Socialism In The End Zone
Progressives Have Moved The Ball Bit-By-Bit For A Century
by Michael D. Hume, M.S.
Late January in the United States: the season of the State of The Union presidential address, and the run-up to the Super Bowl. As the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers prepare to face each other about a week from now (and as the media bombard us with every exciting detail of that preparation), it might be helpful to remember that American politics is a lot like American football. Two sides battle back and forth in both games, and it's amusing to watch.
But since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, America's first true "progressive" president, the rules of both games have changed. And the changes, often very subtle and made over more than a century, have left us with both games very different from those that were being played a hundred years ago.
Back in 1900, the game we call "football" in the U.S. was brutal. It was a college game - there were no pro teams - and college boys died every year from the damage football did to their bodies. No padding... thin leather helmets... and no real strategy: every play was a smash-mouth running play in which the most violent collisions possible were not only encouraged, but required of all young men on both teams. Teddy, the "rough rider," turned out to have a tender enough heart to mandate that football change, or be banned. He literally forced the game to incorporate the forward pass, which added strategy and finesse and reduced some of the violence in the sport. It's still the roughest sport out there (with the possible exception of hockey)... but deaths are much less common. So good for Teddy.
Meanwhile, Teddy's time was also a pivot point in the game of American politics and government. To push the metaphor, you could say the founding fathers of the nation have been squaring off against the forces of authoritarianism and elite rule since the nation began. The founders grabbed the ball from the British, drove down the field, and scored the first touchdown by setting up a government unlike any seen before in Earth's history. They sought to prove that, contrary to prevailing wisdom at the time (and at almost all times in world history), man really could rule himself... and the documents they created to found the nation, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, were meant to ensure one nation of citizens the opportunity for self rule. What a surprise! The winners of the U.S. Revolutionary War, unlike any victors ever before, sought not to seize control and power over people and territory, but to use their victory as a chance to give that control and power away.
Touchdown!
It took another fourscore and several years, but the founders posthumously kicked the metaphoric extra point during the Civil War by asserting the supremacy of those founding documents to end slavery and preserve the Union. The nation paid a terrible price to make that point - but it's the point that defined what sort of nation America would be for generations to come. A nation where all humans are thought to be created equal, and blessed by God with the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to pursue happiness.
Shortly thereafter, collectivist thought - embodied in the writings of such blackguards as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - became all the rage in Europe (which was still the only location of global super-powers). Intellectuals began to dream of Utopian societies in which the all-powerful government would take from citizens according to each's ability, and mete out the society's largesse to citizens in accordance with each's needs. Absolute equality was the dream - not the equal opportunity guaranteed by America's founders, but actual equal outcomes. Not just the right to pursue happiness in freedom, but the right to your fair share of government-issued happiness. And to ensure all this, of course, the government had to have absolute authoritarian rule. Man, they argued, shot through with infirmities such as greed and sloth, simply cannot rule himself.
So while we continued to play football on this side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals were setting up their own experiments, most notably in the Soviet Union (born shortly after Teddy's presidency). The Red October revolution, unlike America's, left the communist authoritarians in charge. They did not give their power away. Instead, over the next almost-fourscore years, they introduced new terms into the international vocabulary: central planning... quotas... mass shortages... permanent military buildup. People who tried to opt-out of this paradise were called "defectors" - if you wanted out of the Soviet Union, they reasoned, you had a defect.
By and by, other societies decided that what the Soviets had going looked good (mostly the elites in those societies thought so), and they tried their own experiments. They didn't work - eventually you run out of other peoples' money, and average folks who would've been inspired by opportunity had learned not ambition, but dependence on the ubiquitous Mother State. Steadily, over decades, people in the collectivist societies got worse-and-worse off while the rest of the world's citizens kept earning better-and-better lives. And we all know how the Soviet experiment - the most pure example of communism - ended up. Other communist regimes have had to abandon the "pure" form of communism in form of a lighter version commonly called "state capitalism" (still authoritarian, and much more statism than capitalism; but, easier to "sell").
By the way: the free West, led by the U.S., still subsidizes those societies (even mighty China) with "foreign aid." Betcha didn't know that. Statists in America and throughout the West have a vested interest in the success of these overseas adventures in collectivism.
