Category Archives: Culture

A Flight of Fantasy: What Conservatives Should Do When They Regain Power

I first conceived of the idea for this article in the spring of 2009. At that time the thought of conservatives in power again in the US really did require a flight of fantasy. But since then, the arrogance, duplicity and recklessness of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi gang has caused many Americans to conclude that entrusting the fate of the country to this radical triumvirate was a huge mistake. If the polls continue their current trend, we might yet see a Republican Congress and/or a Republican President before the year 2012 is out. So perhaps the flight I am about to take the reader on is not really that fanciful; nevertheless, the title is catchy and so I did not alter it.

Now conservatives can come to power in one of two modes. One mode would be as it was with Reagan and with Gingrich—i.e., a strong, yet limited mandate. For example, Reagan ran and was elected as a staunch conservative, but he never enjoyed a conservative Congress, even in the Senate where the Republicans had a majority. Similarly, Newt and his band of followers in the House enunciated a strongly conservative platform of governance; but he was easily checked by a liberal President and the remaining liberal members of Congress. Still, Reagan and Gingrich did have some signature successes. If nothing else, they substantially slowed the inexorable march to the Left that the US has been on during the last century. And if conservatives come to power in this mode again, they need to prepare now in order to make better use of the opportunity than either Reagan or Newt did.

But there is a second mode in which conservatives could achieve power. That would be with a vigorous, sustained and clear mandate to return these United States to a truly conservative political, economic and cultural system of the type that characterized the nation during its first 125 years of independence. This would be heralded by a smashing conservative electoral victory, which installs a strongly conservative President and a very conservative Congress, and then a repeat of the process multiple times for at least a decade or two (comparable to what the liberals enjoyed in 1932-1952, albeit of course in the opposite direction).

Now that’s a flight of fantasy. Or perhaps not! Given the horrendous mess that Obama and his liberal minions are making, there are signs that the American people might finally be coming to their senses. An increasing number realize that the utopian dream of fairness and equality (of misery) toward which the liberals have been driving us for a century is in actuality a gigantic nightmare that will destroy the American way of life. Perhaps the people will be ready shortly to throw the bums out, abandon statism and start over. If so, conservatives must be ready to lead that counter-revolution. I will lay out a grand program for doing so in a future article. Here, I will concentrate on a simpler program that will be suitable if, as is more likely, conservatives come to power in a more limited mode.

Polls and pundits continue to assert that the US has been and remains a center-right country. I am not so sure. In the 110 years since 1900 we have had 19 Presidents—eleven Republicans and eight Democrats. The Democratic Presidents have ranged (in philosophy) from moderately liberal (Kennedy) to ultra-leftist (Wilson, FDR, Johnson, Obama) with the average far closer to the extreme left than the moderate center. The Republican Presidents, on the other hand, varied from center-leftish (Teddy, Hoover, Nixon and the Bushes) to strongly right (Coolidge, Reagan) with the average definitely closer to the center than the right. This does not strike me as strong evidence of our country’s supposed center-right orientation. In fact, in the last 80 years—during which time we have experienced the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society and Obamania—there have been only two strong surges to the right: the election of Reagan and the Republican takeover of Congress led by Gingrich. Newt’s surge fizzled in a haze of faux conservatism wherein the ensuing Republican President and Congresses engaged in a spending frenzy and social engineering worthy of their liberal nemeses. Reagan had more success—especially in foreign affairs (victory in the Cold War) and economic matters (more than 20 years of economic growth and prosperity). Newt’s Contract with America was too grandiose, broad and generic. Reagan, on the other hand, had three clear and focused objectives:

  1. Cut taxes and pursue deregulation in order to jump start the economy.
  2. Defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War.
  3. Shrink the government and return it to its proper role as servant, not master, of the people.

