Why Liberals Think What They Do
Note that Barack Obama is running not on his liberal record, but as a challenger against incumbent Mitt Romney who has done all sorts of terrible things like causing the 2008 meltdown and outsourcing jobs to China. In Obama’s view, given the supposedly tranquil world abroad, we must try nation building at home, and thus concentrate on bold new initiatives like stimulus, infrastructure, green jobs, and federalized health care — none of which have been envisioned before, much less funded. And to the extent Obama has a concrete example, he points to efforts of the private oil sector to find more gas and oil despite, rather than because of, his own efforts. Conclusion? Obama himself apparently has given up on liberal ideas in lieu of Big Bird, binders, bull****ter, movie stars, and hip-hopsters, which prompts the question: does anyone believe in liberal ideology anymore — and if so, why?
Did California’s redistributive elite really believe that they could all but shut down new gas and oil production, strangle the timber industry, idle irrigated farmland, divert water to the delta smelt, have 37 million people use a highway system designed for 15 million, allow millions of illegal aliens to enter the state without audit, extend free medical programs to 8 million of the most recent 11 million added to the population, up taxes to among the highest in the nation, and host one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients — and not have the present chaos?
The California schools — flooded with students whose first language is not English, staffed by unionized teachers not subject to the consequences of subpar teaching, and plagued with politicized curricula that do not emphasize math, science, and reading and writing comprehension — scarcely rate above those in Mississippi and Alabama. Did liberals, who wanted unions, a new curriculum, and open borders, believe it was good for the state to have a future generation — that will build our power plants, fly our airliners, teach our children, and take out our tumors — that is at the near-bottom in national test scores?
Do Bay Area greens really believe that they that will have sufficient water if they blow up the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir? Did Barack Obama think that the Keystone pipeline or new gas and oil leases in the Gulf were superfluous, or that we do not need oil to make gasoline, wheat to make flour, or to cut timber to produce wood?
Did liberals (and their hand-in-glove employer supporters who wished for cheap labor) think that letting in millions from Central Mexico, most without legality, English, or a high school education (and in some sense at the expense of thousands waiting in line for legal admission with capital, advanced degrees, and technological expertise), was not problematic and that soaring costs in law enforcement, the criminal justice system, the schools, and the health care industries were irrelevant?
What, then, are the motivations that drive so many to such absurdities? Note here that I am talking of the architects of liberalism, not of those who receive generous entitlements and whose desire for bigger government is thus existential and elemental.
Equality of result
Keen minds from Aristotle to Montesquieu and Tocqueville have lamented that the proverbial people sometimes prefer equality under authoritarianism to inequality accompanied by personal freedom. As long as there was grinding poverty, the liberal agenda of “leveling the playing field” made sense enough — Social Security, disability insurance, the 40-hour work week, and Medicare. But once modern mass production and consumption arose, energized by globalization and the entry of billions of new foreign workers into the equation, and high technology extended the appurtenances of the aristocracy to the poor (today’s ubiquitous smart phone is 100 times more versatile than yesterday’s $3,000 primitive suitcase cell phone), how could you keep promoting government-sponsored equality for the less well-off? Ensure no one has to drive a Kia? Petition on behalf of those who do not yet have an iPad?







Well said Professor. How is it that so many people fail to understand this? Perhaps they just don’t want to see. Perhaps we will continue to wallow in ignorance hoping that someone will fix it while we sip chardonnay and allow our country to fall into the European abyss.
There’s another aspect to elite liberalism (or perhaps it’s a slightly different breed of liberalism) that Hansen danced around but did not directly call out – shallow liberalism. Liberals (especially celebrities) spend their lives being rather shallow, and arrive at a point where they realize that they’re shallow, and so they attempt to offset that lifetime of shallowness by donning the costume of pseudo-intellectualism…namely in the form of liberalism. To make up for obsessing about their ridiculous shoe collection, they spend a few moments each day pretend-pontificating, doing their best to borrow the vocabulary and style of their favorite hard-hitting TV demagogue. To offset their total lack of selfless charity, they abruptly take up the mantle of some highly visible cause (usually a government program or expansion of some sort) for which they will have to expend little to no effort once implemented. Basically, they try to find a silver bullet that will solve their guilt problem, offset their shallowness, yield them great praise and admiration, and ultimately require no effort on their part beyond the initial declaration of their support.
Studious, you are onto something because many leftists/liberals are chasing meaning to their shallow, often unearned status driven lives.
Even more so, leftism is a quasi mental disease. For if this is not the case, how else would one explain their impervious mindset. And more to the point, why are so MANY Hollywood types abnormally liberal, yet living lives of complete decadence? It makes no sense, other than to stroke their egos, thus making them a ‘better’ person.
The best case study is leftism in Israel, and those involved in the ‘business of peace’. DESPITE all the dead (Jewish) bodies, they proceed like blind men in an alley. Why is this? Here’s the thing -http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/22/when-leftist-mega-rich-peace-obsessed-instigators-get-involved-what-can-go-wrong-everything-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-111/
One can extrapolate the findings herein, and it will fit leftists world over to a tee. MOST significantly, their fealty to their ideology is deadly, and it does not bother them a whit, as they step over the bodies/wreckage in their wake. After all, they are above it all, and feel mentally empowered.
http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/22/when-leftist-mega-rich-peace-obsessed-instigators-get-involved-what-can-go-wrong-everything-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-111/
“Even more so, leftism is a quasi mental disease. For if this is not the case, how else would one explain their impervious mindset. And more to the point, why are so MANY Hollywood types abnormally liberal, yet living lives of complete decadence? It makes no sense, other than to stroke their egos, thus making them a ‘better’ person.”
I think that it all boils down to the desire to be “cool” along with peer pressure and fear of being blacklisted. Combine that with the lack of a need for basic economic or political literacy to get ahead in their industry.
Liberalism is easier if you have no deep convictions of morality or a strong moral compass. People in Hollywood feel the need to justify their decadence with a political world view that accepts their chosen lifestyle. Liberalism allows people to imagine a balance between immoral behavior against feel good pseudo-social justice government programs; sort of a self-justification for one’s immoral lifestyle being paid for by acts of governmental goodness and acts of philanthropy.
gb- You are SO right ! Let us not over interperete leftism as a mental disease. It is more simply being arrested in adolescence or a developmental delay of sorts. It is the teenager’s desperation to be part of the “in” group at any cost and at the price of suspending independent adult thought processing. Presenting an aura of being a “cool” black guy is what got Obama elected and those who voted for him and have not yet transcended adolesence will vote for him again. Within this immature group are those who still need parenting and a free lunch as they refuse to grow up. It makes the affluent feel so powerful to feel needed by these children. Thus the relief of guilt by providing eternal government parenting. This also insures a pool of voters who have been taught that they are victims. Anybody who has raised ungrateful spiteful, rebellious teens know exactly of what I speak.
History tells us that when people are taxed at a high rate, they change their behavior. Jack Northrop left the company he created while at the height of his powers- realizing that the 90% income tax rate meant that he could never gain from continuing to work in aerospace. US aircraft design stalled, with the B-52 and KC-135 of that era remaining in service for 40 years. The Boeing 777 bears more than a superficial resemblance to the Boeing 707, showing how little progress has been made since the best and brightest were driven out.
You asked for another explaination as to why liberals are liberals other than a mental disorder. Try this. Most liberals are university educated, have the IQ to get an education & are able to see things more clearly as how they really are. You also asked why so many people in Hollywood are liberals. Maybe because they are artists that have the sensabilities to give a damn about their fellow man. These people are brighter, & more sensitve than neanderthal right wingers. Now you people are all freaked out about Barack. Even when you people moblize for years against him, you still can’t muster the support anymore to get the job done. By 2014, the Repubs must shed yesterday if they want to ever be taken seriously again.
The pendulum swings, but with each swing it makes the natural progression toward freedom. Soon ALL Americans can marry the person of their choice, & Pot will be legal. That’s the way clear minded people with vision & education see it, unless they only want gain for themselves opposed to gain for all humanity. There is a reason why it’s called Humanism & why it progesses forward.
Adina
Take a look at the description Dr. Hansen gives
for the left’s 1% – look familiar ? I suggest “the 1%” is just
another euphemism for an older hate – “the Jews”.
Chore:
1) Get the English translation transcript of bunch of old Hitler or Lenin speeches.
2) Change all the references of “Jew” or “Capitalist” to “Rich” or “1%”
Result: You get Obama’s speeches from 2000 to today.
What the hell does the 1% have to do w/jews? The one percent has nothing to do with religion, except those like Republican Fat Cats who’s God has a symbol of a twisted cross that looks like this ‘$’
The goal of Leftism is to destroy existing society. Utopia is a con, a fake explanation to chill-our the masses while their society, culture, religion, and general way-of-life disappear. of course, social mores and religion define and stigmatize degenerate behavior. A side-benefit for the twisted among the Legions of the Left is that their personal little kinks get the green light in the absence of ‘society’. If Leftism is economic materialism, why is religion their first target? The Republicans in Spain pulled men out of battle to execute priests and nuns and destroy churches and religious art. And they were correct — they might’ve lost the war (for the moment), but the people and art they destroyed are gone forever. And Western/Christian/European civilzation “being gone forever” is the goal of every Leftist
The shallowness which you aptly identify comes primarily from a serious lack of committment to truth and a strong preference for wishful, utopian thinking.
Why is Isreal so war like? Net ‘in’ Yahoo act like he takes all the Iranian posturing as serious. Isreal can nuke Iran & wipe them out in the blink of an eye.
In America I am more worried about people not having equal rights as Americans, & the mindset that Romney typifies of returning to 1950′s America.
Thank God that Barack is a man of progress. The American election will mean whether America returns to fascism again, or continues to move forward.
Isreal can take care of itself. America’s only worry is thet the Yahoo called yet in, may go off half cocked & start ww#3
Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just MAYBE, the Israelis have no desire to send 50 million people to the stone age because their leaders are theocratic dictators? That they’d prefer the nation led by religious nutcases to NOT have nukes precisely so that possibility will never be necessary?
Expend little or no effort and use other peoples money
Studious, we must also remember that a lot of these celebrities who champion liberal causes are PAID to do so. I can’t tell you how humorous I find it when, for example, a celeb who for years was paid to shill for PETA, is found wearing a fur coat. They do this when PETA is no longer funding the celebrity’s lifestyle. PETA moves on to someone newer and hipper, and the celebrity drops their oh-so-earnest support of the liberal cause du jour. Actors are oh-so concerned about Africa or orphanages in third-world countries, as long as they are being PAID to care. When the cameras are turned off, they don’t give these places another thought.
Celebrity liberalism is among the most shallow and hypocritical. Do as I say and not as I do is definitely the mantra for the celeb spokesperson crowd. This also goes for the fashion world (where frankly, which SHOES one wears are far more important than one’s foreign policy). Among the political chattering classes, getting invited to the “right” cocktail parties is far more important than actually researching your point of view. This is probably also why most of the “elite” liberals reside on the coasts, with a vast expanse of conservative red states, filled with real people, in between.
To me, all liberalism is of this variety. They move, like sheep, from cause du jour to cause du jour. If this year’s windmills kill last year’s endangered eagle population, oh well. We all have to sacrifice in the Brave New Order.
The reason this is so, and why liberals think the way they do, is that they are a cult, brainwashed from birth, isolated by lack of exposure to anything that contradicts the world view they’ve been inundated with all their lives. Their behavior is EXACTLY the same as that of cult followers. And when faced with irrefutable facts that fly in the face of their beliefs, they just walk away, reboot the brain and come back the next day as if the facts had never been presented.
The only thing that can ever deprogram a leftist is economic reality combined with years of exposure to sensible people of a more conservative view, and even that doesn’t always do the trick, especially in an “entitlement” on demand society.
To me, all liberalism is of this variety. They move, like sheep, from cause du jour to cause du jour. If this year’s windmills kill last year’s endangered eagle population, oh well. We all have to sacrifice in the Brave New Order.
The reason this is so, and why liberals think the way they do, is that they are a cult, brainwashed from birth, isolated by lack of exposure to anything that contradicts the world view they’ve been inundated with all their lives. Their behavior is EXACTLY the same as that of cult followers. And when faced with irrefutable facts that fly in the face of their beliefs, they just walk away, reboot the brain and come back the next day as if the facts had never been presented.
The only thing that can ever deprogram a leftist is economic reality combined with years of exposure to sensible people of a more conservative view, and even that doesn’t always do the trick, especially in an “entitlement” on demand society.
Happy Thanksgiving & Merry Winter Solstace
I agree to all above. There is another way to look at all this insanity.
The Progressive liberals who have hijacked our monetary system, our entire government, the supreme court, our education system and 90% of our MSM, are they just stupid idealogs or is their a second agenda?
An agenda to destroy opposition and create some kind of Utopia with them on top of the food chain Permanently. Is this their idea for a new world order that is talked about?
True enough about the pretensions of so many “liberals” to hide their own shallowness with virtue…
But then a conservative is just a person who takes their own personal shallowness for virtue (modelled after your very best pundits). They blame the government for ruining their wealth, when there has not been a wealthy person since the progressive era who has not made their fortune by gaming markets shaped by government subsidies, tax exemptions, and military-industrial government spending that their lobbyists have crafted. ALERT: You did not make your money in a free market!
Today’s rich conservatives are the people who made their money by gaming the progressive system and the corrupt federal reserve. Why? Because there was not way to get super-rich. Of course it always helps to blame the people who tried to fix the system ad claimed that it could ever work fairly. (Which it can’t, you’re right about that. But it didn’t stop you from using it to fill your closet with shoes any more than it stopped the liberals!)
So you’ve got it right that Leftist government is not the answer. But leftist-trashing like the kind found here exemplifies your reactionary strutting and buck-passing perfectly. Not to mention that anyone who has a clue about the philosophical roots of today’s conservatism does not refer to leftists or progressives as “liberals.” The main theorists who founded the doctrine of the free market and laissez-faire were dubbed liberals! (Locke, Hume, Smith, Mandeville, and later on Hayek) Lord knows that no conservative today (post-Reagan) could get by without inanely aping the work of these classical liberal anti-statists!
If you think that people should listen to you BECAUSE you are proud that you have never felt the need to pick up a book to explain your politics (not counting Rush Limbaugh) and because you are not guilty that you spent your lives filing your closet with shoes then, yes, you’re worse than your “liberals.” Worse for everybody including for yourselves!
Hence, conservatives have been most effective at marshalling popular support by appealing to hatred for the poor, minorities, people who are different, or for your demon liberals who wrongly argue that the system can be fixed. Not to say that all those interest groups are essentially good, or good at all, but the point is that twentieth century conservatives have spent their political lives creating and fighting your own demons because you have found it extremely profitable to do so.
Ultimately, the only political argument that conservatives really have is the bald argument for their own power and for economic liberty as long as it is theirs. The bottom line, however, is that whether you earned it through hard work, inherited it, got lucky, or scammed it–the fact of your own economic power is not an argument for your own righteousness!
Stand down unless you have something productive to suggest. Your free market has never existed and you have no clue about how to make the dream of laissez-faire a reality. Above all, you will consider no plan that means cutting into your nest egg! You are reactionaries. You are corporate statists. YOU are the ones who have sold out every value that this country really stood for and you blamed the “liberals” for letting you do it while they pretended to stop you!
Well it’s nice to see that Ron Paul is letting you guys out of his basement to get some fresh air.
“Stand down unless you have something productive to suggest.”
I haven’t read anything from you suggesting any “productive” solutions either. Just a philosophical rant. And by the way, today’s description for “liberal”, at least from a conservative viewpoint, is different than it was 200 years ago. Just as the word “gay” is used differently than in the 1920′s and 30′s. Blaming conservatives for how the term “liberal” is used is a non-issue.
Precisely, hence the term “classical liberal” being used to describe Republicans in the 19th century.
“Liberal” and “conservative” are relative terms to begin with, but they tend to take on even more varied meanings depending on the culture that adopts their usage. For example, “conservative” in Saudi Arabia means to be in support of strict laws as outlined by the Quran. “Conservative” in Great Britain means to be in support of a government solution to climate change, but only a mild one.
I wonder do you wipe your ass with a piece of the Constition as well?
Correction *Constitution was libbed out for a moment
I see that demagogic accusations of “hate-mongering” now pass as logic and reasoning at the Daily Paul.
Great article.
