I remember reading a few years ago that the food packets we dropped on Afghanistan were, because of political correctness, made entirely vegetarian. The Afghans were not consulted in the preparation of these rations, and it turned out they wouldn’t touch the stuff. The food that our military delivered at some risk and considerable cost was fed to the Afghans’ animals.
I don’t know if this story is true, but it strikes me as symbolic of the New Leftist welfare state. We have an altruist government forcing on people what no one seems to want, but the state gives anyway because it makes them feel morally noble. Oh, yes — it also gives them the power to rule our lives, but they are not motivated by greed, so they are certain they can do better with our lives than we can.
The American people did not want ObamaCare. The Democrats gave it to them anyway. Now we get news that four in 10 Tea Partiers are not Republicans, but are Independents or Democrats. In light of this it is astonishing that the Democrats still pursue a strategy of demonizing Tea Partiers as racists, violent extremists — as idiots no respectable American would hang around.
Why must Democrats smear their opponents? Leftists are not stupid people. Many leftist political leaders were educated in Ivy League colleges as Obama was. Surely they could rely more on rational arguments (or pseud0-rational arguments) instead of dismissing the Tea Partiers as KKK, Nazis and so on.
I think we are seeing the power of philosophy in action. The Democrats have lost all confidence in reason. They believe that only force has efficacy in human affairs. Thus when they are confronted with an cultural phenomenon such as the Tea Party movement, which opposes big government and wants a return to Constitutional government, leftists lash out with smears. Politics is important — in Biden’s words, it’s a big f**kin’ deal to the left. One doesn’t fight an important battle with weapons in which one has no confidence. You bring out the big guns.
The New Left is still living the finest hours of its salad days, the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war protests. On both sides they had morality on their side (in the antiwar protests only because our government was drafting men to die needlessly in an altruistic effort to keep a jungle half a world away free). Its opponents in the civil rights struggle were racists. Ever since then, when leftists see angry faces, they flash back to the ’60s, when they had morality on their side. Morality provides more powerful flashbacks than LSD.
Now we see that even some Democrats are part of the Tea Party movement. The left could be in for a huge shock in the next few elections.
Personally, I know some Democrats who for decades have been predictable. Reagan’s tax cuts were bad (although those Democrats prospered greatly from them). The Republicans are religious nuts who went after Clinton for getting a blow job. George W. Bush was arrogant and his tax cuts created the deficits.
Now I’ve noticed that some of them have changed. For the first time in their lives, they don’t like what the Democrats are doing. They’re worried because we should be out of the recession by now, but Obama’s policies just seem to make things worse. This is a new script for them, and they’re not certain what to think.
These Democrats look back on Clinton with fondness. I must admit, in the ’90s I never thought anyone would make Clinton look good, but both Bush and Obama have done just that.
Clinton wanted to be loved. Obama wants power over your life. Yes, Clinton wanted power too, but the moment the polls wavered a fraction of a point, he triangulated. He was pushed around by the Republicans for eight years (resulting in a balanced budget). Obama doesn’t care about the polls. He doesn’t give a damn if he goes down in flames, so long as he can take the rest of us with him. Clinton made me laugh. Obama scares the crap out of me.
With Democrats questioning Obama, how can their party do anything but lose big? Well, we will see in November. I think our culture is changing quickly because of Obama: radical push causes radical pushback, as if Newton’s laws of thermodynamics applied to society.
I don’t know how it will turn out, but I do believe things will not be the same again.
Myrhaf,
Just a quibbling note. Newton’s laws were about motion. You’re probably referring to his third law derived colloquially as “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
Thermodynamics had many contributors to its formulation and can be most easily generalized as the study of the distribution of energy (heat or work) throughout a closed system.
That could make for some interesting analogies too! For instance, a collectivist system generates no work, only heat through friction between warring interest groups. Or, entropy is the natural outcome of the socialist policy.
But I fear I may be suffering from Physics Envy. (HT, Andrew Dalton)
Yes, the Democrats may lose big. But the reality is that we have a Leftist state. If the Republicans win, then we will have Republicans governing a Leftist state and as we saw under Bush that’s not a positive thing. I am hard pressed to see any positive outcome so long as the welfare-state and its underlying ideology is not challenged. And if it ever were to be challenged, I can’t see how that would *not* end up in violence.
Is there any realistic scenario where Washington politicians willingly dismantle some portion of the welfare-state and there isn’t a violent reaction to this engineered by the Left? Can anyone even see another Reagan out there? In many ways we are worse off than we were in the 80s.
Madmax, I too have thought the Left has too much power to give it up w/o violence, and it worries me. I don’t have a perfect scenario to avoid it. Yes, things are worse than in the ’80’s but they are also better, too. The ARI book project has reached tens of thousands of young people, as well as AS being read by many adults over those years. I know the culture is becoming receptive to reason and other answers because people are looking for answers and people with rational views are being sought more often by MSM.
We have the Internet/cell phones etc. we didn’t have in the ’80’s- which makes it much more difficult to repress info and people. The Tea Party movement didn’t exist a year ago. It is a pure opposition movement, which is its best chance of directing change. And it’s not, so far, been co-opted by the Religious types.
The Left has nothing to offer anyone; they know it and people are coming to see it. Besides confrontations, there’s passive resistance to statist ideas. If doctors or hospitals or patients, refuse to cooperate with the statist agenda, it will have an effect. Look at what one urologist (Florida) refusing to treat anyone who voted for Obama is doing- people are up in arms about it! That’s good! Keep the issue alive, use the courts to challenge the statist premises behind Obamacare. Which is tedious, drawn out and expensive, but it may work.
It’s still a horse race, what will happen.