"The day that liberalism died, and progressivism rose from the ashes, a dark turn in leftist history that no one seems to have noticed."

In the American Spectator, Jack Cashill writes in part, about the Travon Hoax, a new movie presently showing on YouTube.

Zimmerman’s arrest marked the day that liberalism died, and progressivism rose from the ashes, a dark turn in leftist history that no one seems to have noticed.

The results have been catastrophic. In January 2009, 79 percent of whites and 64 percent of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, following the Zimmerman trial, those figures had fallen to 52 percent among whites and 38 percent among blacks. They have never recovered. As Gallup notes, “Since 2013, Americans’ overall positive perceptions on race have cooled, and perceptions among blacks have soured considerably.” Propaganda works.

...Getting neither satisfaction nor any corrective truth from President Barack “If I had a son” Obama, militants transformed their anger into action. The most radical of these activists formed Black Lives Matter (BLM), a group whose website traces its founding “to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.”

In August 2014, a year and a month after Zimmerman’s acquittal, protesters chanting “black lives matter” torched the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and left much of it in ruins. Ferguson represented the second major racial conflagration in two years rooted in a hoax, this time, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The media chose not to notice.

Nationwide, but especially in cities where rioting followed lethal police–citizen encounters, cops instinctively began to pull back from actively policing black neighborhoods. Sensing opportunity, criminals moved into the void.

...The murder rate began a steady decline once Barack Obama left office, but God knows what the final body count will be when the “Minneapolis effect” runs its course. Once again, the great majority of the dead will be black. This time, God willing, the young African Americans who survive may demand real answers as to why their brethren had to die.

Read more here.

"the frightening wages of progressivism"

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

...Looting with near impunity and the impotence of authorities have utterly ended the logic and the authority of big-city mass quarantining: if the state is not going to arrest hundreds of arsonists and thieves without masks, it certainly cannot detain and fine a barber or florist at work with them.

...John Durham has a rendezvous in late summer with a number of felonious “wise men” who have broken the law with impunity and had dreamed up a coup fit for a South American caudillo. As more unredacted new transcripts appear daily—even hourly—Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and Strzok grow quieter. Progressives have lost the Russian “collusion” narrative, as Russia has boomeranged to the hiring by Hillary Clinton and the FBI of a foreign national who colluded with Russian sources to warp an election and destroy a transition.

...So Trump’s task is to tweet judiciously about elements of the economy’s rebound and his own initiatives, calls for calm, promises to restore law and order, assurances of a complete federal investigation of any police who broke the law and were responsible for the death of George Floyd, the need for national unity and to cite periodic breakthroughs against the virus, while allowing the subterranean Joe Biden to calcify as Joe Biden—and let fake news and failed people stew among themselves. Trump’s motto should be “Do no harm” to a news cycle that, even in its most biased and ideologically warped delivery, reflects the frightening wages of progressivism.

Read more here.

"power over the People"

Co-blogger CBD writes in the Ace of Spades blog,

Is progressivism the political philosophy of misplaced priorities? Obviously, it is also the purview of the masturbatory fantasies of every budding dictator, who giggles with glee at the prospect of sending the jack-booted thugs of the state to enforce increasingly ridiculous edicts, all in service of their ultimate goal...power over the People. Examine most of the grand schemes of the Leftover the past three generations and one will discover some spectacularly misdirected efforts. Gun control leaps to mind, where the thousands of byzantine laws are directed not at the miscreants who would misuse weapons, but at the law-abiding citizens who are exercising their God-given, natural rights to self-defense and protection against those despots who would steal their rights!

Fast forward from 1968 to 2020, and the same tired stupidity reigns supreme. Instead of protecting those who are most at risk from Sino-Lung-Rot, the elites, in their imagined infinite wisdom decided to focus their fascistic power grab on those who are least threatened by it, and leave to their own devices the most vulnerable among us.

Blue State Governors Lied, Thousands of Nursing Home Residents Died
Over 7,000 of the country’s coronavirus deaths emerged out of nursing homes.
Of the 4,377 coronavirus deaths in New Jersey, over 1,700 died due to infections in nursing homes. That nearly 40% of coronavirus deaths in one of the hardest hit states took place in nursing homes casts a stark light on the misplaced priorities of blue states battling the pandemic by locking down houses of worship and small businesses, while putting few to no resources into protecting nursing home residents.

