Author Archives: Ron Lipsman

Preaching to the Choir

After a recent posting here, a regular reader sent me a message saying: ‘As usual, Ron, I like very much what you wrote; but in the end, what is the point? You are just preaching to the choir!’ By this, she meant that, as far as she could see, the readership of my blog—and other outlets of a similar bent—consisted of people who were already convinced of the merits of the arguments advanced by me and other conservative writers. Therefore, she wondered, what were we accomplishing beyond the reinforcement of each others already well-established beliefs? She has a point. But I also believe she misses some points. My goal here is to address her concern.

I will first lay out four objectives that I pursue in publishing a conservative point of view in the blogosphere. Then I will step back and briefly describe the current perilous state of our country, which is in part a consequence of the political drubbing that conservatives have suffered recently, occasioned by their failure to practice what they preach. This will lead to a fifth—and most crucial—reason for why it is important that conservative authors continue to fill the ‘pages’ of the conservative blogoshphere with their ideas.

1. Development and Reinforcement. The most basic objective, and the one I stand ‘accused of’ by my reader, is the development and reinforcement of my own ideas on political conservatism. A measure of the worth of one’s beliefs is how well they stand up to one’s own scrutiny as well as the scrutiny of one’s sympathetic listeners. More than three decades ago, my formerly liberal ideas failed that test when several traumatic events (chief among them the forced busing of my child) caused me to closely reexamine my political axioms. It is important that those who are motivated to put their political ideas ‘out there’ should regularly subject those ideas to the tests of self-examination and public scrutiny. In any event, the positive feedback I receive from readers is very reassuring.

2. Refinement. This is close to, but not exactly the same as the first objective. I seek not only to reinforce my and my ‘co-believers’ ideas, but also to refine and improve them. In this regard, the reactions I hear from both sympathetic and non-sympathetic readers are highly useful. We are often seduced by the harmony of our own music, but there is always room for improvement. Putting one’s ideas into the trough of public opinion is a good means to elicit both the friendly and unfriendly criticism that can lead to a sharpening of one’s arguments.

3. Influencing the opposition. I am always a little surprised to learn that my blog does receive some limited attention from liberal readers. In particular, I have many friends and relatives who fall in the enemy camp, and yet some of them read my posts carefully. Occasionally, I get correspondence from such a reader acknowledging a point I made and admitting the legitimacy of my view. A small but gratifying victory. No liberal would be exposed to conservative ideas if the blogosphere did not exist. Other conservative media outlets, some of which have substantial liberal following, play a similarly salutary role.

4. Winning the culture war. In several earlier postings (see, e.g., http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/04/10/different-visions/ or http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/05/17/what-culture-is-it-that-the-politics-have-caught-up-with/), I outlined a long-term strategy for recapturing the conservative spirit that once animated the majority of the American populace. Put simply, it was to reverse engineer the mechanism, dreamt up by socialist thinkers a century ago—which was to completely capture the culture of the nation, knowing that the politics would follow. That is precisely what has happened. In those articles I laid out some ideas for reversing the process. The conservative blogoshpere plays a fundamental role in motivating the foot soldiers of the counterrevolutionary struggle.

The Left has been advancing on many fronts in our country for more than a hundred years. They have captured the media, the educational establishment, most foundations, the legal profession and more. Their progress has been steady, highlighted by periods of huge leaps to port (under Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and perhaps now Obama). The only successful counterattacks in the 20th century came under Coolidge and Reagan. And while Reagan had some success, his good work has largely been undone by the Bushes and other fake conservative Republicans who aped and appeased the liberals over the last twenty years—which has resulted in the unmitigated disaster that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid regime represents.

It is easy for a conservative to survey the scene and be dejected. The behemoth that the Federal Government has become constrains our individual freedoms on a daily basis—and the Obama team is working feverishly to turn the screws tighter. The respect for Western Civilization and our Constitutional, republican system among the people is at an all-time low—and declining. Our economy is crippled by massive debt, a crumbling dollar and runaway entitlements; the latter summons the image of a train speeding on a one-way track toward a brick wall—and Obama is stepping on the accelerator. Who or what shall rescue us? Oh despair…which leads me to my last and most important reason why I, why all conservatives need to keep putting the truth before the American people.

5. Faith. The creation of the American experiment in self-government more than two centuries ago was an act of faith. Our founders had faith, not only in Divine Providence, but also in the good sense of the American people, whom they believed manifested a unique zeal for the ideals of individual liberty, limited government and moral propriety. They understood that the struggle to maintain those ideals in the future would be difficult—that it would require the continued benevolent hand of Providence and the good judgment of the people. Without these, the Republic would succumb to one of the tyrannies at either end of the political spectrum—the concentrated power of a despotic individual or group, or the mobocracy inherent in an unchecked ‘democracy’ devoted to mindless egalitarianism. Today the Republic is in danger, thanks to a bizarre combination of both extremes—albeit much more of the latter than the former.