Speaking of home-grown statists, U.S.intellectuals watched these experiments with interest for several decades. One of the biggest (and briefest) of these experiments with collectivism was that of National Socialism (brought to you by Hitler and his "Nazis") in Germany. Hitler was certainly a guy who did not feel man could rule himself, and we all know where he led Germany. Eventually he had to be forcibly removed. The world learned harsh lessons from both World Wars, and collectivism took a hit.
What does this have to do with football, you ask? Well, the intellectual elites in America, watching these developments from afar (though the U.S. did have to participate in the wars), were still down 7-0 in the metaphoric game. They realized that bloody revolution to replace the founders' constructions with collectivism was not going to work in America. Life was just too good here, and no one was angry enough to revolt. In other parts of the world, socialists had influenced their economies to ruin their currencies, create massive inflation, and take advantage of the ensuing social unrest to seize power. That seemed tough in the U.S., where the poor were (and still are) the world's most well-off poor, and everyone had a chance to get rich through hard work and discipline. So rather than revolution - the great, deep, touchdown pass in the political game - American collectivists decided to move the ball "progressively" - a little at a time. These "progressives" (nice-sounding word, huh?) sought not revolution, but evolution. If they arrive at the end zone of socialism gradually, they reasoned, taking a freedom here and a liberty there, Americans might just hand over their self-rule voluntarily.
The progressives made some big plays early. Teddy, that rough-riding war hero, made soft-hearted social programs seem macho enough, and that gave the progressives their initial first-down. The election of Woodrow Wilson, the "father of public administration," was another end-run... here was an academic statist who'd risen to the highest office in the land, helping replace bold action (such as military heroism) with intellectual elitism as the standard for leadership in America. First down! And when Teddy's cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was elected to an unprecedented fourth term on the back of his "new bill of rights" (a slate of collectivist social programs that even the Soviets would've admired), it was a broken-field dash deep into opponent territory.
But the defense stiffened around the middle of the last century. The unpleasantness of two world wars and a severe economic depression (artificially extended by FDR's policies) had given the "free" world a taste of collectivism, and it was not delicious. By 1952, a conservative war hero had been elected president and communism was fully recognized as an opponent philosophy to America's founding principles. The progressives made more big gains in the Lyndon Johnson era of the "Great Society" social programs... but by the end of the conservative Reagan Revolution, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the progressives had been sacked for a big loss.
But the progressives have kept the ball for more than a century by changing the rules of the game in their own favor. Gradually over all that time, they've taken over every influential institution in the land: the administration of government, the media, education, and even Hollywood. In 1911, people generally read factual, balanced reports of events and formed their own conclusions. Now, just try to find an unbiased report. In fact, everywhere Americans turn for influence or entertainment, let alone information, they find themselves spoon-fed with hefty portions of liberal thought. We all say we make our own decisions, and that no one controls our thinking. But... really?
Having these institutions in their pocket give the progressives some pretty nice advantages in the game. It's like this: suppose one team was down 7-0 in next week's Super Bowl, but they were able to (1) replace the referees with people from their own sideline, even wearing their team's uniforms, (2) have security remove from the stadium any fans of the other team, (3) replace the sportscasters and camera operators with their own folks - again, dressed in their team colors - and ensure that all coverage of the game would be only of their successes and record none of their rampant cheating, (4) use the Player's Association union to actually take a few of the other team's players onto their own side, or at least force those players to allow their ball-carriers to pass unmolested (consider today's RINOs - Republicans In Name Only), (5) muzzle the other team's coaches, and (6) get the National Football League rules committee to do away temporarily with the cumbersome down-and-distance rules and declare that their team was allowed to keep the ball indefinitely - regardless of the outcome of any play - until they are allowed to score a touchdown and a two-point conversion - at which point the clock would be forced to run out, and the game declared a victory for the team driving to the left.
Fun game, huh?
Sure. Super.
For the health of the nation, and indeed for the hope that man can, in at least one nation, rule himself... take personal responsibility to join the defense. You have a few hours to work every day - use them to build wealth and prosperity for yourself, your family, and your neighbors. You have a vote - use it to keep the game fair, and to stop the next end-run around the Constitution. And you have a brain - use it to get smart about what's really going on in the global game of politics and economics.
One final note: Obamacare was a Hail Mary touchdown pass for the statists, about a year ago. But one honest referee, (let's call him "T. Party") threw the flag in November and cited the progressives for flagrant interference with the rule of law. That play is under review as we speak... and if it doesn't get called back, well, turn out the lights.
