Don’t worry…
Bernie only wants “the good kind of socialism.”
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Tag: progressivism
America’s worst racial and sexual injustices were institutionally addressed years ago, in the Sixties and soon after — by folks in the Civil Rights movement, everyday citizens, and their representatives.
So what do today’s earnest, Johnny-and-Jilly Come Lately “Social Justice Warriors” have left to complain about?
Why, building names, of course!
The local college in Annville, Pennsylvania, has been embroiled in a bizarre civil rights complaint about their Lynch Memorial Hall. Named after one Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, a Depression Era benefactor, some SJW students are demanding that it be changed, because of, get this, “associated racial connotations.”
“Lynch,” you see. It triggers them.
I kid you not.
Colin Deppen, writing last week on pennlive.com, explained how Dr. Lynch had nothing to do with the lynching of African-Americans in Jim Crow days. The extra-legal hanging tradition began much earlier, in the Revolutionary War, “with a Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia.” This fellow “headed a self-constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.”
Lynching’s origins? White-on-white violence, not white-on-black.
SJW students, mostly ignorant and incurious, prefer coming off as whiners or moral scolds than learn something.
Or let a coincidence go.
The problem is this: the closer some people get to reaching their goals, they have less and less to do. Yet many “late adopters” covet the moral authority of their predecessors. So they pack all their frustration and passion into making more and more unreasonable demands.
But this may be self-correcting. They look like idiots. And they have obtained our attention. This Lynch Mob nonsense could be the sign of their end times.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Don’t worry comrades!
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In Tuesday night’s debate, Democrats put all their egos in one ideological basket: progressivism. Even Jim Webb managed to sound progressive … until he identified his prime personal enemy — the man he shot in wartime.
Bernie Sanders once again insisted on lecturing Americans on what it means to be a “democratic socialist.” Martin O’Malley relentlessly pursued an impossible dream, 100 percent carbon-free electric production by 2050 — far enough off to avoid any possible accountability. And Hillary Clinton said that, sure, she’s a progressive, “a progressive who likes to get things done!”
But what has she “got done,” ever?
It was her secrecy regarding the initial health care reforms back in her husband’s first term that helped spark the firestorm of opposition that led to the Revolution of ’94, and to the triangulating successes of the master of manipulative compromise, Bill Clinton. His was not a “progressive era,” though Democrats still use the 1990s as proof that their (“our”) policies “work.”
With exception of Bernie on gun control and Hillary on foreign policy and spying (Snowden gave out secrets to the enemy: traitor; she gave out who-knows-what via her insecure email server: blankout), the spend-spend-spend mantra of progressivism, mixed with “fair taxes” (higher tax rates) on the top 1 percent, was not challenged on the stage.
How far would they go to close ranks? Bernie sided with her regarding “your damned e‑mails.” That’s so ideological as to eschew any consideration of character or loyalty or trust.
Quite a revolution … in the party.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Swedish “Generosity”
The headline? Gaspworthy: “World’s First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, To Install Muslim Prayer Space.”
Are we being punked? Onion-ized?
I checked: apparently not.
The place is the Seamen’s mission church in the eastern docks of Stockholm. The Church of Sweden’s local bishop challenged the mission’s priest with a what-if: Suppose a Muslim came off the boats and wanted a place to pray?
Had the encounter been just a one-off, we could shrug it off. But this is one latitudinarian cleric, and she didn’t let it go:
Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels,” the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths.”
Generosity über alles strikes again!
I’ve long wondered about radicals who infiltrate religions. If you don’t like Catholicism, join or start something else; if you find the Baptist Conventions opprobrious, check out the Methodism, Greek Orthodoxy, or … Thelema. Why horn in on someone else’s religion?
But there is a reason it’s happening in the city that gave us “Stockholm Syndrome.” The Church of Sweden’s a state institution, while Scandinavia’s real religion is secular progressivism. You need no gift of prophecy to see where that’s bound to go.
Separation of church and state just makes sense. To each religion its own. There need be no fighting for adherents, or laying down of one’s own beliefs merely to appeal to “inclusion.”
