by Daniel Clark
At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Arnold Schwarzenegger told how he first became involved in American politics when he came to this country in 1968. It started when he was watching coverage of the presidential race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
"I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which is what I had just left," he said. "But then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting government off your back, lowering taxes and strengthening the military. Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air. I said to my friend, "What party is he?" My friend said, "He's a Republican." I said, "Then I am a Republican."
… But a funny thing happened on the way to Sacramento. It seems that Schwarzenegger, like Nixon, has "grown" — which is how the media condescendingly describe it when a politician becomes more liberal over the years. By this measure, he has become more massive than ever, since announcing his latest proposals on health care and global warming.
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Posted by Walt in Politics, Socialism categories at 12:21 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called "humanity." Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore's championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers' jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Socialism categories at 10:56 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Democrats, committed to the theory that only the political state can improve people's lives, explore ways to deliver on campaign promises.
David Wessel writes in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal here, (if you're an online subscriber):
In campaign rhetoric, Democrats raised expectations they would do more than Republicans to boost wages and living standards of ordinary Americans……Now Democrats have to deliver, or at least look like they're trying.
…….Democrats, [Gene Sperling, a Democratic cabinet-secretary-in-waiting] says, must figure out what government can do to encourage business to create more middle-class jobs in the U.S.
…….[Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary], recites a familiar list: trade policy, industrial policy — government attempts to influence the flow of capital toward promising industries and companies — antitrust, publicly financed research and development, and stronger trade unions.
The sorts of policies advocated by Mr. Reich are what led us to economic and social disaster in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 70s. Those policies are also essential elements in the economic doctrine of Mussolini's and Hitler's Fascism.
In both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, the political state had the last word in establishing wages, hours, production volumes, and sale prices of goods. Unlike Soviet Communism, Fascism left property ownership in its original hands, recognizing that regulatory control was sufficient to carry out political and economic policies. Labor unions remained in existence and were strengthened vis a vis industrialists, and farmers were assured higher prices.
In common with the left-wing liberals of the Democratic Party, Fascists believed that private individuals and private business counted for little, if anything, in the creation of jobs and the necessary production of society's goods and services. People's lives and livelihoods were viewed as the creation of the political state, which therefore had the last word in regulating human activity.
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Posted by Walt in Politics, Socialism categories at 11:45 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Since the 1930s, most Americans have come to believe in a fairy tale that has no happy ending. Democrats' victories in the recent elections have revived the fairy tale.
Washington Post staff writer Dan Balz, in a November 13, 2006, article explores the unresolved questions and internal debates remaining after the recent congressional elections.
One of those questions, as he sees it, is:
Equally important is the question of which party can adequately address the twin problems of keeping the United States competitive in a global economy and restoring the social contract that has helped provide economic security to workers and that has been shattered as a result of the corporate restructuring that globalization has brought about.
Mr. Balz is working under a false assumption: the expectation that the Federal government controls business, as well as the idea that it is possible to have a "social contract" under which government can effectively provide economic security to workers.
That assumption originates in the religion of socialism, which presumes that councils of intellectual planners, backed by technocratic administrators, are capable of managing businesses better than businessmen. Intellectuals and technocrats theoretically are motivated solely by the common good, not by private greed for profit. Businesses therefore, in theory, will be more efficient and be able to support full employment at all times when under government control.
In practice, this hasn't worked well, a typical example being the collapse of the socialistic EU's technocratically-managed AirBus and the resurgence of Boeing.
The term "social contract" was most famously used by John Locke in 1689 and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762. Locke's conception, not Rousseau's, was the basis of our War of Independence in 1776.
Locke erected a theoretical framework for a government of inherently limited powers. Even the king is subject to God's higher law of morality, which embraces the natural-law rights of individuals. Individuals, when they entered a social contract to create political society, retained inalienable rights to life, liberty, and private property. Hence our 1776 slogan, "No taxation without representation."
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Posted by Walt in Politics, Socialism, US Constitution categories at 8:07 AM EST
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By Thomas E. Brewton
Words remain the same, but lose their meaning when twisted to fit ideological aims. One such word is equality.
A New York Times editorial dated October 26, 2006, proclaims, "The New Jersey Supreme Court brought the United States a little closer to the ideal of equality yesterday when it ruled that the state's Constitution requires that committed same-sex couples be accorded the same rights as married heterosexual couples."
The Times editorial implicitly presumes that the "ideal of equality" means entitlement to actual equality in all respects. Same-sex marriage is just the latest in a long list of socialist intellectuals' demands that judicial pronouncement, if not statute law, mandate equality of condition, rather than equality of opportunity.
