The Death of the Left
I have a good friend, an Italian who lives in Milano, who for a while was the head of the youth organization of the Italian Communist Party. One day he was walking across one of the major Milanese piazzas, and had an epiphany, which he later described very simply. “I shouted, ‘There is no working class!’”
A bit later he left the Party to become a newspaper and book editor — and an invaluable guide to the workings of European Communism. But I want to focus on that epiphany, because it’s both rare and important. It’s rare, since very few true believers have the honesty and courage to blurt out a truth that puts paid to their entire worldview and compels them to abandon a career, which in his case was already very successful and held the promise of even greater things. And it’s important because it underlines the intimate relationship between our ideas and the real world.
The epiphany was a fine example of one of Hegel’s basic insights, which is that the world is constantly changing, and ideas must accordingly be updated, or become anachronisms. So it was with “working class,” a concept that accurately described a group in a society at a certain stage of industrial development, as in 18th- and 19th-century England and Europe. For much of that period, “working class” helped understand what was going on, and it helped policy makers deal with very real problems. There were working-class parties, scholars who specialized in studying the working class, politicians who made careers by representing working-class districts, and so forth.
But the world changed, and in the modern postindustrial societies, the working class vanished. There aren’t working-class parties any more, since there aren’t enough voters who think of themselves that way. And honest politicians like my Italian friend gave it up, updated their thinking, and tried to cope with today’s problems.
In this process, there are plenty of people who can’t update their thinking. They’re easy to recognize, because they write and talk about a world that no longer exists. The easiest places to find them in contemporary America are Hollywood, college campuses, and the Obama administration with its attendant satellites, the dead tree media and the Democrat Party. Their common bond is anger and frustration; frustration because they can’t understand what’s going on, and anger because their remedies for contemporary problems do not come to grips with the essence of the problems.
I am not so sure that they are angry because they cannot debate effectively. I don’t think they ever cared about that, did they? I mean, were they ever really interested in getting at the truth? If they were, they became like your friend.
I think they are angry because their power is being broken. Government unions, big government, racism-charges, grievance-mongering, MSM monopoly… all being diminished. Their propaganda is less and less effective, so the propaganda just gets louder, more brazen, more desperate-seeming. And now we are beginning to laugh at them. That has really got to hurt! And the more they rage, the more we laugh.
Keep laughing at them, and they will melt away. The laughter is like dumping water on the Wicked Witch.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/12/1082975/-EVERY-Romney-Lie-In-One-Place-UPDATED
Thanks, Nick. You are right – this IS a perfect example of the mindlessness the author was talking about in this article, and the lies that the ‘Progressives’ have adopted. Thanks for finding this perfect example for us!
Who Is us ? NIAC, PAAIA, MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, CAIR ? Stupid Thug Islamist Junkie
Funny How You talk back to your own Profile, Isn’t it Ayatollah TERRORIST ON LINE ?
Sorry, MBB – I may have been too subtle. Perhaps my other post will help clarify.
Nick,
Here’s another good compendium of ‘progressive’ foolishness and lawlessness – since you were kind enough to find the other one for us, I figured you find this one helpful too.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061812-615239-obama-is-dangerously-close-to-totalitarianism.htm?p=full
Oh, beyond doubt that’s one of the reasons. But there are many, including the frustration of which Ledeen speaks above.
People become angry for many reasons: frustration, envy, a sense of having been done an injury or insult, a perception of personal insufficiency, and more. I’d imagine that all of these are at work among the Left, in varying degrees. But I pity them particularly in this regard: they must harbor a terrible fear that they’ve been radically wrong — that the world they’ve been carrying about in their heads is not the world around them.
These are folks who believe themselves morally and intellectually superior to non-leftists, entirely on the basis of their political stances. How much worse a blow to a man’s self-regard could he absorb than the discovery that he’s not only not smarter and more moral than his adversaries, but demonstrably less so, and that by insisting on the reverse has contributed to laying a swath of destruction among innocent others?
Man, by nature, is amoral. He seeks power, pleasure, prestige, and status in the community in which he exists. In seeking those attributes, he will do what he believes necessary, within the bounds imposed by another individual or group with more of those attributes than s/he, and strive to achieve them by any means possible. The above applies in broad strokes to nations, as well, since they, too, act as individuals to achieve their “manifest destiny.” The Left believes, both individually and as a group, that their “superior intellectual achievements” uniquely empower them to make those decisions for man, as a whole, and to define the metes and bounds of control required to achieve their goal: political and economic domination forever. Today we call this “progressive government.” In my time at the University we called it the “dictatorship of the oligarchy”
Yes, clear and direct.
But beware. The coming onslaught of financial security and the hope of a future will only make the lazy and jealous more angry. It’s their core belief and though incorrect, makes them see the world as unjust because they are left behind in the world of competition. That world being where one has to get up off one’s ass to do some work in order to succeed.
They prefer a world where one points out that a successful individual is unfairly “stealing” from another in order to put fuel in their yacht vs. the reality of the John Kerrys who oppress the successful so that they themselves can simply own a yacht and thumb their nose at others.
In other words, the proletariat as the “successful” caste.
Yet the useful idiot at the bottom continues to fail to see that the difference that in the former structure they can work hard to have a yacht of their own but in the Kerry structure, they cannot. They prefer the latter for some odd reason.
Perhaps it’s due to the empty promises that the government will punish “the rich” and give more to the lazy, unskilled, unproductive selfish as long as they sing the party song and remain blind to their own misery, soviet style. Yay. Let me know how that works out. As a matter of fact, we’re sitting in it with 8+% unemployment, hyperinflation about to hit, apparatchiks in high government places touting the party line about how great everything is while gasoline and food prices climb. So…that’s how it all works out.
But see, a guy like Romney gets elected, the economy takes off and grows and normal people take advantage of it and gain wealth while Mr lazy dumbass sits and continues to lose ground because they never learned anything except how to complain. And, there are relatively wealthy doctorate-holders who are more than happy to confirm that he’s correct in his assumptions of evil capitalism.
So his response to the election will be to scream louder and die in poverty and his death will “prove” the evils of a capitalist society. *sigh*
The minority communists-in-waiting will then scream louder and the cycle starts anew.
From a Buddhist point of view, people tend to get lost in ignorance and a lack of basic awareness. No matter how good things are, some people will refuse to enjoy it or even acknowledge it. Not good enough. If only this, if only that, then they would be happy, then there would be justice, etc. Of course it gets more complicated, but this addiction to dissatisfaction will always feed Marxism, even for the children of wealth and in a land of opportunity and largely equal justice.
Please. You are making bold statements without backup. “man is by nature amoral”.
Huh. Where does that come from? Your imagination or some philosophical fantasy.
You are painting with a broad brush through out your comment. Your rhetoric is all ginger spice but lacks substance and verification.
“How much worse a blow to a man’s self-regard could he absorb than the discovery that he’s not only not smarter and more moral than his adversaries, but demonstrably less so, and that by insisting on the reverse has contributed to laying a swath of destruction among innocent others?”
Indeed. This would serve to make most anyone uncomfortable in their own skin, which is bound to make one ultra-sensitive on a number of fronts. Is it any small wonder they are so difficult to reason with?
Hegel would have well understood one of the most interesting contemporary developments: the old liberal establishment is shrinking, both in numbers and in confidence, and their political/ideological opponents are growing. Several smart people have noticed the extraordinary depth of the conservative political team, many of whose members were on display in Tampa this week. The Ryans and the Romneys, the Christies and the Haleys, the Loves and the Rubios, the Brewers and the Walkers, on and on. They have a much clearer vision of the real world, and they accordingly have more realistic political approaches than those on the left, who are trapped in a world that no longer exists.
the author bats a thsoudand with this hit.thelefties are amost history and the intellectualso foyesterday have devolvedinot shamwn of theleft like axerod plouffe and jarrett,idealouges hell benot on power first and dicta secnd.that has never worked and never will
I think they are angry because their power is being broken. Government unions, big government, racism-charges, grievance-mongering, MSM monopoly… all being diminished. Their propaganda is less and less effective, so the propaganda just gets louder, more brazen, more desperate-seeming. And now we are beginning to laugh at them. That has really got to hurt! And the more they rage, the more we laugh.
Marc Malone above has their number. Its about broken power,the idealouges/true believers have been sent to the back of the bus or worse yet run over.
As the money runs out for welfare,huge legacy pensions and $40.00 per hour paychecks,the promises get smaller and smaller we shall wave goodbye in the rear view mirrors of our Chevy Suburbans all the losers pushing their volts down the potholed highways of despair.
I always ask lefties what the trash bin of history looks like from the inside.
To persons on the Right, the Democratic Party may look “left” and superannuated, but it is by no means a given that Hegel looks down on a victorious Republican Party. For one thing, feminism has left its mark on many women and on consumer capitalism itself. I tried to lay that out here: http://clarespark.com/2012/09/01/sex-sex-and-less-sex/. Traditionalists have no idea how far feminist ideas have penetrated academe and the culture in general, and may make the difference in the November elections. Just wait until all the glamor girls are trotted out next week, and will use their wiles effectively.
“Just wait until all the glamor girls are trotted out next week”
Glamour girls?! Oh yeah, there’s a ton of sex appeal in this list of female speakers. Hubba-hubba… that’s some bunch of female pulchritude! Independents will be panting to pull the lever for Fauxahontas, Pelosi, Chu and Lee…all of whom are old enough to be their grandmothers…of course there will be the usual airhead Hollywood babes with their plastic breasts, spray tans and fake smiles demeaning themselves while being cynically used by so-called feminists.
Add the code pink loons outside and you are only a few clowns short of a circus. Oh that’s right, Biden will speak…they’re full up with clowns.
My favorite Ryan line was Obama “trying to sail on yesterday’s wind”
“The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously. Its mission belongs to another time. It is reduced to fighting for political power alone…”
I think this is the key point: it’s all about power. I’ve been saying this for a while, but Michael has completed the idea by setting it in historical context. I sometimes get frustrated when I see blog posts or tweets by smart conservatives who generate with great skill a careful rebuttal to some progressive ploy. Many times I think they are wasting their time and missing the point. The hard organizational leftists don’t care about improving society, for the poor for example (any more than they cared about the people of South Vietnam once the U.S. was gone)–it’s the accumulation of money and power through groups like ACORN, SEIU and the SPLC in the name of helping the poor that’s important to them. The other day I saw someone, perhaps Jonah Goldberg, reference a quote of Woodrow Wilson admitting his deep appreciation of absolute power. Decentralizing power into the hands of individuals is anathema to them.
And Michael is so right about the rarity of self-revelation. It’s why I’ve abandoned most “debate” with my progressive friends–a change of heart of that kind really has to come from within.
Jeff S, has put an unerring finger on reality. It doesn’t take “intellectual prowess” to win elections nowadays. The ground game is the fulcrum.
Stop and ponder on this thought awhile, in the midst of all this gleeful thigh-slapping about empty chairs. What if Obama wins re-election? The Republican Party becomes history and along with it, everything else goes down the toilet – the Constitution, the economy, the middle class, the military, SCOTUS, entrepreneurship, American exceptionalism, the 21st Century – everything. America will get a new set of Founding Fathers. Scary thought.
Does R&R have the ground game to win?
Michael neglected an important Wisconsinite — Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee. If you think he’s your standard political operative, see this piece by Stephen Hayes: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/reince-rules_650800.html
He’s got the ground game covered. He is responsible for Scott Walker’s victory over the recall, and a lot else. I volunteer in local Republican politics, and I’ve never seen Republicans so organized.
I believe Priebus understands Republicans will need a lot of lawyers as well as foot soldiers in this election.
thanks Judy, you are right, and there are many Badgers I left out. Re: lawyers, right again, and the enormous importance of lawyers warrants a separate post. thanks for reminding me.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this talk of lawyering up to defeat Obama. We still remember the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 – neither party came out unscathed after the lawyers and Supremes got done. Also, for every lawyer the GOP can muster, you’d better believe that this time around the Dems will bring five. After all, the Liberals have the lawyer community, like the academic community, pretty much sewn up.
If lawyers get to have a say after the votes are cast, it can only mean a right-royal scrap about which votes to discard and which to accept.
Romney must win emphatically, so much so that even if the Big Chief of Harvard, Mr Lawrence Tribe, gets into the fray, he’ll stand no chance of parsing the votes.