The fifth objective of the conservative blogosphere is to express its continued faith that the two sets of hands into which our founders entrusted the American experiment are still reliable. Conservatives still believe, as Reagan said, that ‘God had a divine purpose in placing this land between the two great oceans to be found by those who had a special love of freedom and courage,‘ which expresses our faith in both founding pillars. If we lose that faith, then there truly is no hope.

Swimming Upstream: The Life of a Conservative Professor in Academia

This article appeared originally in the American Thinker at
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/swimming_upstream_the_life_of.html
I have been a faculty member at a major State University for 40 years. Several years after my arrival, I voted for George McGovern. Eight years later, I voted for Ronald Reagan. In those eight years, my family and I experienced several traumas that caused me to reevaluate — and ultimately, drastically alter — the political, cultural and economic axioms that had governed my life.

 

Within months of buying my first home in an excellent neighborhood, within walking distance to the University and, most importantly, located in a district with an outstanding local public elementary school, my five year old son was forcibly bussed to an inferior school, many miles away, in a horrible neighborhood in order to satisfy the utopian vision of a myopic federal judge. This betrayal of my fundamental rights was undoubtedly the greatest shock to my political psyche.

 

Another was a Sabbatical year spent living and working in Jerusalem, during which time the UN issued the infamous ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. I was able to observe firsthand that the standard propaganda about Israel and Zionism that was promulgated in America and elsewhere — almost exclusively by those on the Left that I had formerly supported — was nothing more than bald-faced, hateful lies. This and other events in the 1970s caused me to rethink everything that I had taken for granted since adolescence about how the world worked.

 

I emerged from the exercise as an enthusiastic conservative. Thus I was no longer your average faculty member who adhered to the liberal party line, but instead one of a tiny cadre who completely disagreed with the leftist mentality that dominated the thought of campus faculty and administrators.

 

The overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere on campus is well known. In the one place in society at which there should be diversity of thought, exploration of conflicting ideas and a propensity to challenge conventional wisdom, we have instead a mind-numbing conformity of opinion and a complete unwillingness to entertain any thought or idea that deviates from the accepted truth. That conformity encompasses:

 

  • The legitimacy of virtually any program that promotes the interests of minority and female faculty, staff and students, even if the program is blatantly racist or sexist — justified by a belief that America’s past unjust treatment of blacks, American Indians and Japanese-Americans, and its unfair treatment of women render such discrimination necessary and lawful.
  • A multicultural mentality, which preaches that America’s Eurocentric, white, Christian heritage is responsible for colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism, and that its replacement by a culture that ‘celebrates diversity’ will transform the US into a more just and humane society.
  • A distrust of free markets and democratic capitalism, and its severe limitation in favor of a centralized, government-controlled economy that will redistribute the wealth of America more fairly.
  • A denigration of religious belief and its replacement by the ‘worship’ of secular humanism, with mindless environmentalism occupying a central place in the new religion.

 

Not being in sync with any of this, how did I cope? Not so well, actually. First of all, it took me a long time to recognize and accept that the university atmosphere I knew as a student was gone. Initially, I was too busy pursuing my career and building my academic resume to notice what a fish out of water I had become.

 

My epiphany came about 20 years ago at the inauguration of a new campus president. In his acceptance speech, he said many things that seemed bizarre to me, but the comment I recall most vividly was his insistence that he would create a world-class university by building ‘excellence through diversity.’ His point seemed to be that by substantially increasing the number of minority and female faculty, staff and students (and consequently decreasing the number of white males), this would of necessity make us a great university.

 

I always thought that the best way to build a great university was to attract the brightest, most innovative and productive faculty and students — regardless of their hue — but I realized at that moment, as the applause for his idea rained down, how out of step I was.

 

What did I do? To my eternal shame, I ducked. Oh initially, during a painful, but relatively brief period, I contested the new campus consensus. People quickly, but politely, informed me that my ideas were retrograde and that I would be well advised to get with the program. In fact, I was passed over for an administrative position I coveted and for which I was far more qualified than the individual selected. Realizing that my resistance was damaging my reputation on campus, I more or less clammed up and spent more than a decade trying to ignore the poisonous atmosphere.

