Posted on 11/04/2013 5:18:33 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Anyone who pays attention to politics can see that when Democrats attack, they speak from the same text, and when they vote, they march in lockstep. If one Democrat says the wealthy must pay their “fair share,” all Democrats do — regardless of the merits of the charge. If their leaders say Republicans want to shut down the government in order to deny Americans affordable care, the rest of the party will follow their lead — whether the claim is true or not. When a key program like Obamacare is the issue, not only do Democrats back it with one voice, but every player on the political left — journalists, professors, talk-show hosts, union heads, MoveOn radicals, and Occupy anarchists — falls into line and promotes it with virtually identical words. They act in “solidarity” in fair political weather and foul, and they do it even for a program like Obamacare, which (as some of them must surely see) is ill-conceived, falsely presented, incompetently executed, and fiscally unsustainable.
When the voices of the Left all come together, the amplification is stupefying. The result is that a morally bankrupt, politically tyrannical, economically destructive party is able to set the course of an entire nation and put it on the road to disaster.
Republicans, in contrast, speak with multiple voices, and in words that often have no relation to each other. If one Republican says “defund Obamacare,” another says, “fund the government,” even if that might mean funding Obamacare. The argument and the dissension are over tactics, not substance, since all Republicans oppose Obamacare. If one Republican says “don’t intervene in Syria,” another says “don’t hesitate”; if one says “Obama-supported immigration reform is a dagger aimed at American sovereignty,” another says “opposition to immigration reform is a death-knell for our party.” This, again, is a tactical division, since all Republicans support enforceable borders.
These contending party voices are multiplied by conservative talking heads in the nation’s media who march to their own political drums. The result is a cacophony of talking points, which in the end point nowhere. Because Republicans speak with many voices, their message is often difficult, if not impossible, to make out.
Internal dissension not only blunts the Republican attack; it hands Democrats a convenient stick with which to beat them. No one on the right, whether conservative or Republican, thinks this is a healthy situation. Why, then, is it the case? What is it that unites Democrats that Republicans lack?
It’s not a party whip to enforce discipline, since both parties have them. Moreover, there are no whips to rein in factions like the grassroots, or media voices that command larger audiences than members of Congress. That goes for both sides. Democrats also lack a formal means to bring their media sympathizers and grassroots allies into line. So how do they do it? What unites them as they go to battle?
It is the power of a unifying idea. A unifying idea is not a consensus over policy or an agreement on tactics; unanimity in these matters is difficult to achieve and impossible to sustain. Instead, their unity is inspired — forged actually — by a missionary idea. On the eve of his election in 2008, Barack Obama said to his followers: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” That idea of transformation is what unites the Left. Unity in embracing a future goal — the fundamental transformation of society — is what motivates them to march together. It is what makes them “progressives” in the first place. It is their identity in the same way “Christian” and “Jew” are identities of people with a religious faith.
“Progressive,” “socialist,” and “liberal” are interchangeable terms that describe members of a moral crusade. The goal of the crusade is “social justice,” or its equivalent: equality. The quest for this utopia of social and economic equality is what forges their alliances, defines their allegiances, and justifies the means they use to get there. They may differ on particular policies and tactics to advance the cause, but if they are Democrats or supporters of the Democrats, they see the party as the practical vehicle for making the idea a reality.
To transform society, you need the power of the state; it is the only way their future can be achieved. That is why they are willing to follow the marching orders of a party that can control the state, and that is why they want to advance its fortunes. The Democrats’ perennial campaign message — Republicans are conducting a war on minorities, women, working Americans, and the poor — rests on the central idea that unites progressives behind the party: We are for equality, they are against it.
The reasoning behind such behavior was revealed by Leon Trotsky when he explained why he would not leave the Bolshevik party even after Stalin — who would eventually murder him — became its absolute leader: “We can only be right with and by the Party,” Trotsky said, “for history has provided no other way of being in the right.” “If the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.”
Non-Bolsheviks may not share Trotsky’s metaphysical certitude, but they will recognize the principle. If the cause is about changing the world and there is only one party that can acquire the means to do it, then even though it may be wrong on this or that matter, its fortunes must be advanced and its power defended. This commitment is magnified when the opposition party is viewed as the enemy of the noble cause. If Republicans are seen as the party of privilege at war with minorities, women, and the poor, then their ideas are not only wrong but evil. As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.”.......
..........National-security issues are off the political radar because the Left wants to keep them off and because conservatives who are focused on economic-policy issues have simply let them do it. But in a democracy like ours, national security is first of all about freedom and its defense. That is why the Left is not particularly happy with national-security matters and wants to shrink our military and open our borders. It does so in the name of equality — of nations.
The attack on our military and our borders is an existential threat to our freedom, the first in our modern history with such a strong domestic component. Unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have been reluctant to frame national security as an issue in that way. Meanwhile we are confronted by a new totalitarian enemy in political Islam as promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and the regimes in Syria and Iran. It is no accident that our president and his party have supported the Brotherhood — the spearhead of political Islam — at home and abroad, and appeased our Islamist enemies in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran.