Reagan succeeded magnificently in achieving objectives (1) and (2), but he failed spectacularly with (3). Well, two of three is not bad. And his rate of success easily exceeded that of Gingrich, whose agenda was less focused. Therefore, when conservatives return to power, presumably in limited mode, they must be ready to pursue, like Reagan, a short list of clearly defined major goals. And conservatives must stick to them, even though there will be scads of other worthy things they will want to do. But if they attempt too much, they will accomplish, a là Newt, relatively little. So, here are three specific goals that I suggest be the main objectives when our turn comes again—hopefully soon:

  1. Role of Government. Shrink the New Deal/Great Society/Obamania-inspired gargantuan government that is choking freedom out of American life.
  2. Defeat Islamic Fundamentalism. Reduce, and hopefully remove the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to the US, to the West, indeed to the World.
  3. Recapture the culture. Initiate a multi-faceted approach toward rescuing the culture of the US. The basic goal is to restore (a reasonable facsimile) of the traditional culture that permeated American life from the 18th to the 20th century. Start on the long path toward delegitimizing the pornographic, anti-family, anti-religious, egalitarian, multicultural, environmentally wacky, anti-achievement, socialistic cesspool that passes for culture in America today.

Let me elaborate somewhat on each of these.

1. Shrink the government. This objective is identical to Reagan’s unfulfilled third. The need is even greater now than it was 30 years ago. There is virtually no area of American life into which the federal government has not inserted itself. It ranges from the picayune (how many gallons our toilets may flush, which direction our small children may face in our automobiles) to the serious (what we may eat, where we may build our houses, whether we can be promoted at work, where our children may go to school) to the tyrannical (controlling our health care, imposing crippling taxes and regulations on our industry, taking our property on an unconstitutional whim). In many ways, the US government today oppresses Americans to a greater extent than King George’s Britain did in the mid/late eighteenth century. To make matters worse, our government leavens its tyrannical behavior with incompetence. It continues to expand entitlement programs that are on the cusp of bankrupting the country; it increases the national debt to levels guaranteed to impoverish our children and grandchildren; and it refuses to identify clearly and fight resolutely the Islamic fundamentalists (foreign and domestic) who have declared war on us.

The task seems herculean, especially in light of two enormous obstacles. First, the entire education establishment (from kindergarten through graduate school), aided by the media and other leftist-dominated, opinion-forming organs of society, has brainwashed too many Americans into thinking that the government is actually performing its assigned role properly and that in fact it is not doing enough. Second, the liberals have arranged it so that an ever increasing portion of the populace is dependent on the government—for direct payments, jobs, contracts, grants and various ‘benefits.’ Such people may recognize the threat that the government has become, but they resist any change for fear of jeopardizing their own welfare.

Shrinking the government is indeed a tall order as Reagan’s inability to manage it substantiates. But there are things a conservative government could do; for example: eliminate the most egregiously wasteful programs, reduce the budget of every federal agency by at least 20%, close at least one cabinet level department (Education, Energy and Labor would be my first choices), re-energize the deregulation  process started by Reagan, and of course cut taxes and spending in general. There is infinitely more that could be done, but that would require the second mode of power. Even in the limited mode, I believe the country would support an effort to shrink the leviathan and move toward restoring the government to the more modest role intended by the Founders.

2. Defeat Islamic Fundamentalism. This objective is of course analogous to Reagan’s second. It is worth recalling that the United States (under Wilson) led the West in the defeat of the German-Austrian-Ottoman alliance—although historians have begun to doubt the worthiness of that effort. On the other hand, there is no question as to the moral correctness or necessity of the effort led by the United States and Britain (under FDR and Churchill) to rid the world of German-Italian-Japanese fascism. Similarly, the effort sparked by Reagan (aided by Thatcher and Pope John Paul II) to dispatch communism to the ash heap of history was a monumental achievement of the Western World. Much as we wish that these sorts of challenges would stop coming our way, the US and the West are confronted once again by an ideological enemy bent on our destruction. The next conservative government must strive to defuse this threat as well.