And Romney must be declared the winner in November itself. If the lawyers take the legal battle into January, the Bush tax cuts will have automatically expired. The double-dip recession will come roaring in and the economy will get broken. Period.
“The ground game is the fulcrum.”
It always was.
That the left is about power began to percolate through to me way back in 1967. One would think, based on Israel and the Arabs, that the left would welcome and celebrate an Israeli victory. Of course, the Six Days War began the slide of the left into its current anti-Israel position.
On every proclaimed value of the left–women’s rights, trade unions, a free press, etc.–Israel not only adheres to western standards but stands out among its neighbors, none of whom even make much of a swipe at lip service to those standards. If the left genuinely valued women’s rights, for example, it would support Israel enthusiastically as its women are about as emancipated as you’re going to find on the planet.
Instead, of course, it picks the Palestinians as its pets and the Israelis as its bete noire. Israel isn’t even cut any slack on these issues. Its enemies persecute gays; Israel has a thriving gay community in Tel Aviv and has an annual Gay Pride parade, the opposition to which shouts nasty things.
So if the left’s prime concerns aren’t women’s rights, gay rights, trade unions, and so forth, what is it really focused on? And as you say, power.
I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s remark that they raised their clenched fists and shout “Power to the people” but what they really want is power over people, power to the state.
The left is always about getting power, woarld wide revolution
Homosexuals are politcally powerful in the USA and a useful ally to the far left. Same sex marriage weakens society as does the blurring of the disticntion between men and women (the next frontier of the gay movement).
Anything that weakens society, helps the left consolidate power.
In the middle east the left would rather have the moslems on their side than the gay Israelis.
Abu Mazen of the Paletinian Authority attended “Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University” in Moscow back in the Soviet era. This is where the Russians trained 3rd worldrers to become communist revolutionaries. He is a hardened leftist, but probably not a big fan of homosexuals.
American gays are too busy consolidating power to worry about gay moslems being hung off the back of trucks in the middle east.
No, the New Left’s hostility to Israel can be explained in a different way.
Starting in the late 1960s, the New Left abandoned the Old Left’s emphasis on economic advancement for the working class, in favor of multiculturalism. Now they became champions of all Third World peoples against Western peoples. And the Israelis, many of European descent, became the enemy; and the Palestinian “people of color” became their new heroes.
Indeed, the New Left increasingly saw the white working class in America as their enemies too. The Old Left had extolled the factory worker. The New Left called him a racist.
I recall similar pronouncements of the “death of the left” and the “permanent conservative majority.” Each time they sweep back into power. The American voter is a very short-memory creature. If Romney wins and engineers some recovery, the voters will soon forget what Obama and the Left did and vote them back in as soon as they get soft and happy again.
The death of the left always seems to take place theoretically. It’s true that the left is intellectually dead, but no matter — if you can’t fight with ideas, then fight with scare tactics, voter fraud, vote buying, and other forms of corruption and coercion.
Yep & they have the constant & consistent help from the powerful MSM that never misses a beat in its endeavor to promote & augment the small c’s agendas.
People are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded. (Niccolo Machiavelli)
The other side of that is that we must constantly work on our friends, family, clients, business colleagues. We cannot take those relationships for granted.
I recall similar pronouncements of the “death of the left” and the “permanent conservative majority.”
This is a common failing for certain conservatives, seemingly the “neo” variation thereof most often.
A recent example was Dana Loesch hyperventilating on Twitter that “religious liberty died today” when the Obamacare contraceptive mandate went down.
What a stupid piece of hyperbole. Religious liberty (a mere species of freedom of thought, but I digress) came into that day already wounded, took another wound, and left it accordingly, but it is not dead yet. Perspective, please. It’s things like that that have me wondering whether there really are false-flag Lefties masquerading at conservatives to discredit the Right by means of such gasping at straws.
Ledeen’s references to Hegel don’t fully describe the Hegelian dialectical process of “Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis” which concludes with a resultant that incorporates the characteristics of both the original competing propositions. This is what we see today when we can’t identify a clear difference between the two nationally prominent political parties. The progressives pushed their Marxist position with such success that the traditions of individual freedom and liberty that distinguished the American ethos from the rest of the world’s tyrannical governments are long forgotten. The Bushes “compassionate conservatism” morphed the Republican Party into a Democrat-lite Party, where even the statists and totalitarian progressives could find a home. The fact is the ideas of the progressive leftists and their Leviathan government are still very much in vogue.
This is exactly right…..er, correct:
” The American voter is a very short-memory creature….”
Let’s add that the American voters – those 53% who last time put this Chameleon in the White House – will have forgotten all of our carefully cogent criticisms and will again run us a very close race(!) because they can try again to flip the bird to th’ Establishment. One week is a long time now.
Mr Ledeen is correct in the long run about the diminishing “working class” as these so labelled today are light years ahead materially from the “working class” of the 1940′s and even the prosperous 1950′s.
If this so called “working class” of today recedes further as a voting bloc, another bloc will emerge to confront the “Establishment”. They’ll be emerging from liberal Academia and will be somewhat better equipped with biting rhetoric than today’s so called “working class”.
This’ll be brought about by the increase of computer-stuff “apps” saturating our hands-on lives. Assembly lines of white clad technicians in our America will replace the United Auto Workers whose real hands-on work will have been absorbed by the Chinese and Indian billions of very needy mouths. Same with United States Steel.
Our emerging problem IS ( ….we’d better start right now) how to create jobs for those not inclined towards those new technical white suited and masked jobs, and don’t think “service industry” entry level jobs…we’ll need challenging, emotionally satisfying new jobs. The Industrial Revolution is now long gone.
Those that are saying that once Conservatives get back into power and fix things that the electorate will forget what obummer did to them and America don’t take into consideration the one factor that has been responsible for a large part for the demise of the anachronistic media – the Internet and the *new* media. The MSM can no longer completely control the flow of information and as the millennials have discovered, certainly the ones that are on the fence, are seeing the leftward bias from which the MSM “reports”. Instantaneous, unedited, raw information is the most powerful weapon that people in the conservative movement have to counter the propaganda of the left. And it would appear that they know it, otherwise, how else would one explain the viciousness of their attacks on PJMedia bloggers, and other conservative participants in the new media.
” The American voter is a very short-memory creature.”
From a 49 state Reagan win and economic recovery—to this. If recovery occurs under R&R the cries will be for more government spending; as Thomas Sowell put it, faster under Democrats, slower under Republicans. Because learning never sticks. Only a critically thinking population and an honest media would produce a different result—maybe.
There is a working class (pundits really need to get out of their bubbles and live outside of Washington and Europe), but there seems to be a war on it from both parties.
The left seems to want to put everyone either on welfare, disability, or government.
The right seems to think that everyone can be successful in business if they just try really really hard or as this article indicates, aren’t there.
The reality is that you have a large portion of the country that wants to work, but simply doesn’t have the skills, or if they have the skills, they don’t have any jobs. These people aren’t going to all start their own business, or become scientists. These are people who should probably be in manufacturing jobs. Or even retail. But retail is really disappearing, and jobs that once were looked up on as solid 100 years ago (like a store or bank clerk) now are derided.
But yet there ARE jobs, good jobs, which are going begging because they are “out of fashion.” I read recently that the industry fears a shortage of trained auto mechanics. These are jobs which in the past kids who were not interested in college academics could train for, get and perform well. Nowadays, the country seems to have developed the idea that working with one’s hands is demeaning and in place of vocational training we have the cargo-cult notion that everybody needs a college degree. That’s great for the colleges maybe but try getting someone with a degree in Transgender Revolutionary Dance to fix your car.
The problem with blue-collar jobs like auto mechanic, is you need to have upper-body strength to do the physical work required. That’s why most auto mechanics are men. Your average skinny nerd or petite woman can’t do that job. Neither can someone who is physically disabled. White-collar jobs are all they can get.
And the job of auto mechanic doesn’t pay all that much (unless you’re the one actually running the repair shop business), nor does it typically offer any kind of health care or retirement plan. Inflation, the decline of the U.S. dollar, and rising health care costs have depressed the wages of blue-collar workers.
Any way you slice it, the disappearance of higher-paying white collar jobs that offered generous health care and retirement benefits represents a real step backward for American workers–especially for female workers.
Seems like you miss the government run health care and job bank. Sorry, but you are wrong.
Sinz carries a lot of wrong around here.
I am not sure what his criteria for good pay is, but all of the mechanics that I know (I know a lot of them as I am one) make at least 40K working for the man plus OT and side work puts them into the low 60′s and still fishing and hunting on the weekends and two weeks for vacation. And these guys are working for the owner. If you want to make more there is nothing stopping a trained mechanic from opening his/her (and there are a bunch of her’s in the business)shop. Well that may not be true if we get another course of the Obama treatment.
Over the last 20 years I had responsiblity for hiring industrial employees for several large manufacturing corporations. Skill machine operators and industrial mechanics were always in high demand and very scarce. When a verifiably skilled guy came to our attention, we automatically hired them regardless of our current labor needs. These guys regularly make from $60,000-$80,000 easy with only about 5-10 hours overtime per week. One hourly industrial mechanic was knocking down $125,000-$150,00 (depending on the amount of OT that year) in a NON-UNION facility in California. He refused to take a management job because the drop in pay and increased hours required. Not a bad living when you don’t have school loans to pay off.
BTW–the idea that the USA no longer has a manufacturing base is a myth.
There’s really not much that is physically demanding about being an auto mechanic these days and the pay is one Helluva lot better than somebody with a “Studies” or “Communication” degree can expect in government or a non-profit, the place they’re most likely to find work.
Juneau, my former home, is a rabidly white collar town; it is dominated by government employees the majority of whom look down on anybody who has ever done anything for wages that resulted in dirty hands. Vocational education is non-existent and they have a 40-50% HS drop-out rate by trying to force all students through what passes for a college preparatory education. Consequently, to the extent it has any young people in it at all, the youth culture is right out of “A Clockwork Orange,” and you can’t get ANYTHING fixed or built there.
I think we have the tax code and labor regulation as much as anything else to blame for the demise of so many retail and service jobs; a retail clerk is an ongoing expense and just advertising a job exposes the employer to liability. A bar code reader just gets expensed off. Likewise, a bank teller. Our tax codes have favored automation over human labor. Add in the liabilities inherent in unionization, in discrimination suites, in “reasonable accomodation” of the disabled, of Workers’ Comp fraud, and all the reasons it is a PITA to have employees as further disincentive to hire humans when you can buy machines. And the no-skill, low-skill labor pool hasn’t done itself any favors with the rotten, surly attitudes that so many of them come on the job market with. Sorry, but I’d much rather deal with the pleasant, efficient computers at Amazon than the surly punk behind the counter in most stores – in the event you can actually find the surly punk.
Are you in Anchorage? Love the way they take such good care of the grounds. Noted as well driving around the countryside how well things are kept up (yep, ran into just a few roadblocks where they were busily working on said roads) & virtually no litter! People living in Alaska seem to love it there. A truly uplifting experience visiting your great state.
It hasn’t always been that way and there are places where it still isn’t much kept up; rural Alaska is its own World, a world most Americans would find unbelievable and unlivable. When I first came to Anchorage in ’74, I thought Alaska generally and Anchorage specifically was the scruffiest place I’d ever seen, and that’s saying a lot since I grew up in rural Georgia. Likewise, Juneau was really run down when I moved there in ’84 because of its being threatened by the capital moving all through the ’70s. Juneau is better these days but nothing like as developed as Anchorage; nothing like having half the Legislature to pour money into your community. Those “grounds” you were seeing are oil money at work.
But as to the litter part; you ought to see it in late April, early May when the snow melts and turns to dogcrap, garbage, and the ocassional dead body. I don’t know where you are but if you don’t know, in places where snow stays on the ground for any length of time, along the roads it turns anywhere from a nasty shade of gray-brown to black as it gets covered by all the sand from the roads; that pretty white stuff lasts a day or two along the roads. Most places have a big community cleanup at “breakup” in the Spring where lots of people turn out and pick up trash all over their towns.
I think still most of us in the urban areas are here because we like it but there are also lots of people for whom this was the last place to run to, lots who’d do anything to avoid a cop or a background investigation, and, unfortunately, lots who are here for the elaborate social welfare programs.