 

This less than noble strategy proved effective and eventually I achieved a high administrative position in which I adhered to policies and shepherded programs that were diametrically opposed to my fundamental beliefs. For years I tended to my bleeding tongue because I was constantly biting it during meetings to prevent myself from blurting out my true feelings about the bigoted ideas that constituted the consensus of the folks at the table.

 

But as I began to near retirement, I decided there was no point in maintaining my forced silence any longer. As I had 15 years earlier, I unburdened myself and let fly my misgivings about the liberal campus hegemony. What happened this time? Here come three novel observations: 

  1. To my surprise, my “retrograde” conservative opinions were not met with calumny or derision, but rather with smiles and amusement. “Oh, that’s just Ron being Ron,” it was said. I wasn’t viewed as a threat to the campus philosophy, but rather as some kind of queer duck to be tolerated at best, ignored at worst. This was certainly more pleasant for me than being told to shut up and get your head straight as I anticipated. But it was also incredibly frustrating that colleagues didn’t take me seriously. The impression I had was that they felt there was no reason to take my ideas seriously because I was so obviously wrong that no right-thinking person could be swayed by my arguments.
  2. My second observation is that I was not the only one failing to make waves. In fact, there were no waves whatsoever. There was no debate, no controversy; just the calm serenity of a campus at peace with its almost universally accepted mind set. I attribute this to three things. First, of course, anyone raising an objection was viewed, as I was, as hopelessly out of it and worthy only of being ignored. This has a chilling effect, perhaps even more effective than derision. Second, I suspect that those who believed as I did were still in lockdown mode—for the same reasons as I was over the years. And third, I believe the liberal brainwash has been so effective on campus—and in the national educational system in general—that many in the liberal majority can’t even fathom that there is anyone who doubts the legitimacy of their point of view.
  3. My final observation is the following. The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters of the country beside academia—e.g., the mainstream media, major foundations, law schools and the trail lawyers they produce, public school teachers, the Democratic Party, even big corporations. But none of these can maintain the atmosphere as effortlessly as campus profs and administrators. Politicians encounter opposition from their constituents; the media from its readers, listeners and viewers; trail lawyers from their clients; and corporations from their stockholders and consumers. But the educational establishment—both higher and lower—encounters little resistance. The students are ignorant, the parents are cowed, and Boards of Regents are cowardly. The ivory tower is alive and well in America and the intellectual product it presents is completely one-sided. What a tragedy for our nation and especially for its youth.

 

On the Existential Threat to Israel, II

In a previous blog posting (http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/08/05/on-the-existential-threat-to-israel/), I discussed a hostof existential threats to the State of Israel as described in several pieces of recent literature. I argued that the threats could be subsumed under the rubric of ‘three mega-trends that encompass them, and which pose a mortal danger to more than just tiny, beleaguered Israel. Those trends are:

  1. A worldwide resurgence of Islam, much of it in a radical and deadly mode;
  2. A worldwide resurgence of virulent Anti-Semitism, much of it cloaked as anti-Zionism, but in reality nothing more than old-fashioned Jew hatred;
  3. The steep decline within Western Civilization of self-esteem.

That the portentous eruptions implicit in numbers 1 and 2 pose a grave threat to Israel is totally self-evident. On the other hand, the identification of the third trend as the parent of certain existential threats to Israel required some explanation. Now by that trend I meant the declining belief by the peoples of Europe and North America that the fundamental political, cultural, religious and social principles, which undergird the advanced civilization they constructed and maintained during the last half-millennium, have any validity any longer. No civilization, lacking faith in its own bedrock principles, legends, stories, religions and history can long endure. Witness the demise of the late, unlamented Soviet Union, occasioned by precisely such a loss of self-esteem. The West appears headed down the same road with Europe in the lead — but with Obama in the saddle, the US is rushing to catch up. And Israel, which is surely an outpost of Western Civilization, has moved toward the head of the pack. A more precise tie-in to Israel was via the observation that the growing leftist, multicultural, pacifistic, egalitarian, anti-patriotic, anti-religious, corruption-riddled mentality that inhabits the Israeli body politic is, I believe, a manifestation of exactly the same kind of loss of self-esteem that is crippling Europe and increasingly the United States.

The question left unanswered by the article was: What is Israel to do about these threats? How can it deal with the three trends in order to preserve not only its existence, but its vibrance as an independent state, governed by the rule of law, with a (mostly) free and vigorous economy and a society characterized by high levels of education, culture, achievement and faith? It is my humble goal to offer here a few suggestions.

