Today’s cartoon by Eric Allie is apt as usual:
A National Day of Unity: it begins. Inauguration day saw a flood of orders, proclamations, and revocations. It evinced an energy belied by the campaign and took on a very progressive cast. Lowlights include:
- Rejoining the Paris Accords
- Revoking the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit and a bunch of executive orders that expedite environmental reviews; defining stakeholders as “State local, Tribal, and territorial officials, scientists, labor unions, environmental advocates, and environmental justice organizations;” requiring cost/benefit analysis of all environmental regulations—oh, but the costs analyzed are the “social costs” of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide; and generally treating global warming as the existential crisis it isn’t
- Rolling back any deregulatory or reformist tendencies that the Trump administration had
- Enacting regulatory reform that “promotes policies that reflect new developments in scientific and economic understanding, fully accounts for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify, and does not have harmful anti-regulatory or deregulatory effects” and “propose[s] procedures that take into account the distributional consequences of regulations, including as part of any quantitative or qualitative analysis of the costs and benefits of regulations, to ensure that regulatory initiatives appropriately benefit and do not inappropriately burden disadvantaged, vulnerable, or marginalized communities.” Further: “[t]hese recommendations should provide concrete suggestions on how the regulatory review process can promote public health and safety, economic growth, social welfare, racial justice, environmental stewardship, human dignity, equity, and the interests of future generations. The recommendations should also include proposals that would ensure that regulatory review serves as a tool to affirmatively promote regulations that advance these values.”
- Embedding racism in every executive decision and program, both explicitly by promoting “equity” at every turn and implicitly by revoking Executive Order 13950—possibly the most effective federal anti-racism (in the good sense) program in the modern era. The likely worst part of this EO in the long-term is the disaggregating of datasets “by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, income, veteran status, or other key demographic variables.” This will foster “disparate impact” lawsuits and actions with wide-ranging effects.
This is going to be a long ordeal.
Coincidentally, the Left loves the fact that Hitler is commonly regarded as being “extreme Right-wing”. What a wonderful roomate for your enemy.
Hitler was a version of Right-Collectivism or Right-Leftism. This version of collectivism was discredited after WW2. But Left-Collectivism or Left-Leftism has never been discredited and in fact is still considered an ideal as in “Communism was good in theory but flawed only in practice because the right people never were in charge.”
“But Left-Collectivism or Left-Leftism has never been discredited and in fact is still considered an ideal”
It has been discredited as a path to material prosperity. (Communism was originally touted as pro-industry.) But as long as economic collectivism is considered a moral ideal, practical concerns will continue to be swept aside, or else reworked to coincide with the moral theory. Hence the anti-prosperity gospel of environmentalism.
The Communists were smarter than the Nazis, because they understood the importance of propaganda — not just in the nations that they ruled, but also worldwide across a span of decades. The Nazis made the gambit of trying to win everything by force in one swoop; and when they failed, they had no benevolent-sounding pretexts or excuses for their naked brutality.