Lest you think that nothing much can be done, I have first-hand experience with a facility that was proactive and took Kung Flu seriously. But they have the resources to deal with it effectively, going beyond the state mandates. And those mandates are scattershot and chaotic. So State Troopers patrol the parking lots of state parks, and arrest peaceful protesters. State administrators write arcane and insane rules governing face masks to be used by the healthy, while our most vulnerable and most in need of finite government resources die in their beds in understaffed nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Meanwhile our hospitals are furloughing employees because the expected (by the elites) tsunami of Commie-Flu cases never appeared, but they were told to cancel everything else, including cancer surgeries and cardiovascular procedures!

Yes...they worship at the altar of power, but they also focus their attentions on exactly the wrong things. It is a toxic combination of arrogance, power and stupidity, and it has come close to destroying us.

At least their philosophical antecedents could do a few things well...Mussolini was famous for getting the trains to run on time. The current crop of authoritarians can't balance a checkbook or manage to keep the streets clean.

And they want to run healthcare in America? Our experience of the last few months should be the final nail in the coffin of single-payer, government-run medicine in America.

But it won't be...

"Ultimately, they are going to trade Jewish votes for Muslim votes!"

Andrew documents the three years of panic the media has tried to create when referring to the Trump presidency.

Then, he interviews Ben Weingarten, who has written American Ingrate about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The book documents how Omar's ingratitude led to animus, as it always does. This woman sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee! Bernie has made this antisemitic person the co-chair of his Minnesota campaign! A progressive Islamist! Both are totalitarian! Their common adversary is Judeo-Christian western civilization! Ultimately, they are going to trade Jewish votes for Muslim votes!

Breaking free from the squeeze of the progressive octopus

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson's latest piece is about the Progressive Octopus.

As the progressive octopus squeezes the country, its dominance comes at a price. Lately fewer and fewer want to waste precious time watching the pampered adolescents of the NFL. Fewer wish to blow an afternoon viewing preachy mediocrities from Hollywood. Madonna is a tiring bore who needs to go away and age gracefully. Ditto ESPN.

Read more here.

Globalism, immigration, and the concentration of business and property ownership

Joel Kotkin writes,

One obvious, if little discussed, reason the progressive wave receded last week: The left’s increasingly unappealing economic agenda.

...Today, notes former Bill Clinton aide William Galston, progressives rarely promote economic growth, having developed a particular hostility to many of the industries—energy manufacturing, transportation and agriculture—that offer economic opportunity to millions of Americans. This new environmental orientation has been less than enthusiastically embraced away from the coasts, where Trump, not coincidentally, triumphed.

In contrast to the old Democratic notions embraced by the likes of Harry Truman or the late California Governor Pat Brown, today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like.

...There are fundamentally three forces driving our post-modern feudalization, all of them related. One is globalization, highlighted throughout the campaign, and clearly responsible for considerable job losses for certain classes and certain regions. As countries such as China and India move up the value-added chain, even higher-paid workers will face mounting economic competition. San Jose and Raleigh soon could feel some of the pain that Youngstown and Flint have absorbed for decades.

The second is immigration which, for all its many blessings, tends to depress wages for lower and middle workers. Many native-born Americans who used to enjoy steady work have joined the rapidly expanding, and economically vulnerable, precariat made up of contingent, irregularly employed workers. Both Bernie Sanders and Trump identified the problems faced by such workers by unrestricted immigration.

Undereducated whites are not the only ones who are suffering from downward mobility. Trump trailed but still considerably outperformed previous GOP nominees among both Latinos and African Americans. Increasingly, educated workers are threatened by such things as -IB visas for skilled workers, which essentially replaces indigenous skilled workers with imported indentured servants. This has already resulted in job losses among IT workers at places like the Disney Company and Southern California Edison.

The third driver of feudalization lies in the concentration of business and property ownership. Lenin once identified “small scale production” as what “gives birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie.” America’s small firms are in retreat while large corporations increasingly dominate everything from food to technology. For the first time in our modern history, exits from business now exceed new incorporations.

Similarly, home ownership has dropped to its lowest level in five decades, with the decline steepest among young people. More millennials now live with their parents than with a partner. And when they do move out, they are often trapped into renting, often at high rates, with little chance of ever buying a house.

...Today religion is in, pardon the pun, secular decline. Particularly in the bluest states, it has been replaced by two new faiths. One is the green religion, now focused on climate change. The other new faith is technological determinism, the idea that there is a magical, disruptive solution to any problem, including those relating to nature.

...Most critically, the theology of green progressives will do as little good for today’s middle and working class people as extreme Catholic dogma did for the medieval peasantry. Overall, according to a recent Social Science Council report, California is now the most unequal state when it comes to “well being,” combining stupendous, mostly coastal wealth with the highest rate of poverty in the nation, concentrated inland.