Too many words, as excellent as they are, are written about the mental disease known as “liberalism” or “progressivism” and the wreckage that is left in the wake. I yearn for the time when that page can be turned and the next chapter is filled with equally great writing about how we who have not been suckered into this mindless way of “thinking” can escape the carnage and go quietly about productive lives as we are most capable of doing. Let the damned liberals sink with their ship while the rest of us man the lifeboats. How to bring that about is the next big issue.
Well said, Yooper. Arrested development. Adults in mental pampers.
Blame the boomers, blame the communist infiltration of the progressive movement, blame the grownups for producing a new lost generation. The Millennials are supporting Obama, if we can judge by Lena Dunham’s infamous endorsement of Obama as sex-facilitator. I wrote about her and her generation here: http://clarespark.com/2012/07/29/girls-or-the-new-lost-generation/. They are not equipped to cope with the modern world, and are no friends to women.
The millenials are for Obama because youth is not screwed up with all the superficial mores of society.
That is why it is said that if you are not liberal in your youth, then you have no heart.
The wacko religious right forgets that the temple elders were the religious right 2,000 years ago & they executed a rebel leader of a small cult of wild eyed liberals that said he was here to show us a new way. They thought he & his were no counts. Then at the semon on the mount they saw that the multitudes wanted the new hope & change. That’s when the religious right targeted him for elimination. They charged him with religious treason (blasphomy)& hung him from a cross outside the town at high noon.
Liberalism is centered in universities because you need a certain level of brain power to see the joke that America is when conservatives periodically return America to Amerika.
RE: “Mental pampers”. But unlike real and effective pampers, we have to deal with — are victims of — the crap that oozes out.
Well stated. But for that to happen, collectivism (as I prefer to call liberalism, progressivism, etc.) must be driven from power, and that is a tall order. Because as long as collectivists control government, entertainment, higher learning, and media, they will have the power to make it impossible for us to live the life you’ve described. I’ve seen that happen in my lifetime, and it won’t stop until they are removed from power.
Calling it all “collectivism” — brilliant! I hate the way two perfectly fine words, “liberal” and “progress” have been bastardized by these people, and I’ve long been looking for a better label. I usually use “leftists” or “statists”, but neither quite does the trick — sound either a bit anachronistic or maybe a touch precious. But “collectivist” is superb — and it applies to far more than just a view of the federal government; rather, it clearly encapsulates for me an entire world view, from the overarching to the very particular and small.
Well done — and thanks for the inspiration.
collectivism is good. I am an exream leftist, & I like it. It fits & proud of it.
Amen.
You’ll have to pardon my disbelief at the assertion that you’re a university professor. To the best of my knowledge and (very recent) experience, such reason and observation are impossible to summon from the hollow gourds of academia.
And therefore, I must insist that you, sir, are a liar and a fraud. ;)
Well,it’s easy enough to come to that conclusion given the current lay of the land in academia….I always thought liberalism was a way for stingy pricks to feel morally superior by showing how “compassionate” they could be spending other peoples’ tax dollars
To me, elite liberalism always seemed like unprompted declarations of innocence. When a man greets a police officer by saying “I didn’t do anything”, it rightfully arouses the officer’s suspicions. Much the same, when a liberal haughtily declares his moral superiority by way of “compassionate taxpaying”, it is probably a safe assumption that he is, in fact, quite selfish and dispassionate about anyone’s plight but his own.
A simple way to test your assertion of, “selfish and dispassionate,” is to investigate their personal charitable giving. Invariably, the response directs one to the taxes they pay, as if you pay no taxes.
Because, of course, REAL charity requires actual work and dedication. Redistribution – or as I call it, pseudo-charity – requires no thought, work, or commitment on the part of the advocate.
Well Stated!!
I too, do not believe Mr Hanson to be a University Professor.
I believe he is a Farmer, from a long line of Farmers.
I believe the sum total of his hours spent with cold fingers inside work gloves,
easily exceeds the sum total of hours his fingers have ever spent on a keyboard.
I believe his larger and more taxing physical accomplishments afield far exceed the caloric expenditures he has ever committed in the classroom.
I believe he MAY have strung more words together on paper, than fence-rails through a field…
But I also believe it is the matter of the FENCE RAILS influencing the WORDS, and not vice-versa.
Mr Hanson is, IMHO, A farmer who writes.
And I believe it is the physicality of a lifetime of such farmwork, the “personal research” required to decide where to place the well, and the “discipline” and “resolve” to dig it sufficiently deep so that it may actually DO what is intended, that colors his written works with a “factual” and ‘mechanical” correctness and authenticity, such that secondary employment as a “Professor” of the subject matters which he writes about, is then possible.
It is these secondary work-tasks of his, these slews of words and pages that I and many others, in our leisure reading and web-surfing, have become aware of him, for I have never been to the Farm that occupies his majority efforts on this earth.
It is, I believe, his Farming that is responsible for his Professorship.
His professorship, in turn, can have but little (positive) influence on his farming.
Hear. Hear. “For he’s a jolly good fellow” in three verses.
I’m very jealous I never had a professor like Dr. Hanson.
Brilliant.
Dear VDH, why don’t you write a novel about Obama? A sort of 21st century version of “Being there” meets “Gulliver Travels”. The journey of one individual who becomes President without any special qualifications for it, except for a brilliant talent to play to this psycholigical condition on a national scale. Could be the greatest satire since Swift.
Didn’t Chris Rock star in that movie already?
I’m convinced VDH has several contemporary thrillers in him. Once he gets this Ancient World stuff out of his system…
Don’t get me wrong, Hoplites are fascinating, but I still have nightmares about that ominous pick-up truck he described circling the Hanson homestead. Or his confrontations over water with the neighboring farmer/rancher.
As evidenced by this blog, Hanson has a strong, conversational writing style and knows how to hold an audience. It would be exciting to see him write some mainstream commercial fiction.
Although this might be blasphemy to VDH’s political opinion fans. Like encouraging Charles Krauthammer to write for Marvel Comics. But again, I think Hanson could write a very strong thriller or perhaps a memoir.
“Once he gets this Ancient World stuff out of his system…”
Ah, spoken like a true 20-year-old. But don’t you see this ancient world of yours, for all its flaws, lacks and mistakes, is the fountain of wisdom for all that may be truly good thought in this world today? You don’t? How sad.
Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Professor -
You always eloquently state the problems. What are the solutions?
Is there no way to breed that damn delta smelt in a fishery? Is there no way to prevent its extinction AND provide water to the Central Valley? Why can’t this one problem be solved?
Is no one on any of the 10 campuses of the UC up to the task? Are there no graduate students to write a paper on what could be done? Is there no private think tank that can be found that knows how to save a fish?
With all the money and brainpower in Silicon Valley, or Hollywood, is there no to fund a study to find a solution?
Why can’t a California mogul like a Larry Ellison or an Elon Musk be motivated to help California?
Yes, what are the solutions. We all know the problem now. But beyond elections how do fix it?
How do reform the media which is a threat to this nation and it’s people?
Unions? The corrupt payout scheme between unions and the Democratic party is an absolute disgrace.
Education, how do we deal deal with the perpetual indoctrination of statism in our schools and colleges? This cannot go on if we intend to survive.
Culture, how do we stop, take back and prevent Hollywood from setting our cultural framework and agenda?
How do we fight off the lobbyist feeding at the trough, peel back the built up bureaucracy?
Finally, how do we reform our courts where laws are not clay waiting the judical activist to sculp, but set in stone?
I’m waiting for an action plan and I am tired of only waiting for politcal answers.
What are the solutions?
Doesn’t hurt to state the obvious now and again: They are many, the work of decades. Best to start at the top: the WH and the MSM, then the schools and the trial lawyers. After that, head on down the (long and open) list; the categories of nonsense aren’t closed and never will be. As a rule of thumb, those who’ve spent a lifetime at the trough feeding the problem are unlikely to be part of the solution. That includes wanked-out Republican grandees and bag-carriers, too.
If there are two constants, they are these: given the will to win, the enduring strengths of the American people will prevail; and propaganda is the most effective tool against the darkness. Hatred, contempt, ridicule directed at our enemies — yes, they are enemies, however louche that sounds in the faculty lounge — can coexist alongside our virtues; used quite mercilessly, crude tools will speed the process. Never underestimate the power of the politics of personal destruction.
For those who balk at the prospect, ask yourselves: What do you want to leave your grandchildren?
What are the solutions? You’ve pricked the blister caused by the rub of Dr. Hanson’s well stated essays. Well written, but lacking the American, optimistic, “can-do spirit” of solving a problem. Instead they read like predestined Greek tragedy.
One gathers that Dr. Hanson fails to grasp the true nature of the crisis gripping our great country? He should since it dates from Ancient Greece. Jefferson, Madison and Adams founded this country based upon allowing the individual to pursue his own happiness. They took the philosophic justification of this idea for granted. How could anyone be against pursuing individual happiness? It was a grave error. First the religionists, then later the statist whose philosophy was steeped in German philosophers secularizing religion by substituting God with society began attacking the rightfulness of the notion of pursuit of happiness. The American character of independence, optimism, and self-efficacy that sprang from this idea was branded as selfish, lacking moral duty, or crude. Where do we start? We start at the beginning and realizing the great moral virtue of leading an independent, flourishing life–pursuing our own happiness. We openly challenge those who say that our primary duty is to sacrifice for others to whom we do not know or care. We stand up for our individual rights on moral grounds, not for the good of society, but that the good is for each of us. Until more people–especially conservatives who claim to want to fight the statists–realize they must question their moral acceptance of altruism, our fate is, as Dr. Hanson, seems the feel, predestined.
What are the solutions? You’ve pricked the blister caused by the rub of Dr. Hanson’s well stated essays which lack the American, optimistic, can do spirit of solving a problem. Instead they read like predestined Greek tragedy.
Jefferson, Madison and Adams founded this country based upon allowing the individual to pursue his own happiness. They took the philosophic justification of this idea for granted. How could anyone be against pursuing individual happiness? It was a grave error. First the religionists, then later the statist steeped in German philosophers secularizing religion by substituting God with society began attacking the rightfulness of the notion of pursuit of happiness. The American character of independence, optimism, and self-efficacy that sprang from this idea was branded as selfish, lacking moral duty, or crude.
Where do we start? We start at the beginning and realizing the great moral virtue of leading an independent, flourishing life–pursuing our own happiness. We openly challenge those who say that our primary duty is to sacrifice for others to whom we do not know or care. We stand up for our individual rights on moral grounds, not for the good of society, but that the good is for each of us. Until more people–especially conservatives who claim to want to fight the statists–realize they must question their moral acceptance of altruism, our fate is, as Dr. Hanson, seems the feel, predestined.
Sorry about the double post, the first one did not come up timely & I’ve been experiencing connectivity problems leading me to think I needed another post.
I see that you are a disciple of Ayn Rand.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. Or like it’s a refutation of what he actually said.
How to undo the indoctrination….I have no desire to follow the path outlined in Atlas Shrugged, (mainly because I don’t think there’s a large plot of land hidden in the mountains!) but….what could be done is that those true patriots could be encouraged to take a page out of the community organizer playbook and Atlas Shrugged. Overwhelm the system. Apply for every government handout and assistance available. If you’re retired, visit the health departments, the VA, etc, and apply for their assistance. Do NOT lie on the application, just state the truth. You’ll most likely be turned down for everything, but even that will take up their time and overwhelm the system. If you do happen to get some assistance, like an EBT card or something, DON’T use it….throw it away or give it to a family you know to truly be in need. Go to the left wing and MSM comment page and blog posts and let your opinions be heard…even though they’ll be ridiculed. Everytime you see redundency, reverse discrimination, plain hypocrisy, and incorrect information dissimenated, take the time to make the correction verbally and/or in writing. Every time you have an opportunity to talk with a government worker, encourage them to find real employment in the private sector, open their own business because they’re on the dole even more than the people they serve. We’ve been the silent majority for too long. Let’s take back our country.
Why can’t a California mogul like a Larry Ellison or an Elon Musk be motivated to help California?
I remember in years past people asking why Bill Gates didn’t use his vast fortune to donate money to their pet cause. The answer is because he had other uses for his money in mind. It’s his money to decide.
I can’t speak for neither Larry Ellison nor Elon Musk. I’ve read a great deal about Musk. He wants to retire on Mars, making humanity a multi-planet species. He’s spending a great deal of effort to make that dream potentially possible. Compared to that, solving California’s problems might just be too hard. Californians elected the politicians who’ve implemented this unsustainable mess. Until the voters quit doing that, there’s no hope of changing things there. The ship of state is taking on water faster than the pumps can drain the bilge. Until you slow down the rate water is flowing in, it’s only a matter of time before everything sinks.
Far be it from me to spend someone else’s money. I’m not the gov’t.
Ebay celebrity CEO and billionairess Meg Whitman gave such altruism a whirl in 2010. California’s tax eaters elected Moonbeam 2.0 instead.
What are the solutions?
I remember during the 60’s when Mao Tse Tung came to power in China. One of the first things he did was round up all the scholars and intellectuals, march them out into the countryside, and force them to spread human waste on vegetable gardens.
When Pol Pot took over in Cambodia, he rounded up all the scholars and intellectuals, marched them out into the countryside and shot them!
Pol Pot may have been a little excessive in dealing with the self-anointed elite, but I’m beginning to think Chairman Mao may have been on to something.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, and it is grossly inaccurate. Pol Pot and shooting the “…self-anointed elite”? Yes, the closer people are to living off the earth, and where life-and-death decisions are regular occurances, people tend to more pragmatic and less idealistic.
While the first victims may not have been salt of the earth, I do not believe that 25% of the Cambodian population was “elite” by any means. Having worked directly with Cambodian refugees, we learned that almost anyone who could read, or wore glasses, much less any professional, was summarily executed. Please, do not compare apples with oranges.
Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Che, et al., are prime examples of where unfettered liberalism takes people. Unfortunately, they are heroes to the American “elite.”
That would be a solution for the delta smelt, but I suspect your answer to that would that it isn’t a “natural” solution. When they were hammering out the details of one of the big climate treaties, they were all about forested land being great as a carbon sink until it was pointed out that US has ample land to easily offset all its carbon output if it heavily invested in tree farms on its currently unused ag land. Then, they suddenly added that the forested lands must be natural and not unnatural aggregations of trees (in other words, tree farms wouldn’t count anymore). So, it has to be “natural,” and if they can save the smelt the natural way, who cares how many humans starve in the process?
What are the solutions?
Sometimes there are no ‘solutions’ – only consequences.
And sometimes the solution is worse than the problem.
A couple of thoughts on the professor’s excellent piece.
Why not use the Hetch Hetchy water to farm delta smelt…its clear that the Hoi-Poi in SF and environs dont NEED it as they are willing to do away with it. Put it to a higher use…like irrigating the fields for crops (which SFers et al should be willing to forgo as they use forbidden waters…) and provide JOBS for those callow urban youth picking lettuces etc. Send the Mexican nationals who cannot prove right to be here, BACK to the festering cesspool called Mexico. Tell them to fix their own house, not tear down ours. If the Liberals scream, maybe they can give their own jobs over to the illegals.
VDH calls them pretty closely, telling the truth about the direction, motivation and self-serving pontification of the Liberal mind.
To those of us who see the signs clearly, its nice to have someone with the gift of words to expound clearly on what we can see with our won eyes but maybe not put into words quite so well.
I make my living figuring out how to DO/MAKE things, not PURE engineering, but applied such. Most of the “problems” that CA (and the rest) has made for itself have simple solutions that just do not translate into the feel-good mentality of practicalities.
As we said up here during the spotted owl wars of the 1980s, try wiping your beknighted tookus with a Spotted Owl.
Thank you Professor, for laying it out so well.
California has been there, done that – ‘cept just as happened with Arizona’s SB 1070, California’s Proposition 187 that was passed by the voters in 1994 with 59% of the vote (a majority of Hispanics voted for it too) the courts shut it down.
In ’94 I figured that Prop 187 was California’s last chance. So far, I’ve been proven correct.
A nice rant, but not really great analysis.
First, they do think they can get away with it, for the simple reason that they *have* got away with it. At each step they were told it would bring disaster, and it hasn’t. Well then, who is the fool? California has had a paralyzed legislature and two zombie Senatresses for twenty years, has exceeded what moaning conservatives and fundamentalist prophets have been complaining about every year, and yet the sun still rises. WHEN something bad happens, then we’ll see. Such is life.
Second, what do you mean “liberal”? These guys are communist fascist green know-nothing choom squaders. Is that “liberal”? More like Dionysian.