I know somehow with Palin’s rise to prominence we became some sort of conservative icon, but fundamentally Alaska is a socialist state. When I was director of labor relations for the State only people in boardrooms in London and Houston had more power over the Alaska economy than I did. Public employee wages are the driver of the private economy and our wage policies could put money in or keep money out as political authority chose. People predictably bitch about taxes and government spending, but they pay some of the lowest taxes in the Country and all those pretty “grounds” in the towns on the road system were paid for by the State or, in the case of roads, airports, and ports, mostly by the federal government. The state pays for most education and either builds directly or reimburses the polisubs for school construction expenses. That fancy interstate standard interchange and new police station in Palin’s old town have hardly a dime of Wasilla tax money in them. The good people of Wasilly can afford to be staunch conservatives; they don’t spend money on government or infrastructure; the State spends it for them and stuff appears magically.
Buck, don’t believe the GM trade school article’s hype.
Buck, don’t believe the GM trade school article’s hype.
As today’s auto mechanics reach retirement age, so do neighborhood plumbers, electricians and carpenters.
Exactly…try to find a competent plumber in an emergency. Our hot water tank went out last year and we just flat lucked out. We had to call one of the big national outfits as there weren’t any local plumbers who do same day hot water tank replacement.
We feared the inevitable hack job that usually accompanies a franchise operation. A guy in his early 30′s arrived on time, in a clean truck and uniform with picture ID, had the skills and personal toolbox to do the job, which he did neatly, expertly and cheerfully. Sadly he is an exception.
I find the essay very persuasive. I believe as well that the infatuation has run its course. But then I read the polls and find the electorate seems split 50-50. We are not out of the woods yet.
I believe as well that the infatuation has run its course.
We made the same mistake of hoping this was the case in the 1990′s. Why were we wrong? Simple: The Left controls the intellectual high ground. If a generation becomes disillusioned with their ideas, they merely need wait one generation, alter some surface details and sell the new virus to the unprotected new generation. There is no fundamental *intellectual* opposition to the Left save Objectivism, and they’re just a “fringe”, “crazy” etc. (notwithstanding their apparent takeover of Cato).
They know that the public schools work to sabotage principled thinking, that the new generation will be unequipped to identify the underlying essentials of the past evils in a manner that enables them to recognize it in the present. They know that once those for whom the horrors of collectivism were experience instead of dry history have died off, their road to infect a new generation with the same old virus (with some meaningless surface details switched around) will be clear.
How many World War II veterans do you know who are still around? How many fewer than last year? That war, the last great all-out battle between individualism and collectivism, will become pure history for all of us soon. While I don’t see the Left trying to rehabilitate National Socialism, the ongoing effort to do so for its International cousin have been under way for some time, and will increase considerably in the very near future.
If you’ve ever run up against someone who insists that there are *fundamental* differences between socialism and fascism, or fascism and communism, you have seen a live demonstration of precisely how this intellectual disarmament works. (If you have met someone who believes that “corporatism” means corporate rule, that’s not a disarmed mind, that’s a *deactivated* one.)
When faced with a new variant of the old evil, such minds will not recognize it for what it is. They will entertain the “new” ideas, repeating the same mistakes of history until the cattle cars bearing human cargo start rolling in the night. The Left has not wasted any time over the past decades trying to come up with another ideological combination that “catches” in that manner, the envirocult being their nearest miss (I hope).
Except this time, who will be the America to wade in and save the world when America itself is traveling the Weimar road? Mars?
The reason we were wrong, was because we became arrogant and overreached.
This happens repeatedly. Any time liberals or conservatives win a big electoral victory, they start to imagine that this represents “a historic realignment”–and now they can start doing everything on their wish lists. They become arrogant and overreach, figuring that they don’t even have to listen to their political opponents anymore.
In the 1990s, a coalition of Gingrich conservatives and Clintonian moderate Dems like Rubin decided that the marketplace could do everything by itself, and so they deregulated derivatives like Credit Default Swaps. Liberal Democrats warned that based on past track records, Wall Street financiers couldn’t be trusted to stay honest, but the GOP and the Clintons didn’t listen to them. The result was catastrophic–a financial bubble that burst in 2008 and gave us the mess we’ve got today.
That’s why America seems to swing back and forth like a pendulum, from liberal dominance to conservative dominance and back again.
The fix is for everybody to realize once and for all that even landslide elections do NOT make for “historic realignments.” Only successful administrations do. Conservatism didn’t suddenly come into vogue on the day Reagan won the 1980 election. It only came into vogue *after* President Reagan had revived the economy.
“This happens repeatedly. Any time liberals or conservatives win a big electoral victory, they start to imagine that this represents “a historic realignment”–and now they can start doing everything on their wish lists. They become arrogant and overreach, figuring that they don’t even have to listen to their political opponents anymore.”
The greatest failure of the GWB years and the reason that Rove’s “Permanent Majority” was a fleeting majority is that as a general matter Republicans can’t run a government built to be run by Democrats and couldn’t fill all the appointee positions in the federal government with loyal, competent Republicans if their lives depended on it, so they put in a few friends, supporters, and contributors in the most visible spots and leave the Democrats in charge of the bureaucracy. They they spend the term being leaked, thwarted, sabotaged, and wondering why their poll numbers are swirling in the toilet.
Hopefully, the manager and change agent in Romney will come to the fore and he’ll first fire everyone he has an arguable right to fire and leave positions vacant unless he actually has a competent person to fill it; they career bureaucrats will keep the function running because they know it is more work to fix it than to just keep it going. Then he can assemble a team that knows something about governing and start redrawing some org charts to get a much flatter, more centralized organizational structure that eliminates the duplication, triplication, even quadruplication of so many functions and all the stovepiping so that the federal government can actually be an integrated organization instead of a collection of fiefdoms. But, that would take some of that actual knowing stuff about government that Republicans hate so much; it’s so much more fun to talk philosophy and have ocassional purges of the unpure.
You are right about Objectivism being the only fully consistent philosophy in opposition to the left and its ethics of altruism. But you are becoming increasingly wrong about it being seen as a “crazy” fringe group. Atlas Shrugged is now classified as a “Classic” in book stores and Ayn Rand is being quoted everywhere–even at Epcot’s American Exposition.
Objectivists just need time to educate and present their case. Objectivism is the perfect antidote to the spreading disease of leftist dogma killing the American culture.
Sadly there are still millions of such denizens lurking all over this fine nation, from Harvard, Columbia and the far shore of Berkeley.Hell, California alone is a vast barrel of poison spewing its filth from every pore.But without an adversary, what would the Noble Warrior fight for. There is no good without the knowledge of evil.Etc, Etc.
Only those harnessing the youth will be pulling any wagons.
I cannot fathom why a seemingly intelligent person would be attracted to a political system that remorselessly exterminated over 100,000,000 fellow human beings during the 20th century.
What wire remains disconnected?
What secret self-hatred exists?
It’s not “self”-hatred, but a hatred of others. Coupled with a belief in one’s own inherent perfection.
It’s the desire to rule over others, and force obeisance from them, thereby reaffirming the exaggerated self-perception of the “specialness” of the one demanding the obeisance.
And in extremis, it’s the yearning for the power to abuse, and even kill, others after they are rendered defenseless. Mainly to avoid boredom, and to avoid at all costs confronting the one’s own mortality.
The most terrifying thing, to the self-perceived enlightened, is a two-word Latin phrase; Memento Mori. Meaning, “Remember, you too will one day die”.
The concept of mortality, of their “specialness” and “wonderfulness” not saving them from Time, frightens this sort to the core of their being. And so they seek absolute power over others, either to try to stave off the inevitable- or to “console” themselves with the thought “If all else fails, I can make everybody else go first“.
Modern day leftism, Roman-style imperial rule (ala’ Nero, Tiberias, and/or Caligula). Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. And I would point out that both had their genesis in states which began as republics.
clear ether
eon
Eon, I believe that we will agree that while we may feel relieved that the philosophies of the left are headed for the dumpster the real and present danger lies in the behavior of the left when they are in their death throes. For example, the next time a Joe The Plumber challenges an authority the leftist will know that a verbal response will no longer sell but a figurative or possibly an actual swat to the head with the butt of an AK-47 will. The next time an Eon or a Yooper pipes up maybe a visit to their home by the IRS or an edict placed upon their business by the EPA will end the argument since philosophy won‘t. Give us a re-elected Obama and that will be the reality.
And sad to say, Obama might well win reelection. It ain’t over yet . . .
Chalker’s Law;
The more power the “superior one” has, the more they want, just like any other addiction. And addictive personalities seem to find a natural home on the extremes, notably the left. (Of course, they always insist that their addictions are harmless, while those of others are evil incarnate- marijuana vs. tobacco being a case in point.)
But the power must be used, as much as anything else to prove to the powerful one that he has it, and can wield it at pleasure without fear of consequences. Otherwise, he’s just… ordinary.
Progressives tend to rewrite Dean Alfange’s I Do Not Choose To Be A Common Man as
This by the way is why so many on the left are, not agnostics, but full-blooded atheists. They claim it’s based on logic, but it’s actually based on their utter rejection of the idea that there could ever be anything superior to them. Plus, if there’s no God, no Heaven, no Hell, and no afterlife, as long as they can avoid facing the judgement of others here on Earth for their deeds, they get off scot-free no matter how heinous their behavior. It was this that led to the brutalities of all forms of socialism in the 20th Century. (And before anyone asks, the Nazis didn’t believe in the traditional Christian “afterlife”, either- look up “Himmler and Tibetan mysticism” sometime.) They may not like their own mortality, but they are perfectly willing to use it as a rationalization for not reining in their own basest instincts.
Leftism operates on the principle that non-existence is the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free Card. Which, considering their fundamental distaste for the game of Monopoly (TM), is rather ironic.
cheers
eon
“Power is meaningless to its possessor unless it can be used to oppress another- at the victim’s expense.”
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… The more the party is powerful the less it will be tolerant; the weaker the opposition the tighter the despotism… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the Priests of Power… The real power; the power we have to fight for night and day is not power over things but over men… Power is power over human beings, over the body; but above all over the mind… How does one man assert his power over another… by making him suffer… Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation… We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back… You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” George Orwell – 1984
I disagree. I think many leftist are filled with self-hatred which stems from a hatred of life and human life in particular. Leftist evironmentalist, for instance, want to lower the earth’s carbon footprint. Since humans and all animals breath out carbon dioxide, what does that tell you? Also, listen for 5 minutes to our leftist brethern over at PETA. These people explicitly state their hatred of human beings.
More personally, though and more to the point, most philosophical leftist I know–my family is full of academics, so I know a bunch of them–are pretty unhappy people.
I am also from such a family. And yes, my being a Truman/Eisenhower moderate offends them greatly.
But I disagree that their hatred is in any way self-directed. It is always an Other they hold responsible for the ills of the world, and only they, the evolved, superior “wise ones” can save the world. And of course, only they are fit to rule, and be “true custodians” of (fill in the blank).
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six shows this mindset in full panoply. The eco-activists there deploy a weaponized Ebala virus strain to attempt to wipe out humanity to “save Holy Mother Gaia”. But only after carefully immunizing themselves first. Because they, and only they, are fit to be the “conservators” of their Goddess.
The worldview of the “enlightened elite’” is a darkling twin of Linus van Pelt’s semi-humorous rejoinder, “I love Mankind, it’s just people I can’t stand!”
But in the case of progressives, it’”anyone who is not of our faithful”. Which probably explains their failure to grasp the dangers of Islamism. We see primitivist theocratic fanatics with an eschatological worldview which sees Apocalypse as a good thing. They see people who they are sure will sympathize with them, and ultimately recognize their (the progressives’) true superiority, and consequently worship and obey them as they are certain they deserve.
Never mistake Utopianism for self-hatred. And always remember that when those in search of perfection say “sacrifices must be made in the name of the Cause”, they’re never talking about themselves.
Just everyone else.
clear ether
eon
Humm, maybe, eon. I see your point, but let me make one more stab at it.
Compare the typically optimistic sense of life of a right winger–”the world is knowable, I can figure things out, I am in charge, I am responsible”–to the pessimistic sense of life of a left winger–the world is mysterious and unpredictable, people are vunerable, life is filled with woe, the strong must sacrifice for the weak”–and you can see what I am getting at. And their philosophy of life seems to reflect their personal life–at least for the ones I know. They often seem envious of success, vunerable, helpless, needy, a slave to their emotions, pathologically sentimental etc. Overall an unhappy, life hating lot.
