a tyrant. And that is the swift and violent death of
the democracy.
This always occurs, invariably. It is as certain as death and
taxes. It occurred in Athens twenty-five centuries ago. It
occurred in France in 1804, when an overwhelming majority
elected the Emperor Napoleon. It occurred in Germany in
1932, when a majority of Germans—swayed by a common
passion for food and social order—elected Hitler.
Madison stated the historic fact: in democracy there is
nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.
There is no protection for liberty. Hence it is, that democracies
always destroy personal security (the Gestapo, the concentration
camps) and the rights of property (what rights of property
ownership are there in Europe, now?) and are as short in their
lives as they are violent in their deaths.
(The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane)
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The Democrat Party: Anti-American and Proud of It
A Growing Divide
Patriotic Americans are at a loss over what to do with fellow countrymen who refuse to listen to reason, take heed of history, or treat other citizens with civility and respect.
Those of us who revere our nation's values, traditions, religion, family life, military, capitalist system, and Constitutionally limited government cannot comprehend why members of the society we share would take on such a defeatist, contrarian, and downright anti-American point of view about this nation. The situation has gotten so dire that one wonders if it is even meaningful to refer to ourselves as a nation.
The steadily growing gap of understanding between patriots and leftists has now become a full-blown rift that threatens to tear America at its seams. It is crucial to understand what the source of our mutual misunderstanding is, and what, if anything, can be done to alleviate it.
But let me be clear: bi-partisanship, or the spirit of cooperation, should not be the American patriot's primary goal; conquering the socialist-rooted ideology that is the source of our mutual enmity should be.
The best way one might best understand the root of America's great divide is to look at the directly oppositional nature of the ideals this nation was founded on and the ideals of the modern left.
The modern left supports nearly all ideas anathema to reason, success, the good, truth, and justice. (see Evan Sayet for more on this). This profoundly corrupted worldview screams of ideological subversion, as America's destroyers are not coming from barbarians at the gates, but from subverters within. One can best appreciate this by taking a thematic look at the left's positions on American politics and culture.
The United States, as carefully designed by its founders and framers of its Constitution, was an undeniably successful experiment. But its success was not due to it being an experiment, its precepts of life, liberty, and property and its republican form of government were crucial aspects of its constitution arrived at after serious historical and philosophical deliberation. The lend that came to be known as America grew from humble beginnings to straddle a continent contested by colonialist powers, and both outlawed the importation of slaves from the outset and abolished the institution within a hundred years. This is not to suggest the nation was without its flaws or its injustices to overcome, but the justice that was accomplished in the long-run, at great cost, owe to the legacy of the founding, and not to any so-called "social justice" movement.
We should note that America's values were undermined by Federalist usurpations almost from the outset. The central banks, the Alien and Sedition Act, and the extra-juridical assertion of Supreme Court authority make it clear that the battle with statism began early in our nation's history, and modern patriots tend to be somewhat late to the party acknowledging this fact. But conservatives are much more advanced in knowing the criticisms of their point of view than the left respectively. Thus we will proceed to critiquing the left.
The Anti-American Ideology of the Modern Left
To appreciate just how far from our founding America has come, and just how anti-American the Democrat Party has become, consider the following.
Anti-American Values
The Democrat Party refuses to view the nation in exceptionalist terms. It promotes multi-culturalism, diversity, and lawless open borders (along with the Republicans, it should be added). President Barack Obama, the party leader, has dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism (the concept) and has been seen on multiple occasions refusing to salute the flag. They thus fracture the shared value system that is the essential cohesive of a free nation.
Anti-American Principles
The Democrat Party, which can now be safely deemed the party of leftists, through its actions and policy positions, stands in direct opposition to freedom, liberty, life, and even equality. Leftists constantly seek to undercut free speech through political correctness and bullying conservatives and libertarians in institutions where they control the rules. They promote every policy that facilitates death, though they stand opposed to individual choice. They are elitists and treat the American citizenry as a whole with disdain.
