Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[a_majoor]

Sadly, even great men like Vaclav Havel gat their names dragged through the mud when progressives go to work:

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2011/12/24/how-the-left-sees-the-life-of-vaclav-havel-and-why-they-do-not-mourn-his-passing/?print=1

How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing

Posted By Ron Radosh On December 24, 2011 @ 11:35 am In Uncategorized | 13 Comments

PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen [1] beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”

But now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.

The most egregious is the article in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article [2] reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”

Clark does not question that Havel was “a brave man” who stood up for his views. That he cannot deny. It is Havel’s views, and his anti-Communism, that he detests. For Havel, he writes, did not help make his country “and the world, a better place.” In particular, denying everything we know about the nature of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the repression, the bureaucracy, the lack of necessary consumer goods to lead a decent life, the ever pervasive secret police — he faults Havel for the following:

    Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Surely Mr. Clark must be kidding. Has he not read any of the scores of books revealing the nature of life under what his comrades then called “really existing socialism”? Does he not realize that all these so-called “positive achievements” were there mainly in the minds of the state and Party propaganda apparatus, and that the only people to have them were the Party’s apparatchiks?  Does he really believe that communism put the needs of “the majority first”? What accounts, then, for the scores of brave crowds who swept Havel into office, and who openly taunted the regime’s spokesmen as liars and no different than the Nazis who ruled before them?

Clark does not stop with the above. In true Communistpeak, he attacks Havel as “the son of a wealthy entrepreneur,” in other words used by the Maoists of the day, a “capitalist roader.”  How dare the son of a bourgeois merchant becomes a national hero? Havel, to Clark, as to the comrades who ruled for decades, had no right to power, since he came from the hated capitalist class.

Clark comes up with statistics meant to prove how life became horrible in the Czech Republic after privatization. He cites a study that one million died due to health problems which resulted. We see no statistics about how many died during Communist rule, both in political prisons or from the polluted lakes and rivers and air from uncontrolled industrial pollution, which under Communism was a concern no government addressed. And horror of horrors, there is now “income inequality” in the Czech Republic. Certainly, Communism took care of that problem. All were equal, and shared the scarce resources available, making everyone poor except the Party rulers.

Even worse, Havel had the temerity to support “the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and then “sided with the rightwing Republican hawks on Iraq.” As we look at both cases, it is clear that Havel had it right both times. NATO intervened to destroy massacres carried out by the Serbs under the leadership of the last brutal ruler of post-Tito Yugoslavia, and under the Bush doctrine, the Iraqi people were freed from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. Clark ends by saying we should “look at the bigger picture,” and realize how Havel  supported the killing of innocent men, women and children” conducted by “western military adventures he supported.”

Writing at The Daily Beast, Geoffrey Robertson [3] also is displeased with Havel, but even more displeased with the fact, as he sees it, that “the American right has claimed him as their own,” while in fact, he believes Havel wanted only to “balance socialism and freedom.” Havel, he argues, wanted most of all “to lift the Stalinist miasma that had wearily settled over Czechoslovakia,” so that in its place there could be created “the democratic socialism in which he believed.”

Unlike Clark, who thinks Stalinism was good for the Czech people, Robertson knows it was bad, but claims that Havel was himself a socialist. Robertson at least knows how bad life was under Communism, and how repressive the government was. A supporter of Czech dissidents at the time and of their Charter 77, he tells us how “its leading members were sacked from their jobs” and later “arrested on charges of ‘unlicensed trading.’”

Certainly, Havel talked about “socialist legality,” a mechanism for showing how the regime ignored its own vaunted standards, which never meant much. But Robertson writes that “Havel’s presidency was plagued by…the difficulties of keeping any socialist faith at all in a free-market free-for-all.” And Robertson shows his own, but not Havel’s, disappointment that the Czechs wanted “guidance in contract law and in the conveyancing of private property.” In other words, having ended communism, they failed to move on to the kind of socialism favored by Robertson.

Robertson, unlike Clark, honors Havel for things like support of the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia, which he writes “was an influential contribution to the evolving principle of humanitarian intervention,” and he honors him for standing “with Sakharov at the head of the pantheon of people prepared to sacrifice their own liberty so others could enjoy theirs.” But he faults him for being unable to “reconcile his beliefs in both socialism and freedom.”

In 2002, the writer Joshua Muravchik wrote a book [4] about socialism’s failure called Heaven on Earth:The Rise and Fall of Socialism. On the book’s back is a blurb from none other than Vaclav Havel, who wrote: “I have always been suspicious of people who claim to have the key to heaven on earth. This book shows why.” Muravchik’s book is the story of the failure of any form of socialism, not just its Soviet style variant. Would Havel have endorsed its central conclusion if he still was a socialist?

In both the case of Neil Clark, who believes Havel was bad for destroying communism, and Geoffrey Robertson, who is sad that he didn’t bring democratic socialism in Communism’s place, you have the two poles of Leftist criticism of Havel. They amount to sadness that the socialist alternative to democratic capitalism ended with the destruction of the Soviet client states.  That tells us more about the writers of these pieces than it does about Vaclav Havel.

Article printed from Ron Radosh: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2011/12/24/how-the-left-sees-the-life-of-vaclav-havel-and-why-they-do-not-mourn-his-passing/

URLs in this post:

[1] Michael Ledeen: http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2011/12/21/havel/

[2] article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/19/vaclav-havel-another-side-to-story/print

[3] Geoffrey Robertson: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/22/vaclav-havel-was-torn-between-socialism-and-freedom.html

[4] book: http://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Earth-Rise-Fall-Socialism/dp/1893554783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324753651&sr=1-1

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting find from the 1940's

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/12/obama-and-the-f-word.php

Obama and the F-Word

One of my holiday projects is to finish my rereading of the complete corpus of Whittaker Chambers (with a retrospective essay on his overlooked theological interests to follow eventually), and a couple days ago I read through an article Chambers wrote for The American Mercury in 1944 about the rise of Italian fascism.  Somehow this paragraph reminded me of someone . . . familiar (“let’s see, start’s with ‘O’ I think. . .”):

    Civilized countries, like civilized individuals, like to keep their budgets balanced.  For years old-fashioned Italian leaders tried to make income and outgo jibe.  But in 1876 there came to power a modern politician for whom red entries had no terror, but even a certain charm.  Agostino Depretis, Italy’s first Liberal prime minister, started Italy on the road to fascism.  He was a journalist who discovered that the key to modern power politics is the masses and their mouthpieces, the Left politicians.  With their help, he managed to stay in power for eleven years.  He owed this achievement to a technique that seemed inspired then, but is familiar enough now: he had no program.  He simply promised every sort of reform regardless of whether or not his promises were contradictory.  Thus he promised to reduce taxation but increase public works, to restore prosperity but introduce social security.  This catholicity attracted men from all schools of thought.  Oppressed tenants and underpaid workers, reactionary landlords and big employers all sought to collect on the promissory notes which he issued on his way to power.

Seems to me you could easily rewrite this paragraph and apply it to Obama, spanning the range from the Occupy lowlifes to Obama’s Goldman Sachs financiers.