We now have a president who can’t do numbers to make change for a dollar, a national democratic party that can’t and won’t even pass a statutory budget, a governor here in Kalifornistan who wants to spend billions he doesn’t have building a high-speed railroad from nowhere to nowhere that won’t even go very fast, two unctuous ballot propositions that have tiny voices pleading to save the schools for the kids and don’t even MENTION that that’s done by raising taxes to pay for the schools that were already paid for once by taxes and a second time by the lottery so it’s all a scam to siphon off all old money for corrupt purposes. Which part of this is “liberal”?
But again, we gotta have some bad stuff happen, before anyone is going to believe in it. That is apparently human nature. And if you don’t believe it of the citizens of Kalifornistan and the United Snakes, look at the Wall Street Banksters who just kept blowing up the balloon until it burst, and they were supposed to be the smartest and most rational ones around, right?
People, huh.
Josh, “something bad” is imminent vis a vis California. Just a peep around the twist– as Kingsley Amis would say– and one can see the inevitable disaster: a public debt so massive that, short of the massive budget cuts that CA’s liberal establishment will never countenance, taxes will have to be raised exorbitantly in order to bring it into balance. Thus sending employers and other wealthy tax payers careering for the state line– and thus in turn shrinking the tax base, causing revenue shortfalls and more huge budget deficits. If the CA legislature and Jerry Brown don’t get serious about reducing public employee compensation and other fiscal extravagences, then California will soon look a lot like NYC circa-1976.
And I disagree with your use of the metaphor “Dionysian” to describe the fiscal incompetence of California’s liberals, for Dionysis would loathe their harsh treatment of California’s agricultural industry! (Although he would doubtlessly be grateful for their overindulgence of expensive Sonoma Valley wines.)
California’s crisis is compounded by its size. Its liberal politicians have the same hubris about spending and the ongoing tax base that New York’s did at roughly the same stage of looming insolvency 40 years ago (the city solved one annual budget shortfall by simply extending the year three days when counting revenues, and assuming they’d somehow find the funds 12 months later to pay the expenditures on the now three-days-shorter new fiscal year). But New York had to deal with the fact that people could move across the Hudson or up to Connecticut and still be in the area, but out of the city or state’s reaches.
California pols rest happy under the idea that the rich in Silicon Valley or the L.A. basin have noplace within 250 miles to relocate to that they can’t tax, so they can delude themselves longer that the state can do whatever it likes because it has a captive audience.
New York ended up getting bailed out by the state, which created a financial control board to basically cut up the credit cards until it was solvent again. And as bad as New York State is about keeping its own house in order, the fiscal control board remains in place for cities that can’t make a budget. California doesn’t even have the spine to do that, as shown by the recent municipal bankruptcies.
The fun part will be down the line, when the state tries the same thing New York City did initially in 1975-76 — to get the taxpayers from across the country to bail the Big Apple out, and then blame the evil Republicans in D.C. for their woes. It’s easy to picture California Dems and others across the country blaming John Boehner and (if he wins next week) Mitt Romney for their woes, using the same “we send more money to Washington than we get back” rationalization New York tried to usefor the other 49 states giving them a bailout with no cuts to state employee salaries, benefits or pensions required. The only bailout that should be offered by D.C. is the same type New York got from Albany in 1976 — complete loss of control by Sacremento of managing California’s finances, with an oversight board created to rein in spending until fiscal responsibility is restored.
No Josh, we must not allow the truly “bad stuff” happen, because we may never come back. Sometimes great nations do fall – permanently. Enemies are watching, and waiting…
Remember that he American radical left which now controls the Democratic Party is itself only one element of a global network seeking to impose a kind of global plutocracy. It would look much like Russia and China, i.e. A small network of ruthless extortionists sitting atop a world-spanning economic regime, a sort of state-capitalist / collectivist hybrid with very small scale, limited capitalism at the domestic consumption level. Fuel, food, water, electricity, medical treatment etc. will all be rationed by the government (and used to suppress dissent). Much of it will be syphoned off, ostensibly to redistribute to the Third World or to protect the environment, but really it will be to line the pockets of the plutocratic oligarchs at the top. Political Correctness will be used to identify dissenters so they can be coerced back into line…
Many interests are involved in constructing this global plutocracy but they are not fully united. There is competition for who will ultimately control it. The UN is one nexus of control driving hard to create it. Presumably those involved are less motivated by national considerations and instead see themselves as builders of the first benevolent global empire. Some of the Russian oligarchs are likely involved, including Putin himself, but they seem to be driven by strong national interests. So for them this new world order would just be one vast cash cow to milk at their leisure, ruthlessly eliminating all challengers and competitors. Top international financiers, bankers, corporate moguls etc seem to be involved. In fact it looks like one of the main drivers of the current push is George Soros. No doubt he raises billions by promising a piece of the action to anyone with serious money and a similar ideological outlook. I’m sure there are Latin American drug lords, Arab oil moguls and African dictators involved…
My point is that the useful idiots whose psychology VDH brilliantly describes, are really just the pawns of much more focused individuals, intent on seizing the levers of power that the liberal sheep mindlessly offer them. These people are dangerous because they are already several steps ahead of you: They know what they want, they are setting the agenda and the tempo with one manufactured crisis after another, they control the political dialog of the nation, and they are utterly relentless. Few nations ever successfully repel an assault from such a powerful foe with a tentacle operating from inside. And those who have, did so by the skin of their teeth. In my opinion if the collapse they seek ever truly comes, we will not recover. It’s better to launch our counter-attack now, standing on what foundations of power are still left to us, than to cede the field completely. Either way we have our work cut out for us in the next decade or two. First we need to clearly identify these people, their methods, networks and objectives. Then we have to formulate an effective strategy for countering them. Then we have to implement our plan, until we defeat them or they enslave us. One might argue that in the annals of human conflict, never has so much depended on the resolute determination of so few.
I’m not Josh, but I didn’t get that he wanted to “allow” bad things to happen first. I think his point was that, historically, people don’t seem motivated about such things until something bad *does* happen and wishing it were not so will not change that. The immediate doomsday-ism of many conservatives, while properly motivated, does not help because the immediate consequences have not occurred. For example, California is still there and has been chugging away, even though many conservatives have, in the past, claimed the they could hear California’s swan song. Unfortunately, this merely reinforces the liberal’s notion that the conservative position is incorrect and that the liberal position is, in their mind, correct.
Teenagers suffer from a similar problem. My mother told me that “nothing good happens at midnight” in an effort to persuade me to stop staying out late. But, until something actually happened, I thought she was just being a nervous nelly. It turns out, that while “nothing good happens at midnight” might be an overstatement, it is probably true that your chances of having something bad happen at midnight far exceed something happening at noon. Mom was right, in general, but until I saw something concrete (and I was willing to attribute it correctly), I was able to ignore her advice.
This, I think, is what Josh is getting at, and, unfortunately, it may be the way of the world. People don’t like to change their mind about something until forced to do so by something untoward.
Fair enough, but I have been appalled by how often I’ve run across this sentiment. For the last four years I’ve spent countless hours engaging friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues and even strangers on matters of political ideology (a subject I myself was not particularly engaged in until September 2001). I think I can claim that several dozen individuals will be voting Romney because of my efforts. But a striking number of conservative minded folks responded with a stubborn “pox on all their houses” view; and claimed that only a large scale collapse of the system could bring true reform. After considerable digging I concluded that at least in some cases, this was the desired outcome. In other words there is a strain of apocalyptic nihilism in some conservative circles as well. I think this is a dangerous and historically ignorant view. The End of Days may well be coming, but I don’t believe that God wants us to facilitate the process. Rather our task is to combat evil, and ease the suffering of the good; not to abandon the fight and thus condemn the innocent to bondage. This is a cowardly view, (and I’m sure you’re right in saying that this is not Josh’s position).
I would also submit that the same luxury, in absolute and relative terms, that non-liberals (conservatives, libertarians, etc. etc.) also enjoy is a disincentive to rock the boat. The big cases get the big headlines (school choice, gay marriage, tax levies, etc.) but the web of regulation, bureaucracy, and Draconian punishments for minor, even unwitting offenses, is so finely woven and pervasive that compliance is too often a simple, if regrettable, decision.
Let’s use driver’s licenses and license plates as a mundane but familiar example. Safety on the roads and identification of drivers and vehicles is reasonable but there is a politically driven dichotomy even in these endeavors. Native-born citizens must spend untold hours compiling birth certificates and other documentation to obtain licenses, suffering indifference, resistance, and even abuse at the hands of so-called public servants at the DMV. Simultaneously, those same citizens watch in wonderment and horror as illegal aliens are actively courted and shepherded through the system (via the expenditure of those same citizens’ tax dollars) by liberal politicians seeking warm bodies to stuff ballot boxes, national citizenship notwithstanding.
License plates are, in the simplest terms, a means of identifying vehicles by police and citizens in the event of an accident or commission of a crime. But annual registration – of a vehicle and plate that remain unchanged – is an easy $50 for the state (multiplied by millions of drivers and vehicles). Many states have safety inspections – a laudable pursuit until the inconsistency and corruption of the system are exposed. Responsible Citizen A will spend the time and money to replace his iffy-but-acceptable brake pads in order to pass inspection while Irresponsible Citizen B somehow passes despite a vehicle with a smashed headlight as sparks fly from the road while dragging the undercarriage along. Most of us have driven past the Lexus driver getting a speeding ticket while minutes later we take evasive action to avoid colliding with a dangerously overloaded white rental van full of ‘day workers’ or a decrepit pickup truck with a bed full of more of the same doing 45 mph in the passing lane. In no case do we see such vehicles stopped for their own safety – and ours – and we certainly never see the passengers questioned or apprehended for obvious immigration violations. In fact, our own national government forbids such common sense law enforcement. The mind boggles.
Complaining about the DMV is nothing new but, to paraphrase Mark Twain, nobody does anything about it. The amount of time spent (including missed work), the state’s insatiable appetite for personal data, and of course the fees (to say nothing of exorbitant insurance premiums, a healthy portion of which are kicked back as political contributions) are wildly disproportionate (and irrelevant) to the stated goal of identification and safety yet there we all are, taking a number and grumbling to ourselves. The bureaucrats, doing the bidding of the elites, have won again.
But what about more extreme cases? We watch news reports and films about jailed dissidents in dictatorships, past and present. We think that political prisoners exist only in some backward foreign land – until a man in Southern California, home of the summer blockbuster and the skin flick with producers of both operating under First Amendment protections, is dragged from his home in the middle of the night on a trumped-up charge. Because of the bloodthirsty, vengeful nature of our enemies he is forced to wear an Invisible Man get-up lest he be identified and targeted for death. But his own government does not care, for his own government claims that our enemies are our friends. Our government has decided that First Amendment protections are transient and a license to be revoked to suit their political aims, especially as their tissue of lies about diplomatic personnel being murdered by more bloodthirsty, vengeful enemies is disintegrating. Law enforcement types, who swear an allegiance to the Constitution, not to politicians, shrug off that oath and arrive in their droves to apprehend and transport a single nonviolent individual. The odds are that he will receive a fine or a non-custodial extension of his existing sentence, but he will be behind bars until after the election. What convenient timing.
The point is that in interactions with with liberals we must have the individual and collective courage to say NO, firmly, flatly and consistently. We have made great progress in recognizing legislative Trojan horses but it still requires great effort to prevent them from being constructed and even more effort to eliminate those already in place.
Well said.
Josh is precisely on point.
VDH, there are no more “liberals”. The leftists ate them whole.
And, there is no more “liberalism”. Or the silly and oxymoronic “progressivism”. These words are the rotary phones and buggy whips of today’s society. They serve no function other than nostalgia.
Leftism, the radical, angry, hostile, festival of betrayals that it is…is to “liberal” what a fox is to a whale. Both mammals and from that point the differences in environment, form, function, size, and basic nature are universally different.
Leftism is also its own “reward” for its adherents. Bathed in disloyalty, oozing with treason, built upon layer after layer of lies and distortion…one cannot be a leftist without creating a virtual world of loathing tradition and then bloviating about it.
Leftism is a permanent protest culture. It is the primordial slime from Ghostbusters that thrives on negative energy. It seeks out ways to create divisiveness and “war” between people. Class warfare, racial warfare, gender warfare, sexual orientation warfare, age warfare, religious warfare. It gins up “victims” where there are none, just to feed off the carcass of dead relationships.
And, betrayal is its mother’s milk. It will take our homeland and find ways to denigrate it, trash talk it, buckle its knees, leave it open to enemy invasion, tear apart its borders, gut its military, weaken its might, strip its place in the world. And, it doesn’t treat our allies much better.
Peel a leftist and at his heart you will find betrayal. Tearing down the building blocks of the free market democracy is not a bug, it’s a feature of leftism. Obama is a radical leftist. The Democratic Party is crawling with them. We are in the Days of Betrayal. The mass media is a betrayal farm. Academia is a betrayal farm. Hollywood is a betrayal farm.
We are being cut up, shredded, torn to pieces by traitors. Leftism is their god, their country, their religion. They are…our enemies.
…And your eloquent definition leaves no room for doubt: This is an existential enemy and must be treated as such. Destroy them or they will destroy us. This means neutralizing their effectiveness at every level in which they operate. It will be a long and messy process, but I for one refuse to live on my knees.
Bleachers;
Tnx yet again saving me lotsa time expounding this issue. I could’ve not say it any better. I’d add a couple things, though. Instead of betrayal, I’d use treason. Another thing that drives these palookas is hate, based on inferiority complexes, avarice & insatiable lust for power. These types are total control freaks. When their hypocrisy & agenda are exposed, vicious rage follows. After they reach & consolidate power, the rage translates into the elimination of the opposition by any means. I know.
I am impressed by your insight if you are a native-born American who hasn’t lived under such a brutal regime as my family, friends & I did. There is hope for this country.
More than a hint of California narcissism visible here. If Californians can’t be bothered to fix their own mess, and they have demonstrated repeatedly that they can’t, why should anyone else do it for them? CA is just ‘too big to fail’? — but it isn’t.
It really isn’t hard to block interstates and deny landing rights, leaving Californians to fight it out like cats in a sack. What claim do they have on your time or generosity if they won’t lift a finger to help themselves?
When you see CA teachers rotting in the sun, piled high like cord wood, you’ll know there’s hope. Until then, brace for endless whining as usual.
Dear Some,
Right you are. But if Obama wins election, CA liberals fear nothing because of guaranteed fed cash from the other 49 sucker states.
But if Romney wins, CA liberals just wait out four or eight years for another nanny state liberal to bail them out.
But if the god nemesis has any power, CA goes broke with a POTUS that has the guts to say, like Ford to NYC, “Drop Dead.”
But all in all, it reminds me of the Eagle’s Hotel CA song wherein “you can’t kill the beast” because since progtards define themselves by getting others to always pay, they are rather clever at never having to pay for their mistakes.
Like trying to pin down a pesky bunch of flies with a five pound hammer, it never works. They are too fast, too good at escaping their own consequences. A good spider’s web is better…
“The president knows that?”
I don’t think so.
VDH nails it again. This article is bookmarked. Outstanding.
You are a National Treasure Dr. Hanson. I hope you consider putting your thoughtful and informative commentaries in a book for those of us who occasionally need substance in a increasingly shallow society. It has always fascinated me that most of my friends on the Left find fault in believing in man as an imperfect creation of a perfect God. But they are firmly convinced that man can be perfected by an imperfect Gov. They seem to feel that Gov’s legislation has the same power as God’s redemption. I tell them that despite their education they lack true knowledge and wisdom. You, David, are that rare breed that brings all three together. Thank-you sir for sharing what you have learned.
Well said – well described: the intellectually homeless.
I beleiventhere is also a co
I’m sorry that I’ve never read one of VDH’s books. I plan on remedying this privation very soon. Christopher Hitchens’s endorsement pretty much closes the sale for me. He introduced me to Kinglsey Amis and Robert Conquest, thus ensuring total literary credibility with me. (And of course his own books are a big part of my trust in his advice on what to read.)
For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political make-up.
Not so irrational as all that. As you go on to suggest, some of the fury comes from simple envy. The street-sweeper does not care how many billions Bill Gates has. But some people feel deeply wounded that friends they went to college with earn millions while they limp by (as they see it, and feel it) on half a million a year. Rather than admit to anything so undignified as envy over material things, it is preferable to become indignant on the street sweeper’s behalf.
Yes, well put.
I, Liberal
I’m sure that there could never be
A man as virtuous as me.
I’ve honed my precious self-esteem
In ways no common man could dream!
To feed my moral vanity,
I preen for all the world to see;
I thrust in everybody’s face
The noble causes I embrace.