In truth there is precious little that Israel can do about the first two trends. The emergence of radical Islamism in the latter part of the twentieth century has far more to do with the end of the Cold War than it does with any actions taken by Israel. Yes, it is fashionable to assert that the failure to conclude a peace between Israel and the Arab World, and especially between the Jews and Arabs in the lands that constituted the British Mandate of Palestine, is the root cause of Arab unrest in the Middle East and Muslim hostility to the US in particular and the West in general. That is complete and utter nonsense. There is not a shred of evidence indicating that, had Israel not come into existence, the Arab and more generally the Muslim world would be a sea of tranquility, content to live in peace with its non-Muslim neighbors in the West and East. On the contrary, with the demise of Soviet Communism and the increasing demoralization in the West, the Muslim world sees itself as ascendant and, moreover, it appears anxious to spread its influence and rule over vast stretches of the planet. Israel is just one small obstacle in its path — albeit one it has found difficult to overcome. Israel could agree to every demand of the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ahmedinejad — which of course would be tantamount to national suicide — and it wouldn’t decrease by one iota the Islamic assault on Western Civilization.

Similarly, there is not much Israel can do about resurgent world-wide anti-Semitism. Treatises have been written offering numerous reasons for the continued existence of this deadly malady. The horror of the Holocaust — the systematic murder of one-half of European Jewry, one-third of the Jews on Earth— put the disease in remission for a period of time. But that period is over. Jew hatred is once again rampant in Europe and of course it never really disappeared from the Muslim world. There is no conceivable course of action by Israel and world Jewry that could cure this deadly disease — save perhaps mass suicide. And even that might not work. The expressions of anti-Semitism in corners of the world where there are no Jews (e.g., Southeast Asia) makes one blink in wonder. Our very existence — past as well as present — is a casus belli.

I believe the people of Israel recognize these facts. Islam has been at war with them for nearly a hundred years. How could the Israelis not notice? Indeed, the memory banks of most Israelis — so many of whom are descendants of victims and survivors of the Holocaust, of other pogroms in Europe and the Middle East, and of Arab terror in Israel itself — are indelibly stamped with the ability to recognize Jew hatred in the Muslim world or wherever they see it. The Jews of Israel have been dealing with it for generations with enough success to allow themselves to stay alive. How?

The answer is by being resolute, strong, courageous, determined — and violent when necessary. Realizing that you are in a fight to the death is more than half the battle. If you do, then you have a shot at building and maintaining the strength and courage to face down your enemies. Denial or appeasement on the other hand is a prescription for death. The Jews of Israel have pursued a policy of strength for 80 years. But there are some signs lately that Israel’s prosecution of this policy is weakening. The reason is precisely because Israel has fallen prey to the phenomenon of declining self-esteem that is so widespread in Europe and North America. (For more on this, see http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/09/04/is-the-united-states-of-america-doomed/ and http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/07/07/the-nature-of-obamas-liberalism/.)

Thus I believe that trends 1 and 2 are manageable — not easily and not without great sacrifice — but only if number 3 is dealt with successfully. And it is here that I believe there are some concrete steps that Israel could take.

The first main step is to recognize that the issue is cultural, not political. As was recognized a hundred years ago by radicals like John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci, one can change the nature of a country by capturing its culture, the politics will follow. (This is also discussed at some length in http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/05/17/what-culture-is-it-that-the-politics-have-caught-up-with/ and http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/04/10/different-visions/.) Of course this is precisely what has happened in Western Europe, as well as in the US and Israel — although not quite as deeply in the latter instances as in the former. The solution: take back the culture. I am not as conversant with Israeli society as I am with American society, but it seems to me that conservatives and traditionalists in Israel need to:

  • develop extensive conservative, cultural media outlets analogous to American talk radio, the Washington Times and magazines like Commentary and the American Spectator;
  • develop robust think tanks that will promote traditional ideas and policies — e.g., like the Heritage Foundation;
  • try to displace the leftists who control the educational system;
  • resist judicial usurpations that cripple the nation’s ability to defend itself and that diminish the Zionist creed that gives meaning to the State;
  • continue and intensify Israel’s defiance of anti-Semitic regimes around the globe — and the spineless governments and organizations that appease them — who demonize her and attempt to delegitimize her.

I am sure there is no shortage of Israelis who could easily embellish this limited set of recommendations in order to produce a more extensive program of self-renewal and pride in Israeli culture. Implementing it is another matter.

Next, any objective observer would agree that Israel has the right —inherent from the Bible and more than three millennia of history, and codified in the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate and the United Nations’ resolutions of the late 1940s — to its existence as a Jewish State in the formerly British-administered territory of Palestine; and that any threat to that existence is an act of war, with genocidal overtones, against the Jewish inhabitants of that State. Moreover, Israel has the unquestioned right to defend itself from those who promulgate such threats. These unalienable truths must be drummed into the heads of Israeli youth and repeated incessantly to the nations of the world who deign to doubt them.

