PrintExpect More Democrat Hail Marys
It's pretty obvious to me that the Biden Student Loan Handout is a midterm Hail Mary. With a 40 percent approval rating, why wouldn't the president throw some free stuff at the gender studies graduate vote? What has he got to lose?
Notice that I said: "what has he got to lose." I didn't say: what has the average American got to lose by adding $300 billion to $1 trillion to the national debt?
It helps me understand how the Peronistas wrecked Argentina, and the Chávezistas wrecked Venezuela. When your policies have wrecked the economy, why not double down, throw money at your supporters, and call your opponents names?
Let's leave aside the economic debacle of the 1930s where FDR's famous Brain Trust failed to recover the U.S. economy from the Great Depression with their New Deal and FDR blamed it all on "economic royalists."
Let's start with the Sixties, when Democrats passed the Civil Rights Acts (with Republican support) and then the big spending programs of the Great Society. If you were a Democrat in those years you knew that Democrats had cracked the code to justice and prosperity and would rule for a hundred years. But something went wrong.
How could it be that blacks did not shoot into the stratosphere, and that the 1970s would be the decade of stagflation and the end of the big-union industrial economy?
And how come, with the great feminist movement and careers for women and the Pill and no-fault divorce and Roe v. Wade, that women did not live happily ever after?
Victor Davis Hanson has a piece going into the details of how the elite has earned the "disdain" of the lower classes. It's appeared both at American Greatness and the NYPost. It's all true, but that's not the problem.
The bigger problem is that, time and again, the elite group mind has converged on some brilliant and earth-shattering program that was going to change the world. First it was the Progressives and their administrative government by the best and brightest. Then it was FDR and the New Deal. Then it was the Great Society. They all failed. Next up to fail: the Green New Deal.
It goes without saying that the best and brightest, the educated, the evolved cannot make a mistake. We all know that. So anyone that disagrees with the experts is committing "disinformation and misinformation." Stands to reason.
In the old days of the Stalinist Soviet Union, things were different. The first Five Year Plan failed because of "saboteurs and wreckers."
At the end of 1931, Stalin thundered public threats against wreckers and saboteurs, including those "professors who in their wrecking go to the length of infecting cattle in collectives and on Soviet farms with plague germs and the Siberian anthrax, spreading meningitis among horses, and so on."
It couldn't have been Stalin's magnificent Five Year Plan that did the damage. But professors? No Big Guy Joe today would ever dream of blaming college professors, except the "semi-fascist" ones from Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Same thing when Mao staged his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution after the utter failure of the Great Leap Forward. It couldn't have been the utter stupidity of smelting steel in agricultural villages that caused a famine and the death of an estimated 30 million Chinese. It had to be "capitalist roaders."
Same thing here in these United States. It can't be the stupid programs of the liberal elite that have caused the misery of childless career women, the "deaths of despair" of the old white working class, the failure of blacks to rise into the middle class as the GIs did in the 1950s.
Mind you, in the 1950s the GIs cheated. They got to buy all those houses in Levittowns on the cheap. How did they do that? Well, for a start, "The building of every house was reduced to 27 steps." I won't tell you the price, because you might have a heart attack. And Levittowns were racist: no Jews or blacks need apply.
If we translate the Stalinist and Maoist reaction to failure to our own time we can see that the current woke war on systemic racism is the ruling class's response to the failure of big-government liberalism. Thus the war on "disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation" is nothing new. It is merely the modern equivalent of "saboteurs and wreckers."
And the Green New Deal is just another brilliant and earth-shattering elite plan that will eventually fail -- like all the others. Because "climate denier" wreckers and saboteurs.
We can expect more Hail Mary passes from our Democratic friends in the months ahead, throwing money at Democratic loyalists in a desperate attempt to get them to the polls. Until the day that our Democratic friends run out of other peoples' gas money. Or the day that we the people stop the money printer going brrrr.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