And lest there be the slightest doubt
That I’m no bitter, clinging lout,
The bumper stickers on my Volt
Affirm that I’m no right-wing dolt.
As these credentials will attest,
I am the brightest and the best –
And true to my enlightened soul,
Utopia shall be my goal!
The planet should be mine to run;
I know what’s best for everyone.
My Nanny Squad will nag and scold,
Until the plebes do as they’re told.
My Social Justice Ministry
Will outlaw inequality –
With good intent unwavering,
I’ll redistribute everything!
I’ll be obscenely generous
With subsidy and stimulus;
To fund my drunken spending sprees,
The fat cats’ profits I will seize!
For those who fail, my heart will bleed,
But woe to those who dare succeed.
I vow to vanquish human greed –
To each according to his need!
There’ll be no want, there’ll be no war,
My Welfare Corps will feed the poor.
There’ll be no limit to my grace,
When I control the human race!
I’ll heal the Earth, I’ll low’r the Seas,
My Healthcare Force will smite disease –
And all will rightly worship me,
The Savior of Humanity!
that is classic. Did you write it?
Why the insult? It is a liberal trait to take another’s production as one’s own! I am sure you did not intend to insult.
Are you talking to me? I have saved it and would love to repost it. I just want to give proper credit.
Becky, you may properly credit the poem to me, and thank you for the compliment.
Winslow has Wisdom. I suspect the same seduction was whispered into Eve’s ear by The First Liberal in the Garden. Is it not strange how those promises remain the same, down thru the ages, but there is always a new promiser and people willing to swallow that poison fruit?
Isn’t “AnarchyRules” self-contradictory?
Well done!
Nice poem. Rhyme & meter stir vague memories of 7th grade. “Trees”, by Joyce Kilmer, perhaps? Sr. Bernadette made us memorize that one.
Well done. Excellent!!!
A well written article that takes on some complex mindsets that infest liberalism and hurt America. I would say that in the case of liberalism the flip side of oikophobia is not xenophilia so much as a racial nostaligie de la boue based on the self-contradictory idea that race matters/doesn’t matter.
This began early on with the Beat Generation and their absurd “cool” stereotypes of race and through the Rolling Stones and the Counter Culture and has never really ended. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs are still heroes to the Left. It’s no surprise that John Scalzi, the head of the Science Fiction Writers of America, would right a piece taking down whites for benefitting from white privilege. These notions are still at the heart of youth culture, pop literature and television and film.
The irony here is that conservative thought really doesn’t care about such matters. A pragmatic rationalist sees failure and success where they are and the gender, race and sexuality is largely irrelevant. Conservatism doesn’t predict so much as react. Liberalism predicts, even when their predictions never come to pass and we are left with stark failures like California.
Just recently it has been revealed that since 1950 our k-12 schools have expanded by leaps and bounds in terms of money spent and bureaucrats added, but with no improvement in grades or graduation rates. That is the stark failure of liberalism in the last half century. Apply it to whatever sector of American life you wish to and you’ll find the same.
This political correctness, perhaps the single most destructive force even unleashed on America, infests our culture, largely through the info and entertainment media, political advocacy, and our schools. It is identity-based, mostly racial, and cynical to the core, mostly about imagined enemies constantly fought against and talked about, but never clearly shown.
This is how Mitt Romney and indeed much of America claims a de facto title of racists based upon the liberal desire to have monsters to push back against in the form of racists, Islamophobes, homophobes and woman haters. The new meme common in the Dem Party is to suggest the GOP longs for the days of Jim Crow and Ozzie and Harriet.
Reverse-racial hate speech has been mainstreamed in America to a point unthinkable only a few years ago. Obama’s 2007 Hampton U speech reviled whites and media outlets like the HuffPo and MSNBC commonly have phrases like “frighteningly white” cities and ideas about a New Jim Crow and even New Confederacy.
I don’t know what the solution is other than to speak up and discredit these people. Push is coming to shove and some solutions will come about simply through the contradictory nature of the Dem tent. Islam will not play well with gays in the Dem Party and illegal immigration is sucking the life out of black unemployment. Unfortunately it seems that one must destroy first in order to rebuild. The legacy of Robert Frank, Kerouac and the Counter Culture had been more of a stain than a solution since no matter how many battles are won liberalism declares there has been no progress. The very phrase New Jim Crow is a testament to this.
Nitpick: Kerouac was no liberal. He was a conservative Republican who disliked the New Deal. William Burroughs was not a liberal either ; he self-identified as a conservative while a young man, and probably was best described as a right-libertarian. The California Left of today, given how uptight, elitist, and prissy it has become, would not have any room for either man.
Great insight, Fail Burton.
Perhaps humor is the only weapon left to us that works.
I saw a bumper sticker on a car driven by a woman. The bumper sticker had a picture of Obama. It said, “Does this ass make my car look big?”
Liberalism is an elite person’s psychological investment in enjoying a guilt-free affluence.
Yes, but that’s not deep enough an analysis. Liberals try to have a guilt-free existence in all things, whether it’s their wealth, their politics, or their individual peccadilloes. How often can anyone here recollect some Liberal having an instant and self-serving excuse for something bad they’d done?
Of which I say, here’s the answer as to why Liberals have such a love-fest with Islamists. The Quran is basically the same kind of thing, a checklist of excuses for one’s bad behavior, a “free-pass.” Liberals love these people because they can live the same kind of no responsibility lives, but the Islamists are just so much farther advanced down that road.
You nailed it Professor. We have a whole lot of people who live as parasites off the taxes and wealth someone else created and many have no idea that they are in fact living at someone else;s expense. Someone they may very well regard disdainfully as beneath them. Without the proper credentials. So they do send junior off to the prestige school where he or she gets surprisingly little for all that money spent beyond some serious attitudes and connections to other kids who FEEL much the same.
We have many areas of the US now that have a thoroughly socialized economy and do not know it. Rural areas where the local hospital or the school district are the area’s largest employer and others live off various transfers from the state. Stagnant and staying that way because the transfers from more dynamic areas of the state or country allow people who would have in the past moved on and started anew. Stay put and get by.
But the mind stagnates. And the Levelling harms us all. And the Parasites who are frequently unaware of that fundamental fact are killing the host without any genuine understanding of the implications. For everyone.
And I honestly believe our Day of Reckoning is a week from today. And these Obama years will be looked back on as the time when enough of us realized what was at stake.
I don’t think the Good Professor would have appreciated ridiculing the 1860s mind as unsuitable for the 21st century anymore than I did. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/ridiculing-the-1860s-mind-as-unsuitable-for-the-21st-century-cui-bono/
Only an ignorance of history and the liberal elite’s fondness for inane talking points justify this insistence that we need new kinds of minds. Yes ones that will not notice predatory political and economic relationships and complain about them. And vote them out. En masse. A week from today.
“Liberalism is an elite person’s psychological investment in enjoying a guilt-free affluence.”
Perfect.
300 years ago the liberal elite of the time, otherwise known as nobility, caught a case of the guilt trips. Their answer was noblesse oblige, where it become a moral obligation of the landed and titled wealthy to ensure the basic needs of the peasant class. Their solution was not giving away their wealth, but getting the government to tax the merchant class to pay for providing the poor a safety net. Sound familiar? The new affluent liberalism is just a repeat of the old affluent liberalism. Maybe it never really went away.
Two additional thoughts to add to Hanson’s spot-on analysis. First, well-off progressives are casual about the purchasing-power loss inherent in higher taxes and deficit spending because they sense that their political and/or market power will raise their incomes sufficiently to offset any such loss. Second, a personal life seen as privileged, immoral and/or exploitative by the hoi pilloi is considered justified by the progressive’s commitment to personal liberty (or more accurately, “personal license”) and his support of compassionate redistributive policy.
Smoking your own crack again. Paranoid delusional hackery. Crawl out of your caves and get some fresh air – It’s beautiful out here.
We crawled out of our caves and invented things. Now, in order to sustain that, one at least must graduate high school. Graduation rates are not a fantasy, they peaked in 1970. Gee, what sad stupidity overtook America about that time?
Nixon?
It actually started with JFK, the original rich Democrat, who gave us licentiousness, lies and media coverups in the White House. His brothers and Clinton learned from him.
woodstock
it turned me off for the rest of my life
but it was embraced by too many who never escaped from its grip
It’s beautiful out here.
That’s a funny thing. I’m old enough to have watched our society change since the 1960s. I look around today and see crack hos, gang-bangers, the collapse of the inner-city black family, rampant entitlements, illegals granted benefits, welfare abuse, graft, you name it. And I ask myself just how is this society we have today – mostly driven by Democrat policies over the last 45 years – so “beautiful?”
Some perfection.
Liberal does not equal Democrat and there has not been one party rule for 45 years. Also the only thing on your bitch list that is new is crack.
There has been one party rule in the black community, entertainment media, immigration policy and academia and the results are hard to ignore.
True; many DemoKKKrats weren’t stupid enough to be liberals.
The term I used, “Rampant,” is a qualifier. Did this stuff always exist? Yes. Has it ever been the case that it has grown, in a relatively short time, 100 times worse due to weepy, Liberal governmental programs? No, not until the last 45 years.
You sound like my Grampa – he wanted all the darkies to go away to.
No we don’t want them to go away, we just want the Democrats AND liberals to quit shielding them from responsibility. Stop treating them like 12 year olds on an allowance. Stop making excuses for bad behavior. Quit calling everyone racist just because they expect people to act like citizens instead of parasites. I believe that has changed in the last 40 years, hasn’t it?
When the civil rights era started, I don’t remember the call to let Blacks not work and get free stuff, make babies without responsibility for their upbringing, go to school and not learn anything, be all about form without substance, expect jail to be a part of your life experience, hate those who choose to try and better themselves. No these are all “gifts” from our liberal leadership of the last 40 years.
Treating Blacks as incapable of making any important life decisions hasn’t helped them and espouses racism at it’s most basic level. What is more racist than telling a population that you can’t succeed without our help? Especially when 50 years of this patronization has done nothing but make the majority more dependent on handouts.
How can you argue that this all right? Move along. Nothing to see here. Go smell the roses. Well Mr. Grasshopper, the roses are dead, it’s winter, and and a lot of people are going to be in a world of hurt when the gravy train runs out.
So sad you willfully consume the crap hackery and false narrative served up by Professor Hanson. Enjoy
So sad you willfully consume the crap hackery and false narrative served up by Karl Marx.
“The proletariat [tax-eating, non-disabled, government-dependent Blacks] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois [White middle class] individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the [Black] proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Of course you can substitute any “aggrieved” class of “victims” in place of Blacks, and you can substitute any non-White middle class in place of a White middle class. In truth, under real free enterprise, there is no such thing as an aggrieved class of victims, because under true free enterprise all men are created with equal rights to life, liberty and the fruit of their own labor in creative pursuit of happiness.
I didn’t think I either supported or rejected anything VDH said. I was addressing your snarky, non-sequiter brush off of Allston’s comment that there isn’t a lot that’s beautiful in much of today’s Black culture. You blew off every bit of legitimate observation by equating it to something a bigot would say (at least that’s how you seem to want to present your Grandpa). It’s sad to think that a culture would embrace these things so much, that to criticize them, is racist.
You’re so full of the liberal head-in-the-sand racist attitude. Which I’ll paraphrase as: “You won’t go along with our obvious failure of a social experiment, so we’ll call you a racist, instead of thoughtfully considering your points.” And you do a good job of “I disagree with you, but I have crappy reasoning skills, so I’ll just gloss over the debate and mock you instead”. Biden would be proud.
What’s really crappy, is that people like you would rather keep destroying a race with failed policies, than have an open dialog about what’s right, wrong, what to keep, and what to throw out with current racial policies. The fact that Blacks vote 95% Democrat pretty much sums up the liberal incentive to keep the same policies in place.
“Crap hackery”? “False narrative”? Okay, back your charges up with an analysis. Otherwise, it’s ad hominem, at best.
I wasn’t around back in the 1950s when “the civil rights era started” but by the mid-1960s the expression ‘welfare rights’ began to make the rounds and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was campaigning for more and bigger welfare programs.
And you sound like the “sensitivity trainer” who makes a living telling people that they’re racist and that the worst part is that they don’t know it. Tell me more about how everything is racist and that I would understand that if I was racist like you.
Insults and ad-hominem arguments. Reinforcing Dr, Hanson’s observations rather nicely.
You get an ‘F’ little boy. Class dismissed.
All of the above is the prerequisite for the next thing to come, the emergence of a new socioeconomic class “the parasites” (unconditional minimum income, the right to live with the parents until the age of 56,… ) They may even adopt the name (see: “the pirate party” in Germany)
“Liberals, 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally.”
Phil Ochs
The only problem is that they should be called leftist or lefty’s. By calling them “liberals” you make it sound like a good thing, it is like calling a cockroach a hug-bug or water bug. Please don’t help the left by making them sound better. The word “liberal” has positive connotations that is why they like being called liberals not leftist.
I call then “at one remove” thinkers. They never think beyond the first leve or surface on the effect their policies will have, just stop at the most “obvious” assertion. Lazy thinking.
“Someone is poor? Just give them money, that will solve it!”
“The economy is stalling? Just have the government take a bunch of money from its magic money tree and spend it!!! That will solve it!”
“Terrorism? Lets just ‘understand their needs’ ‘feel their pain’ and ‘apologize’ and we’ll be ok!’
Etetera. Never much of an ounce of though on the foundations of the policies, on second orde or third order effects. Never an ounce of though on the ripples emanating from the stone they throw in the pond – or the waves from the boulder. Just whatever allows them to believe they have ‘addressed the problem’ with a minimum of effort or personal work and sacrifice.
Yes. And the Democrats’ critique of conservative fiscal and monetary policy proposals tends to be that “the arithmetic doesn’t work.” But the economy does not work on arithmetic; it works on matrix algebra — thousands of simultaneous and complex equations that contain not only economic and financial variables, but social and psychological variables, too. Any action sets in motion a search for a new equilibrium, best found by free people operating in free markets.
Liberalism is a sociopathic disorder.
Solutions:
One place to look for models of reform is the Reformation.
Luther did not condemn Christianity, per se. On the contrary he articulated a more compelling vision of it than that on offer from Rome. Likewise blanket condemnations of “liberalism” or “progressivism” are likely to do more harm than good in reconnecting our rising generations to love of a country founded on liberal principles or whose core identity (what brought our ancestors here) is about the opportunity to make Progress together. Real progress: Hoover Dams, the Internet, Borlaug’s Green Revolution in agriculture, Apollo.
It is to participate in that culture that the rising generations sign up for liberalism and progressivism in the first place, as did the Reformers – the bulk of the best and brightest minds (and certainly those at the heart of the very real progress achieved both in England and the continent) of the Northern Renaissance considered themselves Protestants – continue to deeply commit themselves to Christianity even as they redefined what that meant.
I love historical fiction.
The eve of All Hallows is a Catholic holiday. The tradition of dressing up as spooks is to mock death – for we have been saved by Christ Jesus and live in the hope of the Resurrection on the Last Day – and to mock Satan and all his works – for he has been defeated by the sacrifice on the cross. For Protestants there’s their “Reformation Day”, also remembered on Oct. 31. For them there’s no candy, just a list of the 95 Theses and a reminder that there’ll be a quiz on Friday.
The greed for power is as strong in some as the greed for money is in others. Saul Alinsky nailed it when he wrote: “the issue (Delta smelt, illegal immigrants, global warming etc.) is never the issue, the issue is always power and control.”
Choey,
I was waiting for someone to finally say it… simply and powerfully.
The left really does not want these problems solved.
Cheers.
worlds are born then worlds are swept away. Ideas come then disappear. This column is more about keeping the true believers in your ideas still believing as if your ideas are the gospel truth, The idea I like is the one Jesus say about God letting HIS rain fall on the good and the evil.
So there is the world’s platform and why? Matthew 24:22 answers that question:
“In fact, unless that time of calamity is shortened, not a single person will survive. But it will be shortened for the sake of God’s chosen ones.”
Your ideas can lead an ignorant person to believe God is the psychpath when God just ask the unchosen to stand in line and end up chosen by going to hell in the afterlife then purgatory before one can be chosen for heaven
No one has really put themselves in dialogue with Paul Krugman why, his voice is too high and he sound like girlie man yet I find he believes without even knowing Jesus words how God lets it rain on the good and evil yet man when he begins to play god with his trickle down belief this leads to worlds swept away not by God but by men playing god
yes/no?