Of course, even for the Times, equality has limits. There is no thought to equal protection of an infant's right to life, when weighed against the "right" to sexual promiscuity implicit in the pro-choice advocacy of abortion.
Our nation was founded on a completely different understanding of equality. Not until President Lyndon Johnson's full-bore-socialist Great Society did the politicians adopt the New York Times's definition of equality as entitlement, rather than opportunity.
English political traditions brought to North America in the early 17th century remained the founding traditions of the United States in the 18th century, when the Constitution was written. In that framework, equality meant only that everyone was entitled to equal treatment under the law, that the ruler, as well as the ruled, was subject to a higher law of God-given morality.
The Bill of Rights was intended, not to legislate equality, but to safeguard individuals' natural-law political liberties from arbitrary government power. One inescapable consequence of the individuality protected by the Bill of Rights is the absolute impossibility of uniform equality in social station, distinction, and income.
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Posted by Walt in Politics, Socialism categories at 11:32 PM EST
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By Thomas E. Brewton
Diversity is another word battered beyond recognition by liberals and progressives. Orwellian NewSpeak has made the word diversity into a bangalore torpedo to undermine the defenses guarding civilized society.
Liberal-socialists, with our educational system in the vanguard, have made diversity into an end in itself, a principle of materialistic social justice.
In education, for example, the goal of diversity is elevated to a higher status than providing the best possible education for students. Diversity is, not an educational principle, but a correlate to Lenin's program to create the New Soviet Man via material factors imposed by intellectuals. Students are somehow to be made better by the corruption of a system that supposedly is devoted to academic excellence.
As economist Thomas Sowell has so articulately observed many times, poorly prepared students, of whatever race, gain nothing by being admitted to colleges with academic standards beyond their reach. Either the better students are held back, or the poorly prepared students are discouraged and eventually drop out. Nothing is gained by the mendacity of liberal-progressive educators giving every student a minimum grade of B. Victims of grade-inflation have simply been set up for failure and embittered cynicism in real-world job competition.
Less well prepared students can get a good education at colleges with less stringent academic standards. Students who earn Bs and As in those colleges can have the priceless gift of real self-respect based on their own hard work.
Diversity of the liberal-progressive stripe has disastrous consequences for the survival of the United States. Economically we see its results in the widening gap between linguistic, mathematical, and scientific competence of average American graduates and their overseas counterparts. In an increasingly technical world, the United States is suffering, not only from inflated production costs arising from the welfare state and unionism, but from falling behind in the innovation curve.
We can celebrate the diversity of our student bodies, but at the cost of fewer and fewer Nobel Prizes for science awarded to Americans in the future, along with more and more manufacturing transferred overseas.
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Posted by Walt in Education, Liberalism, Socialism categories at 9:55 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Liberalism, Politics, Socialism categories at 8:21 AM EDT
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First posted on Aug 14, 2006 in The View from 1776
by Thomas E. Brewton
The View from 1776
British MI-5’s success in thwarting the plot to blow up a large number of transatlantic airliners reminds us that hamstringing our own intelligence forces by the ACLU and its sympathizers has a long history.
The op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article by David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey. The authors describe the important differences between British and American legal doctrine that enabled British intelligence forces to work more effectively than can our own intelligence and law-enforcement community. Great Britain is the home of personal liberty and limitations on arbitrary government power, but the British, in the area of surveillance and apprehension of terrorists, have been considerably more realistic than have we.
There is a long pedigree for the liberal mindset that leads to assiduously blocking effective methods of surveillance and detention of enemies of the United States, the same mindset that produced repeated, putatively criminal revelations of top-secret national security programs by the New York Times.
It goes all the way back to the late 1800s, when socialist and anarchist agitators began to make their presence felt in the United States. On Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Union Square, with Greenwich Village intellectuals’ propaganda support after World War I, anarchists and socialists staged protest rallies that blocked traffic and interfered with ordinary business. Police often had to stop violence, which usually involved mass arrests of demonstrators.
Those socialist and anarchist activists, in effect, demanded that the First Amendment’s freedom of speech be interpreted as a suicide pact that would allow them to carry out their openly avowed aim to destroy formal government under the Constitution (in the anarchists’ case), or to replace the Constitution with a collectivized socialist system that would seize private property and redistribute it to the masses.
Socialist and anarchist leaders were involved in, and openly advocated, assassination of political and business leaders. Emma Goldman, the most widely-heard oratorical voice of anarcho-socialism, was the leftist version of Timothy McVeigh, the radical right-winger who in 1995 bombed a Federal office building in Oklahoma City killing 166 people.
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Posted by Walt in ACLU, Communism, Freedom of Speech, Socialism, Terrorism categories at 1:44 AM EDT
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