PrintApril 24, 2011
The Left's Government Inversion Strategy
The common political wisdom is that liberals adore massive government whereas conservatives champion limited government. While this is incontestably true, this observation often eclipses the also true point that liberals are not wholly incapable of criticizing government. The left's relationship with government is one that is strikingly schizophrenic. As much as liberals worship Uncle Sam, their love for government is displayed only when the government is functioning in ways that treat codified constitutional principles as analogous to the infantile scribbling of preschoolers.
Liberals possess what I have labeled a reverse morality complex, which is their propensity to champion evil over good; however, it is critically important to understand how this insidious morality complex is manifested. Liberals blame legitimate functions of government for society's problems in order to obfuscate the fact that illegitimate functions of government are the cause of today's social infections. It is arguably the left's most pernicious act of prestidigitation that gets very little attention.
With startling obstinacy, liberals seek to transform the legitimate role of government so that cradle-to-grave handouts and abortion-on-demand are treated as consecrated constitutional rights. Furthermore, through the mainstream media, liberals create an environment of disinformation so that national security, defense, and policing are viewed as not only unimportant functions, but functions that are corrupting and destroying the United States. This is the left's government inversion stratagem.
Liberalism: All Problems and No Solutions
Liberalism is not an ideology that offers any meaningful solutions to the critical problems evident in society. Rather, at best, liberals are only capable of pointing out problems, and, at worst, creating and worsening problems with their ideas.
Clearly, even celebrated leftist academics are incapable of proprietary thinking. What passes for stunning intellectual insights into society, apparently worthy of all sorts of prestigious prizes and awards, is the tedious application of debunked Marxist theory to various academic fields. The conclusion of all avant-garde liberal ideas is the same: capitalist society is evil and the state needs more power -- except, of course, where the state has legitimate constitutional authority to operate.
Arguing for the end of the criminal justice system, stopping all military conflict in the defense of the nation, and increasing welfare via redistributive taxation on the rich is the quickest way to be lionized as an intellectual superheavyweight in America.
The Black Family and the Criminal Justice System
The liberal attempt to blame legitimate functions of government for the countless problems caused by the illegitimate functions of government is most apparent during their continued assault on policing, which is incessantly used to cover up the wrongheaded, decades-long policy prescriptions of Democrats on Capitol Hill vis-à-vis the black community.
Liberals have succeeded in persuading black people that the main reason for all the maladies that are evident in urban America is an institutionally racist criminal justice system. This counterfactual nonsense has been repeated by the left-wing intelligentsia to the point that vociferous dissenters are instinctively treated with complete condescension and overwhelming opprobrium.
Rather than believing the farcical idea that racism in the criminal justice system is to blame for the massive number of blacks that are incarcerated, it is far more sensible to believe that the disproportionate representation of blacks in the criminal justice system is a direct consequence of the left-wing war of attrition on the black nuclear family -- especially considering that a preponderance of the social science research confirms that the family is, and always has been, instrumental to reducing criminality.
To conceal the fact that the ideological brainchild of the leftist intelligentsia has been an unmitigated disaster -- and that the politicians who continue to peddle this idea of unfettered welfare are completely wrong -- liberals prefer to construct conspicuously meretricious narratives that attempt to explain why traditional government functions, like policing, are to blame for America's social problems.
If liberals cared as deeply about the plight of blacks as they profess, surely the catastrophic consequences of their "well-intentioned" policies would have by now induced careful reflection and sincere policy analysis. The fact that liberals have refused to review their policies after decades of failure is demonstrative of the sinister nature of liberalism.
An obsessive focus on police brutality is one of the main ways liberals blame policing for the social problems in urban America. Of course, while police brutality is a problem that needs to be weeded out of society, it is not the main problem that plagues urban communities. Nevertheless, the sporadic occurrences of police brutality, both apocryphal and genuine, are religiously covered by mainstream media outlets to create the impression that the criminal justice system is a modern-day iteration of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost no attention is paid to the fact that blacks are disproportionately represented in acts of violent criminality, which can be directly linked to the fact that over 70% of black children are born outside wedlock.
As problematic as police brutality unquestionably is, it has also become a convenient red herring that has been used by the left to avoid a more fundamental discussion of the failure of liberal policies and the resultant proliferation of urban crime it has inarguably engendered. If black crime rates were organically lower, the cases of police brutality would naturally decrease as there would be less interaction between blacks and police officers. This logic is never publicized as it ruins the cherished leftist myth on this issue.
Indeed, this issue provides a faultless example of liberals creating a problem via injudicious public policy, only to turn around and hypocritically blame traditional governmental institutions like the criminal justice system for the problems that their policies cause.
War Spending vs. Unconstitutional Spending
This analysis of leftist government inversion can also be comfortably applied to the economy, where unconstitutional spending is ignored while defense spending is argued to be the cause of America's bloated federal deficit.
According to statistics from liberals, the War on Terror over the past decade has cost $1.1 trillion. Of course, this number does not factor in the cost of labor constraints that would have been experienced from the mass death from another terrorist attack, nor does it factor in the misallocation of resources that would have been taken from more investment-oriented programs and used to rebuild cities if America decided to not go to war after 9/11 and simply allowed al-Qaeda to use prominent American cities as target practice.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the execution of the War on Terror, the responsibility of national defense is clearly delineated in the Constitution. However, over $13 trillion of the federal debt is still unaccounted for -- a lot of which is used to finance constitutionally dubious federal programs.
Clearly, liberals care nothing about the issue of deficits; they simply seek to destroy traditional functions of government in order to replace law and order with a government that is more conducive to their worldview. The fundamental goal of liberalism is to create a world in which Judeo-Christian morality is diminished and government power is massively increased.
Government, albeit limited and adhering to the limits in the Constitution, is essential to the existence of America. Therefore, it is critically important that conservatives counteract the left's clear attempts to assault legitimate governmental institutions by blaming these institutions for the social maladies caused by liberalism.
Mr. Okeem is a freelance writer and can be contacted at mrokeem@gmail.com. His blog on politics and culture can be read at voiceofchid.com.