The hardest part of this effort will be deciding to do it. The detailed plans will be drawn of course by those who will implement them, but it seems to me that at a minimum those plans must include:

  • No more pussyfooting around the identification of the enemy—rather a clear pronouncement that radical Islam, together with the countries that harbor and promote it, is indeed the enemy. Unfortunately, we must also recognize that this pernicious movement enjoys wide support in the Muslim world.
  • Dealing with Iran, whether or not it has become nuclear—presuming that the Mullahs have not been done in by the locals before then.
  • Dealing with Saudi Arabia, the seedbed of Wahhabism and therefore the font of much of the philosophy that motivates the enemy.
  • Helping Europe to deal with its large but undigested Muslim population. Those that pledge allegiance to radical Islam and refuse to be assimilated should be deported; and Muslim immigration must be drastically curtailed.
  • Ditto with our Muslim population.
  • Developing strategies to help bring the non-radical part of the Muslim world into the 21st century.

3. Recapture the culture. There is no analog to any of Reagan’s objectives here. Certainly Reagan recognized the dreadful effect that the liberals’ capture of the culture was having on the nation. But I think he didn’t see it as a political problem, at least not one he could address in a fundamental way. (He did on rare occasions though; e.g., in his ‘farewell’ speech, when he talked about a re-emphasis on the study of American history by the nation’s youth.) Well, not only should the culture be seriously addressed by a new conservative government, but in fact, I believe this objective to be the most important of the three. I (and others) have spoken often of the slowly developing, deadly scheme by which the Left captured the culture of our nation. (See e.g., http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/05/17/what-culture-is-it-that-the-politics-have-caught-up-with/) The theory was that ‘the politics would follow the culture’ and that is precisely what has happened. Therefore, I believe it is impossible for conservatives to permanently regain political supremacy unless they first recapture the culture. This must be one of the fundamental objectives of any future conservative government.

Once again, those who actually do it will set the agenda, but that agenda should certainly incorporate the ideas expressed in another of my IC articles (http://new.ronlipsman.com/2009/04/10/different-visions/), to wit: ‘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…’ I would augment those ideas with the need to: develop major conservative media outlets (beyond Fox News) to combat the big three networks; aggressively attack the liberal mindset that dominates higher education; and finally demand that our founding documents (the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers) be studied regularly by all members of society—adults as well as children.

 

Hopefully, a conservative recapture of the culture will not take a century—as the successful liberal assault did. A conservative renaissance in limited mode will allow us to get started. If the miracle of a strong mode occurs, we can surely get it done in a matter of decades. The politics will follow and then my grandchildren will not have to worry—as I do—about whether their grandchildren will live in a free and prosperous United States of America.

Obama Practices Reverse (or is it Perverse) Hospitality

In this past weekend’s headlines, I read: ‘Obama to meet with Myanmar rulers.’ This is reminiscent of other headlines of the same ilk like: ‘Obama bows to Saudi king’ or ‘Obama is nonplussed by Chavez’ tirade and gift of anti-US book’ or ‘Obama offers hand of friendship to Iranian Mullahs.’ Of course, Obama’s obsequious courtship of certain world leaders does not extend to everyone. Past headlines also include: ‘Obama to snub Israeli Prime Minister’ and ‘Obama removes bust of Winston Churchill from Oval Office’ and ‘Obama snatches missile defense shield from Poland and the Czech Republic.’

There seems to be a pattern here. If a country has long-standing, friendly relations with the USA, if its people share common values with the American people—like love of liberty, commitment to a society governed according to the rule of law, freedom of religion, free market capitalism—then it can expect the back of the hand from our enlightened President. Conversely, if a country is committed to repression of its citizens, a government-controlled economy, world-wide revolution and above all, enmity toward the United States, then its leaders can expect warmth and love from our post-American President. It wouldn’t surprise me if Obama extended an invitation to the White House to Hezbollah’s Nasrallah or Hamas’ Mashaal.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Sun-Tzu is reputed to have said: ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.’ Popular culture attributes the aphorism to Michael Corleone in Godfather II. The thinking of our new godfather, er, that is, the President, modifies that to ‘you should fall all over yourself to be nice to your enemies, but it’s perfectly alright to kick your friends in the teeth.’

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.

 

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.