While we’re on the Chambers beat, I was surprised to discover that Chambers reviewed Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals in Time magazine in 1946.  Who knows what might have been edited out of the rather spare review that was printed, but what survived makes clear that Chambers clearly perceived that Alinsky was a not just an extreme liberal, but a Radical with a capital R, who had no use for American liberals or liberalism.  “A liberal is [a person] who puts his foot down on thin air,” Chambers quotes Alinsky from his book.  Chambers adds that “The author has glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”  To the extent that Obama seems otherworldly, aloof, and/or clueless, it is because he really is a dedicated Alinskyite, whose desire to change America fundamentally should be taken seriously.  It helps explain why his heedless irresponsibility is in fact purposeful.

 

[a_majoor]

A critique of the State:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/deconstructing-the-state/?print=1

Deconstructing the State

Posted By David Solway On December 28, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Culture Bytes,economy,Education,Europe,Judiciary,Legal,Politics,US News,World News | 19 Comments

For the sensibility of the contemporary Left, the State (generally capitalized) assumes the aura of a sacred object, revered as idols were once worshiped in the pagan world. That what is meant by the State is merely a conceptual abstraction, a phenomenon that has no material existence as a locatable entity — in effect, a disembodied idol — does not register. This error of understanding, of course, is not confined exclusively to the mentality of the Left, but it is there that it gains most traction.

Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum [1] isolates the four chief causes of error in human thinking. He defines these as Idols of the Tribe (weakness of understanding in the whole human race), Idols of the Forum (faults of language in the communication of ideas), Idols of the Cave (individual prejudices and mental defects), and Idols of the Theater (faults arising from received systems of philosophy).

The notion of the State seems to partake of all four cognitive delinquencies: “tribal” weakness, miscommunication, individual frailties, and questionable political/philosophical theory, a quadra-faced idol before which multitudes continue to bow in misplaced supplication, as President Obama bowed before the Saudi monarch. For the Left and liberal progressivists in particular, the State is idealized as a beneficent and autonomous institution that increasingly intervenes in everyday life to regulate the economy and improve the lot of ordinary people. The idea of the State, however, inflected as it is by the three prior inadequacies Bacon enumerates, is best construed as an Idol of the Theater, which carries the prestige of a long and persuasive cultural tradition. Thus, it is rarely challenged and tends to command absolute fidelity, a form of secular adoration of a philosophical misconception.

True, for Marx the State is both an evolving principle and an instrumental agency rooted in class distinctions, which organizes society in such a way as to consolidate its own power and that of the socioeconomic sector it proxies for. It must therefore, according to communist doctrine, be abolished (see Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program [2]) — or as Engels put it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, [3] the process of its “withering away” allowed to run its course. Nevertheless, the State is considered as a concrete institution with an independent character, a kind of organism in its own right — or in technical terms, as a quiddity rather than an epiphenomenon.

Similarly, the influential Leftist ideologue Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “the state that is not a state,” fleshed out in his Prison Notebooks [4] as a replacement for “the integral state,” is no less palpable and self-subsistent. Again, Dutch Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek in his major contribution to political thought, Workers’ Councils [5], labels the State as an “apparatus of oppression.” But the “State” remains for him an “apparatus,” a sort of monad, integral and monolithic, and not a troupe of actors invested in a performance tailored to receipts. Such thinking is typical even of those who are skeptical of the State’s hegemony.

For the State as a tangible object does not exist. It is a reified abstraction that festers in the minds of its votaries, a theoretical construct that resists disenchantment. How easily we forget that the State, whether in its theological or political guises, is nothing more than a congeries of favored or ambitious individuals who have put on the mantle of corporate authority, men and women who hide, Wizard-of-Oz fashion, behind the screen of altruism, wisdom, superior knowledge, or utilitarian power. They are for the most part commonplace and fallible individuals bristling with all the imperfections, desires, contradictions, and weaknesses of run-of-the-mill humanity. Pope, primate, president, savior, dictator, revolutionary hero, legislator, minister, they are just people.

Some of them are blessed — or cursed — with a force of personality or a strain of moral ruthlessness that enables them to exercise control over their peers and ultimately to monopolize an administration, a consistory, or even an entire nation. Others are corrupt or debauched beyond the norm — Boris Yeltsin urinating on the tarmac on a visit to Washington, D.C., is a pungent illustration — and still others suffer from a deficiency of intelligence that augurs poorly for the implementation of effective public policy. Some are predators, some epicureans, some toadies, some careerists. Most are average human beings with the pedestrian qualities of mind and spirit that all of us share. They are generally uninspired and often subject to the manipulations of the craftier exemplars among their number.

Such is the essence of that metaphysical oracle we call the State, a group of people who have, whether through legitimate or illegitimate means, acquired the privileges and prerogatives of instrumental preeminence. They flourish in the belly of the Leviathan. This is equally the case for the police state or the nanny state. The truth about the fictive identity of the State is almost inexpressibly simple; even so, it customarily resists recognition as we proceed to concretize, animate, or deify it into something it manifestly is not.

The State is not a god. It is not a supreme or “higher” or wiser or beatific or somehow omniscient authority. It is not a hypostatic substance. It is not a thing. Indeed, it is nothing. It is, in fact, a figment of iconolatric homage, a subtle and insinuating illusion which derives its power from a combination of its coercive function and the mystique of psychological projection on the part of those it controls. It is what the Greeks called an eidolon, a phantom or apparition, an image like Euripides’ Helen [6] who was fashioned from cloud-stuff while the real Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt. A moment’s reflection makes this species of necromancy glaringly obvious. Yet we are ruled by specters and chimeras, of which the State is a paramount instance.

There is, indeed, something ludicrous in the elevation of the State, as if it were not only an Idol of the Theater, but a production in the Theater of the Absurd behind which a stubborn and prosaic — and occasionally tumultuous — reality  willy-nilly persists. This is the fact, like the poet Rimbaud’s “waterfall [that] echoes behind the comic-opera huts” in Illuminations [7]. Regrettably, its theatrical, or even farcical, nature does not prevent it from being treated with undue respect or errant veneration. Despite its figuring as idol or comedy, the apotheosis of the State is no whimsical or laughing matter, since it disables critics from articulating — without seeming like heretics bent on sacrilege — reasonable ways to reduce its size and influence. We note, for example, that the sacrosanct nature of the State is precisely what the Obama administration and its supporters appeal to whenever they counter Republican efforts to prune it back.

As Hegel pointed out in his Critique of the German Constitution [8], the chief purpose of the so-called State is self-preservation, which amounts in practice to a clique of self-interested individuals — with some exceptions — who labor chiefly to secure the enjoyment of their perquisites. Far too many of us are prone to give the State absolute ascendancy. We concede it a primacy it does not merit rather than perceive it as only an assembly of people in whom we have put our temporary and often disappointed trust.