One small point that is often overlooked, the liberal mindset is driven by a belief of ‘finite’. There are finite resources, so if one has more than another, then that person is greedy or unfair by default.
Spot on Alec.
The other related concept is the zero sum. To wit, if that guy over there has a buck, it came at somebody else’s expense. This is an explicit underpinning of Marxism.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
– Charles Mackay
Remember “Stop the Insanity” by Susan Powter, the 1993 book about bad diet?
It’s close to TWENTY years since this came out, and despite being a famous phrase and cause, why, what do you know—there are even MORE fat, and even fatter, people!
Liberalism is a form of insanity. My guess is that all the brilliant writing by Doctor Davis, along with the heartfelt rants by people like Hannity and Limbaugh also won’t make a dent in the bad political diet Americans have been following for a hundred of years.
Progressivism, liberalism, socialism—whatever: people have been fed this poisonous “food” for too long for mere words to matter much. Things can always EASILY go from bad to worse, and from worse to terrible. Right now, I’d say we ALREADY went from the bad of Clinton to the worse of Obama, and even if Romney wins, something terrible is coming. Without taking the Senate, Romney won’t be able to do a whole lot, domestically.
The political “body” of each person is ALREADY full of fat and toxic material. There’s been a whole lot of swallowing going on, 24/7.
Therefore, Just SAYING “I’m fat” doesn’t make any difference. There is no short cut to getting lean and healthy. It will take a long time, IMHO, for the bodies politic to burn off so much crap—if it can be done at all, before the spit hits the fan.
Yes, 20 years after SAYING “Stop the Insanity!”, and what do you get? Another 20 years older, and deeper in “political fat” debt.
No—it looks like Obama was right when he said, “I won”.
The physically AND politically fat Americans have spoken, and it will take much more than a single election to undo the already huge century long “meal” that’s been swallowed whole by most people.
How many people bought the book, “Stop the Insanity”, AND changed their diet for the better?
QED
Liberals think? I was under the impression their mantra is, “I feel your pain.”
Michael Savage diagnosed it best: Liberalism is a mental illness…
Stupendous piece, Mr. Hanson. Please continue to write for us all. I almost come to tears thinking about the wrong turn we have taken, especially considering I firmly believe it is too late to correct. One day I think we will either balkanize in this land or return to the Continent.
Be careful Dr. Hanson, your words contain so much common sense that you may cause a progressive’s head to explode. Then they may come after you for a thought crime.
That would never happen because no progressive would ever read this through. I thought of sending it to some of my prog friends, but decided it would only tick them off. Satisfying on some level, but not productive. Our only hope is to outvote these our deluded friends and make sure that they don’t get out of hand, as they did in ’08. Does anyone want to see Obama name the next two Supremes? One more lefty vote on the court and there’ll be no turning back from lefty dystopia. We also need to try wrest the media and ed systems out of their hands — a huge struggle.
Hey, we drive a Kia. Don’t insult our Kia!
I’ve been a big fan of yours for years and have enjoyed your books. However, I confess I’m somewhat disappointed by this article, which I would characterize as a bit of a screed. For starters, you are defining modern “progressives” as liberals; I might nitpick with several of the points you’ve made– in ancient Rome it was the “grubby” Greeks, slaves and freedmen who did all the work– but the overarching definition of liberalism is ill-served here. There are many features of the modern liberal democracy that we all take for granted, including civil and women’s rights, and that we would never wish to roll back the clock on. A perfect example of the principles I’m talking about is that of Herbert Hoover, who considered himself the greatest liberal of his day on social issues and was so beloved by Jewish voters at the time that high schools are still named for him even today.
If, however, by “liberals” you mean “American social democrats”, then I agree fully with most of your points. It is this unnamed social force in American politics that has since the Civil War been busy with the construction of the modern welfare state that you describe so acutely in California.
An excellent analysis. I’d add a few points.
I agree with the concept that the leftist ideology of redistribution to the ‘peasantry’ is a form of sanctimonious ‘isolation of guilt’ for the reality of inequality. But in addition, it’s a form of security, for the left considers that the unequal, the peasantry, might riot and take their pleasant lifestyle from them. Therefore, distributing goods and services is a tactic of self-preservation.
What neither side of the economic pole consider is that inequality is a basic reality, and indeed, a necessary reality. If there is no surplus, a surplus beyond the needs of current consumption, then, there is no future. This is as valid in the human world as in the biological world. If there are no seeds left over from consumption, then, there are no plants growing next spring. If all the apples are eaten, then, there will be no more apple trees. If there are no mice to give birth to more mice, then….not only are there no more mice, but no more owls.
If there is no surplus or profit money left over from any and all daily consumption purchases, then, there is no money to invest in the long term projects of building a new factory, a new road, investing in medical and scientific research labs which will only generate results in ten years..and so on.
People ignore that an economy is made up of a triad of actions: Production and Consumption….and above all, Investment. Investment requires that profits be made; Investment removes that profit from current use and puts it away into long term projects such as a group of investors building a new industry or supporting research or building a railroad. The vital role of Investment, which is the setting up of the ability-to-produce goods which we can consume, is totally overlooked by the left.
People ignore that an economy is made up of a triad of actions: Production and Consumption….and above all, Investment.
The undergirding princple of which is delayed gratification. Something that so-called ‘progressives,’ too busy immanentizing the eschaton, can’t be bothered with. The very idea infuriates them.
Also, the left, in their alternate reality seems always to be surprised by unintended consequences.
My favorite example is Barry’s idea that government can somehow harness the profits of the private sector without any lowering of that productivity or profit.
We are the ill-fed, overworked horse drawing the carriage, if you’ll permit a Dickensian metaphor. Beat us too hard, cuss at us, starve us, and we’ll die. Or better, draw back our skinny little pointy hoofed legs and kick the driver right in his forehead.
The solution is as painful as the disease. That’s why you won’t see it in written form. It would attract the same bad press as VDH has used to report the disease.
Its the same human condition that compels us to attempt to ignore a physical malady for fear that the cure is worse than the disease. Until we can no longer ignore it and both become our undoing, not being able to handle both at the same time.
I see this as our future. Sorry. But no solutions were forthcoming from VDH now or in the many past and excellent articles he’s written. Neither from his commenters nor from me. I know. I’m ready.
End all immigration, boot out every illegal and commit to lowering our population from 300 million to 200 million. I’ve said it many times. We are not an airport at the service of whoever from wherever. Our current path will end in disaster.
“For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political make-up.”
What’s irrational about it? Is not this article itself a rightfully furious condemnation of the system in its own right?
Those with the power and insight necessary to reform it have been divided and conquered by those who benefit from it.
Only parts of it. It was a lack of understanding, a kind of innocence, or perhaps wilfull blindness that prevented us from understanding what was happening in our media and academic institutions. By the time we noticed that the leftists (many of them still funded and controlled by the Soviet Union, even up into the 1980′s) were “boring-in” and attacking the ties and traditions that kept us free, it was too late. The “system”, minus a few tweaks is well conceived in its fundamentals, but unless we make the conscious effort to breathe meaning into the values that sustain it at the individual level, it will not last.
We are awake now, but we can’t afford to go back to sleep.
The good doctor’s thesis has a lot of merit, but much as he tries, he is never willing to go to the real explanation for what drives the architects of liberalism, or whatever word they choose to disguise themselves with at any point in time.
It’s power, naked power. That’s what drives the architects 100 times more than guilt, several times more than envy, and an infinite times more than compassion. Lenin is the model. He is the perfect liberal in every sense of the word. And our own little Fraud is the best example or someon filling his shoes since Lenin’s enemies figured out how to circumvent his bodyguards (a mistake that Stalin made sure didn’t happen to himself).
I am puzzled by the term intellectual. I have read the “BOOK” definitions and find them wanting. “An intellectual is a person who primarily uses intelligence in either a professional or an individual capacity.” The inference seems to be that academics and the idle rich can be intellectuals, and everyone else can’t!
Every profession I have encountered fits that definition. Carpentry, for instance, is much less physical than mental. Cutting a strait line requires spatial recognition that the saw is following the correct path and making the required adjustment to maintain that path. These are intellectual actions operating the saw is on a par with using a pencil, using either required years to master. Even intellectuals choose auto-mechanics on their intellectual ability diagnose and repair the vehicle, and not the ability to break nuts loose with their bare hands.
This brings me to the term Anti-intellectualism. From the time I start college I heard complaints by professors of anti-intellectualism. Their complaints centered around the hoy-ploy criticizing higher education and those employed therein over the high cost and poor quality output (their children going in well adjusted, coming out unemployable raving communists). Mind you, these professors were receiving most of their income from the public treasury. It took me a while to come to the conclusion that the professors were unhappy with their BOSSES, that they considered their intellectual inferiors, had the timidity to criticize their BETTERS work.
“There are some things so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.”
~George Orwell
“I do not approve of intellectuals.”
~Hercule Poirot, sleuth extraordinaire
The Question:
…does anyone believe in liberal ideology anymore — and if so, why?
The Answer:
Liberalism is about power and influence, impossible without millions of dependent constituents…Liberals believe that abstract caring allows them seclusion and cocooning in the real, material world… if one is loudly for “pay-your-fair-share” higher taxes, or for affirmative action, or for more deficit spending, then one feels absolved from guilt over his isolated privilege — and can enjoy it without lamentation…In short, twenty-first century elite liberalism has become a psychological condition
Happy Halloween
Great article. Any capacity that true believing liberals had to see the overall harm liberalism has caused went out the window after Obama became president, which event they see as exhibit A in the validation of their core beliefs. O’s presidency was the kind of thing they were waiting for and now they probably feel inoculated forever against conservative attacks on Liberalism that are designed to make them see that it works about as well as, well, Obama’s presidency.
You saved the best for last….great closing statement.
Additional insights
Recently Lloyd Blankfein, an uber-titan of Wall Street whom many would call the ultimate Snidely Whiplash capitalist ogre, characterized his own politics as “left of center.” I don’t know if he voluntarily pays extra tax, though. Guilt really seems to trump (no pun intended) hypocrisy among the idiot elite who think of themselves and all they do as “progressive.”
Typical crank piece by the professor, full of crap that people who don’t know California (but loathe it anyway) will eat up.
Fact: “Liberals” did not let illegal aliens flood California. The federal government did, by not policing the border. Rich agribusiness types loved this; one presumes most of them are not liberals.
Fact: California gets $1 in federal dollars back for every $1.20 or so that it sends to Washington. This is a pretty typical for blue states. The difference is sent to red states to try to remediate endemic child poverty and general backas*wardness.
If California sank into the ocean, as many PJ types seem to fervently hope, the US economy would drop 20%, and you’d lose military and technological infrastructure that would take a generation to replace. A better solution would be for the South to become its own country, institutionalizing its third world labor standards and letting the rest of the country govern itself pragmatically in an adult fashion instead of being driven by juvenile Randian fantasies.
Are you suggesting California has no blame for its current ills? I think we can all agree that the Federal government has helped its passing along.
Most of California’s current ills stem from the huge liability of having millions of undereducated aliens and their children. Once they are here, you have to try to educate them and keep them healthy. I don’t want someone with TB coughing in line next to me at the bank or the grocery store.
A ten year old study documented that a typical immigrant family paid about $10,000 in taxes annually, but used about $30,000 in public resources. There’s the state’s budget problem in a nutshell.
Like the professor, who is my contemporary, I’ve been here to witness the change and decline. Demographic replacement started in the 1980s, accelerated in the 90s and is now maybe levelling off. It was not just illegals; there was also a flood of legal immigration which changed entire metropolitan areas in a span of a few years. Traffic and crime zoomed upward. When Californians complained about it thirty years ago, no one cared.
Ever hear of a sanctuary city? Ever walked around the bad parts of Anaheim? Stop pretending Calif. doesn’t embrace failure. Sure there’s a lot of good stuff going on in Cal.; it’s America. But it’s half Third World and sinking.
The number and proliferation of California bureaucracies boggle the mind, most are individuals drawing salaries for pushing paper and making up dumb rules.
California taxpayers should be outraged at the amount of their money being dumped into paying pensions, some (worthless) ex-bureaucrats raking in 1/2 million or more.
So 10% sales tax in CA is cool and the ex-hippy governor is pumping for 13%?
Golden State is going down the drain.
If California sank into the ocean, as many PJ types seem to fervently hope…
Dumb statement.
The average pension for a CA state employee is about $35,000. CA ranks near last in the number of state employees per capita.
The big pensions are going to county and local government public safety chiefs.
CA ranks near last in the number of state employees per capita.
Really ?
California State Agencies
As for pensions, my information was from a long article in the LA Times a couple of years ago.
The list you linked to is misleading, as many of the “boards” and “commissions” maybe employ one secretary and may meet a few times a year to make recommendations on legislation. Including universities in the list is kind of pointless, too.
Yet another factually incorrect Sorobot. You can quote data from 20 years ago, but it doesn’t make it right. See, California’s #1 export are businesses and millionaires. You idiot had to give tax exemption to the hypocrites in Hollywood to keep the movie industry from leaving the state. Welfare now costs this country over a TRILLION dollars, and one third of ALL welfare recipients are in California.
Read and learn if you are capable: http://www.infowars.com/16-reasons-to-move-away-from-california/comment-page-1/#comment-3141963
You are delusional. No wonder you hide behind anonomous. If the political “leadership” of CA had wanted the US to secure the Border, the Border would have been secured; those 50-odd Electoral Votes can get pretty much what they want from a Democrat and a lot even from a Republican. Instead, CA encouraged illegals, rewarded illegals, sheltered illegals, used illegals for Democrat voter fraud schemes.
Your BS about CA’s tax contribution only works if one doesn’t consider how much the US spends in CA. Let’s don’t even look at all the social welfare spending on Democrat constituencies, lets look at all that technological and intellectual infrastructure you brag about? Who built that? You didn’t build that, to borrow a line from the communist in chief. The joke in organized labor used to be that the CIO in AFL-CIO stood for California Improved Okies because the WWII and Cold War Eras built up so much aerospace industry in CA which was primarily organized by the CIO’s Machinist union. That CA aerospace industry was in large measure built with the tax dollars of the whole Nation. Even the vaunted Silicone Valley was financed in large measure by the fact that the taxpayers of the Nation spent many billions in the ’90s to completely, and often unnecessarily, “wire” state, local, and the federal goverments.
Actually, I’m not one of the people who’d like CA to fall into the Pacific; too many people would swim away and they’d Californicate the rest of the Country. I’d like to deport your illegals and incarcerate most of your politicians. You brought up The South and The South gives us a template for the reconstruction of CA. I’d reduce you to a military district and take away your self-governance at all levels for some while; at least long enough for the government parasites in social welfare and community action to starve out. With your constitution set aside by the military government, the constitutional guarantees on the public pensions can be abbrogated and some sanity restored to the system and the level of benefits that accrue to CA public employees at all levels. The extortionary unions can simply be decertified or not recognized by the military district government. After a few years you can be allowed to move to territory status and have some limited self-governance. After a decent interval, say ten to twenty years, CA can develop a sane constitution and seek re-admission to the union.
Please let me know when you figure out how to deport 10 million people without starting WWIII. If you magically removed these 10 million, California would have a balanced budget, and the prisons would be mostly empty.
Folks in California were screaming about immigration beginning in the 80s, but the politicians on both sides of the aisle ignored it. We had conservative Republican governors then (Deukmejian, Wilson) and they ignored it. Folks in red states didn’t give a sh*t back then, since it looked like California’s problem.
“Please let me know when you figure out how to deport 10 million people without starting WWIII.”
Who’s going to fight that war? Is Mexico going to declare war because we send their citizens back? There’ll be a war IN Mexico fairly quickly when they lose the safety valve of their discontented going to the US, but that is another issue. I know if I lived in Mexico, I’d be up in the hills with an AK-47.
I’d start with ruthless prosecution of employers of illegal migrant labor, and if that makes the price of lettuce go up, so be it. I grew up in the rural South and it was an article of faith amongst the farmers that cotton and tobacco farming could only be done with hand labor. Well, the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society took away their peon labor and both crops are totally automated now. Californians can blow their own leaves and mow their own grass; they’ll be better for it. Hell, maybe they could even get some Blacks to do some to that “work Americans won’t do.”
The cat comes out of the bag when you see preachifying leftists, (take Michelle Obama (please) who finds the legislative process so cumbersome to her own and her husband’s enlightened objectives)…advising audiences to forgo personal enrichment and seek work in the “helping” professions…
While they themselves have been and are heavily into personal enrichment, elegant lifestyles & spending. Estimated that personal expenses alone, travel, clothing, jewelry etc. of the Obamas have cost the American taxpayer $1.4 billion. A formal dinner at Obama’s White House costs something like $4,700/per person, far and away exceeding previous presidents.