Anti-American Traditions
Those on the left seek to blur or replace our traditions with their own. They replace the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln with "President's Day," though FDR and Wilson have no right to be mentioned with these widely esteemed presidents (for better or for worse). They transform Christmas into "Happy Holidays" or most tellingly, "X-mas." They introduce pointless holidays like Earth Day and play up the socialist holidays May Day and Labor Day. They have turned the Fourth of July, better known as Independence Day, into local community fireworks shows and not much more.
Anti-American Prosperity
Democrats expand government with sheer abandon when in power, disregarding all dictates of prudence and dignity. They flood the market with countless taxes, constrictive regulations, and unwieldy and self-defeating welfare programs. They are so unabashed in their lust for spending the public treasury that the once "fringe" idea that leftists seek to "overwhelm the system" with debt and by running the monetary printing presses has almost become a mainstream acknowledgment. Ultimately, leftists undermine self-reliance and thus, self-government, which is the only sustainable way freedom can survive in a republic.
Anti-American Religion
Leftists accord religious freedom to nearly every religious sect, except those based in Judaeo-Christianity. If you are Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim, you are a "protected minority"; but if you are a Christian, you better sit down and shut up. The left takes this attitude despite the tolerant nature of Judaism and Christianity worldwide, according to openly available statistics, and the malevolent nature of (radicalized) Islam.
The left's reaching out towards Islam appears to be a strategic move, inviting in more enemies to help them achieve their anti-American goals. Refusing to criticize Islam for atrocities against women, playing politically correct games with our national security in the wars overseas and the war against terrorists, and even supporting the outrageous building of a mosque at 9/11's ground zero by an anti-American imam are but a few examples of how the left is anti-American in its religious preferences. (But it should be noted that the left may be seeking a rapprochement with Christianity in order to draw on certain anti-capitalist strains in Biblical thought.)
Anti-American Families
The left attacks the American "nuclear" family (one is a bit suspicious of the militant connotation here) from a number of angles: Economically, socially, and politically. Economically, it cannot be emphasized enough that the central bank's devaluation of the currency, and the undercutting of manufacturing and other "manly" jobs from a number of angles (corporate taxes, regulations, illegal immigration), feeds the need for two-income families (along with income taxes), as well as privileging women's work (primarily service jobs) both in the private and public sector. From a politico-economic and a sociological standpoint, this model is unsustainable and indeed, volatile. One must add the the need for a two-income family outsources child-rearing to the oh-so-trustworthy and competent hands of the state.
Anti-American Defense
Leftists are notorious for protesting wars, but seemingly for its own sake. Whether a war is just or unjust, whether the mission is noble or ill-considered, the left is against it. Korea, "the forgotten war," clearly shows the consequences of opposing communism: On one side of the DMZ is misery and immense human suffering, on the other is productivity and increased human happiness. Korea is what Vietnam might have been given a more concerted effort and the backing of all Americans. The Gulf Wars were carried out against a genocidal madman, but as a socialist-cum-Ba'athist, he was the left's kind of madman. Whether it was wise or not to try to nation-build Iraq is a question for another time, since the rationale for such an endeavor is almost quintessentially Wilsonian. The Afghanistan War is a war of self-defense, but to most leftists, it is, as all wars are for the U.S. regardless of merit or results, "imperialist."
Anti-American Politics
The left does not seek a political landscape where ideas are debated openly and honestly, though I don't pretend that politics is inherently conducive to Harvard-debate team style policy-vetting. But the Alinskyite politics-as-war, ends-justify-the-means demonization of any and all ideological opponents of the left makes "going along to get along" increasingly difficult for liberty-loving American who, as Rodney King admonished us, "just want to get along." We have to realize, in light of much more than can be put in the space of a short article, that the left is anti-American in almost every respect. One might see their utopia as a world where the United States did not even exist.
