Posted on 05/06/2009 1:26:18 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
The GOP platform in 1996 stated: "The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education." President Bush let Ted Kennedy write his education bill and he outspent Bill Clinton. I wonder what happened to undoing Roe v. Wade...what happened to getting rid of AMTRAK? It seems to me that the GOP abandoned limited government during 8 years of George Bush and now with a full blown socialist like Obama...is Conservatism politically dead? In 1962, a Madison Square Garden arena was filled with 18,000 conservatives and Goldwater predicted a wave of conservatism, but it is impossible to imagine 18,000 conservatives gathering in Madison Square Garden today.
The GOP took full control of the federal government and decided that big government was fine as long as the GOP was in control of it.
That's pretty much it. At least some folks get it.
Trivia question: Who was the first U.S. President to propose federal aid to public schools in the states? Which provision of the Constitution did he rely on?
Answer: Eisenhower; and he relied on the provision empowering Congress to "raise and support Armies." (The first federal aid to public schools was the "National Defense Education Act," which was claimed to be necessary to provide a population sufficiently educated to overcome Soviet technical accomplishments such as Sputnik).
You mean like the same promise that Reagan had too???
Just abolishing the Dept of Education or AMTRAK is no longer enough. The federal government’s growth is so far out of control that the States now face the prospect of systematically eliminating half of the federal government through a constitutional convention.
This means the end of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, much of the National Intelligence structures, many cabinet departments, renouncing the national debt, creating a balanced budget amendment to the constitution, etc.
It also means reducing the jurisdiction and appellate authority of the federal courts, renouncing many international treaties and obligations, returning much of the US military currently deployed overseas, and returning most federal lands confiscated from the individual States.
I guess they don’t mind being a minority party...as long as they control the remnant and get a few bread crumbs.
Time for a Second Contract with America. Too bad Newt is too busy with the DC party circuit.
Question answered.
Just a bunch of happy talk.
A federal department of education was in the socialist platform in 1912.
I think that is why they have abandoned support for conservatives and the GOP is going for the brand image as the “less bad” Socialist, er, moderate party.
>”National Defense Education Act,”
I have an idea... drop ALL federal funding of public schools EXCEPT specifically for firearms training classes... and the use of “assault rifles” should be encouraged, because they’re being taught as an aide to national defense.
And with sitting on the “global warming” couch with Pelosi.
...they don’t mind being a minority party....
If they get to play golf with the Dems every now and then.
“The GOP took full control of the federal government and decided that big government was fine as long as the GOP was in control of it. “
Thats about right. Years of wild spending and expanding government with Bush as the President and a Republican Congress kinda destroyed our credibility on fiscal issues.
Hey clown, Newt's contract called for defunding the Left. From Planned Parenthood, NPR, your name it, all were to be left with no taxpayer $.
A bigger reason is that social/religious “conservatives” decided that anything and everything was worth sacrificing, for even incremental advancement of their anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-gay, and anti-sex-outside-of marriage agendas. Since taken together, this group of anti- agendas are unacceptable to a substantial majority of voters, a large percentage of voters who would otherwise prefer to vote for candidates supporting drastic shrinking of the federal beast, end up voting for whoever the Democratic candidate is, and a large percentage of “conservatives” vote for and eagerly support any candidate or elected official who at least pays lip service to their social agenda, no matter how many additional billions of tax dollars that candidate or elected official pours into various federal schemes.
The nation would be a lot better off if conservatives tossed these social issues off the political cliff, and relocated these debates to homes and churches and synagogues. Socialist strategists are having a field day keeping the masses on both the left and right focused on these social issues, which easily provoke irrational emotional responses from both sides, and keep them distracted from the much more important issue of how government is appropriating ever larger chunks of the lives of all productive citizens, through ever larger schemes of taxation and regulation.
Oh God. Art History. Who would admit to that?
Sputnik scared the crud out of most Americans. It raised the specter of Russian control of space for military purposes. Eisenhower's response was to say that we needed federal aid for science education in the public schools.
I vaguely remeber the Russo/Sputnik/science connection in my Boston public school (I was born in ‘48), but waaayyyy too young to get the politics of it all.