Game over.
by Michael D. Hume, M.S.
Late January in the United States: the season of the State of The Union presidential address, and the run-up to the Super Bowl. As the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers prepare to face each other about a week from now (and as the media bombard us with every exciting detail of that preparation), it might be helpful to remember that American politics is a lot like American football. Two sides battle back and forth in both games, and it's amusing to watch.
But since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, America's first true "progressive" president, the rules of both games have changed. And the changes, often very subtle and made over more than a century, have left us with both games very different from those that were being played a hundred years ago.
Back in 1900, the game we call "football" in the U.S. was brutal. It was a college game - there were no pro teams - and college boys died every year from the damage football did to their bodies. No padding... thin leather helmets... and no real strategy: every play was a smash-mouth running play in which the most violent collisions possible were not only encouraged, but required of all young men on both teams. Teddy, the "rough rider," turned out to have a tender enough heart to mandate that football change, or be banned. He literally forced the game to incorporate the forward pass, which added strategy and finesse and reduced some of the violence in the sport. It's still the roughest sport out there (with the possible exception of hockey)... but deaths are much less common. So good for Teddy.
Meanwhile, Teddy's time was also a pivot point in the game of American politics and government. To push the metaphor, you could say the founding fathers of the nation have been squaring off against the forces of authoritarianism and elite rule since the nation began. The founders grabbed the ball from the British, drove down the field, and scored the first touchdown by setting up a government unlike any seen before in Earth's history. They sought to prove that, contrary to prevailing wisdom at the time (and at almost all times in world history), man really could rule himself... and the documents they created to found the nation, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, were meant to ensure one nation of citizens the opportunity for self rule. What a surprise! The winners of the U.S. Revolutionary War, unlike any victors ever before, sought not to seize control and power over people and territory, but to use their victory as a chance to give that control and power away.
Touchdown!
It took another fourscore and several years, but the founders posthumously kicked the metaphoric extra point during the Civil War by asserting the supremacy of those founding documents to end slavery and preserve the Union. The nation paid a terrible price to make that point - but it's the point that defined what sort of nation America would be for generations to come. A nation where all humans are thought to be created equal, and blessed by God with the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to pursue happiness.
Shortly thereafter, collectivist thought - embodied in the writings of such blackguards as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - became all the rage in Europe (which was still the only location of global super-powers). Intellectuals began to dream of Utopian societies in which the all-powerful government would take from citizens according to each's ability, and mete out the society's largesse to citizens in accordance with each's needs. Absolute equality was the dream - not the equal opportunity guaranteed by America's founders, but actual equal outcomes. Not just the right to pursue happiness in freedom, but the right to your fair share of government-issued happiness. And to ensure all this, of course, the government had to have absolute authoritarian rule. Man, they argued, shot through with infirmities such as greed and sloth, simply cannot rule himself.
So while we continued to play football on this side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals were setting up their own experiments, most notably in the Soviet Union (born shortly after Teddy's presidency). The Red October revolution, unlike America's, left the communist authoritarians in charge. They did not give their power away. Instead, over the next almost-fourscore years, they introduced new terms into the international vocabulary: central planning... quotas... mass shortages... permanent military buildup. People who tried to opt-out of this paradise were called "defectors" - if you wanted out of the Soviet Union, they reasoned, you had a defect.
By and by, other societies decided that what the Soviets had going looked good (mostly the elites in those societies thought so), and they tried their own experiments. They didn't work - eventually you run out of other peoples' money, and average folks who would've been inspired by opportunity had learned not ambition, but dependence on the ubiquitous Mother State. Steadily, over decades, people in the collectivist societies got worse-and-worse off while the rest of the world's citizens kept earning better-and-better lives. And we all know how the Soviet experiment - the most pure example of communism - ended up. Other communist regimes have had to abandon the "pure" form of communism in form of a lighter version commonly called "state capitalism" (still authoritarian, and much more statism than capitalism; but, easier to "sell").
By the way: the free West, led by the U.S., still subsidizes those societies (even mighty China) with "foreign aid." Betcha didn't know that. Statists in America and throughout the West have a vested interest in the success of these overseas adventures in collectivism.