The third major step is an acknowledgement that the record compiled by Israel in its 60+ years of existence is at least as meritorious as that of any other nation in that time and easily exceeds most. It includes:

  • defending itself successfully against its mortal enemies despite vastly unfavorable odds;
  • developing a national culture of scientific development, artistic achievement, aid to less fortunate nations, tolerance and respect for its non-Jewish minority, and constructing a society governed according to the rule of law;
  • becoming a world leader in technological innovation and development;
  • reviving Jewish nationhood and language after an hiatus of two millennia;
  • building a robust economy and increasing the prosperity of its citizens;
  • assimilating millions of immigrants successfully.

This is a record of achievement of which any nation would be proud to boast. But like its basic rights, these achievements must be trumpeted endlessly to its own people and to the world. Together, these steps — initiating a domestic ‘culture war’ to recapture the cultural (and political) initiative and promulgating, to their own people and to the world, the country’s rights and accomplishments — would go a long way toward helping Israel deal with its self-esteem problem, and consequently with the existential threats it faces.

Even if Israel takes these steps — and I believe it must if it is to survive — it will still face formidable challenges, some of which could prove fatal. For example, here are five, at least the first two of which have lethal potential:

  • the Arab demographic problem;
  • the nuclear threat from Iran;
  • an overdependence on the US, especially in light of the fact that the new US President is less than favorably inclined toward the Jewish State;
  • the inability in six decades to satisfactorily reconcile the religious-secular divide in the body politic; and
  • a leadership that is unworthy of the people’s trust.

Apropos the last, Netanyahu is now the key person facing these formidable challenges. The nearly universal assessment is that he didn’t perform so well in his first stint as Prime Minister. We shall know soon whether he fares better this time.

 

Is the United States of America Doomed?

Recently I posted a piece in this blog entitled, ‘On the Existential Threat to Israel.’ In it, I discussed the manifold, deadly threats confronting the Jewish State and how many of them eventually, and perhaps imminently, could prove lethal. I also located the threats in the context of three portentous developments in the world:

  1. A worldwide resurgence of Islam, much of it in a radical and deadly mode;
  2. A worldwide resurgence of virulent Anti-Semitism, much of it cloaked as anti-Zionism, but in reality nothing more than old-fashioned Jew hatred;
  3. The steep decline within Western Civilization of self-esteem.

Finally, I pointed out how each of these developments also posed a mortal danger to the nations of the West (specifically in Europe and North America). It was easy to justify the latter claim for numbers 1 and 3; the justification for number 2 was somewhat subtle and restricted to Europe.

In this article I will look more closely at these ‘existential threats as they apply to the United States. While alarmingly present in Europe, number 2 above is, thankfully, not really pertinent in the US — but its place in the list is taken ably by another malignant threat to our nation, our gargantuan federal government. Thus, with some revision to the first and third to make them more applicable to the US as opposed to the entire West, the threat list now reads:

  1. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism, or Islamism or Islamo-fascism as some prefer to call it — is it as much of a threat to the US as it obviously is to Europe?
  2. An increasingly powerful, coercive, unresponsive, irresponsible and repressive federal government.
  3. The sharp decline among the American public of faith in American exceptionalism, esteem for the historic culture of America and Western Civilization, respect for and adherence to the Constitution, and public displays of virtue as this would have been understood by the Founding Fathers.

Now the majority of the threats to Israel’s existence are physical —should they be fulfilled, it would likely result in the actual destruction of the State: the slaughter or expulsion of its people, the annihilation of its cities and towns, the total loss of sovereignty — that is, the physical extinction of the State in any corporal sense. (It makes my blood curl just to write that sentence.)

The threat to the US is more political, cultural and economic than it is physical. Even though one could imagine an attack or attacks on US soil by Islamists with WMD, it is not possible to foresee the Iranian Revolutionary Guard occupying the US, declaring an Islamist totalitarian state, and killing or forcibly converting those Americans who resist. Rather, the envisioned consequence, especially of the latter two threats to the US, should either reach a cataclysmic stage, is that our beloved republic would cease to exist in any sense in which our Founders understood it. Our people, our towns, our industry,our farms, our infrastructure, even our armed forces might remain intact. But: liberty would no longer be our most sacred value; our freedoms would vanish; our Constitutional rights would be replaced by the ‘bounty’ we receive from the State; a phony tolerance for all cultures would supersede our Judeo-Christian heritage; our morals would be defined by the government and its lackey media,not by religious principles; our economy would be directed by the government and entrepreneurs would not exist; our standard of living would sink precipitously; our military would atrophy and we would cease to be a great power; and the concept of American exceptionalism would be relegated to the dustbin of history as we take our place as just another cowardly, Euro-socialist, crippled nation watching as the might of China, India, Islam or whomever grows and supplants us as the most powerful force on Earth. America has been a beacon of freedom and a force for good in the world for nearly a quarter millennium. Will that be true of our successor if we fall?