In short, a great number of us do not regard the State in the proper sense of a governing body of representative officials elected to serve the people and ensure public order, and who can be dismissed or voted out should they prove venal or incompetent. Too often we regard it as a material entity, an idol, instinct with lustral properties and quasi-magical attributes. The State acts. The State disposes. The State governs. The State knows best. Or so we think. But the State, as such, neither acts nor disposes nor governs nor knows anything at all. Treated as a unitary object, when it actually conceals a multiplicity of discrete subjects, the State is a fungible hallucination to which we have accorded our political obeisance.

And it is precisely this form of laic credulity and intellectual conceit which unscrupulous or parasitical elites rely upon to work their will on those they are determined to dominate.
(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com [9] image.)

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/deconstructing-the-state/

URLs in this post:

[1] Novum Organum: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B004L9KUS8/pjmedia-20

[2] Critique of the Gotha Program: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1434463095/pjmedia-20

[3] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0873489772/pjmedia-20

[4] Prison Notebooks: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/071780397X/pjmedia-20

[5] Workers’ Councils: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1902593561/pjmedia-20

[6] Helen: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1452838690/pjmedia-20

[7] Illuminations: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393076350/pjmedia-20

[8] Critique of the German Constitution: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521459753/pjmedia-20

[9] Shutterstock.com: http://www.shutterstock.com/

 

[Edward Campbell]

I have a problem with this thread, "Deconstructing Progressive Thought," and its partner "Conservatism Needs Work." Neither is about Canadian politics. I know this might be the "least bad" place to put them ... but they do not fit here. The "progressive" thought that is being deconstructed is, almost exclusively, American; ditto the "Conservatism" that is thought to be in need of work. Neither Canadian "progressives" nor Canadian "conservatives" are as extreme as their American confreres. A novice, coming to this Canadian Politics forum might think that we, the military family, lump all "progressives" and all 'conservatives" together - that, in my considered opinion, does a disservice to us and them. I don't know where else they can go ... but I reiterate that they, both threads, are out of place here.

:2c:

 

[GAP]

:+1:

I rarely even look at this thread because it's nothing but long winding articles about something....I'm sure there's a point there, but I don't have the same empty hours to read and reread them to find it. Enough already.......

 

[Journeyman]

Perhaps it's time to creat a whole new board, which will include "Deconstructing Progressive Thought," and its partner "Conservatism Needs Work."

Call it:

Thucydides and Redeye 
If one says 'black,' the other will most assuredly say 'white'  :argue:

        :nod:

 

[Redeye]

:goodpost:

 

[Kirkhill]

A non-American article that hits a number of harmonics that resonate with me.  I would refer critics to Thomas Reid.  iper:

Posted here in its entirety without further comment under the Fair Dealings Provision of the Copyright Act.

The Eurofanatics should join the Marxists in the dustbin of history

The end of the euro may prove chaotic, but recovery will come – sooner rather than later.

The only solution to the crisis is for Chancellor Merkel, right, to bail out the rest of the euro zone - that is not going to happen, despite the pleading of France's Nicolas Sarkozy, left Photo: AFP/Getty Images


By Bruce Anderson

8:52PM GMT 03 Jan 2012

642 Comments


Geoffrey Howe is guilty. Whatever he actually said about Liverpool’s problems during some early Thatcher Cabinet meetings, he was culpable for his failure to draw the obvious conclusion. The city was finding it impossible to compete with London and the South of England. In different circumstances, this could have been rectified by devaluation. Liverpool would then have used a weaker currency: let us call it the Scouse.


In a single country, that option was not available, so there was only one alternative. Despite Geoffrey Howe’s reservations, Liverpool received large subsidies from taxpayers elsewhere in Britain: fiscal transfers. Yet even under that generous regime, it continued to struggle.


So how on earth did Lord Howe conclude that the whole of Europe could use the same currency and the same interest rate, with minimal fiscal transfers? There is one possible answer. Geoffrey Howe may well have believed that monetary union would lead inexorably to fiscal union and thus to political union. If so, we should inquire why he – and the other Eurofanatics – failed to share that insight with the British public, whom they were trying to persuade of the merits of the single currency. We should also remind Lord Howe and his friends that before adding the roof, it is a good idea to build the walls.


Most complex political questions do not lend themselves to an absolute distinction between right and wrong. Even the losing side’s case will have some merits. The euro is an exception. Unless the eurozone was about to become a single country in short order, the single currency could never have worked. Never. It was always a train crash in the making. So the Eurosceptics who pointed this out were 100 per cent right: Geoffrey Howe and his friends, 100 per cent wrong.


That is odd. Whatever vices Lord Howe and his fellow federasts may practise, they do not include stupidity. So how could intelligent men believe arrant nonsense? The other day, I found the explanation, in a detective story of Donna Leon’s (if you enjoy the genre and have not read her, a treat awaits you). Her principal character tells us that he had “always been afraid of people in possession of what they believe is the truth. They’ll do anything to see that the facts are changed and whipped into shape to agree with it.”

When these fanatics are highly intellectual, the danger is compounded. If the facts appear to be against them, intellectuals have the self-confidence to club the errant data into a whimpering silence. We must remember that for 2,000 years, most intellectuals worked for one of the Churches. Many were scholars, some of them positively saintly, who spent their lives in enhancing a gentle faith. But there were plenty of others. The Spanish Inquisition was established and manned by intellectuals. So were most of the heresy hunts and persecutions. Although we think of Thomas More as a subtle and witty man, he was capable of extreme cruelty against those whom he regarded as heretics. He behaved in such a way, because he thought that he was saving souls.

That leads us to the cruel doctrines of the modern era. Their perpetrators also thought that they were in the salvation business, not of souls but of mankind. This started with the French Revolution. Re-make the world, re-make humanity: outcome, the Terror. The Marxists took over the same agenda, and ended with a vastly greater terror. Then there was Apartheid. There is a common illusion that it was invented by Afrikaner policemen with size 13 boots. Not so: Apartheid was a product of the universities. Dr Verwoerd was a professor of sociology. Only intellectuals could have created such an absurd doctrine, so incompatible with the demographic facts.

With the European single currency, there is a similar syndrome. After 1945, a European political elite concluded that the continent had to move beyond the nation states, whose wars had almost destroyed it. That was neither an immoral response nor a foolish one.

But there were two difficulties. The first was the democratic deficit. If you decided to build a new Europe, it would help if the peoples of the old Europe were with you.

If the European public had been prepared to embrace the inevitable disruption and sacrifice while they transferred their allegiance to the Twelve Stars, it could have worked. They were never asked. Those who thought that they knew best just carried on with their federalising plots.

As they ignored the data, they also overlooked the second difficulty. To an extent inconceivable in 1945, old Europe recovered. The inhabitants of the nation states prospered, especially in the North. As most modern politicians have come to recognise, prosperous people do not like paying tax, even to subsidise their own country’s less-well-off. When the money would go to other countries, the reluctance is compounded. So it would appear that the eurozone can neither go forward, nor backwards, nor stay the same. It almost seems as if the federasts have created a problem that is beyond the power of the human mind to solve.