Neo-feudalism diminishes the property owning middle-class. In the Bay Area, regional governments are now seeking to limit all new development to a mere fraction of the area’s land mass, all but guaranteeing the future generations will face almost impossibly high housing prices. And a new set of state regulations, including a requirement that new houses have “zero” net energy use all but guarantees that houses, over time, will continue becoming ever more expensive.

The Bay Area’s regional plan also says goodbye to the American dream, suggesting that 82 percent of all new housing should be rental. Ultimately there will be little left for “little people” save for low end service jobs and benefit-less roles in the gig economy created by the oligarchs . Tech firms in the Valley employ shockingly few Latinos or African Americans, who make up barely 6 percent, for example, of Facebook’s workforce. And that’s better than the average of barely 5 percent among the leading tech firms.

Older industries do far better on these terms. In manufacturing, 16.2% of workers are Latinos and 9.7% are African America, according to 2015 data. In mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, Latinos make up 16.9% of the workforce and African-Americans 4.8%, while in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, nearly a quarter of the workforce—23%—is Latino and 2.7 percent is African-American.

As the green ideology undermines the last bastions of the middle and working class economy, some of the most extreme “ethnic cleansing” is taking place in such cities as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, where high prices, regulations , sometimes aided local redevelopment, have worked to push minorities to the poorer suburbs, or out of the region entirely.

...What Trump deserves credit for—perhaps the only thing he deserves credit for—is derailing the predictable transition of the same old insiders who would feed at the trough in a Clinton Inc. administration. Now it’s up to the rest of us—those who supported him and those, like me, who did not—to determine that making America “great again” also means standing up to the new feudalism, and chasing this regressive order back into the darkness of the past, where it belongs.

Read more here.

"Purveyors of pure poppycock"

Fay Voshell writes at American Thinker,

The truth of the matter is that the Obama administration saw the high-water mark of progressivism. Its overwhelming power has been broken.

...Despite the deeply held convictions of tens of millions of America’s people of faith, the proselytizers of the progressive movement insisted on abortion on demand up to the point of birth. They insisted the primordial universal understanding of marriage as being between man and woman had to be redefined. Even gender, the foundational distinction of the human race, was to be “fluid,” open to redefinition at any time.

Included in the radical agenda was the completion of the retrofitting of academia to the progressive agenda. Even language was to be retooled in order to express gender preference; indeed, to eliminate the distinctions of words denoting male and female. Further, the doctrine of global warming was to become the accepted scientific viewpoint, and woe to those scientists who disagreed.

...But the unreality, extremism and fanaticism of leftist progressivism has been a sure sign of its demise. It became more and more abhorrent to the American people. Voters saw that their country could not continue to embrace the destructive concepts perpetrated and enforced by the Obama administration if America was to endure, much less flourish. If the nation was to survive, the progressive movement had to be rolled back.

As Eric Hoffer pointed out in The True Believer, the confabulist, not worried a bit about facts -- even those recorded on camera or by eye witnesses, can move on a dime and invent another truth to fit changing circumstances. Confabulists hand on their penchant for fabulism to their children, encouraging, for instance, transgenderism in kids as little as six. Of course, confabulism is a descent into insanity -- and mass insanity is what we are seeing today. “Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.”

...Progressives were Sovietizing America, to the point that arbitrary decrees from leading progressives, including the person inhabiting the White House, were forcing people of conscience to recant their convictions and confess their errors lest they be destroyed. We saw the United States military, for instance, subjected to progressivism’s politically-correct mandates that undermined the mission and effectiveness of the armed forces, while protesting generals were arbitrarily forced into resignation.

In sum, by using the power remaining to them; namely the voting booth, Americans repudiated the lies and subterfuges of the extremist progressive movement. While fundamentalist progressivism will live on for a time and fight back through academia, the media and Hollywood, the flood tide crested during the reign of Obama, and now has begun to recede. Progressives will increasingly live on in backwater subcultures, much like the ones to which for generations they routinely consigned those who opposed them. People like Al Gore will be seen in the same light Aimee Semple McPherson is now seen in retrospect -- as an irrelevant curiosity and the purveyor of pure poppycock.

It remains for the newly elected leadership to close their ears to those who want to preserve the outlandish “legacy” of the past eight years. It is time to forge ahead with the mandate of the voting public. Now is not the time for timid compromise and “reaching across the aisle.”

It’s time for conservatives to continue to roll back the progressive tide -- across the board.

Read more here.

We've tried being slaves. Let's try being free.

