This guest post is being published in an effort to promote a different point of view. The publisher and editor of The Socratic Review may agree or disagree with some points of this commentary however, this is immaterial since we encourage all to make informed decisions based upon differing points of view, even ones we may disagree with. The key in a free society, especially in light of the events earlier today in Washington D.C. only underscore the need for peaceful and responsible political debate and discourse based on objective facts.
Dear Mr. Walters:
Much of the reported news today is manufactured with an ulterior motive that is never readily apparent. The COVID-19 scares of 2020 were based upon facts, but much of the panic and justifications for political regulation were not true. Sure, the disease is real and can be dangerous, but there are no asymptomatic carriers, and the death rates appear to be massively inflated while the contraction rate is massively under-reported.
This is not a new situation. I have been close to politics much of my life and even worked in politics for a short period. Someone is always trying to coerce the masses. They manipulate popular mood by half-truths and lies. Again, this is nothing new.
I think that this has always been the case. Humans want to get their own way and believe that they should. It can be small aspirations or large, but human nature is one of self-righteousness and self-absorption. Our species justifies some of the most unethical behavior by telling ourselves many lies and half-truths to feel that others perceive us as acceptable or even superior. It’s all about feeding that narcissism that we can’t get rid of.
Just going back to the 20th century, there are several examples of mass coercion to achieve selfish goals. The communist movement started in the 1880s and really didn’t get strong enough traction until the first years of the next century. Lenin manipulated the small and bizarre subculture of communist revolutionaries in Europe to emerge as a preeminent leader of such a large movement. He did this by lying about his intent, parliamentary trickery, and violence. With such a clearly despicable leader, how did the communist movement clean up his public image so well as to remain popular 100 years later?
Stalin was not so successful at maintaining that clean image as was Lenin. It may be because he led such a large and populated country that he couldn’t expunge history. We find that the further events are in the past, the less they seem relevant to newer generations. The Soviet Union was a generation ago and is now no longer a teachable example. Same with the Cuban revolution, which was merely an extension of Soviet power.
Tactics used by the mass communist movement have been and are being applied to the United States populace. There are elements in society that do not believe that the U.S. Constitution should be our guiding principles. They have continuously experimented with propaganda that would resonate with the masses and obfuscate their goals.
FDR was one of the first leaders in the United States that moved this movement forward. He sponsored and signed unconstitutional laws that usurped U.S. citizens’ liberties in the name of public stability and safety. He nationalized and centrally planned energy production, illegally assigned the price of gold to the markets daily. He illegally confiscated personal property to fund national paternal programs like social security. He claimed he was fighting off the Great Depression, but the fact was that he was consolidating and centralizing illegal authority and undermining our federal republic.
Unions were legalized under FDR in 1935 when he signed the National Labor Relations Act or the Wagner Act. Ostensibly it was to legalize collective bargaining for better working conditions, but it really leveraged significant profit-sharing programs, forcing large companies to share their gains with union leaders. The workers usually got very little in return. They were forced to go on strike so that the union leaders could blackmail for more of the company’s profits from corporate shareholders, and the strikers would only receive a small “strike pay” allowance. Unions didn’t have to risk capital or produce anything beneficial to create wealth. It was now legalized extortion.
Union leadership became a profitable career path once this legalized graft was put in place. Unions would encourage their members to believe that they had a paternal protector in the workplace like the federal government is in the public arena. Now, the story went, the little guy has a tough older brother to beat up those mean bullies down the block. No wonder the Italian mafia controlled unions for so long. They used the same effective tactics.
Unions proved that money could be extracted from the economy without providing some kind of value or service. FDR also demonstrated that the constitution didn't have to be an obstacle for the federal government to illegally infringe on citizens' rights. He also enabled his political allies to harvest money from the nation without providing any value by warping markets.
To effectively manipulate the flow of capital in the economy in ways that contradicted market demands, self-styled political elites needed to deconstruct the U.S. federal republic using the power of mass movements and effective use of manipulative propaganda within the U.S. culture. This elitist group created non-government organizations (NGO), using the unions' tactics, to leverage the courts and administrative bureaucracy so that U.S. voters couldn't be obstacles to the anti-constitution transformation.