Then there are preachifying socialists (take Noam Chomsky, please) jet setting around the planet, staying in 5 star hotels, bashing “capitalism”.
Chief sycophants-in-waiting like Jarrett and Axelrod pursue their own wealth at every opportunity.
All right up there with Barack’s favorite support group, Hollywood liberals, when it comes to spelling that word, h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e
I was hoping for more of “why liberals think what they do” instead of just a list of what they think.
it’s no mystery.
Liberals are like everybody else. Nearly 100% self-serving. The key difference between them and people who aren’t criminals is that they completely reject all moral frameworks other than the ones they invent on the fly (i.e., the “living constitution”).
Once a person does that, he is free to exploit other people and to be as greedy as he wants to be, all the while telling himself that it’s for the greater good. The list of examples is endless. Al Gore may be the comical apex of the list, although singling out a single transparent criminal doesn’t do the others justice.
We should all take a serious look at Evan Sayet’s “KinderGarden of Evil,” if we want to truly understand the mindset of them modern Leftie.
Teaching classics is valuable when it inculcates in the student the disciplines of careful thinking that are the products of a sophisticated grammar, a refined syntax, and an elaborate rhetorical construction; and when it transmits an appreciation of the virtues and vices displayed by strong historical figures and admired polities. It then provides lessons for us moderns, and it gives us a sense that we are not merely creatures of the day. It benefits its students directly and other citizens indirectly, even those who make their livings outdoors, with a cautionary guidance and a precious heritage. Then it joins itself to that vast partnership, the task for us all, in the maintenance of the republic.
When, however, teaching classics serves merely as vehicle for propagating class-envy, racial resentment, and disdain for patriotic sentiment, it soils itself far worse than the coarsest of ditch-diggers.
This is all mostly true, especially the part about the psychological envy and the use of liberalism as a ‘cover’ to justify one’s own comfort and security, and also esp. the aspect of it that is based in a disconnect from physical, objective reality.
The trouble is that this is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, on the Right. There are basic contradictions on our side, too. For example, if you support both untrammeled free trade and full national soveriegnty, you have a conflict in your beliefs, because they are incompatible The former undercuts, inevitably, the latter, by creating a class of peopel with a vested interest in the international _status quo_. We saw one example of this on 9/11, when the borders were briefly closed and many businesses started screaming because their ‘just in time’ supply chains were snapped. More subtly, America is hamstrung in dealing with China both because of our public debt, and because so much of the internationalized industrial network runs through both countries.
Likewise, it’s a mistake to lump all 47% of the ‘dependent’ into one category, not all of them support the progressives just as not all self-supporting people support the conservatives.
As for unions, just as comfortable progressives have become insulated from the realities of the physical world and the private sector, many conservatives have no conception just how harsh a world a pure free market can sometimes create. Even today, while smartphones and laptops get cheaper, basic staples of life are gettng more expensive. In a world of free trade and no unions, the untrammeled free market shows a nasty tendency to race to the bottom in terms of wages and benefits, and the bottom is very far down.
The ‘red’ model can not displace the ‘blue’ model, they are flip sides of the _same coin_. We forget that at our peril.
Nice try, Sorobot. You can yammer that all you want, but it’s patently FALSE. The 47% approval rating for Obamugabe exactly correlates to 47% of our nation being gov’t dependents. OUR side is the only side that gets the fact that a national debt that is LITERALLY THREE TIMES THE GLOBAL GDP is unsustainable. You present all these nebulous made up straw men to make some false point, much like Obamugabe did with his fake girlfriend, but we KNOW reality. Let’s look at the liberal base, shall we, then tell me who doesn’t get it. The entire prison pop’l, the entire welfare pop’l, 95% of the black community, the uber rich/bankers, attorneys, unions, Hollywood, academia,gov’t employees and social deviants. Yeah, that’s a good cross section of America and our founding principles, right? yeah, NO difference between the two sides if you are intellectually immature or dishonest. Yeah, our side has its issues, but WE aren’t the ones voting because “Obama’s gonna pay my rent” or “Obama bought me a phone” etc. Those flash mobs – all of them liberal gov’t dependents. Detroit, perhaps the best example of liberalism on full display is a WAR ZONE with the police warning people to enter at their own risk. Half the city illiterate, dominated EXCLUSIVELY by liberals. But, yeah, we’re the same.
Idiot.
Bam, is that you? Your use of straw men is typically awesome, and the feigned reasonableness a superior cover for your radical core.
Nobody close to being in power on the right comes close to espousing “untrammeled free trade”. Other than the Paulista’s, who are essentially a party of their own, all republicans and conservatives recognize that regulations are necessary for a smoothly operating economy, and most support safety nets of one form or another. There are no “untrammeled” republicans or conseratives.
And the only peope who “lump all 47% of the ‘dependent’ into one category” are on the left, when they are lying about the right. The cartoon characters are all on the left.
“many conservatives have no conception just how harsh a world a pure free market can sometimes create” How would you know that, Bam, since THERE ARE NO PURE FREE MARKETS, and for that matter, there never have been. This is a straw man even a straw man genius such as yourself should avoid.
“The ‘red’ model can not displace the ‘blue’ model, they are flip sides of the _same coin_. ” wow. Is there a meaning in there somewhere. To be speculative, I’m guessing you mean that there is no material difference between conservatism and liberalism, which is, of course, patently untrue. If it were true, then California wouldn’t be degenerating into a 3rd world country while Texas is successfully assimilating millions of Hispanics while becoming one of the largest economies in the world.
Straw man: Conservatives want a pure free market economy, untrammelled, dog-eat-dog capitalism, anybody who can’t compete is consigned to poverty or servitude. Wrong.
Can you argue that modern liberals don’t want to start a complete, cradle-to-grave welfare state paid for by growth-stifling taxation on the most productive members of society? That all they desire is for government to “take care of things private industry doesn’t do very well?” Is that a straw man, too?
Mr Hanson,
Please stop referring the tyrannical academic/political-left elite as liberals. Those people are noting more than historical Royal class wannabees. Their ultimate objective is to gain absolute power and wealth. And the only hurdle to achieve their goal is the middle class and the concept of upper mobility. That’s the reason why during any socialist government – from Stalin to Mao to Castro to Obama – middle class disappears, poverty goes up the ruling class gets richer and richer. Those people are nothing more than vultures, plain and simple.
And liberals. Liberalism has been a cancer throughout society for centuries. The true end game of liberalism is tyranny. It’s the only way to ensure equitable misery and compliance. Sorry, you have to call a spade a spade. I like the term regressives, but it’s all the same, liberalism.
Man, this is a great article. Professor Hanson puts into words everything I wish I could to define “Do Gooder”.
In this Orwellian age of boldfaced lies and projection, is it any wonder that Obama (of all people) calls Romney a BSer and people who fancy themselves open-minded progressives are always the most regressive herd of group-thinkers in the room? On this very thread there will be disagreements between varying degrees of conservatives. Now go look at a HuffPo thread and see if you can find any two “progressives” with any daylight between their thinking at all.
Think back to when you were an insecure child still learning life’s various defense mechanisms, name-calling, manipulation, projection, bullying, and you understand what it’s like in the mind of today’s “liberal”.
PHENOMENAL article
*standing ovation*
An inexorable set of assumptions that cannot and will not tolerate challenge.
For leaders of today’s “progressive” movement, devices for corralling the useful idiots.
For the useful idiots themselves, the body of dogma is sacrosanct
VDH: “So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms 1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor… What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.”
“They [intellectuals] prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige… They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator… Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas… Hayek put it clearly: “the intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties.” He is interested in visions and utopias, and because “socialist thought owes its appeal largely to its visionary character” (and I would add lack of realism and utopian nature), the intellectual tends to become a socialist… The free market system does not typically reward those who are, in their own eyes, the most meritorious. Because the intellectuals value themselves very highly, they disdain the marketplace. Markets value them differently than their own eyes and, in addition to it, markets function nicely without their supervision. As a result, the intellectuals are suspicious of free markets and prefer being publicly funded. That is another reason, why they are in favour of socialism.” Václav Klaus
http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=wFYl3mgsTzI6
Eloquently stated as always, Dr. Hanson. Longhand for the following:
1. Liberals live in a cartoon world; dealing with them is like watching the 1980s music video “Take on Me” by the group A-Ha, in which a woman viewing a series of storyboards gets pulled into the animation and becomes a part of it. Simply put, when reality collides with the liberal cartoon-world, the cartoon always wins.
2. Napoleon Hill, in his book “Think and Grow Rich,” nearly a century ago identified what he called the Seven Major Negative Emotions that pull anyone who indulges in them down into a life of misery and poverty: Anger, Hatred, Fear, Jealousy, Greed, Superstition and Revenge. When you spend a moment considering the emotional state that underlies most of what liberals say and write, it’s typical to see a cocktail of two or more of these emotions at work.
Hill compared the effect on the mind of the seven major negative emotions and their seven major positive counterparts to what springs up in your flower bed: the positives are like flowers, they must be constantly cultivated or they won’t grow, while the negatives are like weeds: they just spring up on their own and will take over the whole plot, choking out the flowers if they are not pulled out.
You can see this comparison at work when examining liberal arguments, which generally reflect a mental laziness and spoon-perceiving-the-taste-of-food relationship with logic while simultaneously showing off an emotional weed-bed of negativity.
3. Everything else that you see — the Luddite environmentalism, the torches-and-pitchforks obsession with those more prosperous than themselves, the double standards of behavior, the self-congratulatory faux intellectualism, the oikophobia, the dissembling and distortions — is just a symptom of what lies beneath.
Post more stuff. You get it.
Wow, Dr. Hanson sure knows a lot about liberals. This article contains more straw men than a Wizard of Oz convention.
Your first sentence is correct.
Your Freudian slip using a Wizard of Oz reference in your second is quite telling.
You liberals do so fear the removal of that curtain, don’t you?
A “straw man” argument is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition, and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
Please itemize each “straw man” that Dr. Hanson has created, matching each “straw man” proposition along with its corresponding unequivalent proposition.
It’s mind-blowing the level of Rage against Obama and “liberalism” and liberals at PJ Media. In comparison, Stormfront is for genteel Presbyterians. Yes I know their hate is misplaced and generalized and unkosher. But they’re sitting around and complaining about how everything went to hell and it’s never coming back. You guys are actually getting ready to fight civil war II. You don’t think Obama and liberals are wrong or misguided or ineffectual, no you think they’re EVIL. I’m not close-minded, I’ve been very open to non-liberal ideas, first neocon ideas were attractive in the early 2000′s, then later some buchananite ideas were very captivating to me. But Witnessing the level of irrationality and hatred against Obama by politically engaged non-elitist white Americans over the past four years has driven me solidly back to the liberal camp. I’m still very concerned about the national question (who are we?) and I’m very unimpressed with AG Holder and his elitist guilt tripping activism. But I’m voting for Obama because it just makes sense to have a public sector to do certain essential things the private sector doesn’t do very well. And because trying to start a war of civilizations, rather than just leaving the rest of the world alone, makes no sense at all. And because white America or a significant part of it has apparently gone nuts and is drunk on some NASTY koolaid. Vote no to perpetual war! Vote Obama.
True to lib form, we’re all racists. Go eff off.
The reason we detest you so-called liberals so much is because you are no longer real liberals. Real liberals, like our Founding Fathers, believed in, and defended, the equal rights of all individuals to life, liberty and fruit of labor in creative pursuit of happiness. You so-called liberals are no different from the pro-Monarchy conservatives opposed by our Founders; the only significant difference is that you have become self-serving, power-seeking Marxist Collectivists rather than self-serving, power-seeking Divine Right Collectivists. Since collectivism destroys the God-given equal rights of the individual, it is evil, and we hate evil.
What are these “essential” things that the private sector doesn’t do very well? If one takes a hard look at our Constitution, one should come away with a short list of functions that are appropriate for our federal gov’t & they are as follows: National security, infrastructure, regulation of trade & international commerce, maintenance of public lands & infrastructure & foreign policy. States have a little more leeway. Beyond that, I will be happy to hear what should be added.
Public safety, roads and transportation systems, sewage, schools and community colleges, parks and recreation facilities at local and state level. National defense, homeland security, immigration regulation, basic financial rules and regulations to prevent systemic breakdowns, basic safety net to ensure minimum level of income, roof over one’s head (not necessarily homeownership) and access to health care throughout life. No reason that such a social contract has to deprive individuals of the freedom to do what they want and prevent them from keeping the vast majority of the wealth they earn. Social democracy with economic freedom works well in Europe outside of the southern nations there. Their only problem is low birth rates which is forcing large scale immigration without assimilation. We should be honest and fearless and non-PC in discussing the challenges of assimilation in a nonhomogeneous society like our own. But I have no desire to live in the sort of dog-eat-dog every man for himself world that contemporary conservativism (which I prefer to call social Darwinist liberalism) wants to foist on us. A nation should be a community and it’s members each receive certain privileges and protections in exchange for carrying out their civic and moral duties and responsibilities. Which include taxes, Jack.
Please remind me which of these “essential functions” our governments are doing well?
Why don’t you tell me which parts of the government are doing their job poorly? Our problems as a nation are cultural and demographic. Some of the most toxic influences on us as a people come from spheres where government has bowed out and liberty reigns supreme (porn for example).
@ markus
doing this would surely crash this website
“Public safety”
Only national public safety is authorized in our Constitution via our military forces. Local public safety, as per the 10th amendment, falls to the States.
“Roads and transportation systems”
Only Federal post roads are authorized by our Constitution, so Federal highways and the Interstate system are authorized, but not other national transportation systems; that would require an amendment.
“Sewage, schools and community colleges, parks and recreation facilities at local and state level.”
Correct.
“National defense, homeland security, immigration regulation”
Correct.
“Basic financial rules and regulations to prevent systemic breakdowns”
There is no Constitutional authorization for a Federal Reserve Bank; no Constitutional authorization for such a bank to create money out of thin air, and thereby create massive public debt, and thereby cause the worst of all systemic breakdowns.
“Basic safety net to ensure minimum level of income, roof over one’s head (not necessarily homeownership) and access to health care throughout life.”
There is no Constitutional authorization for any of this. Under our 10th amendment those responsibilites fall to the States, to private charitable groups (Red Cross, Salvation Army, Churches, etc.), or to individuals.
“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” James Madison
“They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States;
and as the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please…Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.” Thomas Jefferson
“No reason that such a social contract has to deprive individuals of the freedom to do what they want and prevent them from keeping the vast majority of the wealth they earn.”
But American Socialism is depriving the hard-working middle class of the freedom “to do as they please with themselves, and the product of their labor.” Due to excessive taxation the American tax-payer is not able to keep the vast majority of the property that they earn because the Federal government is now free “to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.”
“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
“Social democracy with economic freedom works well in Europe outside of the southern nations there. Their only problem is low birth rates which is forcing large scale immigration without assimilation.”
Collectivist Socialism is not working well anywhere in Europe. England’s prosperity has disappeared because of “Social Democracy.” Southern Europe is a leading indicator for Northern Europe.
“I have no desire to live in the sort of dog-eat-dog every man for himself world that contemporary conservativism (which I prefer to call social Darwinist liberalism) wants to foist on us.”
Truly free enterprise is not “dog eat dog;” it is each man laboring creatively in a struggle with Mother Nature, not against his fellow man, and since there would be plenty of non-government-connected (supported) competitive enterprise, no destructive all-powerful private enterprise can arise – because there will always be free competition which may provide better service or lower prices which reduces the size of any expanding private enterprise – that is the self-limiting feature of free competition and free enterprise. Contemporary American Liberalism is Marxist, and so it is the real dog-eat-dog system where the Marxist elite eat the middle class – the product of their labor, and where the so-called proletariat class is also eating the middle class – the product of their labor. In the end, when the laboring middle class is finally exhausted, the great mass of people will be ushered into the proletariat class – all will be proles – except for their Marxist overlords.
“A nation should be a community and it’s members each receive certain privileges and protections in exchange for carrying out their civic and moral duties and responsibilities.”
The government-dependent proletariat class will not carry out any of their civic and moral duties; to say that they will is a Marxist mind trick for the gullible. The government-dependent proletariat class is composed of the lazy and the criminal, and those in government who service them at the expense of the laboring middle class.