In that case, what should Britain do? David Cameron has one problem: he cannot tell the truth. It must be so tempting to say: “We told you so. You have behaved with asinine stupidity. The only hope is to abandon the whole project, now.” But it would sound like gloating. Mr Sarkozy would become even more hysterical. If he could damage our interests, he might well do so, even if this inflicted damage on France as well. Equally, according to some Treasury estimates, a disorderly collapse of the euro could cost the UK as much as 10 per cent of GDP.

All the PM can do is talk about the need for a big bazooka, in which Germany underwrites the eurozone’s liabilities. Although that is not gloating, it still upsets the rest, for two reasons. They know that it is the only solution. They also know that it is not going to happen.

That said, no one knows what is going to happen. But if something is failing, it is time to find an alternative. Money is like blood. If your blood is not working, nothing else will. If a country’s currency cannot work, the body economic will seize up. The peoples of Europe would like to work, earn, spend, save, invest. All they need is a currency that makes that possible. Italy has hardly grown for 10 years. Spain has five million unemployed. You do not have to be a Keynesian to believe that further austerity is not the answer.

The analogy with blood can be taken too far. The end of the euro would not be the same as a blood transfusion. The initial stages would be chaotic, all the more so because there are no precedents. But given the amount of spare capacity within Europe, it seems inconceivable that there would not be a recovery, sooner rather than later. After all, despite the eurozone’s difficulties, the rest of the world is moving ahead. But it is not in the euro.

Surrounded by the wreckage of their system, some Eurofanatics are still asking for more time. The Marxists used to do the same. It is now time for the federasts to follow the Inquisition, Apartheid and the Marxists – out of history.

Link


PS- To the extent that this thread and the sister thread on conservatism don't deal exclusively with Canadian Politics but with politics in general, and political philosophy perhaps they could be ascribed a separate board (or made a superthread under Canadian Politics called Politics and Politicians).

 

[a_majoor]

This rather reinforces the point in Kirkhills post:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-politics-of-projection-in-the-west/?print=1

The Politics of Projection in the West
Posted By Dennis Mitzner On January 4, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Egypt,History,Iran,Media,Politics,US News,World News | 21 Comments

To many on the political left, Europe’s new right-wing parties seem to represent the perils of Europe’s dark history.  The rise of new right parties in Europe during the past decade led to widespread panic among many Western observers.

When European right-wing parties gain in polls and win elections, newspapers overflow with articles declaring the end of democracy. Following the Swedish parliamentary elections in September 2010, Newsweek‘s Denis MacShane wrote [1] :

Thus the arrival of a new politics in Europe. A decade ago extremist politics was confined to fringes and street protests. It has now arrived as a parliamentary force and is beginning to change how other parties behave and speak.

According to [2] Daniel Sandström, the editor of the large Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, Jimmy Åkesson, the leader of Swedish Democrats, “is a clever populist, careful not to cross the line and say anything that seems undemocratic. But his party has a tremendous acceptance of racism.”

New York Times columnist, Roger Cohen claimed [2] that “hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist.”

However, True Finns (Finland), Swedish Democrats (Sweden), MSI (Italy), or PVV (Netherlands) are proponents of parliamentary democracy and individual rights. More importantly, they are political parties born out of a liberal political culture. None of the new right parties of Europe are advocating the limiting of personal freedoms or embracing fascism.

In 2010, one the vilified leaders of Europe’s new right, the leader of the Vlaams Belang party in Belgium, Filip Dewinter, said [3] the following:

We can’t change the past. We can’t deny the dark spots in our history. But we are not prisoners of that history. This bitter experience has been a sobering lesson. We will never ever again believe the false promises of totalitarianism. One could only wish the left-wingers had learned that lesson too.

Today many Europeans celebrate the rise of democracy in the Middle East. However many are fearful of how the democratic will of the Europeans will manifest itself. Interestingly, these fears are not always applied to other parts of the world.

The Muslim Brotherhood received 36 percent of the vote and the Salafists 24 percent in the recent Egyptian parliamentary elections. When a right-wing party in Europe does well or even barely passes the electoral threshold, no one talks about the triumph of democracy. On the contrary, following a positive result for a right-wing party, many European newspapers are immediately painted with op-eds and headlines decrying the end of democracy.

In 2010, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohammad Badie, declared [4] in his weekly sermon that

Arab and Muslim regimes are betraying their people by failing to confront the Muslim’s real enemies, not only Israel but also the United States. Waging jihad against both of these infidels is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded. Governments have no right to stop their people from fighting the United States. “They are disregarding Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme” over all non-Muslims.

In the light of the statements by Badie and Dewinter, why are the self-proclaimed new-right parties of Europe labeled as threats to democracy when the self-proclaimed enemy of liberal democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood, is not?

The impulsive, yet dramatically different reactions by Western intellectuals to events and movements in Europe and the Middle East are indicative of a particular world view.

How else would one explain Roger Cohen’s willingness to support the rioting masses in Cairo while Mubarak was still in power and while having no idea of the nature or political affiliations of these masses? According to Cohen “this Egyptian uprising is about the very individual rights Tehran flouted in 2009 and Western-backed Arab security states have denied: the right to vote, to the rule of law, to freedom of expression. Almost every conversation I’ve had on the streets of Cairo this past week returns to these themes.”

Interestingly, the European new right parties have stated that they want to increase individual rights by minimizing the influence of the European Union over nation-states, uphold the rule of law in the face of lawlessness in many European cities, and have freedom to express views freely, even if critical of Muslims. All of these demands are well within the parameters of liberal democratic discourse.

It is obvious that the European right-wing parties are not insular movements and they include several factions, some less liberal than others. However, they all operate within the framework of a parliamentary democracy.

Therefore it is surprising that many on the left are willing to support Islamists in the Middle East in the name of democracy but unwilling to grant the same support to European parties and their constituents who are committed to democracy.

Such behavior is worse than cognitive dissonance; it is intrinsically illiberal because it does not address the actual ideas espoused by the new protagonists in Europe and the Middle East.

Indeed, the impulsive reactions to surrounding events are attempts to cement a narrative, regardless of the applicability of the narrative. The Muslim Brotherhood is on the verge of becoming a liberal force in the Middle East, and the new right is about to embrace fascism.

This is the narrative. Facts are secondary.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-politics-of-projection-in-the-west/

URLs in this post:

[1] wrote: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/09/24/europe-the-rise-of-the-extreme-right.html
[2] According to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/02iht-edcohen02.html
[3] said: http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/filip_dewinter_in_jewish_week
[4] declared: http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/10/muslim-brotherhood-declares-war-on.html

The study of political philosophy in general is a highly relevant topic, especially given von Clausewitz dictum: "Krieg folgt die Fortsetzung Politik mit anderen Mitteln". Politics is defined as the means of allocating scarce resources, and operates in every environment, from the inner workings of the Orderly Room to conduct between nations (or even Civilizations a la Samuel Huntington). The main sources of arguments from both sides of the "Progressive" and Classical Liberal schools of thought are American, so I look for examples that are relevant and can be applied universally. (Even in the above example, the use of "Narrative" rather than facts certainly explains the way news gets reported by much of Canada's Legacy Media).

