Progressive speakers and political scientists Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira together have recently written an article entitled “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War.” I say these two gentlemen are progressive leaders, because even if theirs are not household names, their progressive pedigrees show that they are hip deep in the upper echelons of that ideology’s leadership. Leyden is involved in the New Politics Institute and Teixeira is a senior fellow at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.
What these two men are saying about their worldview and all opinions different to theirs is quite unnerving. They are clearly saying that there is now no more room for debate, compromise, or “reaching across the aisle” to find consensus with those who differ from their progressive ideas on matters of culture, climate change, or economics.
We are in a new American civil war, and our only option moving forward is to follow the lead of California as the Democrat Party surged to prominence and all but eradicated the Republican Party from political relevance in that state. California is the model for America to vanquish ideological foes and to bring in a new era of peace and prosperity. Yep, that is what this article is saying, I kid you not. Read it for yourself.
Or you can watch this TED talk with Peter Leyden himself saying much the same thing as his article. California today is the beginning of a wonderful new revolution, he says. (And it’s progressing because those nasty Republicans have become neutralized.)
Please note at the 13:22 mark that he tells us the new revolution is clearly seen in three worldwide shifts: the digital revolution, planetary organization on a planetary scale (isn’t that sort of redundant?), and energy transformation on a sustainable level. California is the model for all of this progress? Yes, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Ebay, and a host of other tech giants find their homes in California.
However, California is also host to crushing debt of their own making. You can’t blame their $400 billion debt on the idiots in Washington, D.C., not entirely. Their own geniuses in government over the past 20 years have put them in that hole (with little hope of them ever crawling out). And of course their liability for state pensions is at $1 Trillion dollars now, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
What a great state to emulate when it comes to economics! Let’s also emulate Detroit when it comes to urban planning, or Washington, D.C. when it comes to managing health care! Just for fun, check out California’s debt clock (makes the geniuses in D.C. jealous, I’m sure).
In their article, Leyden and Teixeira bemoan how California never got anything done up until the early 2000s because “the Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.”
Those darn Republicans. Enemies of all that is good. Darn them. (Isn’t it fascinating that throughout this whole article, THE enemy of America is not ISIS, not Iran, not North Korea, not China or Russia or the narco-terrorists flooding our nation with heroin? THE enemy is … the Republican Party! Of course!)
Um, can we concede for just a minute that BOTH parties are filled with people whose brains aren’t working right, and BOTH parties are controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests? Well, apparently to these two authors, only the Republicans are evil incompetent neanderthals. The Democrats are saviors. And salvation did come, in the form of “supermajorities” in the early 21st century that swept all those Republicans out of power!
“The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent.” Hmmm. Where did the Democrat Party get this supermajority? Maybe a whole bunch of illegal aliens flooding the state in the last 15 years helped out? Maybe?
Two studies, one from the Center for American Progress and the other from the Center for Immigration Studies, seem to indicate that a surge in Hispanic voting (whether from illegal or legal sources or a combination of both) certainly impacts elections (as well as economics and other cultural indicators).
And of course, most illegal aliens live in southern California. Since they have driver’s licenses issued by the state, it is no wonder that their vote is a “supermajority” in many areas.
Leyden and Teixeira compare our current stand-off between Republicans and Democrats to America in 1860. In this analogy, the Republicans are the Confederates who supported an outdated economy based on slavery, and the Democrats of today are the Union forces that swept them into extinction. (Has anyone told these men that it was the Democrat Party that was the party of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan?)
What is the lesson we should learn? That just as the Confederates were “on the wrong side of history,” so is anyone (particularly the Republicans of today) who oppose progressive ideas. The next time someone tells you that you are on the wrong side of history, please give them this video from Prager U:
Leyden and Teixeira point out that the two sides leading up to the American Civil War simply could not coexist, but then the same group of progressives are constantly preaching to me that we should coexist with people who are determined to cut my throat. I see the “Coexist” bumper stickers constantly.
Apparently, these two men see Republicans (code talk for conservatives apparently, although many conservatives such as myself distance ourselves from the Republican Party) as people with whom the enlightened ones must not coexist. We are just so ignorant that we deny the “science” of climate change! (I have often wondered how the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period happened before the age of Harley Davidson.)
And our economics (free market capitalism) only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Has anyone shown these men the latest info on poverty in California? The Los Angeles Times reported that California now LEADS the United States in poverty.
What is really funny to me is this line in the article where Leyden and Teixeira say that when there are two different ideologies in the country, “they see the world through different lenses, consume different media, and literally live in different places. They start to misunderstand the other side, then start to misrepresent them, and eventually make them the enemy. The opportunity for compromise is then lost.” But isn’t what they are decrying EXACTLY what these men are doing throughout their article?
What’s the bottom line here? What are these two proposing? Let them speak: “The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards. The losing party or movement will need that same time to go through a fundamental rethink, a long-term renewal that eventually will enable them to play a new game.”
Did you get that? Those who “lose” (they’re thinking about conservative America) will have to go through a “fundamental rethink.” And just who will make conservatives “rethink?” And how will people make conservatives “rethink?”
In other words, if you disagree with progressives … YOU must conform to the way they think, or else. YOU must change, or be banished. Only THEIR ideas are valid and welcome to the table of ideas. Only their people in government are legit. Free speech applies only to them (we see this clearly on college campuses where the enlightened leftists and their antifa thugs threaten with violence all who disagree with them). What if I refuse to bow down to what they claim is “settled science” or their idea of a “sustainable economy?” What is their plan for me then?
In a constitutional republic, founded on the idea that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” we are supposed to believe that if one side gets 51 percent of the vote, we still cannot erase the rights of free speech, private property, and peaceful opposition of the 49 percent of those who lost that particular vote.
I’m not very certain that Leyden and Tiexera believe that. It seems to me that they think that if they win 51 percent of the vote, then utopia has arrived, and who is Jeff Sanders (and others of his ilk) to disagree with them? Better get your mind right, Jeff. The brave new world of progressives has arrived … in California … and it wants to come to your neighborhood next.
To those who agree with Mr. Leyden and Mr. Teixeira, follow the idea of your “coexist” bumper stickers, because I’m not going away.
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