Richard Fernandez writes at PJ Media,

We expect revolutionaries to be indifferent to money. Yet in reality the Left thinks about nothing but money as the Venezuelan socialists who have stolen $350 billion from the treasury, according to the Basel Institute on Governance, should have proved to the world. If it's any consolation to the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders is not as indifferent to lucre as he seems. Sanders' filings show he's received money from Super PACs and donors with links to Wall Street -- so he may be normal after all.

...The progressive campaign is essentially predicated on the assumption that a sufficiently resolute government can defy the laws of financial gravity. There is now some doubt on that point.

...It's not just the Government that's broke but also its political partners. Recently the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund announced that it was bust. Unless it gets an infusion of taxpayer money, pension benefits for about 407,000 people could be reduced to "virtually nothing."

...Teamsters who are able to intimidate everything find they are finally helpless against addition and subtraction. At the end of it all they, like everyone else who has mismanaged their pensions, can pay their retirees "virtually nothing."

...Lincoln Steffens thought he saw a future that worked but it was cruel fraud. Why not try property this time instead of slavery? We've tried being slaves. Let's try being free.

Black Lives Matter and much more

Jonah Goldberg notices that Bill Clinton got upset at some Black Lives Matter protesters the other day. Jonah's thoughts on Black Lives Matter:

The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

Jonah further notes about Bill and Hillary,

One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Besides these comments, Jonah has many insightful things to say about such diverse topics as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, progressivism, Richard Nixon, classical liberalism, statism, and much more here.

How does Obama get away with it?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at PJ Media,

...The ideological success of Obama-ism, to the degree that it exists, rests largely in using sympathetic media, universities, foundations, the entertainment industry, and billionaire progressive activists — in the other words, the small but highly wealthy, influential and powerful coastal populations — to convince Americans that it is hip and cool to support agendas that they otherwise suspect, and to scare them that the alternative is a racist, sexist, homophobic America run by wealthy, cruel white male Christians.

The goal of mass migration, open borders, and an expansion of the welfare state was to create new voters, who would be both dependent on those who administered and promised greater government largess and yet enraged at those privileged enough to pay for it. The message was embedded within the non-ending administration disparagement ("spread the wealth," "you didn’t build that," "no time to profit," "punish our enemies," "nation of cowards," "my people") and presidential incitement in the Ferguson and Travyon Martin cases.

Otherwise, there is no Democratic agenda per se that is workable. Progressivism has become as nihilistic as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the cry-bully movement on campuses — all liberal children that devoured their parents while winning zero support among the populace.

...Obama-ism accepts that intrusive government, fueled by equality-of-result ideology and pop multiculturalism, has few answers to today’s existential crises. Will we really stop terrorism by banning semi-automatic weapons (as well as box cutters, pipe bombs, and remote-driven toys?), on the theory that taking away guns from those who follow existing gun laws will make us safer from thugs and terrorists who don’t?

Since the government could do nothing about enforcing the ban on the transference (illegal without re-registration) from friend to friend of weapons used by terrorists, or the illegal modification of weapons, in the San Bernardino shootings, can it at least achieve psychological penance by outlawing some other models used by law-abiding citizens who might comply?

Perhaps the liberal solution to ending the threat of jihadism is to further expand government indoctrination about the dangers of Islamophobia?

Or let in more refugees from the war-torn Middle East to expose them to the benefits of pluralistic democracy and multicultural tolerance and thus to mitigate radical Islam by hearts-and-minds outreach?

Or eliminate coal burning to stop global-warming-induced Middle East terrorism?

Or do we need still more presidential speeches damning the Crusades and high-horse Christianity, while apologizing for slavery, racism, genocide, climate change, and inequality — to convince radical Islam that their furor has a “rationale” and “legitimate” basis and thus we understand why we are their enemy?

Or change more vocabulary to mask reality, to build upon terrorism as workplace violence, jihad as a personal odyssey and the Muslim Brotherhood as largely secular? On the theory that gravity did not exist until the post-Newtonian world found a name for it, so too Islamic terrorism will perish if we banish its nomenclature. Is that why President Obama called the San Bernardino violence the result of generic “extremist ideologies"?

At last Obama has no more elections to worry about and can begin “to fundamentally transform” America in a way his electoral worries restrained him on four prior occasions. His dilemma is that he has lost all legislative and popular support for his agenda, and now relies either on executive orders or public petulance to demonize, slander, or otherwise reduce his critics and opponents to caricature. The president gets away with it due to the media stereotype that a) Obama was a constitutional law “professor” (once upon a time part-time lecturers claiming that they were full professors was a pedantic campus sin) who would correct past Bush legal overreach, and b) Obama was once a healer and so would never do what he now precisely does.