““I love Mankind, it’s just people I can’t stand!” And in the case of the left AND the right, the people they can’t stand are the ones who see things the other way. I think that we have to take “people” as a given, unless we plan on exterminating the other half, which fortunately has NOT been the American way.
The Left’s time has come, and is going, if not gone yet. Their best years were the seventies, where the glorious revolution seemed possible and John Lennon’s Imagine was the world that all true liberals aspired to. The Left these days is now older, sadder, greyer but no wiser. Their hate stems from the realisation that the Utopian dream is now out of reach, and of course it is the fault of the conservatives for denying it to them, when in reality it was never achievable at all.
How sad to come to the conclusion that you have been left to gather dust on the shelf, while the bright lights of the future hover over younger, smarter and better-equipped selves. The GOP ‘bench’ at the convention was full of talent and vision. The DNC have only a faded President who has reached his use-by-date, and a bunch of bitter and twisted pink vaginas babbling inanely ever on about abortion and gay marriage.
I’m starting to think that future generations will associate this time period with Tea Partiers/ Libertarians in the same way that we associate the 60′s with hippies & leftist.
Whatever one thinks of its philosophy or methods, the Left once upon a time did care about bettering the condition of the “working class” and poor. It won many battles furthering those interests, many decades ago.
Today’s Left is an entirely different animal. Leftism today is either hollow sloganeering that attempts to glorify and conceal naked opportunism and cronyism, bitter paleo Marxism, or simple negativism. The latter form, the most common among leftist voters, consists entirely of distinguishing oneself from the stupid ones, the evil ones, the greedy and clueless ones. The Out Crowd, as contrasted with the In Crowd. It defines self entirely as that which one is not. It is a pose. It has no convictions other than the inherent and unquestioned superiority of those who parrot the script, the catechism, the unexamined orthodoxy of Cool Kids popular mythology of the moment. It doesn’t think, it never questions.
That’s why it hasn’t changed in a century or noticed how the world has changed around it. It is inner focused vanity, worn like jewelry, the better to impress one’s friends.
You pretty much hit it on the head. The Left keeps alive battles long since won. Go look at the MPLS YWCA homepage and the linked rhetoric and you’d think it pre-dated Brown vs. Board of Education.
The Left has more or less adopted the views of the black political and academic Left that the echoes of slavery are still with us and Jim Crow is alive and well in other forms.
The problem is that they can’t actually show it. What they can show are racist Hallmark cards that say “black ho’” and “you people,” spoken by Ann Romney, as racist as well. These people seem to quite literally believe that Romney and the GOP speak an internally understood code that sneers at black people and appeals to a KKK GOP base.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Dem Party has been taken over by people who are conspiracy theorists and borderline paranoid. Liberals operate in a default scenario where they are Robin Hood and the Rainbow Coalition, including the entirety of the Third World if they can sneak in, are the band of unjustly served merry men. The GOP of course, means to steal or keep as much as possible.
It is not only a child’s view of the world but that of a particularly nervous and even cowardly one. Awareness of social position trumps raw vocational skill, thus the onset long ago of ethnic studies. To say the the Dem Party is a suicide cult isn’t that much of an exaggeration given their willingness to hand over the exceptionalist keys of America to peasants and any Muslim strident enough to be insistent. In fact, it is the American Left that are the ones guilty of radicalizing and politicizing these entities just enough so they know how to play the victim game, exploit it and sue where necessary.
That was what I was going to say. They keep Jim crow alive, because without it, they don’t have a mission any more. Their latest boogeyman, “pollution”, is also largely a thing of the past. Thus the “carbon” invention. Carbon (in its dioxide form) was chosen as their new Goldstein, because it’s so fundamental to modern life. Notice that this wasn’t such a central theme when the USSR was still alive.
They have abortion enshrined in the constitution for the foreseeable future, and yet the donkey party is going to be an abortion fest. Why? Because they can only refight old battles that they’ve already won.
Old leftists never die, they just return to their glory days. They’re old, gray, and no longer relevant. So they raise younger warriors in their image. Which is why these latter-day hippies look so ridiculous.
Has it occured to anyone that what we have here is the Jamestown experiment (early American history, not the one in South America), except it’s on a major, continental scale? Do we recall the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need?”
It failed.
And it was a very bad moment that brought about the change. You know, death and all.
Could it be that we have come so many years forward, 400 years or so, and we suffer the loss of a huge percentage of our population before we re-learn the “if you don’t work, you don’t eat” rule? Human nature is a real bitch sometimes.
The epiphany was a fine example of one of Hegel’s basic insights, which is that the world is constantly changing, and ideas must accordingly be updated, or become anachronisms
Hegel’s ideas are anachronism. (Self-exclusion is a fallacy.)
Not altogether. Hegel wrote that philosophy always arrives late on the scene and so can only reflect on what has actually occurred. He also took note of the role of contingency in historical affairs. Yet his basic insight is correct, that ultimately history advances because of the decisions individuals self-conscious of their potential for freedom make, those that they actualize through their work.
Some developments he could not foresee: that women would enter civil society, that in countries like America (which he wrote was the land of the future and so will not receive the same analysis as Europe) upward-mobility would blur class distinctions.
His basic insight of the role of conflict in human affairs, however, remains true. The Frankfurt School saw that Communism would not appeal to the “working class” in America, so they invented deconstruction, which has been a powerful if demonic force for the last forty years. Hopefully, however, this negation is meeting its own negation as people realize just how destructive deconstruction has become. On a more fundamental level, however, Hegel was correct in demonstrating that there will always be a master-slave dialectic in one guise or another. And (although this is not precisely an Hegelian insight) there will always be an envious party of Progressives that can’t stand the success of those who work hard, eschew blaming others, and who for the most part practice self-reliance but sometimes do stray into cheating and to exploiting the ignorance and indolence of the less energetic.
Whatever one thinks of its philosophy or methods, the Left once upon a time did care about bettering the condition of the “working class” and poor
It is crucial to the ongoing existence of the Left that people believe such poppycock as this.
That is not, and never was, true. Those were liberals, not Leftists; don’t be confusing the two.
I cannot fathom why a seemingly intelligent person would be attracted to a political system that remorselessly exterminated over 100,000,000 fellow human beings during the 20th century.
Then you are not equipped to stop them.
(Hint: check your premises. Everything is comprehensible and explicable so long as you are willing to question *every* assumption, to travel any ideological road to its logical destination. And I mean ***every***. Do not fall for the error of projecting any of your own decency onto them.)
“Check your premises.”
Love it. Another serving of Miss Rand, if you please?
From what I can see from where I live, there has been no “working class” in America since before World War Two. We view ourselves as the producing class as opposed to the entitlement class. My family includes a variety of engineers, artists, teachers, and medical workers. For example, my oldest son-in-law is an operator in an oil refinery, my daughters are a stay at home mother and an occupational therapist. My youngest son-in-law does video for NASA, I am a physics teacher, my father a chemical engineer, and my wife taught biology. We are Republicans because we think of ourselves as the producing class; we do valuable things with our lives. On the other hand, during a large part of my career I taught in schools where many of my students came from the entitlement class. They got “free” lunches from the federal government and their parents, when present, received largess from various government programs. As a general rule they are Democrats and those of us in the producing class view them as parasites. I always assumed that it was my job to turn as many of them from the entitlement class to the producing class as possible.
Unfortunately the Left has gained a shot of new blood by coopting the environmental movement through the “Global Warming Crisis.” However needful some regulation is, for local air quality, for fishery management, clean water . . . the globalization of the “Solution” created by declaring CO2 a pollutant, with carbon permits, cap-and-trade . . .
All taught in elementary school.
Truly, a brilliant revitalization of the Left. They are going to have to be fought all over again when today’s children grow up.
I saved your column as i would a pack of dry matches on a camping trip!
I don’t know about “the extraordinary depth of the conservative political team”. Romney himself isn’t terribly conservative, and when you haven’t got it at the top, it’s hard to see the depth as anything real. Mitt’s a conservative compared to the sophmore-level socialist presently in the White House, but that’s setting the bar awfully low. Certainly when Mitt was our governor here in Massachusetts he was hard to see as any sort of conservative. We all know about the Mass health care experiment, and Mitt’s failure to protect the Second Amendment rights of Bay State citizenry was almost epic. A more reliable conservative than myself could doubtless list more failings.
While I believe I have subconsciously known this for years, I have recently started to articulate to others that the “working class” is a fantasy.
And a dangerous one at that, for it sends a message that – unless you have the pocket depth and/or credentials to be considered one of our allegedly Best and Brightest – that you CAN’T get ahead in life without the intervention of the BB’s. This leads to the suppression, in the lives of millions, of America’s historical ace-in-the-hole: the respect for, and exercise of, personal initiative, that has led us to be a nation of millions of problem-solvers.
As long as people leave the thinking and initiative to “experts” and “authorities” in government/unions/Big Business to tell them what to do and take steps to secure their future FOR them, they remain highly vulnerable to the bottom dropping out from under them when – for reasons from lack of foresight to privileged corruption – the “experts” and “authorities” fail to deliver that future. We are already seeing this play out today, from Detroit to DC – those that already put their faith in these “betters” are among the worst off among us today, because the approaches of the “betters” are not providing sustainable prosperity to the believers.
OTOH, those who took the initiative to “think like businessmen” and took the initiative to implement AND KEEP DECISION-MAKING CONTROL OF prudent planning, sound financial management (both for the here-and-now, and to secure their future), developing/maintaining and ENFORCING their worth in the marketplace … and prioritizing all this hard work over the notion that swilling their $tarbucks$ and twiddling their iThingys is an unalienable right, to the point of deferred gratification … are the ones who are better off today, and the vast majority of these are not part of the much-scapegoated “1%”!
The sooner we restore the respect, the expectation, and the freedom to exercise personal initiative in this nation, the sooner America will once again be “exceptional”, instead of heading backwards into the soft serfdom of Euro-style “social democracy” that is unsustainable over the long term.
Another interesting read by M. Ledeen. Thanks. Having read “The Amateur” by Klein recently and having sparred with many a lefty professionally over esoteric environmental issues it came to me that they (ie, lefties) might all be amateurs. When you finally get to have a discussion (ie debate) over a topic in which you are the expert they always come up wanting. Since this is has always been the case in my subject matter expertise I’m wondering if it’s the case in others?
I know it was certainly true of lefty public employee union reps; the best ones were barely competent, but they sure thought highly of themselves. I don’t think I ever faced a union rep from one of the truly ideological unions like AFSCME who was actually prepared or who had his/her witnesses prepared. They are so smug about their essential rightness on things that they NEVER think about what the other guy might do. How many times I’ve turned a union’s case on its head by cross-examination of their poorly selected and prepared witnesses! What I hated most was arbitrators who were so concerned about a grievant getting a fair hearing and decent representation that the arbitrator would step in and essentially put on the case that the union was failing to present. Some of the arbitrators were formidable adversaries.