 

[a_majoor]

Mark Steyn again

Although there are not so many examples of the Canadian chattering class going off the deep end (or at least not as far off the deep and as these people), the level of discourse is declining; the The Toronto Star's Noah Richler ridiculously claimed that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has sex with young boys, while the the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner claiming that Prime Minister Stephen Harper uses heroin!.

This isn't supporting a controversial or unpopular opinion with facts, figures, historical examples or documentary evidence, just throwing out some repulsive trigger words for shock value (follow the links and read for yourself)

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/287410

The Left’s So-Called Empathy
By Mark Steyn
January 7, 2012 6:00 A.M.

Lest you doubt that we’re headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within ten minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the “crazy things” he’s said and done.

Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America’s political class, but the “crazy thing” Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum’s “taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home,” whereupon he “played with it.” My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is “not a little weird, he’s really weird.”

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

Not many of us will ever know what it’s like to have a child who lives only a few hours. That alone should occasion a certain modesty about presuming to know what are “weird” and unweird reactions to such an event.

In 1996, the Santorums were told during the pregnancy that their baby had a fatal birth defect and would not survive more than a few hours outside the womb. So Gabriel was born, his parents bundled him, and held him, and baptized him. And two hours later he died. They decided to take his body back to the home he would never know. Weirdly enough, this crazy weird behavior is in line with the advice of the American Pregnancy Association, which says that “it is important for your family members to spend time with the baby” and “help them come to terms with their loss.”

Would I do it? Dunno. Hope I never have to find out. Many years ago, a friend of mine discovered in the final hours of labor that her child was dead but that she would still have to deliver him. I went round to visit her shortly after, not relishing the prospect but feeling that it was one of those things one was bound to do. I ditched the baby gift I’d bought a few days earlier but kept the flowers and chocolate. My friend had photographs of the dead newborn. What do you say? Oh, he’s got your face?

I was a callow pup in my early twenties, with no paternal instincts and no great empathetic capacity. But I understood that I was in the presence of someone who had undergone a profound and harrowing experience, one which it would be insanely arrogant for those of us not so ill-starred to judge.

There but for the grace of God go I, as we used to say.

There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers — Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death — or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin — and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general. The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites — they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

Never mind the dead kid, he has six living kids. How crazy freaky weird is that?

This crazy freaky weird: All those self-evidently ludicrous risible surplus members of the Santorum litter are going to be paying the Social Security and Medicare of all you normal well-adjusted Boomer yuppies who had one designer kid at 39. So, if it helps make it easier to “empathize,” look on them as sacrificial virgins to hurl into the bottomless pit of Big Government debt.

Two weeks ago I wrote in this space: “A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future.” Whatever my disagreements with Santorum on his “compassionate conservatism,” he gets that. He understands that our fiscal bankruptcy is a symptom rather than the cause.

The real wickedness of Big Government is that it debauches not merely a nation’s finances but ultimately its human capital — or, as he puts it, you cannot have a strong economy without strong families.

Santorum’s respect for all life, including even the smallest bleakest meanest two-hour life, speaks well for him, especially in comparison with his fellow Pennsylvanian, the accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, an industrial-scale abortionist at a Philadelphia charnel house who plunged scissors into the spinal cords of healthy delivered babies. Few of Gosnell’s employees seemed to find anything “weird” about that: Indeed, they helped him out by tossing their remains in jars and bags piled up in freezers and cupboards. Much less crazy than taking ’em home and holding a funeral, right?

Albeit less dramatically than “Doctor” Gosnell, much of the developed world has ruptured the compact between past, present, and future. A spendthrift life of self-gratification is one thing. A spendthrift life paid for by burdening insufficient numbers of children and grandchildren with crippling debt they can never pay off is utterly contemptible. And to too many of America’s politico-media establishment it’s not in the least bit “weird.”

—  Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

 

[Redeye]

Mark Steyn again

Although there are not so many examples of the Canadian chattering class going off the deep end (or at least not as far off the deep and as these people), the level of discourse is declining; the The Toronto Star's Noah Richler ridiculously claimed that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has sex with young boys, while the the Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner claiming that Prime Minister Stephen Harper uses heroin!.

Wow. This is plumbing new depths, even for you. It would appear you read the first line of Dan Gardner's story and not the rest. Nowhere does it contain anything about Prime Minister Harper using heroin. The "key" involved is that understanding how the government approached Insite in Vancouver show that their claims of being big fans of decentralization are not all they seem, something Gardner uses to start an insightful discussion of CPC relativism. Noah Richler similiarly uses such claims to show how stories are invented to skew campaigns. His piece is written in somewhat poor taste, but hey, it catches the eye of people who might not be interested. Frankly, he raises some good points about how, under the guise of expression it's easy to plant ideas in people's minds. The Cons did this in their campaign against Irwin Cotler, as Richler's piece explains. Again, if you think he was actually accusing anyone of anything, you didn't read the second paragraph which lays bare his point.

This isn't supporting a controversial or unpopular opinion with facts, figures, historical examples or documentary evidence, just throwing out some repulsive trigger words for shock value (follow the links and read for yourself)

It's funny to throw this in - because while it's a nice bromide, you have to hope someone doesn't actually do so, because if they do, well, it becomes clear that the claims you're attempting to make simply aren't supported by facts.

 

[a_majoor]

Wonderful moment in history; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher owns opposition MP's. "You would rather the poor be poorer" totally sums up their arguments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw&feature=player_embedded

 

[a_majoor]

F.A. Hayek certainly knew the history of Socialism, worth repeating (especially since we will be seeing a lot of this sort of language on both sides of the border; the US election and shrill cries here by the NDP over changes to OAS and other government programs):

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/fa-hayek-great-utopia

F.A. Hayek On "The Great Utopia"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/28/2012 19:32 -0500

While it is hardly necessary to provide commentary to one of F.A. Hayek's timeless observations from his book, The Road To Serfdom, rereading the chapter titled The Great Utopia, in this year of what could possibly be the most important election in the history of the United States, in which the US public will be promised nothing short of utopia by virtually every candidate except the one who really knows that fixing America would require pain and sacrifice, is everyone's duty. Courtesy of the Center for Economic Liberty we recreate it below in its entirety, and urge all readers, regardless of political persuasion of economic beliefs to consider what F.A.Hayek was saying some 70 years earlier, and how very applicable it is to our current situation.

The Great Utopia

There can be no doubt that most of those in the democracies who demand a central direction of all economic activity still believe that socialism and individual freedom can be combined. Yet socialism was early recognized by many thinkers as the gravest threat to freedom.

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be "treated as cattle."

Nobody saw more clearly than the great political thinker de Tocqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom," he said. "Democracy attaches all possible value to each man," he said in 1848, "while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives—the craving for freedom — socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a "new freedom." Socialism was to bring "economic freedom," without which political freedom was "not worth having."

To make this argument sound plausible, the word "freedom" was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

The claim that a planned economy would produce a substantially larger output than the competitive system is being progressively abandoned by most students of the problem. Yet it is this false hope as much as anything which drives us along the road to planning.

Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as "the general welfare." There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.