The next grand experiment for the elitist cabal within the U.S. would be to undermine respect for the culture's traditions and authorities. It seems oxymoronic that one would erode government authority and solve the issue by strengthening federal power but that "doublethink" was effective. The anti-war movement began as another attempt to wrest public policy from political parties that partnered with private industry. Before this period, the parties believed that the government's core function was to ensure public safety, national sovereignty, and a self-sustaining economy with minimal government intrusion. These priorities had to be undermined.
The Vietnam war provided the next opportunity to de-legitimize the current power structure. The market was still too free, and NGOs didn’t have enough influence to divert enough of the economy towards greater centralized social control. Unfortunately, the anti-war movement didn’t gain enough popular support on its own, so it had to merge with other social evolution with more compelling and legitimate urgency, such as the civil rights movement.
The lack of equal protection under the law for black Americans was egregious and resonated with most American’s sense of fairness. The anti-constitutional movements saw this target of opportunity and merged these issues with several others that would create a “grievance platform” that ultimately gained control of the Democratic Party. Civil rights was a straightforward issue that had to be corrected and provided legitimacy to the other issues that didn’t resonate with the public. However, consolidating many fringe constituencies with a significant popular issue created perceived legitimacy for them all.
The Democratic Party became the champion of “Government as a Business.” NGOs gained more significant influence on the administrative bureaucracies and on the Party. In the 1970s, public unions expanded rapidly to represent teachers, clerks, firemen, police, prison guards, and others. Now the movement to channel capital away from activities that create jobs and consolidate capital has captured most government workers, and union membership was mandatory to work in these, what are now considered, industries.
The statist Democratic Party struggled to find other issues like civil rights that they could use as a front issue to provide credibility to more marginal issues, but for decades they came up short. They tried to “give back the land” to Native Americans but were quickly labeled extremists.
The “ecology” movement was an early environmental movement in the 1970s that initially caught the public’s attention with an anti-littering campaign and focused on Southern California’s severe air quality problems. But this didn’t create a strong enough popular passion for legitimizing more government intrusion on private decision making. A crying native American on the side of the road could only justify so much outrage.
Radical elitists tried variations on the ecology theme by claiming the “population bomb” would use up all of the earth’s natural resources and that we were entering a new ice age because of our pollution. They did an about-face and claimed we were entering a global warming phase caused by industrialization because ice-ages took too long to motivate a political movement. The doublethink continued as they grappled for issues that would spark enough popular support to legitimize greater federal government control over the economy and our constitutionally protected rights.
In the 1990s, they were still struggling to identify that compelling issue that would legitimize federal control of the economy. Gun control has been tried several times, but besides a few isolated horrible incidents, gun violence has been going down since the 1980s. Statists have tried to establish health care as a human right. Still, the public generally recognizes that government is inefficient and unaccountable by nature and has only resonated with true believers of "government as a business."
It wasn't until the COVID-19 scare that the Democratic Party has found an issue that they could broadly test the elimination of constitutional rights by executive order. In Democratic-run states, they have ordered the 1st amendment rights to free assembly, the freedom to practice religion, and free speech to be limited or eliminated. They are also violating the 4th amendment by illegally tracking citizen's locations through their cell phones. The popular refrain is that people who demand their rights are selfish and shouldn't be allowed to risk others.
The Democratic Party is testing our tolerance for authoritarianism to see how far they can push the society because they have plans to "transform"our country. They mean by "transformation" allows political leaders to arbitrarily make laws without due-process and that judicial review is based upon situational ideological priorities rather than a consistent and knowable legal foundation.
The United States is at a crossroads and will quickly lose control of its institutions. Unions and other NGOs are now setting political priorities, administrative bureaucracies are their enforcement arm, and the Democratic Party provides the political legitimacy for this unconstitutional rule. The faceless nature of where the actual regulations, rules, and laws are created ensures that decision-makers are no longer accountable to voters. Unions and NGOs finance the election cycle to provide political air cover, and a captured media ensures that not too much attention is placed on these unholy alliances.
Government as a business started about 100 years ago, and after all this time, they're finally reaping the rewards. Economic value is becoming irrelevant. What is more important is to have friends in high places to ensure that your business can be chosen to be successful by the Federal Government's central planners. Soon, the economy won't make enough money for those central planners to dole out and what happens then?
"Diogenes"
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