The union rep would walk in to an arbitration with his elaborately prepared case notebook of all the evidence he planned to introduce, his written out opening statement even when he wasn’t going first, his written out questions for each witness, including those for which he wasn’t the proponent so he had no real way of knowing what they’d say (there’s usually no discovery/depositions in arbitration), and a written out closing argument even though he had no real idea where the evidence might take the arguments. They were so confident that they were so much smarter that they’d just assume that you were going to do what they planned for you to do. When you didn’t do what they’d planned, they had no Plan B and just sat and whined or yelled at you, the arbitrator for letting you do it, or both. In my highlights reel in my head is an AFSCME rep screaming at the arbitrator demanding that I put on a case (I asserted a legal affirmative defense and didn’t call any witnesses or offer any evidence other than the law and policy I was relying on and he was totally unprepared.). When I won, the union was raging to their media buddies that we’d somehow tainted the arbitrator; it was inconceivable that they could be wrong. This is so pervasive on the left that they do it in almost every endeavor. When the Democrats took over in ’94 all the old LR hands who knew what they were doing left the labor relations function. We were all replaced by a bunch of kids who got their training from union hands and Democrats. When I inherited those kids on my return to the Executive Branch in ’99, I found them doing the same things; laying out elaborate plans for how hearings were going to go, being expected by their bosses to write out all the questions for all the witnesses and submit them to the boss, who didn’t know s&*t about LR, before the hearing. The Democrats were still in charge when I came back and I got to do the carpet dance over not writing everything out before a hearing and giving it to her. I told her only an idiot would write out questions for a witness whose testimony he hadn’t heard and that if I did write them out I wouldn’t give them to her because I knew she’d call the union rep and ask him what he thought of my questions. I offered to continue the discussion with the commissioner and chief of staff who’d lured me back. Never heard from her again about it. Unlike the situation with the Obama/Soros Junta, the Democrats I worked for at that time realized they were facing an election and they had to make the government actually do some things people wanted it to do or they were going to lose, so in the last couple of years they actually tried to act like a government. Comrade Obama’s regime really has never acted like they needed the government to work in order to get re-elected. We’ll see.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the employer rep and the union rep could finish an arbitration or a day at the negotiation table and go have a drink together. As a general rule that isn’t done at all any more by the big true lefty unions. Capital cities are more segregated today than was a small Southern town in the ’50s; Rs and Ds don’t socialize and don’t even go to the same places. Outside my professional capacity, it has been at least a decade since I’ve actually talked to a Democrat. They live in their own little totally segregated world of lefties and they don’t brook argument.
“Rs and Ds don’t socialize and don’t even go to the same places. Outside my professional capacity, it has been at least a decade since I’ve actually talked to a Democrat. They live in their own little totally segregated world of lefties and they don’t brook argument.”
This is a bad sign, IMO, signaling a strong likelihood that it’s going to take a bit more than a bunch of paper pushing in order to get our country back. It’s truly disheartening. As one of my brothers has been in the habit of saying, “You don’t make enemies, you choose them. Choose them we must, then we have to defeat them in whatever means that is necessary or we are welcome to kiss our asses goodbye.
Sorry to disagree.
Look at the numbers of people in some way, some absolutely, dependent on government “largesse”, i.e other people’s money. Do you really believe these people will cut their own throats and give up their advantages. Advantages those not lucky enough or for other reasons not yet part of that System can only envy. What’s happening as example of the designs of the “left” by whatever name they call themselves in Europe now that other people’s money is running out. Are the intelligent, intellectual even, politicians and shakers and makers also dependent on the status quo accepting things must really really CHANGE. That the teat of government had run dry. Are they hell.They’re hunkering down and as usual “for the good of the people” throwing good money if there is still such a thing after bad. One thing they are not doing is a decent mea culpa and moving off center stage.
Increasing mob, sorry protest group, rule. Remember when and results of same in earlier days of last century. It can’t happen here. National Socialism right. National Socialism.
Good article, but flawed conclusion. It’s more like wishful thinking (what “should” be) than what actually is. It would require a feat of logical gymnastics to rationally deny the left’s takeover of the MSM, Christian churches, Hollywood, the university, the courts, the jobsite, etc., and still maintain that the ideas of limited government, personal freedom, and individual responsibility are winning the day, or even holding their own. And one would need to live on another planet. Wish it were as expressed, but wishin’ don’t make it so.
It’s too early to count them out yet. They do see their power beginning to falter and it is making them even crazier. In effect they are becoming more dangerous in terms of real violence. If Obama loses the election, riots aren’t out of the question either right after or during the next four years. For that matter, deliberate sabotage by executive order and regulatory fiat isn’t out of the question either. Clinton did some petty stuff when he left the White House, most childish vandalism, but left a few other little messes. Obama though has already stated he wants to wreck the system so a bit of slash and burn isn’t out of the realm of possibility, nor is the thought that he might rabble rouse all during a Romney presidency.
The old definition of “working class” might be obsolete but it isn’t gone completely. It is much more complicated now. Even producers and consumers is too general. What we have now is a mash of business owners, workers, professionally unemployed, the underemployed, bureaucrats, the elite all jumbled up with a vast network of government handouts and vote buying schemes. Perhaps there are three classes now: Government (bureaucrats, politicians, elite), Patrons (welfare recipients and others seeking government goodies), and Plebeians/Kulaks (business owners and others who want to stand on their own and have little to do with government). Eventually Government and its Patrons could well turn on the Kulaks for being greedy and not willing to share, etc. It’s happened in the past many, many times and never ends well.
For
a concept that accurately described a group in a society at a certain stage of industrial development, as in 18th- and 19th-century England and Europe
read:
a concept that accurately described a group in 18th- and 19th-century England and Europe.
Now it’s both simpler and truer.
The left, as we call it, can’t die because the ideology of oppression is immortal. It’s been with us since we first climbed from the primordial ooze and it will be with us until the sun goes super nova. We’re not really seeing the death of Marxism either because class warfare has existed almost as long as oppression.
Plus, the rage and hatred is not new… what do Karl Marx and Barack Obama have in common? Both failed at private enterprise and both blamed society for their failure. The same holds true for the disaffected youth – they blame society for their lack of advancement, thus society is evil and must be destroyed.
It’s also not difficult to understand why leftism is the party of failed intellectuals – if they, who style themselves as the best and brightest, can’t succeed then surely something is wrong with the world. It’s not the drug addition, it’s not the laziness, it’s not the haphazard work ethic, it’s not the drinking or womanizing, it’s a fundamental failure of society that they are not masters of all they survey. Leftism is just the merger of Sloth and Envy and it will disappear when humans are no longer failed beings.
“It is reduced to fighting for political power alone, and its weapons are what we recently called “the politics of personal destruction.” It’s the only way they can hope to win. None of us should be surprised when the leftists accuse the righties of pushing old women off of cliffs, or murdering cancer-afflicted employees, or waging war on women, and so forth. They have to destroy their opponents one by one. They no longer have a “movement” of any significance.”
Exactly. To the best of my knowledge, Obama has yet to make a single argument on why he should be re-elected. He has not said what he would do with another four years in office, he has not established any goals, and he certainly has not mentioned any great pieces of legislation he wants to get through Congress. Nothing. The only thing he keeps on saying is “Give me another four years.” To do what? Give us more of what we just went through over the last four years? Give me a break.
So all they have left is the personal destruction of your opponent. Destroy his character or mock him, do anything thing you can to destroy him, EXCEPT engage him on the battlefield of ideas. And I think this is beginning to sink in with a lot of Americans. Regardless of what the Obama people may think, Americans are not stupid. Americans see what is happening in Greece and in the rest of Europe and they know that this is what’s going to happen to us unless we stop this madness of never-ending spending and bloated government. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m beginning to get this feeling that the election isn’t going to even be close this fall. I think Obama is going to go the way of Jimmy Carter. All Americans have to do is see Romney do reasonably well in the debates and they will elect him, just like they did with Ronald Reagan. I think the mood in America is getting ugly right now, mostly because of how the Democrats are waging this war, and it IS a war. Expect them to get even nastier as we get closer to the election, because that’s all they have left, anger and insult. When it comes to new ideas, the Democrats are fresh out of those.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” George Orwell, “1984,” Chapter 42
It’s true that the Left is out of new ideas, and its intellectual capacity is essentially at an end. It has no effective arguments to offer, and everything it espouses has been tried and has failed. But that is no reason to assume that it will therefore shrivel up, die, and leave the stage. There hasn’t been a new idea in North Korea for decades, and yet it is still the darkest area on earth–all the time, but visibly so at night. The Left still maintains tight control in distinct places, and it does not depend upon intellectual vigor to do so. As Ledeen and others observe, it HAS no intellectual vigor. But the logic of its power requires no intellectual vigor. Muscle will do, and that is why it is still on the rise–even, and maybe especially, in such places as the United States of America.
thanks, betsybounds. the left didn’t rise much in the 2010 elections, its leader is at 42-43% favorables in the Gallup poll, and it is in mortal peril in these elections. i wouldn’t say it is “still on the rise…” here at least. And while the left won the latest French elections, it seems slated to lose, bigtime, in Holland later this month…
Mr. Ledeen, I hope you didn’t take my comment amiss. There’s an interesting conversation to be had over whether the Left will prosper in the coming election cycles–here or, as you point out, in Holland. I agree with you that, if we actually have the elections and they actually reflect popular will, the Left is most likely finished. There’s been a fair bit of speculation, of course, in various places over whether or not we will see “free and fair” elections in the near future; some even consider the possibility that the elections themselves will be completely suspended.
I myself have thought for some time that the US is the last opportunity for Leftist revolution–and they know it. I think sometimes that they have long believed that this country presents them with the one thing they may absolutely need but have not yet had: A wealthy society with which to start. They will not give it up without a pretty good fight, is my guess.
“it [the American Marxist Left] HAS no intellectual vigor. But the logic of its power requires no intellectual vigor. Muscle will do…”
“Is it possible or impossible to warn someone of danger? How many witnesses have been sent to the West in the last 60 years? How many waves of immigrants? How many millions of persons? They are all here. You meet them every day. You know who they are: if not by their spiritual disorientation, their grief, their melancholy, then you can distinguish them by their accents by their external appearance… Coming from different countries and without consulting with one another…they have brought to you exactly the same experience; they tell you exactly the same thing: they warn you of what is already happening. It’s characteristic that communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://www.alor.org/Library/LegacyofTerror.htm
The root of the problem for the left is a lack of insight–self-examination. They don’t seem to examine the processes they have used to come to the conclusions they embrace. The problem as described by Mr. Ledeen is that they don’t realize that categories not based in the natural world are artificial and not static. In fact they can exist in some cases only ephemerally. They have it turned around, thinking that natural categories are in flux (evolution), while artificial ones are eternal. They then take these artificial categories and turn them in their own minds into universals or forms. While the average person may not think of these same things in the same ways as I have described, the average person does have the capacity to recognize these facts on a subliminal level and sees the fool for what he is.
yes, teaparty, joe sixpack knows that the world is changing. he used to vote democrat. now he’s rethinking the whole thing.
Progressives are regressive. Same old talking points they’ve used for forty years.
Yes. Same talking points. Only now they are “old” and therefore “regressive.”
meet at the outer limits,
personalities are unpredictable,
events have unintended consequences,
and the law of the conservation of matter applies
to thought as well as to physics.
obama’s god damn america mindset is still very much in force, and he could be reelected.
I don’t think that the Left’s ideas were any better in the 1960′s than they are today. As a libertarian conservative (if that’s actually a thing), I’ve felt intellectually isolated my whole life, like only me and a few other odd, off-beat souls really got it. I always figured I was just vastly outnumbered. The difference today is that the Internet gives us nonconformist nonLefties a medium by which we can propogate our message, as much to each other as to the Left. We finally realize that we are not alone. That was *my* epiphany, and it didn’t happen until September 12, 2009. But the greater cohesion of the Right doesn’t mean that the Left is dead, or even dying. There will always be a market for those who want to arrogate power by twisting democracy into a system where two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for dinner. It means that the Left will just have to find a way to destroy or co-opt the Internet the way they learned to co-opt the schools and the MSM. They have to control the message. That’s what they’ve lost. Their ideas have always been crap, but they will always be there. If the Left didn’t realize that their ideas were crap after the Soviet Union collapsed, they never will.
Debate: Bill McKibben vs. Alex Epstein on Fossil Fuels
by Alex Epstein
July 30, 2012
“On November 5, I will be debating Bill McKibben, considered “world’s leading environmentalist” by some, on the proposition: “Fossil fuels are a risk to the planet.” I will be arguing that fossil fuels dramatically improve the planet for human beings.”
http://www.masterresource.org/2012/07/debate-350-orgs-bill-mckibben-vs-cips-alex-epstein/
Liberalism is the problem….we just sit and beotch about the symptoms on a daily basis…..
Its much like an addiction, the problem has to be recognized before any further actions can be effective.
The real race about to be lost is the number of voters addicted to Liberalism permanently……welfare, entitlement, food stamps, unemployment etc etc.
The Marxist Left is dying in the United States because the so-called proletariat class (non-disabled government-dependents) is not oppressed under a system of true Free Enterprise. The poor in a truly free society, where each man lives by the sweat of his own labor, ends up as the small segment of men who refuse to sweat for their property or the small segment who steal property. The proletariat were oppressed under Medieval Feudalism, and they are oppressed under Crony Capitalism (Economic Fascism), so in order to finally eliminate any justification for Marxism, where some men “do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor” in order to irrationally equalize property outcome, we must outlaw Crony Capitalism and commit ourselves to re-establishing real Free Enterprise where each man may “do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor” in order to rationally equalize property rights.