“The proletariat [lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled, government-dependents] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
“A nation should be a community and it’s members each receive certain privileges and protections in exchange for carrying out their civic and moral duties and responsibilities. Which include taxes, Jack.”
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community…” Adolph Hitler
Thank YOU, Stonewall !
Beautiful refutation of Markus, Mo3871a, Twanloc. VDH must really have struck a Communist/Collectivist nerve in these “Liberals”.
BTW, Markus told the truth once, in his rant: He is “not close-minded”. Indeed!
He is, however, closed-minded. (I know: a typo. But, a telling Freudian slip typo.)
The “close mind”, in terms of facts, logic, and appropriate cites is yours. Nice and tight, Stonewall. Thanks again!
What he said. A vote for Obama here, too.
CLASSIC projection
Excellent analysis Dr Hanson. In addition, it should be pointed out that we are the only species stupid enough to practice liberalism. How do I know that? Because when I look at other species – lets take rabbits for example – I see that they are thriving and, most importantly, not extinct. If rabbits were liberal they’d spend much of their time scolding each other about being sensitive to the feelings of wolves and other predators; convincing each other that hiding from, and running from, these predators hurts their self-esteem and as such is harmful and selfish. Rabbits would be full of self doubt and start questioning the very meaning of rabbit-hood. And ultimately they would die out.
Happily, the reality is that rabbits are too smart to fall for this crap and are thriving all around us. And guess what? The wolves are okay too, even though they can’t feel the LOOOOVE from the rabbit community (*sniff*). Maybe we can learn from all of them – rabbits and wolves together.
What’s been defined is “sophomoric”. The definition states it’s roots are soph-, “wise,” and moros, “fool” thus the wise fool(s). It explains every aspect of the left from their humor (sophomoric) to their critical thinking to their juvenile view of economics and the list can go on and on. It’s a form or arrested development which may be due to their drug use as noted, for example, here
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/08/marijuana_iq_teens_duke_study.php
This also explains Obama – recall he was a bong king or such in high school. Michael Moore? Is there any better example? Pick any topic and their position and I defy you to show it’s not the result of sophomoric thinking.
A factor? Maybe.
But, since there are many conservatives who do/did smoke up, I have trouble with the causal argument.
Conversely, their are many liberals who have never smoked up (but maybe should have?)…
Their/There
Which would make “sophomores” members of the class of “oxymorons”, and “Libtards”, by extension, morons on oxygen? — Where’s the Choom come in?
Oh, I get it. — That’s what Obozo smoked when he was a Sophomore. Trouble is he likely never quit!
Three points.
1. Liberalism has 4 columns. a. greed. b. jealousy c. hypocrisy d. an amusing belief in their own intellectual acuity.
2. Compassion requires there be someone you can look down on.
3. liberals are the people ostracized in jr. high as being unecessary to the tribe and have never gotten over it.
Great article Mr Hanson! I remember that two years ago some PJ author discussed the foreign leftist roots of Obama`s supporters and I contradicted as the former socialist state`s subject that the big state creates it`s 47% supporters.I was supported by nobody there.
California’s decline and collapse is largely due to government unions and the incestuous relationship they have with the Democratic Party in the State. My question is – why is this relationship not considered a criminal activity, specifically racketeering? Traditionally, the word racket is used to describe a business (or syndicate) that is based on the example of the protection racket, engaged in the sale of a solution to a problem that the institution itself creates or perpetuates, with the specific intent to engender continual patronage.
I’m a simple person but the way I see it is as follows: a) We taxpayer’s pay the salaries of the government employees; b) The State of California involutarily deducts the union’s dues from the employees paychecks. (Would the State do the same for the privately owned company I work for, to support that company’s desire to fund lobbying in its own interest? I don’t think so.) c) Those dues are then used to support the election and re-election of Democrat politicians who will be friendly to and supportive of the unions demands – all at the expense of the taxpayer.
It’s the perfect self-licking ice cream cone. And it’s funded – involuntarily – by many of the taxpayer’s, like me, who are opposed to government unions in the first place! Proposition 32 is a perfect example of this going on right in front of our faces. We the taxpayer’s want to stop our government from being in collusion with government unions and yet they are spending over $60 million dollars – much of it the money of the very people who want this collusion to end – to stop us from reforming this corrupt practice.
This is one of the primary reasons this state is collapsing.
Based on the concept that our gov’t (whether it’s federal, state or local) is there to serve the American people, it’s a blatant case of a conflict of interest to have gov’t unions because it’s the taxpayers’ money on which gov’t functions & these unions utilize said taxpayer funding to serve their own agendas. Gov’t unions should not be allowed to exist, IMO. Even FDR didn’t approve of them.
I won’t go so far as to advocate eliminating unionization of public employees; sorry, public employers are lousy employers giving arbitrary and capricious supervision and management all new meaning. What I do advocate is outlawing political activity by public employees and their unions – PERIOD. The price of unionization must be bringing back the Hatch Act, gutted in the Clinton Era, and its state and local law analogs. If you allow unionized public employees to exercise collective political rights, they simply become a socialist workers’ party and elect co-conspirators to help them loot the treasury. The price of a public job is that the only political right one has is the right to cast one’s individual vote; no yard signs, no buttons, no opinions, no contributions, not fund raisers, no nothing!
If California schools suffer from an immigration crisis with students who barely speak English yet churn out aggregate testing scores that match the ultra-red southern states, it begs the question:
What is Mississippi and Alabama’s excuse?
Does the author really think that an education system built on conservative principals could take these same group of non-native students and turn them into Ivy League bound intellectuals?
I live here in Mississippi, the state the author laments as being so terrible in the education department. Conservative ideology reigns supreme. Yet, I’m not seeing a fountainhead of brilliant intellectualism and innovation. We don’t even have an illegal immigration crisis to blame all our problems on either. There’s a solid majority of Republicans in government so political gridlock can’t be the cause either.
On the other hand let’s take a look at Blue New England states, an area with the best education statistics in the nation. Is that an example of the triumph of Liberal policies?
California, like Mississippi and Alabama, suffers from social problems that transcend Liberal Vs. Conservative ideology. To use these sociological issues as evidence of the success or failure of a political ideology is naive or worse yet, blatantly dishonest.
Are you so dumb or are you just baiting? Norm the test scores for the Lower South, CA, and New England for race/ethnicity and you’ll get the answers.
Liberalism is a deal from the Devil in which he grants you absolution from guilt about living the high life while you grant him your soul. Truly, those who make the transaction discover, belatedly, that the Devil really is dead serious about receiving his due.
“Large percentages of the population now work for government — federal, state, or local. Millions more are divorced from the tragic world of mining or drilling where nature is unforgiving. That distance has allowed Americans in droves to disengage from both the private sector, where one either makes a profit or goes broke, and the grimy processes by which we live one more day. A San Francisco professor, a Monterey lawyer, and a Sacramento bureaucrat do not know how hard it is to raise beef, grow peaches, find and pump oil and gas, and haul logs out of the forest and into Home Depot as smooth lumber, or what it takes to build a small Ace Hardware business. The skills needed to keep a 7-Eleven viable in a rough neighborhood, I confess, dwarf those of the classics professor.”
Yes, sounds about right. What does VDH or readers here propose? Splain to me why an average young person would chose private over public. Would his/her virtue and worth be affected by the choice made? If person x chooses public/government work, are they then consigned to a specific circle of hell? Everyone would like to value what they do, higher than those who don’t do it might. Self interest can be taken as a given, but is there some implicit world of true grit and virtue that the better, hungrier, more (or less?) desperate folks will choose?
“What does VDH or readers here propose?”
Cut the public rolls, entitlements, federal regulations and illiminate the alphabet government agencies and public unions. Education reform though vouchers and performance measures for teachers who don’t meet the state standards, flat tax, enforcement of immigration laws and passing an annual federal budget, independent auditing of government agencies with stiff penalities (like they have in the private sector) would be a good start.
Actually, Obama does have an agenda for his second term. It is the completion of his plan to fundamentally transform America from a constitutional republic to a totalitarian dictatorship. However, he can’t actually tell this to the public or he would be defeated in a landslide. So, he has to talk about side issues like the “War on Women” or Sesame Street and hope to get enough of his base to vote to carry him into a second term. Pray that he fails.
Thank you for this article. I’d like to share two experiences, having a unique perspective in California.
Exemption – as a former OPD officer, I saw how welfare and other “high minded” liberal ideals maintained the plantation mentality. Pre World War II Oakland was the jewel of the Bay Area. It’s now nothing but a cesspool of crime and sub-human behavior. Law enforcement is so crippled that Alameda Sheriff’s deputies and CHP are now being sucked in to “help”. It is a hell of black-on-white and black-on-black hatred. No sane place to live. Oakland’s politics and downfall are a portent of what the country is headed towards.
Nihilism – Having escaped to a career in IT, I met Berkeley nihilists. One extolled the virtues of Europe, griping about how we refer to portions of the “Arctic north” so possessively as “Alaska”. Who do we think we are? She also passed observations like how “quaint and Dickensian” a local homeless woman appeared, who sat each day staring vacantly into space outside the BART train station. Her peer, displaying equal liberal sensitivity, held up a small melon in the breakroom one day saying, “you see this, I’d like to smash Sarah Palin in the face with this.” Fresh out of UC Berkeley, in his first job, he was an active volunteer in the Obama ’08 campaign. Another co-worker told me, “Welfare? I thought that was all done and over with in Oakland.”
The “mainstream media” whitewashes Oakland’s news, like it does the national. Liberalism continues it’s destructive course, and liberals remain blissfully ignorant. Thank God for alternative media.
Don’t forget that a lot of leftists sincerely work/ed very hard in academia, but they are no better off economically than unmotivated burger flippers in the market. They make a strong case for government jobs, because government encouraged education so much in the first place, but without the good jobs to back it up (in the long run, at least). Why should people not feel entitled for their labor? Especially such cheap/free labor, with reasonable expectations of a good job later? They were told to expect millions of lifetime dollars!
If they had been told to drop out at 16 and work in a factory, they would have done well at that, too. They would have been compensated. Leftists feel betrayed by conservatives for this reason, and it is only very recently and in “fringe” media that the right has started to talk about education reform. But, it’s too late for too many people.
Fascinating article, Dr. Hanson, as usual, and replete with the classical references that I would expect from such a scholar, and Tocqueville too. Though a bit reductive and simplistic. And I can’t help but wonder. Is the burst of psychological profiles of the liberal mind that I’ve become aware of lately a response to the recent publications describing the psychology of the conservative mind, especially in the light of imaging studies. You know the ones: about the conservative mind with the enlarged amygdala, the overactive limbic system, the enhanced fear responses, the “strict father” upbringing. Is this article one of those? Dr. Hanson?
My only disagreement with this column is the premise of its title – that Liberals actually THINK.
What Libs do instead of thinking is: they feel… they hope… they wish… they dream… They pat each other on the back, NOT for devising a practical, effective method of ACHIEVING the greatest good for the greatest number, but for simply demanding that “something” be done NOW!! They actually celebrate their ability to ignore practical details, unintended consequences, and the realities of human nature – because anything that stands in the way of their dreams, is automatically “bad” and must be abolished (somehow..).
I could not have said it any better myself.
Dr. Hanson, thank you for expressing it all so clearly.
I grew up in Stockton before it became the hell hole it is now. My father was a brilliant man who, because his mother was a widow, worked instead of going to college. He ended up running a successful trucking business, and his friends were all either truckers, farmers, or ranchers. There wasn’t a stupid one among them. One of the most successful was actually illiterate, but he made millions because he was smarter than his competitors, and he worked very hard.
I attended university in San Francisco and became disillusioned very quickly with the people I initially thought were so sophisticated. What a bunch of shallow, self absorbed people they were. They were always showing off how “smart” they were but when something broke they came to find me, the only girl in the dorm with her own set of tools who knew how to use them. It didn’t take more than a couple of these rescue missions for me to realize that not only was I as smart or smarter than them, I was better equipped to handle the real world.
In a way I feel sorry for many of the leftists I know. Not one of them is particularly happy, they’re angry all of the time, they expend lots of time and energy in trying to prove they’re smarter than other people, and they don’t know how to fix a toilet. They are actually dependent on the rest of us to take care of them. I’ve often wondered what would happen if we didn’t.
“They are actually dependent on the rest of us to take care of them. I’ve often wondered what would happen if we didn’t”
To that I say “Who is John Gault?”
But really…..If all the actuall productive, smart and talented people “walked” away….
The Liberals would die. In about 15 to 20 days more than 50% would stop being. with out any “help”. Most Liberals cant do any real work for themselves. That includes building shelter, a fire and getting food and cooking it. Most would die of thirst once the faucets stopped working. Never mimd the sickness from bad water and spoiled food….Ah but we can only dream.
“The Liberals would die. In about 15 to 20 days more than 50% would stop being. with out any “help”. Most Liberals cant do any real work for themselves.”
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the liberals; it is younger people generally. When was the last time you saw a kid “playing” with an Erector Set? Hell, when was the last time you saw a kid playing other than the relatively few that are in organized sports? There are lots of kids in my neighborhood; I see them in their mommies’ SUVs. I see relatively few of them waiting at the school bus stops, but I wait behind long lines of those MommyMobiles as the kids are dropped off at school. I never see kids come by on bicycles. I never see boys walking towards the nearby woods with their BB guns. There are few basketball or hockey goals in driveways or yards and I’ve never seen a HopScotch chalked on a driveway or street. The happy sounds of kids out at recess or playing some sort of sport like dodgeball or volleyball during “Activity Period” is a thing of the long-ago past.
My stepkids all had 21 or even 28 speed, unobtainium framed “mountain” bikes but the only time any of those bikes ever saw dirt was the year there was about a three foot gap between my paved driveway and the newly paved street in front of our house. I bought chemistry sets, microscopes, Legos, and models, and they all went into closets and then into garage sales. When I was a kid the model display in even small town stores had dozens or even hundreds of plastic models. Today the biggest big boxes might have a couple dozen – usually all snap-togethers. Even in the few remaining hobby shops not run out of business by the internet the plastic models are ever more sophisticated and expensive and they’re for old guys like me because only we can afford them. The radio controlled airplanes that were once built stick by balsa stick and covered with hand-”doped” tissue, are now ARF – Almost Ready to Fly – “kits” mostly built and painted by slave labor in China.
What do you do with a iPod, a smartphone, or a computer when the electricity goes off and the battery dies? After a couple of generations without electricity would anyone know what any of them were? I’m a great fan of Canadian author Jack Whyte’s “Skystone” series, a historical “faction” take on the Arthurian Legend. Whyte’s, I beleive sound premise, is that the life, tools, and lifestyles of Roman citizens in the 3-400s AD would be regarded as magic by the 7-800s. I’ve been through enough Republican to Democrat to Republican transitions in government to be acutely aware of how fragile an organizational culture is. Somehow, I don’t think the larger society is any more robust.
Art, you old fart, I know where you are coming from her, and yes, all of our grand children are fascinated by their electronic phones and games and will spend hour and hours with them, BUT all of them but one who are old enough (six out of seven) are on at least one sports team or similar activity. Several of them play in every season and their parents spend half their lives, schlepping them to practices, games, and even coaching their teams. With just a little opportunity (when they are around me) they will bike, kayak, shoot a bow, hike in the woods, or play for hours at the beach. And their parents are generally (gasp) liberals. They don’t play the way we did when we were kids, but I have to admit that they are at least as smart and actually MORE involved in a wide range of activities than I was. OK, they have a lot more things and don’t have to work for money as much as I did, but I have confidence that most of them will when they have to. Maybe we are just lucky and/or they indirectly reflect their grandmother’s (my second wife’s) approach to life, a woman who could make the best out of some bad situations, but I have to put in some good words for them as a coming generation. Adolescence will, of course, bring its own issues that the older ones are now edging into, but so far, so good.
Trick or Treat D-White?
It’s true about the tools, and knowing how to use them and all. I walked into an enlisted women’s dorm at an overseas military base some years ago – and this was not a place full of ordinarily helpless or hapless people – and noticed that the shower-heads in the latrine were just giving out a bare dribble of water. I had just arrived on assignment, and pulled out the handy-dandy screwdriver that I had in my hold baggage, unscrewed the plate, emptied out about a quarter of a cup of rusty crud from each shower-head, and replaced the plate. The next morning, taking a shower in one of the stalls, all I heard from the other women using the latrine was, “Hey, someone fixed the shower-heads!”
I was kind of saddened by this – it was so basic and simple, yet the other women had never even thought to do this. And all it took was a screwdriver and a little basic knowlege.