The very struggle that inspired the Right in the Cold War era — the battle between tyranny and freedom — is once again staring us in the face, but we are reluctant to name it. We have gone almost silent instead. The silence must end. It is time to connect the battle for individual freedom at home and the defense of our free society abroad, and to make them one. That is the way to advance the conservative message and unify the political forces on which the future of our nation depends.
Yada yada.
Bring back American jobs.
Done. I just brought them all back.
However, on October 27, 1964, two years after he had left GE, Reagan delivered a nationally-televised speech in support of conservative Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president. Supporters and critics alike thereafter referred to Reagan’s remarks as “The Speech.” The dean of the Washington press corps referred to it as “the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan’s ‘Cross of Gold’ speech in 1896.” In 1966, Reagan was elected governor of California.
As Reagan later commented, he had been giving The Speech for years, in a variety of versions, in his role as GE’s “Traveling Ambassador.” But Reagan learned more in his GE years than a set of prepared remarks. He became familiar with such diverse thinkers as von Mises, Lenin, Hayek, and the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. He read and reread the practical economics of Henry Hazlitt. He quoted Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. He observed GE’s vice president Lemuel Boulware, whom many leaders in corporate America regarded as the most successful labor negotiator of all time, and Reagan himself sharpened his negotiating skills during this period when he served another term as president of the Screen Actors Guild. (An intriguing aspect of this process occurred in 1960, when Boulware was urging GE’s workers not to strike at the same time as Reagan, as SAG president again, took his members out on strike against the Hollywood producers. Incredibly, the situation worked out for the benefit of both GE and SAG.)........................................The GE years provide an insight, to borrow Bill Safire’s phrase, as to “what made Reagan Reagan.” The question remains whether the political landscape today affords an opportunity to achieve a revolution and whether there is anyone on the scene to lead it."
Cool.
I’ll look for the improvement in our national trade deficit then, this month.
Should be a massive shift.
Working Americans, making the things we buy right here.
In America.
A TIME FOR CHOOSING (The Speech – October 27, 1964)”.................................Now—so now we declare “war on poverty,” or “You, too, can be a Bobby Baker.” Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we’re spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have—and remember, this new program doesn’t replace any, it just duplicates existing programs—do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn’t duplicated. This is the youth feature. We’re now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we’re going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we’re going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.
Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things—we’re never “for” anything.
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.
Now—we’re for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.
But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.
A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary—his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due—that the cupboard isn’t bare?
Barry Goldwater thinks we can.
At the same time, can’t we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn’t you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we’re for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we’re against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They’ve come to the end of the road...................................”
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/timechoosing.html
“WE” are doing no such thing because there IS NO WE unless you believe in THE COLLECTIVE. Business owners simply try to carve out in freedom the best way for them to make a profit. Those in the energy sector are doing so with native jobs. Those in many other sectors cannot do that.
If you think its so damned ez to do, why don’t you finally STFU and CREATE SOME JOBS YOURSELF…….I mean, after about ten thousand posts all on the same subject, I think it’s fair to issue YOU a personal buck up or shut up challenge.
Again, your economic understanding would have Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and your heroine Sarah Palin scoffing at your absurd shallowness. I join them.
“.....................Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ‘round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits—not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/timechoosing.html
I think America needs to go into defensive mode, and bring back American strengths.
We need to enact import taxes, and bring back American businesses. America needs some sort of national defense, against the world.
America is alone in the entire world, currently, in selling off our infrastructure.
Bring it back.
America is going bankrupt.
This cannot continue. America needs jobs.
Bring them back. Protect American jobs. I’m series.
I’m sorry to repeat myself, but this is darn important, and nobody is talking about it.
We are going broke.
It’s important - and your hear is in the right place - but you are still, with due respect, economically ignorant and shallow. You see specific jobs that are lost but are totally blind to jobs that are created by the very same forces. You are a buggy whip advocate without realizing it.
Again, Sarah Palin giggles at your childish lack of understanding. I am not so charitable.
You have nailed it. This is an IDEOLOGICAL war. Our ideology says that individual rights trump those of the collective. Our enemies say the opposite. We need to frame our stance as the guardians of individual freedoms, and our enemies as demanding we give up our individuality and become faceless drones who serve the caprices of our overlords.
“Freedom” isn’t some vague abstraction, It is the right to buy a super-sized soda. It is the right the burn whatever light bulbs you choose. It is the right to flush your toilet using 10 gallons of water if you feel like it. And it’s the right to start a business, travel without restriction, and live your religious beliefs every day on every street and in every office.
In collectivizing rights, the leftist/socialist/marxist tyrants deprive us of those fcreedoms under the pretense that all property — including liberty — is held in common. Remember, if you achieve individual success, “you didn’t build that.” Everyone contributed to your success so you must now share its fruits with the collective.
Nuts.
You are not broke, as long as you have faith.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, the High School Cheater, WHO chief and personal tragedy called Reagan a “Failed Actor”.
seven girls!
seven girls?
Yeah, war on women, right??????
BTTT!
You got it, The Democrats are drones and the media are zombies. And the Rino’s are fifth columnists and quislings. Might as well call them by their right names.
Re: “The argument and the dissension are over tactics, not substance.”
I stopped reading right there.
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