Conclusion
Fortunately for us, although many Americans are ill-informed, miseducated, or both, most are not leftists by ideological disposition. The left's many clients have been incubated in a world of left-wing "mainstream" media that is crumbling. The word is getting out on the leftists' goals, in dribs and drabs, and made plausible by the deteriorating social and economic situation. The failed promises of Obama has made our job easier and we can replenish the American patriot message if we are historically aware and ideologically sound in our views. This is the formula for winning over "the great middle" and vanquishing our anti-American enemy. Our founding fathers would demand no less; and we pray, no more.
Patriotic Americans are at a loss over what to do with fellow countrymen who refuse to listen to reason, take heed of history, or treat other citizens with civility and respect.
Those of us who revere our nation's values, traditions, religion, family life, military, capitalist system, and Constitutionally limited government cannot comprehend why members of the society we share would take on such a defeatist, contrarian, and downright anti-American point of view about this nation. The situation has gotten so dire that one wonders if it is even meaningful to refer to ourselves as a nation.
The steadily growing gap of understanding between patriots and leftists has now become a full-blown rift that threatens to tear America at its seams. It is crucial to understand what the source of our mutual misunderstanding is, and what, if anything, can be done to alleviate it.
But let me be clear: bi-partisanship, or the spirit of cooperation, should not be the American patriot's primary goal; conquering the socialist-rooted ideology that is the source of our mutual enmity should be.
The best way one might best understand the root of America's great divide is to look at the directly oppositional nature of the ideals this nation was founded on and the ideals of the modern left.
The modern left supports nearly all ideas anathema to reason, success, the good, truth, and justice. (see Evan Sayet for more on this). This profoundly corrupted worldview screams of ideological subversion, as America's destroyers are not coming from barbarians at the gates, but from subverters within. One can best appreciate this by taking a thematic look at the left's positions on American politics and culture.
The United States, as carefully designed by its founders and framers of its Constitution, was an undeniably successful experiment. But its success was not due to it being an experiment, its precepts of life, liberty, and property and its republican form of government were crucial aspects of its constitution arrived at after serious historical and philosophical deliberation. The lend that came to be known as America grew from humble beginnings to straddle a continent contested by colonialist powers, and both outlawed the importation of slaves from the outset and abolished the institution within a hundred years. This is not to suggest the nation was without its flaws or its injustices to overcome, but the justice that was accomplished in the long-run, at great cost, owe to the legacy of the founding, and not to any so-called "social justice" movement.
We should note that America's values were undermined by Federalist usurpations almost from the outset. The central banks, the Alien and Sedition Act, and the extra-juridical assertion of Supreme Court authority make it clear that the battle with statism began early in our nation's history, and modern patriots tend to be somewhat late to the party acknowledging this fact. But conservatives are much more advanced in knowing the criticisms of their point of view than the left respectively. Thus we will proceed to critiquing the left.
The Anti-American Ideology of the Modern Left
To appreciate just how far from our founding America has come, and just how anti-American the Democrat Party has become, consider the following.
Anti-American Values
The Democrat Party refuses to view the nation in exceptionalist terms. It promotes multi-culturalism, diversity, and lawless open borders (along with the Republicans, it should be added). President Barack Obama, the party leader, has dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism (the concept) and has been seen on multiple occasions refusing to salute the flag. They thus fracture the shared value system that is the essential cohesive of a free nation.
Anti-American Principles
The Democrat Party, which can now be safely deemed the party of leftists, through its actions and policy positions, stands in direct opposition to freedom, liberty, life, and even equality. Leftists constantly seek to undercut free speech through political correctness and bullying conservatives and libertarians in institutions where they control the rules. They promote every policy that facilitates death, though they stand opposed to individual choice. They are elitists and treat the American citizenry as a whole with disdain.
Anti-American Traditions
Those on the left seek to blur or replace our traditions with their own. They replace the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln with "President's Day," though FDR and Wilson have no right to be mentioned with these widely esteemed presidents (for better or for worse). They transform Christmas into "Happy Holidays" or most tellingly, "X-mas." They introduce pointless holidays like Earth Day and play up the socialist holidays May Day and Labor Day. They have turned the Fourth of July, better known as Independence Day, into local community fireworks shows and not much more.