“With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.” Abraham Lincoln
Barry Loberfeld does a really good job explaining this – that under Free Enterprise there is no such thing as an oppressed proletariat class.
“The history of all existing society,” he and Engels declared, “is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf … oppressor and oppressed, stood in sharp opposition to each other.” They were quite right to note the political castes and resulting clashes of the pre-liberal era. The expositors of liberalism (Spencer, Maine) saw their ethic, by establishing the political equality of all (e.g., the abolition of slavery, serfdom, and inequality of rights), as moving mankind from a “society of status” to a “society of contract.” Alas, Marx the Prophet could not accept that the classless millenium had arrived before he did. Thus, he revealed to a benighted humanity that liberalism was in fact merely another stage of History’s class struggle — “capitalism” — with its own combatants: the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie.” The former were manual laborers, the latter professionals and business owners. Marx’s “classes” were not political castes but occupations. Today the terms have broadened to mean essentially income brackets. If Smith can make a nice living from his writing, he’s a bourgeois; if Jones is reciting poetry for coins in a subway terminal, he’s a proletarian.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
The Left is going “extremely” off their own cliff.
Thanks, Obama Hussein!
There were so many great lines, but I do agree about the Ryan picture of a college student living in his childhood bedroom being the best. So many layers of biting truth!
Leftists are still children. Not grown up.
I also think Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico had the story of the convention, and it illustrates your own point.
“Damn, we’re Republicans.”—says it all.
The ONE true insight that stands out, awakened head and broad shoulders above all the others from the GOP convention—of which there were, gracefully, many—was delivered by Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico.
Too bad it wasn’t on prime time!
If the Romney camp has any brains, it’ll make an ad with her telling how she “became” a Republican.
The insight—that she and her husband were ALREADY Republicans, and just didn’t know it.
I am plus-perfect positive that this is true for the vast majority of Americans—at least 80%. This is really quite easy to prove.
The daily ACTIONS of each human across the vegetated plains and within, even, the high-density populated cities, are 99.99% LAWFUL. Even criminals don’t break the law, most of the time.
Maybe the arrival of Romney-Ryan on the scene will be the Universe’s reminder, or reflection, of this, and a lot of “ripe” people will come home to their true political party.
Watch the slugs, as they squirm under the “salt” of truth!
I am convinced though that there is a sizable number of voters out there who continually vote Dem, even though they are true “Republicans” because of the hard-line stance the party continues to take with regard to the social issues. I firmly believe that many an election across the full spectrum of public offices have been lost to the Pubs because of this.
….lost to the
PubsDems…..The delirious reactions from the left to the masterwork of acting performed by Clint Eastwood tells us everything we need to know about how culturally and historically dead the left is.
They are as scary as “real” zombies, dead but walking, and thick as a brick (no offense intended for seriously working bricks).
There are two major political groupings in America, the Left and the non-left. The Left is small but powerful, united by their primary devotion to government and (necessarily) political power.
The non-left is diverse but large, not primarily motivated by political power and not easily united. What they have on their side is truth, reality and a primary interest doing what is right and practical.
Well, you know, Hegel lived at the end of an age that was very much like our own–an antithetical age, a theory-loving age (and also the age of the absolute rulers).
But i’m inclined to think he almost had it kind of backwards. He thought of the antithesis as the revolutionary movement, but actually the antithesis can be gradual in nature, as seen in the term “progessivism.” Property rights, for example, can be undone gradually, for the very reason that they are concrete.
But the antithesis itself is totalitarian in nature. It undoes property rights from Plato to Marx in favor of absolute rights, but absolute rights cannot be progressively undone. They must be overthrown.
For this reason it is the conservative movements that seem more truly revolutionary. Romanticism was a revolutionary movement. The absolutism of pure reason (“Rationalism”) was overthrown by a new construct of intellect and sense known as the Transcendental Aesthetic.
This MAY BE what is happening right now. We’ve had 150 years of the antithesis known as Modernism and its economic theory, Socialism. Both are totalitaian in nature, and both seem to have lost their appeal.
Now all we need is a Kant and a Hegel to send them toppling.
I spent my college and early adult years on the Left, had a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book in my jeans’ pocket in college, and went so far on the professional Left as to work as a union official and an operative for the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. I learned very quickly once I left school that Lennon was right, if you were carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you weren’t going to make it with anyone anyhow. The Mao and Che stuff can only survive in the hothouse of youth and campus life or in the closed circles of the leftist special interest groups. I’ll admit that I settled pretty comfortably into being a trade-unionist Democrat. My epiphany was the ’80 election season and its aftermath. Like most Alaskans, I voted not so much for Reagan as against Carter who had been instrumental in terrible things having been done to our State. But in doing so, I began to have a very different view of the people with whom I was associated in the Democrat Party of that time and I didn’t like the view. I went to a navel gazing conference in the winter of ’81 to discus how “we” had lost our last statewide officeholder and it became overwhelmingly apparent to me and several others of the old-fashioned trade union/New Deal Democrat stripe that there was no place in that Party for us. Economically you had to be a closet communist, foreign policy required suppressing US influence and self-determination throughout the world, and you had to be fully in support of a leftist assault on every “American” institution; family, gender roles, life itself, authority relationships. These people were deeply, fundamentally anti-American and bent on transforming America into some other country. That conference was my last participation in anything remotely resembling a Democrat Party activity.
The real shape of the post-McGovern Democrat Party developed here in Alaska much faster than in most of the rest of the Country. The McGovernites actually took over the Party and the Legislature in ’74 and bolted the Old Guard Democrats and Labor and supported a Republican, Jay Hammond, as Governor. While Hammond was nominally a moderate Republican, his administration was anything but moderate and the Democrat Legislature of those days was outright radical. Alaska was the Baby Boomer State in those days; the population doubled in the ’70s and most of that increase was rootless 20 and 30-somethings fresh off the roiling campuses of the ’60s. The lefties misjudged both their influence and power. They thought they were still back on campus. The reality was that all those ‘Boomers were trying to make a living in the crazy economy of the Carter years and the staggering inflation of Pipeline Era Alaska. Unless you were being paid to have them, you couldn’t keep the crazy ideas you had smoking dope in a college dorm in the ’60s. I was being paid to keep most of those ’60s ideas but the people I represented weren’t, even the union members realized that somebody had to make some money somewhere or they couldn’t keep working and we on the union side had to understand that our private sector members were very conservative, especially on social and national defense issues.
As we now know to be a familiar pattern when lefties get control, the Left here overplayed their hand and provoked a vehement reaction which in a decade turned Alaska from one of the most Democrat states to one of the most Republican. Instead of adapting to the changing electorate, the very leftist Democrats for a decade or so went further and further left and became less and less influential. The old trade union dominated AFL-CIO faded away and by the ’90s the AFL-CIO was dominated by public employees and was the storm troops for the new Clinton model leftists who could lie so much better and could sound more Republican than most Republicans. Skillful lying got them a two term Democrat governor in the mid-’90s and an Anchorage mayor who is now a US Senator.
I spent the last years of my government career representing the State in its relations with its unionized employees, the largest group of which was represented by the very leftist American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). When AFSCME came on the scene in the late ’80s, I was a line-level labor relations hand representing the State in grievance arbitration, labor board hearings, and contract negotiation. I learned that the World had moved in organized labor; these people couldn’t care less about the wages, hours, and conditions of their members. They viewed collective bargaining simply as politics by other means viewed everything through a political lens. Over time I renewed my acquaintance with Mao, Che, and, especially, Alinsky since “Rules” was the AFSCME playbook.
The new incarnation of the US Left that emerged in the ’00s is very different from the older incarnation of either the ’60s or the ’30s. It remains communist to the core but unlike the communists of the earlier times it hides its red flags and insists that it is “moderate” and “mainstream.” It is very much the Gramsci/Alinsky school of communism; the “Get Clean for Gene” campaign of ’68 writ large. Everything about the Left today is a lie and the leaders all know it and are willful about it. They grade each other on how well they lie. This was best evidenced in the way they dealt with Clinton; the media didn’t criticize his lying, they graded it. They siezed the Congress in ’06 with Rahm Emmanuel’s fake Republicans and the White House in ’08 with their fake “moderate,” Comrade Obama. There is a column in today’s Anchorage Daily News by a University of Alaska poli-sci professor who insists that Comrade Obama isn’t a “socialist,” is in fact quite conservative, and we on the right who try to call him a socialist are just doing so as a dog-whisle for racism. That sort of thing has been the communist playbook since Clinton and Gore took over the DLC back in their Governor and Senator days; they put the attractive, smiling face out there, insist they really are very reasonable and moderate, and LIE about everything.
The reason they’re so angry and desperate these days is that too many people have figured out that they’re lying. Most of Rahm’s fake Republicans were ousted by ’10. I don’t know that enough have figured it out to pitch Comrade Obama out of office, but enough have figured it out that the Left can no longer govern by legitimate democratic means and Comrade Obama is increasingly having to resort to extralegal and undemocratic means to accomplish his objectives and the apparatchiks are becoming more and more blatant with their lying. But at the heart of their anger is their deep contempt for all those people who are just too stupid, too unenlightened to accept having their consciousness raised enough to see that the left is superior and should be our leaders and we should accept that without thought or question. In that, the Left of today is just like the old red flag-flying communists of the past.
It seems like they turn out some mean, stubborn politicians up there — Ted Stevens, Frank Murkowski, Lisa Murkowski.
Alaska politics is rought and tumble and there is a formidable left here heavily augmented by greenies/lefties from all over the Country. When I was Alaska’s head of labor relations for most of the term Swartzenegger’s guy and I were the only two Republican appointee heads of labor relations in the Country. Most Blue places are so deeply Blue that Republicans only have a presence in the hinterlands. Most Red places are so deeply Red that Democrats/lefties only have a presense in the largest cities and in college towns. Alaska is in play in most elections and it produces some real brawlers in its political class.
Year after year it’s the same old thing from the left. Some conservatives have called the steadfastness of their beliefs religious-like. But the Democrat Party’s true believers aren’t likely to have an epiphany anywhere or at any time over their party’s failures or over Barack Obama’s disastrous presidency, which is why their party has to be voted down to a powerless remnant of its former self this November.
Repeal Obamacare. Repeal Obama.
LAMBRO: Obama’s guilty silence No apology for economic sins By Donald Lambro-The Washington Times Thursday, August 30, 2012
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/30/obamas-guilty-silence/
Politics has been driven by identity politics for at least a generation. The GOP and the Dems both got lost in the weeds. It ended up as class warfare, it got ugly.
But now the toxins of racism and victimhood are clearing out of the system, and the GOP began to return to its roots of individualism and small government. So the GOP thus became the natural home of real and true multi-ethnic standard bearers. Mia Love and Marco Rubio are not victims–they are the leaders of the post-racism future.
I’m not sure the modern Left – hardcore ideological “Reds” excepted – believe in a working class anymore. The working class has been replaced by a patchwork of minorities and fringe groups, all of whom are perceived as effectively disenfranchised and discriminated against. The one thing they supposedly have in common is that they are not allowed to enjoy the fruits of the “American Dream” as fully as members of other groups. They fail to prosper, either because the “System” intentionally shuts them out or because of the lingering effects of racism – or both. It is the avowed mission of the new Left (Progressives or whatever you want to call them) to “level the playing field” – to adjust the system so that everyone can benefit equally. Nothing else matters. We all know how they do it: wealth redistribution, racial and other preferences, special laws designed to protect “vulnerable populations,” and massive entitlement programs.
None of this has anything to do with the “working class.” The only people who still use that rhetoric in earnest are actual hammer-and-sickle Communists – fortunately a minority in American politics.
We still need to recognize – yet again the smallest, and weakest link and yet the most important link in our cultural chain is the individual. If 23 million are out of work, (I think far more) then of those earners a substantial percentage have families, or parents or children, its far more than 23 million, more like the 100 million now on some type of Govt. assistance.
Of that percentage, how many are actually going to process an positive feeling about Obama for another 4 years?