How real are these threats and, if they are, what can we do to forestall them? They are very real. First, the end of the Cold War has seen the emergence of a virulent, fanatical and apocalyptic brand of Islam. It has always been there, just in decline and/or slumbering for the last few hundred years. But now ‘Islamic Civilization’ is displaying some traits that seem to be disappearing in the West — namely, self-confidence, religious fervor, ample foot soldiers willing to die for the cause and a bold vision of the future. The ascendant forces in the Islamic world would seem intent on restoring the caliphate and extending Muslim hegemony over vast stretches of the planet, commensurate with their reach a millennium or more ago. They see Europe, and increasingly the United States, as soft, retreating, lacking faith and morale,and ripe for the plucking. It would be the height of folly for the US to ignore the goals of the Islamists, and thus fall prey to the malevolent harm they intend to inflict (and to some extent have already inflicted) on our society.

With the prior assessment of the first threat, I suspect a significant portion, perhaps a majority, of my fellow citizens might agree. But I doubt any such agreement is forthcoming on the second threat.

The ranks of conservative, republican (small ‘r’) patriots have been thinning rapidly since Ronald Reagan passed from the scene. I venture that no more than 20-25% of the US citizenry is aware of the century-long degradation of our Constitutional republic that has occurred. From Teddy Roosevelt, through Wilson, then FDR, Johnson, Carter and now Obama we have seen a near constant retreat from the original liberty-focused, market-oriented, limited form of republican government that our Founders established, and a concurrent march toward the egalitarian, government-controlled, Constitution-ignoring, business-bashing, soft tyranny that our system has become. If Obama wins on either cap and trade or nationalized health insurance, we might pass the point of no return and the Republic will be lost forever.

Am I overstating the danger posed by our overgrown government? Recently, a financial adviser speaking to me about the economy and the stock market, acknowledged the grave dangers that Obama’s and the radical leftists in Congress’ programs portend for the economy. But then he asserted that historically, the market has factored in the constraints caused by the introduction of the income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Sarbanes-Oxley and myriad other government laws and regulations that have hampered American business; and then continued its inexorable, if uneven, march forward. Well then, he continued, the market will just factor in Obama’s monstrosities as well and continue as in the past. I would sum up that stance in the words: we’ve been alright in the past despite stupid and self-destructive moves, so we shall be alright in the future, despite stupid and self-destructive moves. I’m not so sure! As Thomas Sowell has said, there is a tipping point and I fear we are getting mighty close to it.

Yet, I doubt there is widespread agreement with my fear of an existential danger posed by the federal government. Some folks believe, like my colleague, that we’ll withstand the government’s latest assaults and continue our march forward. I suspect an even greater proportion of the populace doesn’t acknowledge the threat at all. They cherish all the ‘security’ and goodies that big government provides for them and ignore the wisdom of Reagan, who said that Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

Finally, the third threat — loss of self esteem — poses, in my mind, the gravest threat of the three. History reveals that great civilizations more often die by suicide than by conquest. The nations of Western Europe, having lost their faith in the cultural, political and economic principles that sustained them for centuries, are playing the death scene right now. The US is manifesting the same symptoms, albeit at an earlier stage. And yet again, I think there is even less support for my belief in this threat than there is for the previous, I sense that the vast majority of my fellow citizens do not recognize that the egalitarian, anti-religious, anti-patriotic, anti-free market, anti-family, big government, unconstitutional and basically anti-American program that is being thrust on them — and to which they appear increasingly receptive — is a recipe for the death of the United States as a free republic. People say reflexively that America is still the greatest country in the world. But because of the brainwashing to which they have been subjected for many decades at the hands of the media, government schools, the higher education establishment and all the other liberal-dominated, opinion-forming organs of American society, those naively optimistic folks have little understanding of how much the US has changed in the last century and where it is headed sans a conservative course correction.