I think you are absolutely wrong. You exhibit a tendency that many libertarians exhibit...you thrash social conservatism...even though you point out that on social issues that all social conservatives get is lip service...much like we get with smaller government talk. I’m socially conservative...very much so...and I have very strong libertarian views on government and I’m tired of hearing how I must abandon the culture war...it is a false dichotomy. Rockefeller republicans are just as hostile to social conservatism as they are to limited government. I’m baffled by how you’d abandon the fight against what is essentially cultural marxism and throw our efforts “off the cliff.” So it may be that you hypocritically give in to an agenda that ensures we are culturally wed to socialism to achieve limited government! You dream!
once the Dept. of Ed. takes direct control of all higher education financing (and is able to grant loan forgiveness and other favors as needed) you can forget ever getting rid of them.
We, the people, have to demand that government be small. How? http://pushbackuntil.com
We have to codify the amount of money we let government spend. No more can we trust any one person or party - it has to be up to us.
Government has done nothing but expand geometrically during the decades since “social issues” became the center of “conservative” political debate. We are being dragged towards socialism because “social issues” that have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism are being allowed to dominate the political landscape. Who cares how other people are living, as long as they’re not doing it with our money? Instead of being dragged into an idiotic fight over gay marriage, conservatives should be working to get government totally out of the marriage business, and focusing on dismantling the huge web of socialist wealth redistribution programs that are tied to government control of marriage. Nobody is saying that you have to abandon the “culture war” — just fight it outside of the political system. Of course, getting rid of welfare programs will have the effect of drastically reducing a lot of social problems, such as teenage girls having babies by a series of unemployed and unemployable men, and college students wasting four years and boatloads of taxpayer money “studying” things like “Queer Literature” and “Black Studies” — but the political focus needs to be on the financial side of the equation.
There is no such thing as “cultural marxism”. Marxism is an economic political philosophy which has its foundation in state ownership and control of all property and means of wealth procuction. Preventing government from having that control absolutely precludes the practice of Marxism. Living as a homosexual couple or having an abortion are not forms of “Marxism”; they are private choices made by private citizens, who should not have access to taxpayers’ money to subsidize those or any other choices (including heterosexual marriage and/or childbearing).
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”—John Adams
Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as “multiculturalism.”
Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs’s first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary’s public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points. They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and very important variable. They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.
Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented “Critical Theory.” What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a “racist” or “sexist” of “fascist” - - and is also mentally ill.
Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood).
After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America. He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand. In his book “Eros and Civilization,” he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, “Make love, not war”). Marcuse also argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief “guru” of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America’s state ideology.
The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and Political Correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward that goal. But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.What is Cultural Marxism?
Our smiley faced socialism is actually big grin socialism.
As I recall, when LBJ was in college, his professor asked him to write an essay on the subject. He wrote this big long treatise and his professor returned it as “wrong.” The constitution didn’t say anything about education. So of course he, LBJ, was going to see to it otherwise.
I think the story is in Paul Boller’s Presidential Anecdotes.
As recently as the 1980’s, it was possible to attend college on a National Defense scholarship, and never study one lick of science.
“What began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society-a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. . . . Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.”—Irving Kristol
And sadly, there's also a plethora of "conservatives" who aim to misuse government in exactly the same way. Big government "conservatives" who want a big expensive government to try to force people to be "moral and religious" (to be defined by the big government "conservatives, of course, just the way leftists want to force their socialist definition of "moral" on everyone). "Conservatives" who have bought into the idea that government should be a tool of social engineering have bought into the foundation of socialist thought.
Very interesting fact - much appreciated
No, conservatives want to restore what has been since America was founded...surely you aren’t going to disparage the morality and religious proclamations of the founding fathers as “big government conservatism.” Conservatives, to their credit, stand in opposition to cultural marxism that seeks to displace western civilization and values. Laws is always concerned about morality...murder, robbery, theft, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and so on. Surely you can’t believe that moral relativism is conducive to a republican form of government.
Another point, I’m a dreaded “social conservative,” and I support abolishing income tax, the welfare state (social security, medicare, and Mediciaid to name a few), federal departments (education, labor) agencies like the EPA, I support withdrawing from NATO, ending our participation in the U.N., ending foreign aid, and so on. So I challenge you to address me specifically.
Liberals started the “culture war”, conservatives had no choice but to fight back.
These battles about abortion and gay marriage did not begin with us.
It is they who legalized abortion, and it is they who began a campaign to dress up sodomy in the flowery language of civil rights and marriage, and then demand that it be taught to our children!
This rewriting of history makes me sick...
I know, I worked for one of those brave men, I remember it vividly. You should have seen the horrific ads that were run against us in 96.
And then our pundits made it conventional wisdom that the Republicans just tried to do too many radical things...balderdash! We just have not a clue how to battle their massive propaganda machine...to this very day.
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