Here is where I think Dick Morris has it correct, “They (The “O” Administration) have hurt to many people for two long. The blame game only works for so long, The MSM can only cover up for so long and they are not at your dining room table nightly. The internet -(this company PJM) and others have basically leveled out the information playing field, the younger group is more sophisticated and uses this technology, they don’t watch MSM.
If Morris, who is a long time observer of the American political culture is correct- and even if “O” does start a war – Morris asks (paraphrasing) looking across the political landscape that exists what is the vision which attracts you? His answer is its not Obamas’
Finally: The 2016 film looked like it was going to play at only two theaters in Phoenix, now its playing in over 15 multi cinemas. And its still drawing folks in. This expansion of screens nationwide is another example of folks looking for information.
As a cultural and a people we have a lot of work to do, people far wiser than myself have posted a plethora of very insightful pieces on this subject for several years. I have gained much insight from my fellow PJM commenters.
I would only add the work we are currently engaged in and have been since the days of the Denver Greek Columns does not end on Nov 6 2012, or 2016. Repair work takes a generation. I know a little about this as I teach in a for profit educational system. We have a generation or two to recapture the culture and finally banish the progressives and liberals to the desert of political thought.
Check “6″
yes, cultural shifts are slow and sometimes reversible. the transition from what was to what will be also depends on real events, on winning and losing. Hegel concluded that Napoleon was a “world-historical” leader after the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon told his commanders what would happen on the battlefield, hour by hour. This current shift, which is global, took on critical mass with the fall of the Soviet Empire. We have many tough fights ahead, against the jihadis, against the control of education by the anachronistic “left,” against multiculturalism and political correctness.
The struggle against evil will not end in this life…
Good point. If you had told me in, say, 1976 that there would be a conservative backlash in 1980, I wouldn’t have believed it. Jimmy Carter was that decade’s Obama. Not to draw too close a parallel, but maybe Romney is our decade’s Reagan.
Clint Eastwood removed all the “progressive” taboos on treating Obama like a person instead of a deity. In twelve minutes he stripped Godhood from the President and restored mental health to federal politics in America.
That’s what you call an epiphany.
The Left is like the monster in the movie that is impossible to kill, and it just keeps coming back. Like the Terminator or The Thing.
It is going to require extraordinary effort to get rid of, like bed bugs. Meticulous, thoughtful, and thorough determined eradication from all levels of government.
I recall reading in “Vixi”, the auto-biography of Richard Pipes, Boris Souvarine being mentioned.
He wasn’t the only one to make the journey from one side of the political spectrum, to the other, via growing up.
For part of growing up is reducing the list of what is considered to be taboo, on the basis of subjective analysis.
Michael,
What you say is true. The corollary to your argument is that the Left must continually invent reasons why fewer and fewer people find their ideas palatable nowadays. “Racism,” “false consciousness,” Gramscian conspiracy theories about rich people and corporations and cultural imperialism–any and all explanations except the obvious: that people don’t want to be lorded over and robbed by a huge state.
Ryan’s best line? ‘Trying to sail on Yesterday’s wind’.
The poetic sadness of it reinforces the truth of it!
Epiphany!
I spent my working career in the center of the ‘Working Class’, the construction industry.
Already, by the early 70′s when I was a 20 something project engineer, construction was no longer the ‘Lift that bale, tote that barge’ kind of job. Breaking a sweat happens outside, because of the heat of the day, not the physical stain of the work (to preempt the naysayers, yes there are still periods of labor, usually moving materials into place, a team job that is done for a couple of hours every other day or so). Craftsmen (a more accurate term then worker) are skilled manipulators of the power tools and equipment required to do the work. Even General Laborers, the foot soldiers of a construction project are well equipped with power tools and, most importantly, skills.
In over 40 years of heavy industrial and highrise construction, I have seen a shovel used rarely, and usually after loosing an hour to find the d**n thing.
The AVERAGE construction wage is $25 for journeymen dollars base with $8-$14 fringes (this is open shop and union) This is a $52k job, the national median income. No job is overtime free…usually adding 10-15% to income. A superintendent with 20 or so years is well into 6 figures with all the associated perks.
The most notable thing about the career craftsman is the lack of reading skills. Dyslexia is probably triple the norm on a construction site. Yet, these fine people develop superior hand memories (one skill making up for another?)and still have good reasoning skills.
Construction is still one place where even a dropout, who is willing to show up every day and do the job at hand, can become a well paid middle class bread winner. (Note, unfortunately, the smaller firms are also among the greatest users of illegals).
Prior to his 0′ness, we were struggling to find reliable workers willing to learn a trade and make a living.
Point of this is to support the idea that the working class is dead. The modern construction worker is a highly skilled, highly mobile, learning individual in a vibrant and always needed industry that can’t ship its jobs overseas.
The term “bourgeois”, which the left is in love with, refereed to the Burgers of old – i.e. the skilled tradesmen who were members of their guilds. The modern counterpart to them is the union tradesman. And yet these are the people they try to pound into the classification of “proletariat”.
Now, “bourgeois” means “yuppie”. And the democrats are the party of the new bourgeois and a long list of grievance identity groups. This bears no resemblance to the old bourgeois/serf dichotomy.
Snork, all good except the ‘union’ part. Unions do not have a monopoly on skilled tradesmanship. My 40 years of management were about half and half. The take home wage differential (allowing for differences in cost of living by area) is negligible. The difference is work rules.
Ya Know….maybe we should just have a one party nation. It would sure make voting easier.
The root intellectual crisis of the Left is indeed the disappearance of the working class, but one can state it more precisely. In real Marxism, the destruction of bourgeois society and the establishment of socialism has nothing to do with idealism. It is to be the work of an immiserated proletariat, made so desperate by capitalism that they rise up and destroy it just to survive.
The problem is that the “proletariat” in industrial societies didn’t become immiserated; it became bourgeois. Capitalism did not produce equality but over time its rising tide lifted most boats.
Ever since WWII the Left has increasingly loathed working people and has struggled to find a substitute proletariat. The Third World, young people, women, ethnic minorities, urban underclasses, even Mother Earth have been proposed as the real proletariat that will inevitably rise up in desperation and destroy capitalism — with a little guidance (meaning:control) by the professional Left.
It never works. Either capitalist dynamism catches up with the Left and lifts the boats or else the chosen group believes the propaganda and destroys itself through Socialist mismanagement. The Third World of the 50′s and 60′s drank the kool-aid and took the Socialist route. Result: those new nations were devastated before they even started their history and are now geopolitically irrelevant. Capitalism is already cleaning up the environment, making the Green path to leftist domination a back number. The Left is only popular with groups that have been captivated by some powerful symbolism and support the left against their own interests: American blacks and Jews, educated women, etc.
The Left is convinced that working people ony support the Right because of “false consciousness.” The irony is that false consciousness is the only the only reason that anyone except government employees supports the Left today.
You have nailed it.
It’s not just the “working class” that’s gone, it’s also “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and others. They once described real things, but no more. And yes, Old Whig, that point about false consciousness is very important. In my book on Naples, I point out that the Neapolitan poor–a truly oppressed and exploited class–hared the French Revolution, and it drove the leftist intellectuals crazy, both then and now.
Entertain this possibility: Contrary to what you say above, perhaps “the working class” never actually existed. That it (and the 3-class system it is part of) may be simply a model imposed upon reality, because it was useful for Marxist and related analyses. After all, anyone with a little skill can make a model seem to work for a long time, irrespective of it’s real accuracy.
I’m not certain this is the truth, but I suspect it is. Certainly, on every subject I have looked at, at all closely, it is clear that the standard models we were given in HS and college become more and more misleading and unreal.
As a start, is there “a working class”, or are there “working classes?” Do all the “workers” really make up a distinct class? In one case, Marxists always realized there was a problem: agriculture. Farm workers never really fit, so in Russia they became despised, as outside the system, while in China, Mao had to stand Marxism on its head to make them the core of his “proletariat.” Does that not, in itself, indicate that the whole structure may be built on sand?
This is a point too little discussed, and I think it merits consideration. Marx was so wrong about so many things; why should we exempt this point?
the right has no intellect, they have VOODOO economics, wars started by LIES,
bribery by corporations.
Another in his old bedroom masturbating over a fading, crusty Obama poster. Grow up, idiot child.
the right has no intellect
The Left confuses the mere appearances of intellect with the real thing; they prostrate themselves before credentialed idiots while ignoring the wise simply because they don’t speak the way they think “intellectuals” should.
they have VOODOO economics
As opposed to the Progressive “magic” that has made TRILLIONS disappear over the last three years … wielded by a Cult of Human Omniscience that really thinks they can run the lives of 315 million from the top down?
wars started by LIES
You mean the lie that, if you treat dictator as morally equivalent to democrat (the philosophy, not the party), the dictator will not be a threat to life and liberty? Name me ONE totalitarian regime in history that, once they started intervening beyond their borders, stopped that on their own. It is the pacifist and “realist” that facilitate “war without end”, because they fail to realize that the enemy gets a vote on whether the war goes on … unless they are DECISIVELY defeated.
bribery by corporations
Facilitated by the Progressive desire to expand our government into area after area of our lives, creating ever more opportunities for the collusion between government and wealth/business/activist that leads to such bribery.
I agree with Art … grow up, so your chair is filled with more than air.
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
Progressive trolls used to go on and on, spewing their vitriol-flecked spittle for paragraphs. How nice that this one, at least, seems to only have the energy for a few capital letters, and less than two lines of lib-talk.
Nick, have you considered coming over to the dark side of reality with the rest of us? The Force is growing here in conservative-land.
Wonderful piece with great insight.
I was reminded of those who are very proud to speak of their ethnic backgrounds and its affect on their upbringing. These bifurcated Americans who think dual citizenship is cool. They carry on the traditions of a place in time. They are in love with the countries their ancestors left over 100 years ago.
They visit the country today and wonder how they could ever have left it. But they are in love with something that no longer exits in the same way. They love it today, but don’t understand that the country their ancestors left may bear little resemblence to the one in existence today.
Not much different from the discussion above. It really has little to do with principles and a lot more to do with that is the way it is always done. Progressives are stuck in the past…maybe they should be called regressives.
U.S. Government: 94% Of U.S. Gulf Oil Production Remains Offline Published September 01, 2012 Dow Jones Newswires
http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2012/09/01/us-government-4-us-gulf-oil-production-remains-offline/
FDR warned that unionizing government employees would bankrupt the country and risk the very destruction of the democrat party. He didn’t foresee that future “progressives” would see that as a good thing.
I’ve maintained for several years that the objective of a bankrupt state is to prevent it from making war like had been so popular in the 20th Century. The Europeans thought that was a good thing, because I’m confident they never figured the US would be stupid enough to follow their lead, leaving them and everyone else defenseless.
Two iconic moments from the convention:
1. Ryan’s “faded Obama posters”
2. Eastwood’s empty chair skit
Both present useful images for the Republicans to exploit in ads, esp. when the voice over is Obama’s remark that if he can’t fix the economy he doesn’t deserve a 2nd term. Time to make him live up to one of his few useful insights.
and Michael Ledeen says the Left is dead. Pure nonsense.
He wishes it were dead, so do i, but it ain’t, and that’s that.
THE WORKING CLASS IS NOW THE NON-WORKING POOR
Just because the Left is morally bankrupt doesn’t mean it’s dead. Lies, distortions, the MSM, self-delusion, public schools, universities, Hollywood, Television shows, political correctness, etc will keep it alive. As will the Left’s alliance with Islamists.
It can’t be said enough: Political Correctness will be the death of the West.
As Joe Biden might say:
“Poor people of the World unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Too little has been, and is being, said here and elsewhere about the fairly rapid collapse of the Soviet system [from within] of total government support of vast populations such as that of Russia spread over eleven time zones and that billion-and-counting populace of the Chinese. Our public needs to be shown the gross cackling irony of Chinese Capitalism rising amongst Mao-Thought. Nowhere do we see any review of…History….and why collectivism is blatantly against Human Nature.
The Russians and their proxy satellites simply ran out of administrators of their resources because the rigid textbook Marxist idea of one-size literally fitting all categories of everything simply could not be “administered” for the benefit of vast swathes of population. Again, Human Nature trumped bulbous bureaucracy. The stark divisions of the Czarist peasants, a few kulaks, and fewer aristocrats created too much friction-tension; and because Lenin was “charismatic” enough, he was the opportunistic catalyst for Revolution.