Anti-American Prosperity
Democrats expand government with sheer abandon when in power, disregarding all dictates of prudence and dignity. They flood the market with countless taxes, constrictive regulations, and unwieldy and self-defeating welfare programs. They are so unabashed in their lust for spending the public treasury that the once "fringe" idea that leftists seek to "overwhelm the system" with debt and by running the monetary printing presses has almost become a mainstream acknowledgment. Ultimately, leftists undermine self-reliance and thus, self-government, which is the only sustainable way freedom can survive in a republic.
Anti-American Religion
Leftists accord religious freedom to nearly every religious sect, except those based in Judaeo-Christianity. If you are Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim, you are a "protected minority"; but if you are a Christian, you better sit down and shut up. The left takes this attitude despite the tolerant nature of Judaism and Christianity worldwide, according to openly available statistics, and the malevolent nature of (radicalized) Islam.
The left's reaching out towards Islam appears to be a strategic move, inviting in more enemies to help them achieve their anti-American goals. Refusing to criticize Islam for atrocities against women, playing politically correct games with our national security in the wars overseas and the war against terrorists, and even supporting the outrageous building of a mosque at 9/11's ground zero by an anti-American imam are but a few examples of how the left is anti-American in its religious preferences. (But it should be noted that the left may be seeking a rapprochement with Christianity in order to draw on certain anti-capitalist strains in Biblical thought.)
Anti-American Families
The left attacks the American "nuclear" family (one is a bit suspicious of the militant connotation here) from a number of angles: Economically, socially, and politically. Economically, it cannot be emphasized enough that the central bank's devaluation of the currency, and the undercutting of manufacturing and other "manly" jobs from a number of angles (corporate taxes, regulations, illegal immigration), feeds the need for two-income families (along with income taxes), as well as privileging women's work (primarily service jobs) both in the private and public sector. From a politico-economic and a sociological standpoint, this model is unsustainable and indeed, volatile. One must add the the need for a two-income family outsources child-rearing to the oh-so-trustworthy and competent hands of the state.
Anti-American Defense
Leftists are notorious for protesting wars, but seemingly for its own sake. Whether a war is just or unjust, whether the mission is noble or ill-considered, the left is against it. Korea, "the forgotten war," clearly shows the consequences of opposing communism: On one side of the DMZ is misery and immense human suffering, on the other is productivity and increased human happiness. Korea is what Vietnam might have been given a more concerted effort and the backing of all Americans. The Gulf Wars were carried out against a genocidal madman, but as a socialist-cum-Ba'athist, he was the left's kind of madman. Whether it was wise or not to try to nation-build Iraq is a question for another time, since the rationale for such an endeavor is almost quintessentially Wilsonian. The Afghanistan War is a war of self-defense, but to most leftists, it is, as all wars are for the U.S. regardless of merit or results, "imperialist."
Anti-American Politics
The left does not seek a political landscape where ideas are debated openly and honestly, though I don't pretend that politics is inherently conducive to Harvard-debate team style policy-vetting. But the Alinskyite politics-as-war, ends-justify-the-means demonization of any and all ideological opponents of the left makes "going along to get along" increasingly difficult for liberty-loving American who, as Rodney King admonished us, "just want to get along." We have to realize, in light of much more than can be put in the space of a short article, that the left is anti-American in almost every respect. One might see their utopia as a world where the United States did not even exist.
Conclusion
Fortunately for us, although many Americans are ill-informed, miseducated, or both, most are not leftists by ideological disposition. The left's many clients have been incubated in a world of left-wing "mainstream" media that is crumbling. The word is getting out on the leftists' goals, in dribs and drabs, and made plausible by the deteriorating social and economic situation. The failed promises of Obama has made our job easier and we can replenish the American patriot message if we are historically aware and ideologically sound in our views. This is the formula for winning over "the great middle" and vanquishing our anti-American enemy. Our founding fathers would demand no less; and we pray, no more.
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