So what is to be done? As I outlined in a previous article, ‘Different Visions,’ while there is definitely a political and economic component to the struggle, the effort to recapture the nation and preserve the structure bequeathed to us by the Founders must be primarily cultural. Repeating part of the argument there, ‘We need to have conservative philosophers and cultural icons that state the case for and epitomize the worth of traditional Western culture. More mundanely, we need to nurture conservative film makers, fund conservative law schools, build conservative foundations (like Heritage, but more of them), defend and expand talk radio, establish conservative newspapers (like the Washington Times, but more of them), concoct an organization to counter the NEA in the minds of the country’s teachers, abandon the mainline churches and support religious institutions that champion traditional values, etc. It might take a hundred years to achieve success; after all it took the Left a century to reach the dominance it currently enjoys. If we don’t do this, then the America that we have loved and which has proven to be such a boon to the peoples of the world will surely – perhaps slowly, but maybe not so slowly – wither into one more Euro-socialist State. Then the light from mankind’s last best hope will have gone out.’

To summarize, I believe the US will cope with the first threat. We took care of the Nazis and the Communists; we’ll defeat the Islamists as well — provided we don’t succumb to one of the latter two threats first. As for the second threat, I don’t believe we can meet it without successfully overcoming the third. If we continue to lose self-esteem, that is lose faith in our heritage, pride in our achievements, trust in free markets and respect for the system established by the Founders, then surely the government will continue to grow into a republic-destroying monster that will make our current soft tyranny seem tame in relation to the much harder tyranny we shall experience.

On the other hand, if there is a resurgence of patriotic spirit, cultural pride, renewed faith in American exceptionalism and respect for our historic, republican, Constitutional heritage, then the people will be ready to tame the government beast. America has faced grave crises previously: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Depression, Fascism, and Communism. In every instance, we managed to prevail. But with diminishing self-esteem prevalent, it is easy to be pessimistic about our prevailing again. And yet we have ammunition in this battle that Europe lacks — such as, God-fearing people, a formidable military, guns in the closet, talk radio and of course our Constitution. What we lack is another Reagan, or — recognizing that the battle is cultural more than political — a Martin Luther King who will inspire the people to reconnect with their liberty, rediscover their heritage and overcome the forces of tyranny that are dragging us down.

A Fundamental Disconnect

This article appeared originally in the American Thinker at
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/a_fundamental_disconnect.html