The Chinese, having suffered periodic clay-eating during droughts and other staggering natural disasters had a vicious Civil War emerge during the 1930′s as desperate groups, desperate for any change at all, saw Russian Communism spill over the border and take hold of vast sweeps of China. Pearl Buck knew what she was writing about, and Mao Tse Tung was a brilliant leader.
Now,….what’s all that got to do with our Obama-albatross right now?
I’m hoping that enough of our Thinking Public (and I’ve got my doubts) will somehow realize that trillions of dollars of printed money with ever-decreasing purchasing power being hurled about everywhere is actually the near term equivalent of Soviet leveling and master planning for vast swathes of diverse Americans. I’m hoping (and I’ve got my doubts) that enough of the Undecided can be educated/persuaded in the very short time remaining that Obama-care spread over our whole economy simply cannot work. It’s a type of collectivism.
Romney and his organizers need to push/rush into public speeches a basic awareness of the innate fallacies of oxymoronic “Managed” Economies and adjust that complex subject so that our current generation of those with their truncated attention spans and no memories at all of History can be shaken into reality.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out for themselves.
Well, I’m not sure, exactly, that people are aware that Communism killed 100,000,000 people.
There’s that book- the big black book about communism- but it’s Big. It’s Black, it’s not got a shiny binding. It rambles. It’s all these weird case histories about strange places, written in non- English awkward phrasing. It’s a big pain in the behind to read. It has pictures, but they aren’t keyed to any essays- they’re just in the middle of the book. There isn’t any sorting of significance. It’s like going through an outbasket of someone studying some fallen empire- and it did fall. It’s about like willingly reading about the labor struggles on the plains with the railroads,blah blah blah blah blah.
I force-marched myself through part of it b/c so many other books that were reasonable length, shiny, modern, clever, well- written, kept referencing it.
It’s not in textbooks. It’s not even in regular books. It’s just some weird compilation of crappy stuff far away people did to each other. Most people have absolutely no clue. We’ve got some speech by Reagan talking about stuff- one clever little quip- ash-heap of history- and that’s it. Oh, snap. Who cares?
There isn’t even an e-book version in English.
Oh- and the pictures? The grainy, strange pictures that send everyone from there around the bend? Those are someone else’s home pictures. It’s easier figuring out what is in the photos of volcanic ash covered victims of Pompeii.
And maps? No maps, as far as I can tell. I don’t know that this town is,like, five days from that town, and it’s always on some weird train- and I don’t take trains. So it really does sound like some weird book griping about cannon mounts on stupid wooden ships.
I’m not trying to be obnoxious. Just- the communication that this book is supposed to do? Failed. When you’re selling to a Western audience something that is complex, far- away, long ago– add information. Make it easy. There are tons of other books competing for attention.
I think maybe one other book has been such a basic fail in book design- it was the gov’t/non-profit book about Arthur Ashe, supposedly written by his kid. Type didn’t match the word length, didn’t match the pictures. The kids had been trained to look for particular things when selecting books- color, word length, sentence length, size of the type- and this was so off they didn’t even try. It’s a pretty profound disrespect for book-design skills, to have made this travesty. Same thing, here.
This sounds terrible, but Holocaust museums are accessible and comprehensible, and we’re related to people like that. You know? We all have Spielberg in the family video library, and Seinfeld’s aunt for a nice dinner. Nobody cares about all the crappy stuff far away.
That’s why. The magic of capitalism hasn’t made icing to put on the horrors of communism cake.
“It is reduced to fighting for political power alone, and its weapons are what we recently called “the politics of personal destruction.” It’s the only way they can hope to win.”
Yes, none of us should be surprised of shameful and disgusting behavior by this sort of nasty people. In reality THEY are the Great Masters in sale of scandals and trumped-up charges in the right of others.
In fact, the American leftists or or more accurately “the Masters of the Power of Complicity to Evil”. They are the most sympathetic force with the evil forces that wish the destruction for America and Israel, and above all to Western culture. There is a strong sympathy and an intimate relationship between them and those who Pro-Evil anti-American from mullahs of Iran to Islamists and Islamic terrorist groups ‘Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihad…and so forth’ and from Damascus to Venezuela’s Chavez”. All are working together in the same trench!!!
Thank you, Michael.
You know folks just reading the intelligent comments on sites like this and AT proves so much as to the death of the left. The comparison between these sites and Huffpo, etc are night and day. It’s like sitting in a college class vs grade school when I consider the hollow emptiness of what they simply parrot.
You can tell an awful lot about the difference in parties just by reading the thought out comments.
The left is trying to reboot its ideas. Hardt and Negri have replaced the working class with the “multitude” that includes creative people producing “affect”. And the bourgeoisie and imperialism are replaced by Empire and “biopower”.
So that’s all right.
Great piece Michael,
No doubt the left is ideologicllybankruptand is runningoutof purpose for itsown existenc, but the mjority of them are very likely to vote for aleftist candidte, sThe republicans need to develop a platform to attract leftist defectors. It’s happened in the past when the disillusioned liberals defected the democratic party and formed neo-conservtism, loyal to the GOP to this date. The one thing that keeps many of them from joining the right is social issues, millions of them have realized that the right has the sound fiscal and foreign policy, but cant deal with social conservative views, specially attracting young tallents is vital to the right’s long term interest. There is no need to reform the whole party, attracting diversity is the key.
tks Cy, i quite agree. but the consensus on social issues is headed toward a synthesis of sorts. i think increasingly the ’cause’ of abortion is losing traction, seems that younger people don’t like it but aren’t prepared to go to war against it, for example. and “welfare reform” is a social issue, isn’t it?
I’m a career teacher thus I’ve spent my three decade career surrounded by lefties. Here are their ONLY four talking points:
1) Pay up.
2) Shut up.
3) You’re a racist. (…or some other ad hominem attack)
4) Change the subject. (…I answered that question already…)
There’s simply nothing else. They want your money so they can have power. Power for the sake of power. Are they angry? They’ve ALWAYS been angry.
Right now, the most successful countries economically are the northern european economies and Canada, with Finland widely reported as having the most balanced economy in the world. All those countries would be incorrectly referred to as socialist countries by this lot here, but are more correctly described as social democratic economies. They represent the future, not the US with its tired slogans, ignorant claims about being the best at this or that, and theocratic tendencies. The American dream is alive and well in Denmark!
What’s Denmark’s immigration policy?
“They represent the future, not the US with its tired slogans, ignorant claims about being the best at this or that, and theocratic tendencies. The American dream is alive and well in Denmark!”
You’re deluded. Scandanavia’s mostly mono-ethnic population shrinks every year, they have low diposable income, high cost of living, high suicide rate and if you ever bother to ask, they will tell you they are socialist.
Buckeye, can you not read. The Scandanavian and Canadian economies are GROWING. The US economy can generously be described as stagnant. Your stereotype of the northern europeans was never true. They are happy, and relatively prosperous. By contrast, you likely know someone who lost a job or house. And suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in there US.
Provide your sources Albert and a trend analysis of same. I’ve been to Scandanavia multiple times and still have friends in Finland and Norway. My experiences and conversations with said residents don’t jive with your “opinion.” Denmark didn’t impress me much, but hey– they currently have a balanced budget and slight growth in a country of 5 million. For now. The periodic economic snapshot is all you got?
The rhetoric of a “Scandinavian Model” has been around a lot longer than you and it simply isn’t a solution for most countries. You seem to ignore the factors why that is.
The World Economic Forum today released a rank ordering of the economic competitive rankings of over a 100 countries. Here are the top 7 (I include 7 because it’s interesting which countries are ahead of the US which is rated 7th, another one of many rankings where the US is not number 1): In descending order, Switzerland, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, and then the US. Five of the 6 countries that are ahead of the US are northern european high tax countries, social democratic countries by comparison with the US, and they are all doing much better than the US economically. Being more competitive than the US, they will continue to outstrip the US. Death of the left? (or at least left compared to whatever you want to call the US economy). Not even close to likely
The left is losing its political attractiveness to the mass of people because they’ve run out of other people’s money. If politicians could continue to borrow against the future to buy votes the voters would happily continue to be bought.
The US dollar has become a true fiat currency (or has been revealed as one) and we are near the end-game. The fight over the scraps is just beginning.
Hegel’s world may constantly change, but human nature is effectively constant.
Still Romney is ready to fail and he will not win the election. What we are seeing is the death of the west and the present form of conservatives will not save the west.
Become visionary and see what can save the west: The three Abraham faiths
this means Christians are not Christians unless they believe Jesus as God and believe in the 12 Apostles sent by Jesus.
Islam people are not Islam unless they believe in Abraham , Moses and Jesus Christ and Mary the Mother of Jesus
Jews are not Jews unless they believe in the Covenaut The True God gave to Moses
Only the three Abraham faiths united has the power to save the west from what is coming are way
If you believe all that you have uttered above, you’re nuttier than a fruitcake. JMO.
If God abandons the west who can save it? Man’s wisdom is foolish in Gods’ eyes
Next question. why would god abandon the west?
this written a few hours ago I believe
xodus 33:13: Moses said, Consider too that this nation is Your people.
When Israel breaks covenant by making and worshiping a golden calf, Yahweh is ready to start over. He warns Moses to stand aside, and at the same time promises to make Moses a new Abraham, the father of a new Israel (Exodus 32:10). Israel has no future; but Moses does.
In all that follows, Moses consistently rejects this proposal and reminds Yahweh that, stubborn and stiff-necked as they are, Israel is Yahweh’s people. Don’t let Your anger burn against Your people. Change Your mind about doing harm to Your people. Consider that this nation is Your people.
Moses is a type of Jesus: He is a teacher, a prophet, the one who leads from slavery. But Moses is most Christlike here, speaking face to face with Yahweh in the tent, pleading for Israel’s future. Like Jesus, Moses wants no future for himself at all unless it is a future with the people of God. And Yahweh agrees.
Jesus reveals the will of the Father in just this way. Jesus wants you as His table companion, and He’d rather die than abandon you. No matter what it takes, Jesus and His Father want a future with you, reclining with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, breaking bread in His kingdom.
The comment “There is no working class” fits nicely into Joel Kotkin’s observations in his recent essay. Kotkin describes a “clerisy” and a “yeomancy” where the yeomancy is directly related to production while the clerisy is dependent on it. So factory workers who produce objects (the old working class) are in the same group as dentists and doctors who work directly with their patients as are restaurant owners, while bureaucrats and physicians who pass judgements on procedures for health insurance organizations and insurance companies are the clerisy.
This makes perfect sense and makes me wonder if the old “working class” observation wasn’t based on a false premise from the get-go.
This article was an amazing explanation for the intellectual bankruptcy that emanates from the political left. For crissakes you can’t even disgaree with Obama’s policies without being called a “racist” by some lame brain on the other side of the aisle.
The fact of the matter is that Obama is way ahead of you on this. Bill Ayers was part of the creation of a new post-industrial proletarian authoritarian politics that can be best called neo-stalinism. Multiculturalism is the US version while movements like the FSLN or Chavez are the third world version. The challenge for the Republicans is to come up with their own variation on multiculturalism. Had Romney chosen Rubio over Ryan he might have been able to chart a path to victory along those lines. But instead he doubled down on the remnants of a disaffected white working class. This will insure his defeat and four more years of the neo-stalinist multiculturalist politics of post working class ideologues like Ayers.
Lament for Mitt Romney and all the hero ancestors who brought him to today
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MhCaU_pjVM
This was not in anyway my heart to see this happen
The real irony is that the onetime core of the “working class”, non-college educated white men, are now held in complete contempt by the dems, and are mostly voting repub.
That’s it “look forward”.
“Don’t look back…we made a disater.”
My college educated engineer daughter is married to a jc educated auto mechanic and I couldn’t be happier! Me. I have a BA in History and an MA in Literature, and I’m in awe of my son in law, who does real work, and is up to date on all the issues via the internet, including PJ media.
INSIDE OUT VAN JONES: GRAB THE WHIP, RUN THE PLANTATION, TAKE MEDIA POWER FROM MEAN, DUMB REPUBLICANS DECEMBER 9, 2010
http://www.westernjournalism.com/inside-out-van-jones-grab-the-whip-run-the-plantation-take-media-power-from-mean-dumb-republicans/
New Film Exposes Unions’ Decimation of Education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGX1dGgeQF0feature=player_embedded