Democratic assemblies cannot function as planning agencies. They cannot produce agreement on everything — the whole direction of the resources of the nation-for the number of possible courses of action will be legion. Even if a congress could, by proceeding step by step and compromising at each point, agree on some scheme, it would certainly in the end satisfy nobody.

To draw up an economic plan in this fashion is even less possible than, for instance, successfully to plan a military campaign by democratic procedure. As in strategy it would become inevitable to delegate the task to experts. And even if, by this expedient, a democracy should succeed in planning every sector of economic activity, it would still have to face the problem of integrating these separate plans into a unitary whole. There will be a stronger and stronger demand that some board or some single individual should be given power to act on their own responsibility. The cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning. Thus the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power. The whole system will tend toward that kind of dictatorship in which the head of the government is position by popular vote, but where he has all the powers at his command to make certain that the vote will go in the direction he desires.

Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and, as such, essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible. There is no justification for the widespread belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; it is not the source of power which prevents it from being arbitrary; to be free from dictatorial qualities, the power must also be limited. A true "dictatorship of the proletariat," even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.

Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated. To a limited extent we ourselves experience this fact in wartime, when subordination of almost everything to the immediate and pressing need is the price at which we preserve our freedom in the long run. The fashionable phrases about doing for the purposes of peace what we have learned to do for the purposes of war are completely misleading, for it is sensible temporarily to sacrifice freedom in order to make it more secure in the future, but it is quite a different thing to sacrifice liberty permanently in the interests of a planned economy.

To those who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters, the connection between the two systems is obvious. The realization of the socialist program means the destruction of freedom. Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is simply not achievable.

 

[a_majoor]

The real reason "Progressivism" is still around can be summed up in one word: incentives

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/02/its-takers-versus-makers-and-these-days-takers-are-winning/2170511

It's takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds | 02/04/12 6:04 PM
Examiner Contributor

“Fifty thousand for what you didn’t plant, for what didn’t grow.  That’s modern farming -- reap what you don’t sow.”

That’s a line from a song about farm subsidies, “Farming The Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.

But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers:  America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.

The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can’t run an economy like that.  If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly.  Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing.

In today’s America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who’ll keep them coming.  The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can’t muster enough votes to put this to a stop.

Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul’s vote.

But the damage goes deeper.  Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures:  An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.

“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens.  But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.”

And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers.  I think we’ve reached that point now:

* People who pay their mortgages - often at considerable personal sacrifice - see others who didn’t bother get special assistance.

* People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits.

* People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts.  It rankles at all levels.

And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens.  The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.

Plenty of the wealthy are doing the latter, and that has its own consequences, which are often worse than those stemming from goodies for the poor.

In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism - which is to say, in the world we live in today - a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies.

Frequently, the latter looks better:  If you spend $1 million on lobbying, and get a $1 billion subsidy from the government, that’s a thousand-fold return on your money.

It’s hard to do one-hundredth as well through actual capitalism.  So why bother to improve your products at all?  Just hire more lobbyists.

Of course, the government can provide such rewards only because it has vast resources of coercive power, and vast stocks of other people’s money.

Deploying those resources for self-serving political purposes is nothing new, but - as Sykes points out in considerable detail - things are much worse now than they were during previous periods of excess.

So what’s next?  Well, as Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.  That’s a special case of Herb Stein's observation that something that can’t go on forever, won’t. 

With federal borrowing at unsustainable levels, with the bailed-out auto companies and banks not looking particularly healthy, and with the steady drip-drip of financial scandals moving toward the point that even an Obama-friendly media will have to cover them, we appear to be approaching a crisis point.

America is not yet Greece, Spain, or Portugal, but those are the natural endpoints of a moocher-based political system.

When the crisis comes, and it will, we should relearn the lesson that the Framers of our Constitution knew and tried to embody:  The bigger and more powerful the national government is, the more prone it is to corruption and interest-group domination.

A federal government that actually operated within the limits intended by the Framers would be much smaller, much less capable of creating economic distortion, and much less attractive to moochers and the politicians they enable. The bigger the pot of honey, the more flies it attracts.

Undoing what Richard Epstein calls “the mistakes of 1937,” in which most of those limits on federal power were removed by the Supreme Court, would go far toward fixing the problem.

That, of course, would require a Supreme Court with a more traditional view of the Constitution’s limits on federal power.  Which would require a president interested in appointing justices with such views.

Something to keep in mind, between now and November.

Examiner Sunday Reflection contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a University of Tennessee School of Law professor, and founder and editor of Instapundit.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/02/its-takers-versus-makers-and-these-days-takers-are-winning/2170511#ixzz1lWp20OyE

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

I prefer the one on the left myself

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

The person who made that might want to take some English classes though....

 

[a_majoor]

Detroit as a model of Progressivism in action. Remember, it was explicity touted as the model for the "Great Society", and every progressive trope was enacted there. Despite this, I'm sure there will still be people saying that there is some "x" factor that caused Detroit to fail, or that despite everything, these programs work:

http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/12832

Detroit: The Triumph of Progressive Public PolicyHow did this great city fall so far?By Jarrett Skorup | Feb. 14, 2012
(Editor's note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on July 6, 2009.)

Imagine a city where all the major economic planks of the statist or "progressive" platform have been enacted:

A "living wage" ordinance, far above the federal minimum wage, for all public employees and private contractors.
A school system that spends significantly more per pupil than the national average.
A powerful school employee union that militantly defends the exceptional pay, benefits and job security it has won for its members.
Other government employee unions that do the same for their members.
A tax system that aggressively redistributes income from businesses and the wealthy to the poor and to government bureaucracies.
Would this be a shining city on a hill, exciting the admiration of all? We don't have to guess, because there is such a city right here in our state: Detroit

Detroit has been dubbed "the most liberal city in America" and each of these "progressive" policies is alive and well there. How have they worked out?

In 1950, Detroit was the wealthiest city in America on a per capita income basis. Today, the Census Bureau reports that it is the nation's 2nd poorest major city, just "edging out" Cleveland.

Could it be pure coincidence that the decline occurred over the same period in which union power, the city government bureaucracy, taxes and business regulations all multiplied? While correlation is not causation, it is striking that the decline in per capita income is exactly what classical economists predict would occur when wage controls are imposed and taxes are increased.

Specifically, "price theory" predicts that artificially high business costs caused by excessive regulation and above-market labor compensation rates imposed by so-called "living wages" will lead to an increase in unemployment. Detroit's minimum wage is more than $2 above the federal minimum wage; and pressure groups are pushing for more. Additionally, any company contracting with the city must pay its employees $11.03 an hour if they offer benefits or $13.78 an hour if they do not.

Such high wage mandates are especially hard on individuals with a poor education and low skills. If struggling and heavily taxed businesses cannot pay such high wages, then they are more selective about the few workers they do hire or simply go out of business altogether. Those who have promulgated these polices may be well-intentioned, but mainstream economists have warned for decades that such policies were very likely to bring about the abject poverty and unemployment that characterize Detroit today. The city has the highest unemployment rate among all large U.S. cities.