So we are left with liberal nihilism for the next 13 months. A self-described constitutional law professor will seek to unravel the Constitution in ever more ingenious ways, and as a "hope and change" healer he will tear the country apart through as many fault lines that he can leverage as possible.

What is the alternative to such nihilism? A new liberal agenda that will win over the American people, jumpstart the economy, pay down the debt and restore solvency, keep us secure here and abroad, and unite the people?

It does not exist, because it could not exist.

Read more here.

The Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system.

Scott Powell writes at The American Thinker,

If people today could somehow be transported back to the time of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy, they would swear those standard bearers were Republicans with little in common with today’s Democratic Party.

...The progressive philosophy that the Democratic Party has come to embrace now has its roots less in the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of individual happiness and more in the tenets of race and class identity, equal outcomes, and an expanding welfare state. Since individuals vary in talent, ability, and motivation and the free market system produces unequal outcomes of success, a core principle of the Democratic Party is now redressing this disparity through the redistribution of wealth.

...Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders -- professional revolutionaries -- to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

...The New Left did not simply fade away when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals deciding to follow Alinsky’s counsel to clean up their image, put on suits and infiltrate the system. They would become professional revolutionaries who landed jobs in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist groups.

...By winning “cultural hegemony,” the acolytes of Gramsci, Alinsky, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School believed that the wellsprings of human thought could be largely controlled by mass psychology and propaganda. One of Alinsky’s unique contributions, explained as the seventh Rule for Radicals, was the tactic to avoid debate on the issues by systematically silencing, ridiculing and marginalizing people of opposing views. At the same time, allies in the media provided cover and a framework of acceptance for radical issues and leaders. Traditional values of morality, family, the work ethic and free market institutions were made to appear outdated -- even reactionary, unnecessary, and culturally unfashionable. Ultimately this evolved into what has become known as political correctness, which now envelops the culture.

...By 1980, the counter-cultural alliances would include radical feminist groups, civil rights and ethnic minority advocates, extremist environmental organizations, and advocates of liberation theology, anti-military peace groups, union leaders, radical legal activist organizations like the ACLU, human rights watch-dog organizations, community organizers of the Alinsky model, national and world church council bureaucracies, anti-corporate activists, and various internationalist-minded groups. Working separately and together, these groups could count on a sympathetic media and favorable coverage, which facilitated building bridges to the Democratic Party and becoming vocal constituencies deserving attention and legislative action.

....Fast forward to 2008, and we find the long march through the institutions resulting in the New Left being embedded in constituencies that provided a base of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background of lengthy associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his formative years and early adulthood, a nearly twenty-year membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “hate America” church, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media–now enveloped with the blinders of political correctness–made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications. Barack Obama was both the culturally cool and articulate black candidate who provided a means for national redemption for a racist past, while also being the one candidate who provided a blank slate upon which people could project their own desires for hope and change.

...The problem today is threefold: the Left’s wholesale domination of much of the knowledge industry, a growing uninformed and disengaged electorate, and a failing two-party system. The normal process of checks and balances, which is made possible when compromise can be accomplished between the parties, simply no longer works. With the long march through the institutions having resulted in one of those parties no longer sharing much in the way of common ground -- in terms of a philosophical heritage and values of liberty, private property, and limited government -- compromise has become nearly impossible. The radicalization of the Democratic Party has so affected Congress and the current president as to render bipartisan solutions and reconciliation all but impossible.

...In the end, what is important for Americans to realize is that the experiment with a left-wing president, like Barack Obama, is less an aberration than the logical outcome of the transformation of both the Democratic Party and the American culture. And the election of Hillary Clinton, a student of Alinsky and well-schooled and practiced in his teachings of deceit and camouflage would take the United States further along its trajectory of decline. Hillary’s election would effectively constitute an Obama third term.

...Edward Gibbon, the renowned historian, published his first of six-volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Gibbon described six attributes that Rome embodied at its end: first, an overwhelming love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the rich and the poor; third, an obsession with sports and a freakishness in the arts, masquerading as creativity and originality; fourth, a decline in morals, increase in divorce and decline in the institution of the family; fifth, economic deterioration resulting from debasement of the currency, inflation, excessive taxation, and overregulation; and sixth, an increased desire by the citizenry to live off the state.

One might hope that awareness of factors associated with Rome’s fall would prompt an awakening in America. But so many are now disengaged and relatively few people read books, let alone possess the capacity to reflect deeply about causality and historical parallels. Many feel atomized and helpless.

Read more here.