Speaking of home-grown statists, U.S.intellectuals watched these experiments with interest for several decades. One of the biggest (and briefest) of these experiments with collectivism was that of National Socialism (brought to you by Hitler and his "Nazis") in Germany. Hitler was certainly a guy who did not feel man could rule himself, and we all know where he led Germany. Eventually he had to be forcibly removed. The world learned harsh lessons from both World Wars, and collectivism took a hit.
What does this have to do with football, you ask? Well, the intellectual elites in America, watching these developments from afar (though the U.S. did have to participate in the wars), were still down 7-0 in the metaphoric game. They realized that bloody revolution to replace the founders' constructions with collectivism was not going to work in America. Life was just too good here, and no one was angry enough to revolt. In other parts of the world, socialists had influenced their economies to ruin their currencies, create massive inflation, and take advantage of the ensuing social unrest to seize power. That seemed tough in the U.S., where the poor were (and still are) the world's most well-off poor, and everyone had a chance to get rich through hard work and discipline. So rather than revolution - the great, deep, touchdown pass in the political game - American collectivists decided to move the ball "progressively" - a little at a time. These "progressives" (nice-sounding word, huh?) sought not revolution, but evolution. If they arrive at the end zone of socialism gradually, they reasoned, taking a freedom here and a liberty there, Americans might just hand over their self-rule voluntarily.
The progressives made some big plays early. Teddy, that rough-riding war hero, made soft-hearted social programs seem macho enough, and that gave the progressives their initial first-down. The election of Woodrow Wilson, the "father of public administration," was another end-run... here was an academic statist who'd risen to the highest office in the land, helping replace bold action (such as military heroism) with intellectual elitism as the standard for leadership in America. First down! And when Teddy's cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was elected to an unprecedented fourth term on the back of his "new bill of rights" (a slate of collectivist social programs that even the Soviets would've admired), it was a broken-field dash deep into opponent territory.
But the defense stiffened around the middle of the last century. The unpleasantness of two world wars and a severe economic depression (artificially extended by FDR's policies) had given the "free" world a taste of collectivism, and it was not delicious. By 1952, a conservative war hero had been elected president and communism was fully recognized as an opponent philosophy to America's founding principles. The progressives made more big gains in the Lyndon Johnson era of the "Great Society" social programs... but by the end of the conservative Reagan Revolution, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the progressives had been sacked for a big loss.
But the progressives have kept the ball for more than a century by changing the rules of the game in their own favor. Gradually over all that time, they've taken over every influential institution in the land: the administration of government, the media, education, and even Hollywood. In 1911, people generally read factual, balanced reports of events and formed their own conclusions. Now, just try to find an unbiased report. In fact, everywhere Americans turn for influence or entertainment, let alone information, they find themselves spoon-fed with hefty portions of liberal thought. We all say we make our own decisions, and that no one controls our thinking. But... really?
Having these institutions in their pocket give the progressives some pretty nice advantages in the game. It's like this: suppose one team was down 7-0 in next week's Super Bowl, but they were able to (1) replace the referees with people from their own sideline, even wearing their team's uniforms, (2) have security remove from the stadium any fans of the other team, (3) replace the sportscasters and camera operators with their own folks - again, dressed in their team colors - and ensure that all coverage of the game would be only of their successes and record none of their rampant cheating, (4) use the Player's Association union to actually take a few of the other team's players onto their own side, or at least force those players to allow their ball-carriers to pass unmolested (consider today's RINOs - Republicans In Name Only), (5) muzzle the other team's coaches, and (6) get the National Football League rules committee to do away temporarily with the cumbersome down-and-distance rules and declare that their team was allowed to keep the ball indefinitely - regardless of the outcome of any play - until they are allowed to score a touchdown and a two-point conversion - at which point the clock would be forced to run out, and the game declared a victory for the team driving to the left.
Fun game, huh?
Sure. Super.
For the health of the nation, and indeed for the hope that man can, in at least one nation, rule himself... take personal responsibility to join the defense. You have a few hours to work every day - use them to build wealth and prosperity for yourself, your family, and your neighbors. You have a vote - use it to keep the game fair, and to stop the next end-run around the Constitution. And you have a brain - use it to get smart about what's really going on in the global game of politics and economics.
One final note: Obamacare was a Hail Mary touchdown pass for the statists, about a year ago. But one honest referee, (let's call him "T. Party") threw the flag in November and cited the progressives for flagrant interference with the rule of law. That play is under review as we speak... and if it doesn't get called back, well, turn out the lights.
Game over.