Hollywood and the media routinely offer up two standard portrayals of government officials — inept and comical idiots or sinister characters. The latter is especially true of media depictions of NSA, CIA, and FBI employees, but both are quite typical of the reigning liberal elite’s opinion of all government agencies and their employees: bureaucrats are either hilarious nincompoops or dangerous evil-doers, and amazingly enough, sometimes both at once. Hollywood seems to think that the government is either screwing up the country because it doesn’t know what it is doing or it is destroying the country because it is trampling on the rights of its citizens.
However, the people who hold these convictions are the exact same people who want to turn over the operation of all the key components of the country to the government to manage. Health care, energy, education, the economy itself — these and dozens of other critical features of American society should be directed, according to the Left, from the hallowed halls in which the bumblers and betrayers work.
These liberal elites, who are now in positions of great power in the nation, seem to believe that the politicians and bureaucrats who populate the federal government, are on the one hand part fumbling meatheads who can’t tie their shoes and part evil plotters who want to screw John Q. Public. At the same time the left believes that those who run the bureaucracy should be entrusted with the management of virtually every aspect of American society. Is there not a fundamental disconnect here? What could possibly explain this self-contradictory faith in the power of the government to successfully solve the nation’s problems? I willoffer three explanations and then speculate as to which applies to the celebrity who now occupies the White House.
The first explanation is ignorance. The people of our nation have been subjected to an intense liberal indoctrination for so long that there are a huge number of them for whom the tenets of liberalism are so deeply ingrained that they accept without question the proposition that the government must address any problem that arises anywhere in America. Under a relentless assault from the liberal dominated media, educational establishment, legal profession, arts community, foundations, and even segments of the business and religious communities, many have succumbed to the brainwashing.
Consequently, they believe:
  • FDR’s New Deal saved us from the Depression rather than prolonged it;
  • the Great Society helped to lift minorities out of poverty, rather than institutionalizing it;
  • capitalism creates unjust, inequitable outcomes in the US, ignoring the fact that it has powered our economy to unimagined and unequaled heights of prosperity;
  • government creates jobs by spending the tax payer’s money, rather than preventing their creation because of the tax dollars pilfered from entrepreneurs;
  • government regulations improve the functioning of our economy, revealing obliviousness to the enormous drag they impose;
  • the rich don’t pay their fair share, whereas in fact the ‘rich’ pay the overwhelming majority of the income tax that Uncle Sam extracts, while the lowest 40% of income earners pay virtually nothing;
  • the Constitution is a malleable document that serves as a guide to the making of law — in fact, it is a binding document that can be changed only by a demanding Amendment process and the American republic has survived and prospered precisely because continuing generations have agreed to abide by the deal struck by our founders with the people;
  • radical change not adherence to tradition, is the American way.
I venture that a large proportion, perhaps a substantial majority of the folks who voted for Obama fit into this category — especially young people.
It is legitimate to ask how such hoodwinked people can accept the portrayal of the government as bumbling or sinister or both — laugh at it if it is the former, be mortified by it if the latter — and why does it not occur to them that it is lunacy to entrust their welfare to the bumblers and evil-doers?
I think the answer is to be found in the attitude teenagers exhibit toward their parents and teachers. The kids often see their elders as at best hopelessly square, out of it and even stupid and at worst as manipulating, tyrannical, and unfair. Most — not all — do not question the fundamental authority of their parents and teachers. The kids expect the adults to remove the obstacles that the youngsters encounter and the kids are willing to put up with the rules laid down by the adults because it is expected of them, because it is the natural order of things, and besides there is no choice. So too does the juvenile mass of brainwashed citizens view the authority of the federal government. They deride and lambaste it for its incompetence; they fear it for its omnipotence; but they accept unquestioningly its ‘legitimate’ authority to control their lives.
The next explanation might be characterized as arrogance. Its practitioners understand that the government doesn’t have a particularly good track record of solving the nation’s problems. They recognize that previous government forays into health care, agriculture, housing, etc. have resulted in mismanagement, excessive waste, deleterious effects on the economy, fraud, and corruption. Nevertheless, they believe that the federal government is the correct mechanism to address the nation’s problems and under their tutelage one (or both) of two things will happen. First, they will do it better. They will bring better design, planning, execution, ands upervision. Or, it won’t work any better, but they will profit personally from the results. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is chock full, from top to bottom, with these types — the naive ones who think they will execute the liberal agenda more perfectly and the corrupt ones who intend to profit from the agenda, however it is implemented.
The third explanation is malevolence. This characterization applies to the hard core leftists who believe the classic American political, economic and cultural systems are rotten and must be overthrown. I am thinking of revolutionaries like Saul Alinsky, George Soros, Michael Moore, and, yes, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. They don’t care that the government to which they wish to assign more and more responsibility is a combination of ineptness and corruption. So much the better; it will bring the system down more quickly. Radicals like these thrive on a crisis atmosphere (as admitted by Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel). They seek to create a perpetual crisis, which leaves the people panic-stricken and easily manipulated by those who, under the guise of addressing the dangerous ills they have identified, will divert more power to the government, and who are in fact at work destroying the system under the false cover of crises like climate change and health care. If they can enact universal, federally-controlled health care and the business-crippling cap and trade bill, their malevolent objective might be attained — America could be so fundamentally changed that there will be no hope of returning to republican principles.
I believe the vast majority of Americans on the left fit into category 1, a substantial number fall under 2 and a small, but dedicated cadre occupies the third position. Into which category does the guy in theWhite House fit?
Like most of America, my acquaintance with President Obama is recent and superficial. That he occupies the White House is a testament to the uncharacteristic recklessness of the American people, who have installed therein a person they know precious little about. Is he the leftist radical his voting record suggests or the relatively moderate politician he seemed to be during the campaign? Everyone who interactswith him insists he is very smart. If so, it is impossible that the rationale for his leftist mentality lies in the first explanation: ignorance.
Throughout the campaign, my impression was that he was a number 2: arrogant. Yes, there was no denying his far-left voting record — but he tacked right during the election and then he appointed a number of relatively moderate cabinet officials (to go along with the hard core leftists he selected as advisors and czars, to be sure).  But since the inauguration, the gloves are off and the trend is clear. President Obama is a leader of the malevolent, revolutionary forces in America who want to overthrow the system and replace it with a Euro-socialist, nanny State that repudiates much of American history, including the Constitution.
What is the evidence? Many of his opponents would cite: his promotion of cap and trade, which surely would cripple our economy; his drive for universal, government-controlled health insurance, which would make virtually all of us wards of the State; his foreign policy of appeasement and repeated apologies for American behavior; or his reckless spending, borrowing and taxing that will bankrupt our children and grandchildren. For me it is as simple as this. I see no evidence that he loves America, that he (or his wife) takes any pride in the achievements of our country, that he subscribes to the idea that America, unlike any other nation, is founded on a political idea and is called to be a beacon of freedom to mankind. That is not Barack Obama’s America. His new America will be a bizarre combination of France, the Soviet Union and Canada.