Progressvism and urban rioting

Elizabeth Price Foley writes at Instapundit,

The rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore isn’t driven by poverty, race, or even police brutality. It’s driven by progressive culture, which teaches that successful business people “didn’t build that,” accepts abortion/divorce/children out of wedlock as normal behavior, proclaims that poor children (particularly minorities) cannot succeed, that police and authority in general are the “enemy,” and that law is rigged against minorities. Urban music, “leaders” like Al Sharpton, and a Democrat strategy of balkanizing Americans through identity politics–echoed daily by mainstream media–has created a culture that has no respect for the rule of law. In the eyes of progressives, the American Dream is dead, and they are literally dancing on its grave.

Until this progressive culture changes (if it ever can) or is marginalized politically, we will have lawless behavior every time these destructive, sociopathic cultural expectations are reinforced by tragedies like the deaths of Michael Brown or Freddie Gray.

Old news?

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the Clintons'

obfuscation worked well with Troopergate, Travelgate, Whitewater, the cattle futures scam, Monicagate, the pardons, and Bill’s serial and sometimes coercive sexual conquests. The scorched-earth protocol has already largely dispensed with the “what difference does it make” and “we came, we saw, he died” Libya/Benghazi scandals. That the ex-president of the United States often flew on a private jet with registered sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, known for supplying underage women to his guests, is, as the Clintons say, “old news.” Hillary Clinton’s serial lies about her email accounts and the Clinton Foundation shakedowns will likewise fade — despite the national-security implications of both transgressions for the United States.

...Despite the dozen or so ethical scandals that will inevitably arise over the next two years, Hillary Clinton will be nominated by the Democrats and has at least a 50/50 chance of being elected president. The Democratic elite will call her survival “fully vetted” and “time tested.”

...Wall Street and corporate American know there is no deal considered beneath the Clintons. If they will, as reported, wheel and deal off the human tragedy of the Haitian disaster, then they will indeed do anything. If they are willing to defame and destroy women abused by Bill Clinton, they will not only do that, but proclaim themselves feminists. They have created a huge shakedown conglomerate in the Clinton Foundation in Machiavellian fashion: the philanthropy brilliantly masks the cynical tapping of such funds for personal aggrandizement. Quid pro quos go through the foundation to “help” the helpless while providing the family the moral veneer to moonlight and rake in huge fees from foundation donors, who do not give such largess for nothing. Hitting up corporate finaglers for $70 million in tag-along private jet travel would be burdensome; but creating a tax-free “philanthropy” to provide such corporate one-percent travel for the three Clintons (whether to lecture on global warming or the unfair tax policies of the one-percent) is brilliant in the Medieval sense.

The utter moral collapse of the House of Clinton is, of course, a national disgrace. But the shame is not because the Clintons are what they are — grifters in ties and pantsuits. Rather, the liberal community’s neglect of three decades of their amorality reminds us what progressivism has become: a psychological squaring in which abstract caring allows privileged people to enjoy their material bounty without guilt over where it came from or how it is used.

Read more here.

What is "Social Justice?"

Is Social Justice" a mirage (Hayek) or is it a Trojan horse (Jonah Goldberg), concealing a much more radical agenda? Goldberg asserts that

"Social Justice" is a profoundly ideological term, masquerading as a generic term for goodness.

This has been the primary disguise of liberalism ever since: "We're not ideologues, we're pragmatists! And if only you crazy ideologues" — "market fundamentalists," "right-wingers," "zealots," "dogmatists," etc. — "would just get out of the way and let us do what all smart people agree is the smart thing to do, we could fix all the problems facing us today."

The subtext is always clear: People who disagree with liberalism do so because they are deranged, brainwashed, corrupt, selfish, or stupid.

According to Jonah Goldberg,

if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves they’re not ideological.

Today, “objective” journalists, academics, and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun apho­risms. Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason: He’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and drama of the Right, solely concerned with “what works.” And today’s liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as:

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?
Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with King George III and ended slavery.
We need complete separation of church and state: In other words, all expressions of faith should be barred from politics . . . except when they support liberal programs.

With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the Pro­gressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false flag of reasonableness is alive and well. And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

Does the United States need a president?

Victor Davis Hanson raised the question in a piece he wrote last October, which I missed at the time.

Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact that the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama are unraveling, in a manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential second terms.

Oddly, the more scandals come to light, the more immune the virtual president becomes. After the politicization of the IRS, the snooping on AP reporters, the Benghazi mess, the NSA eavesdropping, Fast and Furious, the multibillion-dollar overpayment in income-tax credits by the IRS, the Lisa Jackson fake e-mail identities, and the Pigford payments, the public has become numb — as if it to say, “Of course the Obama administration is not truthful. So what else is new?”