A similar pattern has played out in public education. It is now conventional wisdom among the political class that higher pay for teachers and increased spending per student lead to improvements in teacher quality and student performance -— Detroit Public Schools strongly suggests that this theory must be rejected. It has chronically underperformed state averages, yet reforms are vehemently opposed by the system's powerful school employee union.

At the same time that union, the Detroit Federation of Teachers, has won rich salary and benefits packages for its members. Detroit spends one of the highests amounts of money per student nationwide and the district's spending per pupil is eighth highest out of Michigan's 551 school districts. For all that, by almost any measure Detroit schools have for decades failed their students: test scores, safety, drop out rates, etc. Detroit's public school students perform among the lowest in the state. On a 2009 test for urban districts from the U.S. Department of Education, DPS students performed "barely above what one would expect simply by chance, as if the kids simply guessed at the answers."

In the private sector such failure would result in mass firings for unsatisfactory performance. No doubt such a response would be condemned by the progressives who support the school employee unions that have made similar actions impossible in their institutions, and have opposed major transformation at every turn.

For example, in 2003 philanthropist Bob Thompson offered $200 million to build 15 charter public schools in the city in which he would guarantee a 90 percent graduation rate. In response, the DFT balked because charter schools are not unionized. The outcome was that the union jobs trumped better outcomes for children.

People vote with their feet, and all the above suggests why, over the past decade, DPS has lost about 10,000 students each year to charter, independent and suburban schools.

Of course it would be unfair to place all the blame for the city's decline on public employee unions. Detroit is home to the Big Three, whose contracts with their own powerful unions provided the model for those public employee arrangements. The UAW successfully extracted wages and benefits estimated at $73 per hour before the recent shake-ups began.

This is about $25 more per hour than the amount foreign-owned U.S. auto manufacturing plants pay their non-unionized American workers. Due to this disparity, Japanese car companies earn some $1,000 to $2,000 more on each car sold than their American counterparts. The outcome has been a relentless loss of market share that, among other things, has devastated the economic engine that once powered Motor City prosperity.

In addition to being a model of progressive economic, labor and education policy, Detroit is also a case study in welfare statism. Tom Bray, former editorial page editor for The Detroit News, has made the following observation:

"Detroit, remember, was going to be the 'Model City' of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the shining example of what the 'fairness' of the welfare state can produce. Billions of dollars later, Detroit instead has become the model of everything that can go wrong when you hook people on the idea of something for nothing - a once-middle class city of nearly 2 million that is now a poverty-stricken city of less than 900,000."

Today, Detroit is down 25 percent over the past 10 years; to just over 700,000 and dropping fast.

Progressives will complain that this portrait oversimplifies the factors involved in a great city's decline. Perhaps it does, but with this question in mind: At what point does the weight of evidence and logic make it impossible to avoid concluding that in the case of Detroit, correlation is causation?

 

[a_majoor]

Absolute power combined with progressive ideology is pretty ugly to watch in action:

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/More-Than-a-Touch-of-Malice

More Than a Touch of Malice
Paul A. Rahe · 12 hours ago

When Barack Obama first announced that he intended to force all employers, including Catholic institutions, to provide contraception and abortifacients as part of the healthcare package they offer their employees, my friend Michael Barone observed that the President “was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths”; and, presuming that the President could not possibly have intended to stir up a hornet’s nest, he suggested that his decision in this matter must have been a function of ignorance and isolation. This was my first instinct as well. It seemed foolish – guaranteed to alienate a constituency that had supported Barack Obama in 2008 and had hailed his election.

We know a bit more now. We know that the President did not act on impulse, that he took his time in making this decision, and that he sought advice from a range of individuals within the Democratic Party. Vice-President Joe Biden and William Daley, who was then Obama’s Chief of Staff, both profess to be Catholic, and they strongly advised against doing anything that would antagonize the Catholic bishops and the laity. Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House and current Democratic minority leader, were also consulted. They, too, profess to be Catholic, and they fiercely advocated imposing this burden on all employers providing health insurance for their employees.

The decision appears to have been made before the New Hampshire primary. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why, at the debate in New Hampshire in early January, George Stephanopoulos – who pretends to be a journalist but is still obviously nothing more than a Democratic operative – repeatedly pressed Mitt Romney to spell out where he stood on the question of contraception. Stephanopoulos’ disgraceful performance, which drew boos and catcalls from the crowd, is an indication that Obama and at least some of his aides thought that they had something to gain by injecting this question into this year’s campaign.

On the face of it, President Obama would appear to be shooting himself in the foot. Why would he risk losing the Catholic vote? One could, of course, argue that his aim was to excite the feminists and give them a reason to turn out in November. As a rationale, however, even this seems a bit lame. The benefit that the President proposes to provide is insubstantial. The administration’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the pill and other birth control devices are not free. But the expense involved is not great. Among those who are employed and have healthcare insurance, no one is hard put to come up with the paltry sum required.

This suggests that there can be only one reason why Sebelius, Pelosi, and Obama decided to proceed. They wanted to show the bishops and the Catholic laity who is boss. They wanted to make those who think contraception wrong and abortion a species of murder complicit in both.  They wanted to rub the noses of their opponents in it. They wanted to marginalize them. Humiliation was, in fact, their only aim, and malice, their motive.

Last week, when, in response to the fierce resistance he had deliberately stirred up, the President offered the bishops what he called “an accommodation,” what he proffered was nothing more than a fig leaf. His maneuver was, in fact, a gesture of contempt, and I believe that it was Barack Obama’s final offer. From his perspective and from that of Sebelius and Pelosi, the genuine Catholics still within the Democratic coalition are no more than what Vladimir Lenin called “useful idiots,” and, now that the progressive project is near completion, they are expendable – for there is no longer any need to curry their favor.

In his piece in The Washington Examiner, which I link above, Michael Barone mentioned Obama’s decree with regard to contraception and abortifacients in tandem with a brief discussion of the President’s decision to reject the construction of the Keystone Pipeline. He was, I think, right to do so – for there is no good reason that any student of public policy can cite for doing what the President did. Cancelling the pipeline will not delay or stop the extraction of oil from the tar sands in Alberta, and the pipeline itself would pose no environmental threat. If the President’s decision had any purpose, it was symbolic – an indication to all that he cared not one whit about the plight of the white working class and that he was capable of punishing those whom he does not like and more than willing to do so.

In 2008, when he first ran for the Presidency, Barack Obama posed as a moderate most of the time. This time, he is openly running as a radical. His aim is to win a mandate for the fundamental transformation of the United States that he promised in passing on the eve of his election four years ago and that he promised again when he called his administration The New Foundation. In the process, he intends to reshape the Democratic coalition – to bring the old hypocrisy to an end, to eliminate those who stand in the way of the final consolidation of the administrative entitlements state, to drive out the faithful Catholics once and for all, to jettison the white working class, and to build a new American regime on a coalition of  highly educated upper-middle class whites, feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, and those belonging to the public-sector unions. To Americans outside this coalition, he intends to show no mercy.

Mark my words. If Barack Obama wins in November, he will force the Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, and the bishops, priests, and nuns who fostered the steady growth of the administrative entitlements state, thinking that they were pursuing “the common good,” will reap what they have sown.