Unless or until you get the government involved.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Urban African-American poverty is a problem, as is, increasingly, rural and urban white poverty. What can we do?
Not what folks at The Nation suggest: by increasing progressivity in local taxation, adding progressivity to fines (making the poor pay less and the rich more), and the like. That’s the gist of what Brad Lander and Karl Kumodzi write about in their article “How Cities’ Funding Woes Are Driving Racial and Economic Injustice — And What We Can Do About It.”
Though they call their solution “forward-looking,” it is not that time element that makes their views “progressive.” It’s their obsession with tax rates. What makes a progressive a progressive seems to be little more than a reliance on progressive rate taxation.
Embarrassing.
The three big examples of failed cities the authors give are the urban community of Ferguson, near St. Louis; Detroit, Michigan; and now Baltimore, Maryland, currently undergoing “protests” and conflagration.
Typical for Nation writers, they see the problem as not the poverty, culture, and behavior of black individuals in neighborhoods where few work and 70 percent grow up in fatherless families, but not taxing whites enough.
Meanwhile, Detroit and Baltimore have been run as “liberal” Democratic enclaves for years. Yet “blame the rich” is the approach. The authors want to double down on old, failed policies. More taxes. More government.
Now, government is to blame, of course: “welfare” programs encourage the break-up of the nuclear family; horrible public schools; minimum wage laws that hit low-skilled population hardest; and the Drug War.
The authors are right, though, that the cities’ desperate regressive burdens on the poor are no answer. Less taxes, less regulation, less subsidy, less policing for profit, more freedom — those are the better solutions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The Eristic of Ann
If conservative Eris-wannabe and apple-thrower Ann Coulter wants to understand why those of us working for truly limited government sometimes have trouble voting GOP down the line, she might consider her beloved party’s history.
The Republican Party started out as the Big Government party, combining the abolitionist/anti-slavery cause with the “internal improvement” Whig Party remnant. That is, the party started out half right, half big government.
Further, Republican Teddy Roosevelt introduced Progressivism into national politics in a big way.
No wonder the Grand Old Party has been so bad about limiting government. It was the party that unleashed unlimited government in the first place. Institutional inertia set in. Some Republicans remain progressives at heart — though nowadays, thankfully, a tad more cautious in their progressivism.
George W. Bush’s many big-gov measures were no abberation.
Heedless of this history, Coulter called limited government folks who vote the Libertarian ticket “idiots,” ending her latest column with a dare: “If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can track you down and drown you.”
Over at Reason, Ron Bailey provided Google instructions for Ann to get to his house. He’s voting for Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate in Virginia.
I have trouble calling science writer Bailey an idiot for his vote preference. Sarvis is a lot better than his incumbent Republican competitor, Ed Gillespie — whom Sarvis aptly dubbed a “blank check for George W. Bush.”
Maybe Coulter should threaten to “drown” Big Gov GOPers for a change.
Or stop the death threats altogether and help find better Republican candidates.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Want to understand a political movement? Distinguish between its early proponents and its later followers. The thinking and rhetoric change over time.
Take Progressivism. It started out as an intellectual movement. Its leading lights were Americans who had studied in foreign colleges and universities. They brought back European ideas of an aggrandized state to counteract American notions of limited government.
Though I disagree with their notions almost totally (with interesting exceptions), it’s worth noting that they thought they were “scientific,” and would sometimes even encourage an experimental attitude towards public policy: Devise new programs, test them, chuck them when they don’t work.
Modern “progressives” don’t seem to sport that “testing” idea any longer.
I just received an email from BarackObama.com, which was complaining about the Speaker of the House, who — on TV, of all things! — said that “Congress ‘should not be judged on how many new laws we create,’ but rather on ‘how many laws … we repeal.’” My BO correspondent found this “embarrassing”:
We elected our members of Congress to work on the issues we care about: creating jobs, fixing our immigration system, fighting climate change, and passing laws to reduce gun violence.