Three considerations are keeping the U.S. afloat without an active president. First, many working Americans have tuned the president out and simply go on about their business despite rather than because of this administration. If gas and oil leases have been curtailed on federal lands, there is record production on private land. Farmers are producing huge harvests and receiving historically high prices. Wall Street welcomes in capital that can find no return elsewhere. American universities’ science departments and professional schools still rate among the world’s best. There is as yet no French or Chinese Silicon Valley. In other words, after five years of stagnation, half the public more or less ignores the Obama administration and plods on.

Second, the other half of Americans gladly accept that Obama is an iconic rather than a serious president. Given his emblematic status as the nation’s first African-American president and his efforts to craft a vast coalition of those with supposed grievances against the majority, he will always have a strong base of supporters. With huge increases in federal redistributive support programs, and about half the population not paying federal income taxes, Obama is seen as the protector of the noble deserving, who should receive more from a government to which the ignoble undeserving must give far more. And if it is a question of adding another million or so people to the food-stamp or disability rolls, or ensuring that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon or that China does not bully Japan, the former wins every time.

Finally, the media accept that Obama represents a rare confluence of forces that promotes a progressive agenda. His youth, his charisma, his background, his exotic nomenclature, and his “cool” all have allowed a traditionally unpopular leftist ideology to enter the mainstream. Why endanger all that with a focus on Benghazi or the disaster of Obamacare? We have had, in the course of our history, plenty of Grants, McKinleys, Hardings, Nixons, and Clintons, but never quite an administration of scandal so exempt from media scrutiny.

As far as his image goes, it does not really matter to what degree Obama actually “fundamentally transforms America.” For the media, that he seeks to do so, and that he drives conservatives crazy trying, is seen as enough reason to surrender their autonomy and become ancillary to the effort. The media believe that once he is out of office, they can regain their credibility by going after the next president with renewed vigor as recompense.

In other words, the presidency has become a virtual office. Almost half the people and most of the media do not mind, and those who do just plod onward.

Please read more here.

Capitalism versus progressivism

Kevin Williamson writes,

We treat the physical results of capitalism as though they were an inevitability. In 1955, no captain of industry, prince, or potentate could buy a car as good as a Toyota Camry, to say nothing of a 2014 Mustang, the quintessential American Everyman’s car. But who notices the marvel that is a Toyota Camry? In the 1980s, no chairman of the board, president, or prime minister could buy a computer as good as the cheapest one for sale today at Best Buy. In the 1950s, American millionaires did not have access to the quality and variety of food consumed by Americans of relatively modest means today, and the average middle-class household spent a much larger share of its income buying far inferior groceries. Between 1973 and 2008, the average size of an American house increased by more than 50 percent, even as the average number of people living in it declined. Things like swimming pools and air conditioning went from being extravagances for tycoons and movie stars to being common or near-universal. In his heyday, Howard Hughes didn’t have as good a television as you do, and the children of millionaires for generations died from diseases that for your children are at most an inconvenience. As the first 199,746 or so years of human history show, there is no force of nature ensuring that radical material progress happens as it has for the past 250 years. Technological progress does not drive capitalism; capitalism drives technological progress — and most other kinds of progress, too.

The farther away we move from the physical economy into the manipulation of symbols through public policy, the more progressive ideas make apparent sense. And symbolism is more comfortable for progressives in general, owing to a disinclination to literally get their hands dirty. There is, for example, no environmentally clean way to produce energy, and the really productive ways of producing energy — like fracking for gas in Pennsylvania — give them the fantods. There is no environmentally clean way to build a man a house, either, or provide him with clean drinking water, or to heat that house, or to grow a crop of wheat, or to make that wheat into bread. If you think you can have health care and electric cars without steel mills and oil refineries, you are mistaken. But actually expanding physical production within our own political boundaries, for instance by building more pipelines to connect petroleum producers with petroleum refiners, scandalizes the progressives. Every smokestack is another Barad-dûr to them — even as they bemoan the loss of “good factory jobs,” the largely mythical former prevalence of which provided their political forebears with a deep bucket of solutions to throw at the problem of potentially bumptious poor people. They detest the economic use of undeveloped lands, whether for energy or timber or grazing cattle — as though beef comes from Trader Joe’s. They refuse to understand that if you want more oranges and apples, you have to plant some trees — maybe even cutting down some other trees to make room for them, or, angels and ministers of grace defend us, harassing a tortoise in the process.

Read more here.