Because they are ignorant. Because they are inquisivative. Because they are dumb. Because they are the product of the contemporary educational environment. Jackie Mason once asked what is the difference between a schmuck and a putz??????; not much.
Emocrats don’t use the higher, cognitive brain functions – they only emote. Too much reacting, not enough problem solving; the fruits of always buying into and re-selling pre-packaged victimology scenarios all the time; they find it much easier to blame others and do nothing, than to help them selves by accepting personal self-reliant responsibility.
These ever-Moving-Forward lemmings or Progressives, only ever really “progress” from the responsibility to become factually, objectively right, to the opinion that they have a subjective right to remain irresponsibly wrong!
Libs are idolaters who pretend to believe in group rights, never in individual responsibilities!
And their real problem is that liberals hate personal responsibility, so they avoid it by selling endless group-rights victimology scenarios instead. That way the cowards can pretend to be champions without risking accusing any real individual human criminals of their crimes!
So, yes – never having any facts which would ever agree with their perpetual irrationality, the left must always resort to the slanderous evasions known collectively as the critical thinking logical fallacies (the deflective ad-hominem personal attacks, the distractive strawman red-herrings, and of course the immoral relativist’s favorite, the tu quoque – i.e: “islam – or crime in general – isn’t evil because we all do it too! Whee!”).
Isn’t it funny that people who actually have facts, rarely (if ever) seem to feel the need to indulge in fallacies?
;-)
As always another great piece by Dr. Hanson. When Obamass is re-elected the end
of a free USA is not far down the road. Not wanting to see such a horrible thing occur I will be
committing suicide after the election, I refuse to live in a country whose leaders
are elected by a bunch of ignorant bigoted negroes.
Ignorance and bigotry is a human condition, not a racial condition. Our great leader was elected by a bunch of ignorant people, not a bunch of ignorant negroes. Methinks there is a Marxist method to your madness, so please, do it.
Elite Americans as Eloi. Morlocks await. They are always there.
If there is a perfect fit for the term ‘Asshole’ liberals are it. Not that they have an exclusive on it.. but that the proportion is almost 100%. I can tell within 100 words if a stranger is a liberal, and the exchange does not have to be about politics, religion, sex, etc. They exhibit a twisted view / perception of just about everything in the universe. My test, which never fails, is to get them (the suspect lib) into a calm dispute about anything, their view vs my view. I can always get a lib to back up into a position of ‘Well I don’t know then..’. Bingo. Every twisted position they have, when faced with facts will terminate with an admission that they ‘really don’t know enough to continue the debate’. They will NEVER admit they have a wrong view, or are mistaken, let alone change their minds to agree with reality. I cannot have any liberal friends and associates. To live in California has meant a very lonely lifestyle for me, for 30+ years. I’d rather have a animal for a friend than a twisted liberal human.
I’ve said this for a long time now: at any time more than 200 years ago, the vast majority of what we today call “liberals” would have been the people who died at an early age from fecklessness, killer-resentment, and/or incompetence.
It’s not that there would have been fewer of them, as a percentage of the population. But in a less forgiving economic-technological age, they wouldn’t have lived very long.
I think it was James Taranto who noted recently that it’s the 97th percentile or so that really loathes the 1%. Those are the tenured academicians and career bureaucrats obsessed with credentials and status who rail why the businessmen and entrepreneurial risk takers should be so rich.
Liberalism : Moral preening, establishing a sense of moral superiority by being generous with someone else’s money
What a brilliant article! Superbly crafted, it is a deadly indictment of the little man we call our President! May he and his minions and their ilk be retired next Tuesday!
I am impressed with so many intelligence user comment.
Not everyone is living in wonderland with Alice.
I won’t drone on. This piece is superb. Brilliant!
A liberal- to me- and after many years of observation- is one who never regects an idea that tickles their fancy, no matter how likely that it is
bound to fail, for the simple reason that they are unable to comprehend or envision it’s long term effects.
The problem is that our method of choosing our leaders has been corrupted by a 200 year of politicians gradually turning political service into a lifelong ego trip. Currently, politics, with few exceptions, attracts the worst of society and repulses the best. Somehow, the people need to rise up and change the whole process. There needs to be more competition for political office, and the cost of competing has to be made more affordable. The only advertizing allowed should be debates between candidates. Term limits would be unnecessary if it were made possible to have votes of no confidence in congresspersons between elections so that voter’s mistakes can be corrected as soon as possible rather than wait years for the next election.
Extraordinarily well written article. Distills the essence of Liberalism via a striking examination of the illogical, economically paralyzing, power hungry, condescending policies of misdirected, self-alleged elite minds,in seeking a hallucinogenic utopia which does not, and will never exist.
One of the many [and largest reasons] I come here is to see what is up with VDH. Never disappointing and always thought-provoking. Kudos…….
I live 5.5 miles due west of Detroit’s N/West property corner [i.e.,8 Mile and Telegraph]and see,hear and feel what chronic and continual Progressivism/Liberalism/Collectivism/Tribalism creates. It is not in any way conducive to your health and is not gettin’ any better as time rolls on.
…and yet the same old tricks work and similar actors resurface in other guises.Over 250,000 moved outta’ Detroit from 2000 to 2010 and they were ‘the bright ones’.
So, you can imagine who remains. You have to stay in Condition Orange much of the time and always scope out what you are next to. To not do so leaves you at a disadvantage,or much worse, and you best believe it is a smidge stressful. Trusting your fellows is really kinda’ dicey.
The weird thing is how easily I’ve adapted to this crud, and it gets easier all the time. Funny like a crutch, huh?
Victor, Why don’t you write an entire column devoted to telling Americans why you think California schools should do better the Mississippi, or Alabama?
Anthony Burgess wrote something along the same lines in the late 70′s in his extended essay on Orwell (“1984″):
“But is their (intellectuals’) talk of progress truly disinterested? Orwell knew enough, as Arthur Koestler did, of the springs of political authority in Europe. No man it seemed to them strove for political leadership solely out of altruism. Koestler had been sent to jail by the system he supported. Orwell fought for freedom in Spain, and he had to run for his life when Russian Communism condemned Catalonian Anarchism. Intellectuals with political ambitions had to be suspect. For, in a free society, intellectuals are among the underprivileged. What they offer — as school-teachers, university lecturers, writers — is not greatly wanted. If they threaten to withhold their labour, nobody is going to be much disturbed. To refuse to publish a volume of free verse or take a class in structural linguistics — that’s not like cutting off the power supplies or stopping the buses. They lack the power of the capitalist boss on the one hand and the power of the syndicalist boss on the other. They get frustrated. They find pure intellectual pleasures inadequate. They become revolutionaries. Revolutions are usually the work of disgruntled intellectuals with the gift of the gab. They go to the barricades in the name of the peasant or the working man. For “Intellectuals of the world unite” is not a very inspiring slogan.”
On the surface, many of the liberal ideals seem appealing. Everyone equal, no greed, no poverty, everyone has food and adequate medicine—what’s not to like?
But it is just a veneer, a façade. It may sound good, but it is unworkable. Too many people get caught up feeling good about these ideas but never think about the consequences of trying to make them work.
Saving endangered species may be nice, but are we willing to starve, are we willing for children to go hungry to do so? Doing something nice in one area often has unintended consequences.
I don’t think most liberals lack intelligence, or are malevolent or desire power so much. I think they think shallowly. They want to end banking profits. That may be good for a few years, but it will end our civilization if it continues. They want high taxes on the wealthy. Again, good for a few years, but then bad for civilization. And so on.
Then there are those who have developed view of the world and how it works that causes them to embrace liberalism. Liberalism reflects their beliefs. For them, liberalism has to work, it must work, because their whole way of understanding everything is based on these concepts. Liberalism reflects their view of the world and their view of the world demands they embrace liberalism. So they see conservatives as bumpkins and rednecks and illiterate and dupes of the rich.
As a centrist, I prefer your tone to many of the folks who post here, and I agree with the thrust of some of your points, but they are so general at the key moments, such as exactly WHY children will starve, if we protect endangered species. Obviously, hardly anyone is starving in our country and these things have to be looked at on a case by case basis, but I take your points.
Right, Dwight,
Evan Sayet says progtards are the Cult of the Indiscriminate.
You, me, everybody is a racist if you discern something wrong with the following statement:
“To infinity spending, and beyond!”
So Victor Davis Hanson, Bruce Thornton, et al are racists because they discriminate logical government from whack-job.
So, the Troglodytes end up becoming Morlocks who eat the Eloi all the while becoming more and more barbaric, forever fearful and shouting at their intellectual superiors AND saviors: “How dare you discriminate, you racists pigs!”
“To infinity inanity, indeed, and beyond!”
I’m tempted to say, like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, “FASTER, PLEASE.”
Because maybe the insanity will stop only when the end of the road of insanity is reached. One hopes….
Liberalism: How can I be wrong if I’m not wrong, you must have a problem!
I would love to read a rebuttal to this in the format of an article, possibly published on this site.
The rebuttal always sounds like this: If you believe the logic and love of Victor Davis Hanson saying Progressivism has proved itself wrong in the practical, fiscally irresponsible and moral corrupt… then you are a racist, to be at first smeared, then feared, then put away… somehow, since the ends justify the means against all racists.
Dear Professor Hanson,
RE: “What sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better compensated (and all for what — for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return? What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.”
I have though a lot about how “easily fooled” the subjects of Progressive Education have become. Also, I have thought a lot about how “easily fooled” the subjects of Broadcast Christianity and Casual-Nearby-Church Christianity have become. I call it political and clerical mystic tyranny.
What if a miracle happened and education was privatized, with the idea being to make a rube-proof citizenry? The teachers would teach the students to never say yes to any kind of hidden mind enslavement!
The teacher would teach the various forms of stage hypnotism (i.e. Obama’s high voice, low voice, pause… mesmerization techniques.)
The teachers would teach the students to refuse to listen to a preacher/politician that had an affected voice. (STOP, Mr. Speaker! We learned to never listen to a Big-Voice, Affected person! Just talk to us in a normal voice!)
The teachers would test the students: May I, your teacher, take one of your eyes and give it to a blind person? Answer: No!
The teachers would test the students: May I, your teacher, take away your defenses? Answer: No.
The teachers would teach the students the Tragic View: And test the Tragic View: Am I, your teacher, your preacher, your politician incapable of self-dealing? Incapable of harming you? Incapable of misleading you? Incapable of shenanigans? The answer would be, trust but verify… because whereas all men sin, leaders can sin the greatest because they can hide it by self-dealing!
What would happen if Progressive education, which teaches Progressive leaders/teachers/politicians/preachers are incapable of acting outside the best interests of humanity, are incapable of sin, are unquestionably good always, and are unable to self-deal and are never corrupt….. if that faulty teaching were precisely reversed?
Methinks the Spirit of 1776 would return, that’s what methinks.
But all proponents of the Tragic View must necessarily apply it to themselves when on the grandstand… Yes, all men can sin… and YES, leaders can sin the most because they can hide their self-dealing… and finally, YES, YES, YES that applies to me, who says this on this grandstand forum. So watch other leaders’ other hand, but also watch me, if I in any way lead anyone else.
That is the ultimate humility and grace… that we haven’t seen much of yet. Didn’t George Washington example it, though? Lincoln seems to refer to himself vaguely in his Lyceum speech. Madison in his men-are-not-angels reference in the Federalist Papers. Reagan said government, even HIS government, wasn’t the answer but the problem.
Dear VDH,
Since you like Westerns so much, this is from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, wherein “trust, but verify” is explained…
When English Bob is told he can’t carry firearms into Big Whisky..
“Well, sir… neither my nor I carry firearms on Rather, we trust in the our fellow man and the forbearance of reptiles.”
And English Bob gives a smart bow, turns with a swirl of coat-tails that allows a brief glimpse of not one, but two holstered pistols…
Clyde an under-sheriff says, “I don’t trust nobody to load my guns, not for a shootin’.”
And when Munny (Clint Eastwood) spreads a blanket and opens the bags to count the money, he says to his partner, The Kid, “You wanna help me count, Kid?”
The Kid is leaning against a tree in a semi-stupor. He replies, “I trust you, Bill.”
Munny: “Well, you don’t wanna trust me too much.”
—–
Progressive preaching/teaching/politicizing has, on purpose, put the populace in a stupor, unable to detect or suspect self-dealing, unable to comprehend the wily nature of man, unable to defend against our own clever devils.
Warren Buffet is a liberal. No pot shots at the greatest investor of all time? Warren supports Obama don’t you know? Along with the East Coast right wing crybabies who suddenly don’t think Big Government is so bad.
At least now we know why those farmers along 101, I5 and 99 are growing Romney signs like weeds. However the 1,000 acre almond farmer and the fabulously wealthy rice exporter only have one vote just like the urban burger flipper no matter how many Romney signs they plant. Makes you wonder though, no dirt under Romney’s finger nails. None of his blood on the line in the past, current wars or the future ones he blusters about. Then again nobody knows what Romney would do. The rural Ron Paul Tea Party crowd will likely end up very unhappy one way or another. Of course if Romney is elected they will still have the Senate to blame. 4 years of howling at the obstructionist Senate.
Someone please save some of these Chicken Little Sky is Falling posts, they will be fun to read again in 4 years.
“Why, then, would we need Neanderthal things like federal gas and oil leases, icky dams and canals, yucky power plants, and gross chain saws — and especially those who would dare make and use them?”
Don’t forget those scary, scary firearms!
Dr. Hanson, I am very off-topic here, but I wonder if you read Sir Max Hastings’ latest missive in the London Daily Mail, particular his comments about what some Americans actually believe (hint: he wasn’t referring to liberals). I wonder if he’s an acquaintance or perhaps even a friend of yours, given your and his areas of expertise. Just curious. Thanks for all of your fine work.
Here’s the link to the column:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2226558/Superstorm-Sandy–US-election-The-real-dangers-facing-America-hatred-division-collapsing-political-system.html
Good look with getting elected guys, because if you stick to these policies the GOP is as dead as a dodo.
I deplore these liberal devils as much as everyone else, but we have to respond to the reality of the situation.
I’m guessing that it will take a decade before the reality really sinks in, by which time our precious country will be being told what to do by China and RUssia at the UN, and we will probably have our military presence forcibly ejected out of the Pacific area via a currency war. Also, I expect to see Israel forced to accept a twin state solution and a nuclear Iran, and I think that will mean the end for Israel as all it takes is some jihadist to blow up a nuke and that is essentially the end of that noble country.
In se this won’t be the land of the short, if we don’t adapt, we will die – and America will just become another world power fallen on hard times and finished.
Just a question to Republicans & Conservatives. Do you ever see the Conservative movement returning to any degree of power in the United States? I see a part of the population that has been left behind by the changes that are taking hold in America. The Supream Court should legalize Gay Marriage, as it is just a religious issue that a bunch of supersticious right wingers want everyone to act, think & behave just like them. The court will rule on weather all Americans have the same constitutional rights, or if we can bend, pervert, & twist the constitution to try to enforce restrictions upon some Americans. The same will happen when the new pot laws are challanged. The legalization of Pot will spur the economy with a new cash crop that has a high demand factor. Many jobs will be created by the agriculture, storage, shipping, & retail of this new crop that will knock the Spice trade out of business & free law enforcement to persue real criminals.
The movement away from the yesterday that conservativism embraces is so all encompassing & severe that by 2016 who the hell do you have that can beat Hillary?
What’s the big deal about this physcal cliff? It sounds like conservatives just making a mountain out of a mole hill again.
The tax rates will go up to what they were during Clinton’s watch. Business did very well at that time. Sure their taxes were higher, but more working/middle class people had more $ to spend & business boomed. Barack can raise everyone’s tax & then pass a NEW tax break for anyone making under 250,000. I for one am wanting to go over theis cliff as it will increase my witholding tax that will contribute more toward my Social Security. The cuts earlier made to witholding give me more $ each week, but cuts what I will get for life as a retired old coot. I am 67 now & should retire in about 2-3 years. I like paying more into the ss fund at this stage of the game.
All these businesses talking about how their business would suffer is just political posturing. Let the rich pay their fair share. The problem is that the well to do want to keep everything for themselves. Their motto is that they are not their brother’s keeper. The dead actor Christopher Reave once said on a stage at a Dem conventiuon decades ago, “Americans don’t leave their needy to twist in the wind.”
The time has come when Americans can’t hide our heads in the sand anymore. It’s time for GUN CONTROL.
In other words you have a very simplistic view of the world and you prove everything Hanson said based on all of your comments on this article. You have issues sine you keep coming to this article to troll.