PrintSeptember 19, 2009
The left still doesn't get it
Despite steady progress in achieving their ambition, lefties have acquired neither clue nor interest in how things actually work. Imagine the destruction when the revolucion has transferred power from the oppressor class to them. Suffice that whatever works now isn't controlled by lefties, which is why whatever does work, works.
The lefties' only work experience has been organizing protests, crafting slogans and manipulating the media. But regular Americans, in addition to their day jobs in building America and making it work have now also learned the stagecraft of protesting, sloganeering and leveraging the alternative media, while upstaging the mainstream media.
Unlike regular Americans, lefties have never produced anything that works -- neither in the private nor public sector. They have no frame of reference to assess whether their new world order will work; they haven't participated in building what works today. Nor have they ever built any sort of successful competing socio-economic model on any scale to show the rest of us that their future state on a larger scale could work.
More frightening, lefties don't care. Their only interest is to exercise the power of overthrow and erasure. David Horowitz, erstwhile lefty , now turned socio-political critic of the left, reminded Glenn Beck in a recent interview that the end game of Obama's radical movement is simply power. Power has been the goal of the leftist movement for nearly a hundred years, most fervently in America since the late 1950s, today more than ever as they finally have critical mass to achieve their centennial ambition.
In the 1960s, it was "tear down the house, we'll figure out how the plumbing works later." Of course the radicals then were more of an academic curiosity and convenient villain for the so-called silent majority than serious challengers to what works. It was easier then to dismiss those radicals as fringe socio-engineers, pivoting off the baroque sexual politics of poets, painters and librettists in the 1930s. Yet even WH Auden, leading lefty poet extraordinaire whose "making, knowing and judging" marked his works in the 1930s, freely using his art to drive political speech, had largely abandoned that propaganda genre a decade later .
The politics of oppression and grievance mongering, focusing on gaining enough power to expropriate what the oppressor class owns -- capital, means of production and accumulated wealth -- has found its renewed stride mostly due to economic dislocation brought about by globalization. Riding on a wave of generic discontent, the radical class still has no idea how capital is formed or wealth created -- much less once drained and dissipated how to rejuvenate and re-bloom.
They deny any suggestion, despite abundant evidence, that accumulated wealth, whether from small business owners, inventors, entrepreneurs or major corporations, once confiscated and redistributed for consumption rather than reinvestment, cannot be replaced, at least very easily. And their quest for power knows no limits. The means to be used has been laid out in their street manifesto, Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals", resulting in the likes of Van Jones placed within walking distance of the West Wing. All quite deliberate according to script.
Punish capital formation and profits by unrelenting taxes and wage and price controls for anyone not a union member; control energy production and distribution; legislate human behavior through government health care and strictly ration broad band communications to only friendly messengers. All the while manipulate the media with one non-stop message: we will deliver social justice. That's the plan. And as Karl Rove has said, once the left controls health care, they will own the emotional dimension of the national debate. Anyone who would then oppose national health care, trim it or reform it would be hostile de facto to advancing social justice.
Every year the debate would be framed around the spending priorities for government health care. The left would occupy the high ground commanding enough votes from the permanently aggrieved, the "take but never pay" class who pay no taxes, convinced they are victims of racism and capitalist exploitation.
It is this class of the permanently aggrieved, with nothing more to lose, unaffected by 50 years of unrequited loyalty to the Democrats, who still eagerly await another handout, more entitlements, perhaps even reparations, the grand prize. Libertarians and conservatives would be arguing to deaf ears the merits on freedom of choice, limited government and financial liquidity.
In the meantime health care as a political and natural right will be the established norm championed by the left in achieving social justice -- their shorthand for redistributing economic means and denying individual liberties. Voters who pay taxes, thus broadly identified in the oppressor class, know if they lose the health care battle they will never regain enough traction to repudiate the agenda of expropriation and revenge promised to the permanently aggrieved through the left's usual dramatic theatrics, deux ex machina. While the American system admittedly hasn't always worked for everybody, its replacement wouldn't work for anyone.
Which is why these are perilous times. Which is why those who have the most to lose have finally said "Enough!" Which is why the health care debate has been the tipping point. Which is why the radical agenda is being derailed by regular Americans beginning with health care.
The firestorm in full force from regular Americans at town hall meetings in August was captured by the new media, YouTube, its origins a counter cultural techno-phenomenon now owned by millions of everyday people. YouTube along with all the other unrestrained ubiquitous web communications have replicated the hundreds, perhaps thousands of pamphlets and broadsheets from nearly every city, village and town in the pre-Revolutionary War period as chronicled by Bernard Bailyn in "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution."
The "Guns of August" so-to-speak and the September march on the Mall reaffirmed the unique American character mixing free expression and pragmatism-- knowing what works and being prepared to defend it. Regular folks countered the ideology of power, corruption, ineptitude and sacrifice of individual liberty, using their voice to reject the radical left's path to a grim collectivism.
"Don't Tread On Me" worked well enough for Benjamin Franklin in the 1770s. It is now enjoying a fitting reprise.
