Summary: As American politics heats up, preparing for the quadrennial hysteria in 2020, let’s step back and look at our choices. Left and Right are clear about their intentions. Only a mad people would trust either.
“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder – and nearly always from the former….”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s A Study of History.
Congratulations, America. The Left has volunteered you, your family, and your nation as lab rats in one of history’s largest social engineering projects. If allowed to run, in a generation or two it will drastically and irreversibly reshape America. Rest assured, Leftists do this with full confidence that their ideology guarantees a happy ending. Just like their confidence that communism would bring unprecedented peace, prosperity, and social justice to Russia, China, Eastern Europe, and the other nations testing this radical new social system. They are sorry about the results.
And of course there were the Great Society experiments that inadvertently damaged African-American families and turned inner cities from poor zones into third-world-like disaster areas. Voices suggesting cautious action (such as sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan in “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action“) were attacked and drowned out. Sometimes the experiments end poorly.
But all that history has gone down the memory hole. The Left wants us to focus instead on the wonderful new projects that lie ahead!
Open borders.
While the Left has long sought this, the obvious risk led them to disguise their intent. As in the NY Times “Fact Check of the day” on 27 June 2018: “No, Democrats Don’t Want ‘Open Borders’.” This year they have gone public. ICE is denounced as just like the Gestapo. Any methods to deal with the flood of migrants, legal and illegal, are declared illegitimate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “28-Year-Old Democratic Giant Slayer“, condemns any attempts to slow the flow into America. NY Times columnist Farhad Manjoo confidently tells us that “There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders.”
No worries about the flood of unskilled labor crushing wages for those on the bottom rungs of the ladders, overwhelming our ability to assimilate immigrants, development of an underclass from their descendents (see the giant ring cities around Paris), changes to our culture (see the rise in antisemitism and crimes against women in Europe), etc. Imagine the wonderful possible benefits instead.
Massive change in gender relations.
Rapid change of gender roles and relations that are fundamental to society. Definitions of men and women, marriage, homosexuals, transgenders, etc. It is an ever-lengthening list. What can only be imagined today becomes subject of massive propaganda campaigns followed by legal action followed by action against those who oppose it. Wave after wave of change.
Massive social tinkering, massive spending, boondoggles galore: a Green New Deal.
Nobody does marketing as well as the Left! The New Deal put unemployed people to work during a depression, when deficit spending provided necessary stimulus to the economy. A Green New Deal will generate massive deficits during an expansion – when Keynes said that we should be paying down the debt. It is a grab bag of unrelated Leftist wishes with a catchy label.
It might leave just wreckage behind, but the debt will be forever.
Trust me!
Another perspective.
Imagine a troop of monkeys let loose in the control room of a nuclear power plant. Spinning dials. Moving levers. Pushing buttons. All the while laughing. It won’t end well.
And if we instead turn to the Right?
The Right does not see us as lab rats, but as sheep to be sheared.
Tax cuts for the rich. Attacks on unions, to boost corporate profits. Reduced environmental and job safety regulation, to boost corporate profits. Reduced enforcement of anti-trust regulations, allowing mega-mergers to build cartels to boost corporate profits. Massive expansion of military spending, irrelevant to actual threats we face, to boost corporate profits. Cuts to vital social spending, such as education.
And if the far-Right gets its way, there will be drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Perhaps we should be bearish on America
Bill Bonner writes about finance at The Daily Reckoning (and is a founder of the conservative phenomenon The Agora; see this article about it). He is a doomster and perma-bear. He gives a sobering perspective on our situation in “Corrections”, March 2001.
“Men do stupid things regularly and mad things occasionally. And sometimes, the impulse to self-destruction is so overwhelming it overtakes an entire nation. …The best a person can hope for when he goes mad is that he runs into a brick wall quickly …before he has a chance to build up speed. That is why success, in war and investing, is often a greater menace than failure.
“…people seem to make such obvious and moronic errors that it seems as if they were driven to it by some instinct of self-destruction — like lemmings periodically exterminating themselves in a march off the cliffs. What’s more, this diabolical instinct seems to report for duty at the very moment when the future seems the brightest – that is, when it is most needed! Just when men are most proud, most confident, most expansive in their ambitions and hopes …that is when they make the most lunkheaded judgments.”
But it is not too late. We can cast aside our apathy and passivity and retake the reins of America. The Republic has had such moments before and came out stronger than it began. If we try, it can again. We can dream new dreams and create new values. America has everything working for it, except time.
I have faith in all you – in us – so that more citizen involvement will make a better and stronger America. I suspect we cannot imagine the eventual result. Perhaps a better Second Republic (founded on the Constitution). Perhaps a Third Republic.
I do not ask you to share that faith. I ask only that you have faith in yourself and see us as the crew of America – not its passengers. Pitch in and help. For ideas about what to do, see Reforming America: Steps to New Politics.