In the end, politics has as its focus persuasion. Our difficulties are a function of policy, not of mismanagement. If we are to stop Barack Obama in 2012, we will have to find a standard-bearer who can articulate a compelling argument against the administrative entitlements state and, by means of persuasion and praxis, reverse our democracy’s inexorable soft despotic drift. Let us hope that one or another of the remaining candidates rises to the occasion.

 

[a_majoor]

What a surprise to discover who the thin skinned and intolerant ones are:

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/03/13/pew-liberals-most-intolerant-on-line/

Pew: Liberals most intolerant online
POSTED AT 11:00 AM ON MARCH 13, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY
   
It’s a well-known fact that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives or moderates.  Superior liberal tolerance is such a fact that they will scream at you if you dare to disagree or debate them, demand that your advertisers bail on you, and pressure the FCC to get you banned from the airwaves.  Does that sound like tolerance to you?  A new survey from Pew confirms that liberals are the least tolerant of differing opinions, at least on line (emphasis mine):

Politics can be a sensitive subject and a number of SNS [social networking sites] users have decided to block, unfriend, or hide someone because of their politics or posting activities. In all, 18% of social networking site users have taken one of those steps by doing at least one of the following:

10% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because that person posted too frequently about political subjects
9% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they posted something about politics or issues that they disagreed with or found offensive
8% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they argued about political issues on the site with the user or someone the user knows
5% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they posted something about politics that the user worried would offend other friends
4% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they disagreed with something the user posted about politics
Of course, that means that 82% of SNS users have not taken any steps to ignore or disconnect from someone whose views are different – or have not encountered any views that would prompt such a move.

Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

It’s not even all that close, as their chart shows:

Andrew Malcolm has some fun with the implications:

Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans.

In a new study, the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life Project confirmed what most intelligent Americans had long sensed. That is, whenever they are challenged or confronted on the hollow falsity of their orthodoxy  — such as, say, uniting diverse Americans — liberals tend to respond defensively with anger, even trying to shut off or silence critics. (i.e. photo above of President Obama reacting to Boston hecklers.)

The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.

For some full disclosure, I’ve blocked more than a few people on Twitter.  I didn’t do it for disagreements, but for being unpleasant about disagreements.  I consider Twitter to be a true social network; I don’t hang out with unpleasant people in real life, and so I see no need to do so in virtual life.  Twitter is my water cooler, my hangout in slack time between bursts of writing.  I’m happy to have a debate, but when it gets insulting, unpleasant, and intellectually dishonest, I take a pass.

Even if that counts in the Pew poll (and I’d argue that it doesn’t), I’d be in a small minority among conservatives — and to be fair, it’s a small minority among liberals too.  It’s just that it’s a statistically significant larger minority among liberals.  While Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda demand that the government act to silence Rush Limbaugh for challenging their orthodoxy, Forbes’ Dave Serchuk points out the irony, the hypocrisy — and the unintended consequences:

Imagine this scenario: you are a lifelong liberal. You pretty much hate everything Rush Limbaugh stands for, and says. You are really glad that the times have finally seemed to have caught up to him, and that people are outraged by his callous, gross comments. So what do you do next? You do theone thing that will make him a sympathetic figure. You call on the FCC to remove him.

Think this is just not-very-good satire? If only. Nope, I draw from this example because in an opinion piece just published on CNN.com Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan did exactly this. In the process they seem to have played into the exact stereotype of the thin-skinned, hypocritical liberal. One who supports the First Amendment and freedom of speech … except for when they don’t.

Here is the lame excuse they offered for why the heavy hand of government sponsored censorship should come down on Limbaugh, a guy who seemed to be doing a pretty good imitation of a man hoist on his own petard anyway.

“Radio broadcasters are obligated to act in the public interest and serve their respective communities of license. In keeping with this obligation, individual radio listeners may complain to the FCC that Limbaugh’s radio station (and those syndicating his show) are not acting in the public interest or serving their respective communities of license by permitting such dehumanizing speech.”

Umm, okay. But isn’t there something called ratings that are a truer indication of what these respective communities already want? And shouldn’t that count the most? Don’t ratings (i.e. “popularity”) in fact tell the FCC just whom the public thinks serves their interest? Whether we like it or not?

Why do they go for the block rather than provide an alternative?  Michael Medved says they can’t compete — and need government to intervene:

Limbaugh’s critics seem unable to accept the fact that many of their fellow citizens actually appreciate the opportunity to listen to his opinions on a regular basis, so rather than persuade those poor benighted souls to listen to something else, they mean to take away the broadcast that they enjoy.

Why not try to build an eager new audience for liberal opinion leaders and steal listeners from Rush and the rest of us who host right-leaning shows? How about recruiting the most outrageous and opinionated voices on the left, syndicating their shows in major markets, and promoting these fresh, progressive voices with a catchy moniker like “Air America”?

Oh wait, that’s been tried, starting in 2004 and proceeding (intermittently) till 2010 when chronically low ratings and bankruptcy court performed a belated mercy killing on the ill-fated experiment. It’s true that some of the Air America “stars” ultimately found their way to other opportunities—with Rachel Maddow hosting a successful TV program on MSNBC, and the insufferable Al Franken enjoying an unlikely career in the U.S. Senate.

But attempts to create viable radio alternatives to Rush and other right wingers have never gained traction, so rather than continuing to compete in the open market place, lefties merely yearn to shut down the other side with sponsor boycotts, public pressure or, most obnoxiously, the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Fortunately, Barack Obama has consistently opposed the Fairness Doctrine, but many of the Democratic colleagues have promoted it for years, with Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and—most adamantly—that heroic public servant John Edwards providing support.

Well, it’s not exactly news that the Intolerant Tolerance Hysterics are all about choices that they want to dictate to people, too, even if (or especially if) it involved the use of “an oppressive, invidious authoritarian relic” like the Fairness doctrine.  Don’t expect them to understand that irony, Mssrs. Serchuk and Medved, but thank you for pointing it out.  They can unfriend and block all they want on social networking, because those are personal choices not to listen to differing opinions, and every American has that choice.  The problem is when they want government to unfriend and block so that no one has that choice — and that’s the kind of intolerance that’s much more dangerous than humorous.

I see no evidence to suggest that Canadian "Progressives" are any more tolerent (the well known propensity for "progressive" websites like Rabble to erase posts and ban dissenting posters can stand in for the Pew poll), and of course the hysterical campaign to prevent Sun TV from airing is the inverse of trying to force Rush off the air (or the inability of "Progressives" to gain traction in talk radio)

 

[Sythen]

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20120323/sentences-native-status-supreme-court-120323/

Title of the article should be, "SCC says racism ok"

OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that aboriginal background should be a paramount consideration when sentencing violent offenders who have breached long-term supervision orders.

In a 6-1 decision, the justices ruled on a pair of cases in which offenders on long-term supervision were sentenced after violating the terms of their orders.

Both men had long, violent, criminal histories.



Read more: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20120323/sentences-native-status-supreme-court-120323/#ixzz1pxWMXTb4