We didn’t put them in office to sit there and wind back the clock.
Notice the assumption here: All the laws on the books are good, serving the common good; none are worthy of repeal.
Doesn’t seem like an assumption an early Progressive thinker would have made. But for too many of today’s progressives, progress apparently consists in accumulating regulations, rules, prohibitions, and tax programs as if each one were a pearl of great price.
Progress is government growth? That defies common sense.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
President Obama was sworn in for a second term on Sunday, re-enacting the rite on Monday so he could leverage the attention of a traditional news day.
Obama makes a good speech. He intones “We, the People,” with a pause in the middle: “We … the People.” He tells us to seize the moment.
But I’m not at all sure he’s seizing — or sizing up — the facts. He says, “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” As I understand it, those who do very well have increased in number. Many folks have moved out of the middle-income earning category into the upper regions. We’ve more millionaires now than ever — even adjusted for inflation. Their ranks aren’t exactly shrinking.
Many of us are struggling, though. And we struggle under the watch of a general “progressive” mindset. You can’t blame income trends on the “free market.” Though some sectors of the economy are pretty free — the important new technology sector, for instance, and much of consumer retail — the medical and financial sectors are heavily regulated and managed by government, and the housing market has been transformed by multiple government policy initiatives. And here, with these three institutions, is where we’ve taken the biggest hits.
And where some of the worst effects on the poorer amongst us can be felt — and where the biggest pro-rich policies can be seen. Think bailouts, for starters.
The Progressives long ago seized the epoch. The necessity of the moment is to seize it back from them. Their policies of government intrusion and management have rigged the game to get us where we are now.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Townhall: Racist Anti-Racism
This weekend’s Townhall column is about race. It is long, in part because talking about race is still so tricky that brief discussions can be easily taken out of context.
And there’s so much to say.
I expand on some comments I made on Friday. But I try to spell out the logic at greater length. So it doesn’t get missed. Racism is an affront to justice. Justice tries to mete out what people deserve, individually. It is especially concerned about establishing basic rules of how to behave. It doesn’t answer every problem of society. It answers crime with punishment and restitution, answers torts with redress. But it does so based on individual responsibility.
Racism is wrong because it judges individuals not on their merits, but by their race. It’s stupid as well as ugly and unjust.
Progressives, however, have been trying to overthrow the old idea of justice as personal freedom and individual responsibility since Progressivism first became an Era.
So it’s no wonder they spread a response to racism that is itself racist. They don’t understand what justice is. So they make an unjust response to an injustice.
Anyway, go over to the column and give it a read. Come back here and tell me what you think.
You will probably be brimming with ideas, complaints, responses. Fine. Me too. One idea I couldn’t include in the column was the sources for some of today’s inner-city African-American problems. It sure seems like they’ve been selected, by racists, for some horrible burdens. But I wouldn’t be hasty on this.
It’s certainly true that official policy has played a huge role in destroying a lot of lives in the inner cities (especially but not limited to African-Americans) — the progressive trifecta of minimum wage raises, welfare aid to families without in-home fathers, and the war on drugs, has devastated the culture of many inner city blacks. Some folks call one of more of these policies “racist,” but the intent, usually, has seemed to be color-blind. That these policies have hit African-American communities especially hard may be more of an accident of history than a policy of repression. But I could be wrong.
Writers from my perspective were once called liberal. Self-defined “Progressives” took over that word in the FDR era. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to uphold a commonsense view of justice. Important contributions to the study and advocacy of this concept of justice as they relate to racial issues include
- The Economics of the Colour Bar, by W.H. Hutt
- The Other Side of Racism, by Anne Wortham
- Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell
- Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell
- The State Against Blacks, by Walter Williams
These are all books worth looking up. For further reading about the links between laissez-faire individualism and true anti-racism, you couldn’t do better than start your reading here:
- “Selling Laissez Faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier,” by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito
- “The Origin of the Term ‘Dismal Science’ to Describe Economics,” by Robert Dixon
- “Racism,” by Ayn Rand