The devil's greatest trick

Foseti reviews Moldbug's Unqualified Reservations, in which Moldbug makes the point that

And what are “multiculturalism” and “diversity” but religious tests for office?

Progressivism is a nontheistic Christian sect. Progressives are ultraCalvinists who believe in:

1. The universal brotherhood of man – i.e. equality

2. The futility of violence – i.e. peace

3. The fair distribution of goods – i.e. social justice

4. The managed society – i.e. community run by benevolent experts

Moldbug writes,

If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, a constant danger in any democracy for obvious reasons, the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it’s a church. Dropping theology is a no-brainer.

Moldbug writes a series on Richard Dawkins. Foseti writes,

The series begins by treating progressivism as a sort of infection of the mind. Assume progressivism is a virus that is solely concerned with spreading itself into as many minds as possible. We see the idea’s evolution, in which it starts as a fundamentalist religious belief and ends up discarding theism so as to better propagate itself in an officially secular system of government. Shed of overt theism, Progressivism “can be propagated by American official institutions, which are constitutionally prohibited from endorsing its ancestor or competitor [ie theistic Christianity].” The devil’s greatest trick . . . and so on.

Moldbug:

Just say, “I’m an atheist, I’m an atheist, I’m an atheist.” And no one will ever be able to accuse you of being a religious fanatic, at least not without substantial preparatory explanation. What more perfect cover story for an actual religious fanatic?

Read more here.

Bizarre California

Victor Davis Hanson writes about how California has become a truly bizarre place.

The state suffers from the highest combined taxes in the nation and nearly the worst roads and schools. It is home to more American billionaires than any other state, but also more impoverished residents. California is more naturally endowed with a combination of gas, oil, timber and minerals than any other state — with the highest electricity prices and gas taxes in the nation.

To understand these paradoxes, keep in mind one common principle. To the degree a Californian is politically influential, wealthy or well-connected — and loudly progressive — the more he is immune from the downside of his own ideology.

Nowhere are there more Mercedes and BMWs per capita than in California’stony coastal enclaves. And nowhere will you find more anti-carbon activism or more restrictive laws against new oil production that ensure the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States for the less well off.

California’s reserves of natural gas exceed those of nearly every other state. And in California, electricity prices are the highest in the nation. The cost falls on those in the interior and Sierra who suffer either from scorching summertime temperatures or bitterly cold winters. Those who set energy policies mostly live in the balmy coastal corridor where there is no need for expensive air conditioning or constant home heating.

In drought-stricken California, building new Sierra Nevada dams and reservoirs was long ago considered passé, but not the idea of diverting precious stored water from agricultural use to help out fish.

Yet the waters of the Sierra Nevada Hetch Hetchy reservoir are exempt from such fish diversions, apparently because they supply 80 percent of San Francisco’s daily water supply. Those who wish to either stop more dam construction or divert dammed reservoir water from its original intended use draw the line on restricting their own quite unnatural water sources.

High-speed rail is billed as the transportation of the future in California. But its progressive coastal boosters believe that it should first be tried out on farmers in sparsely settled rural areas rather than in their own precious high-density Bay Area or Los Angeles.

In California, open borders and non-enforcement of existing immigration law are also popular progressive causes. But the immediate impact of illegal immigration on public schools is circumvented for the elite by the growing number of private prep schools along the coast.

Professing that you are progressive can be wise California politics. It means you sound too caring ever to do bad things, while the costly consequences of your ideology usually fall on someone else. And that someone is usually less hip, less wealthy and less powerful.

Read more here.

Abridging liberty

CPAC is having its annual conference this week in Maryland. One of the controversies this year is whether or not an atheist group should be allowed to have a booth. Brent Bozell wrote,

The invitation extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles. It is an attack on God Himself. American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?

On the other hand, Charles C.W. Cooke argues here that atheism and conservatism are compatible.

You needn’t believe in God to believe in the American constitutional order.

One of my favorite blogs to read is The Atheist Conservative. That blog is proof of the truth of Cooke's comment above.

More from Cooke:

Indeed, given the troubled waters into which American religious liberty has of late been pushed, it strikes me that conservatives ought to be courting atheists — not shunning them. I will happily take to the barricades for religious conscience rights, not least because my own security as a heretic is bound up with that of those who differ from me, and because a truly free country seeks to leave alone as many people as possible — however eccentric I might find their views or they might find mine. In my experience at least, it is Progressivism and not conservatism that is eternally hostile to variation and to individual belief, and, while we are constantly told that the opposite is the case, it is those [leftists] who pride themselves on being secular who seem more likely and more keen to abridge my liberties than those who pride themselves on being religious.