"Shut up," the 'Progressives' Explained

The apocryphal Sinclair Lewis quote has been proven wrong:

Fascism has arrived in America, and it isn't wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It is a false-flag operation wrapped in Progressive PC Speech Codes of "Tolerance" and "Diversity" and carrying a Rainbow flag, the sword of islam and the Democrat party logo.

In saying this, I do not indict all muslims, all gay people, or all Democrats. Instead, I indict the small-in-number, large-in-mouth leftwing fasci (predominately guilty white latte leftists) in this country who brilliantly manipulate symbols and emotion to mau-mau ordinary Americans into sitting down and shutting up.  Normal people detest how this agenda-driven outrage kabuki has trashed our public discourse, but the leftwing cray cray's march on.

The regressive Progs are out in the open now with their hostility to our God-given liberties. They've abandoned reasoned argument and now are all about harnessing government's coercive power to tell you to sit down and shut up.  When that doesn't work, community organizers and professional indignation coordinators take to twitter and other social media to crowd-source outraged mobs.

I quote copiously from Mark Steyn, because he has written an especially brilliant article on the subject.

Academic Earplugs

A ditzy dingbat from Swarthmore really did say this:

‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’

Mark Steyn's response:

Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor.

He decries Britain's aging performing arts community's lust for shutting people up, when they themselves stormed the censor's barricades back in the 60's:

This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius: new blasphemy laws for progressive pieties. [...] But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it’s hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it’s easier to close it down?

Steyn explains the importance of free speech in a democratic society:

Nick Lowles defined the ‘No Platform’ philosophy as ‘the position where we refuse to allow fascists an opportunity to act like normal political parties’. But free speech is essential to a free society because, when you deny people ‘an opportunity to act like normal political parties’, there’s nothing left for them to do but punch your lights out. Free speech, wrote the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson last week, ‘buttresses the political system’s legitimacy. It helps losers, in the struggle for public opinion and electoral success, to accept their fates. It helps keep them loyal to the system, even though it has disappointed them. They will accept the outcomes, because they believe they’ve had a fair opportunity to express and advance their views. There’s always the next election. Free speech underpins our larger concept of freedom.’

"The (Fill in the Blank) is Settled!" 

Young Erin Ching at Swarthmore College has grasped the essential idea: it is not merely that, as the Big Climate enforcers say, ‘the science is settled’, but so is everything else, from abortion to gay marriage.

So what’s to talk about?

Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.

"Progressives:"  Bringing Middle East-Style Obscurantism to the West!

As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.

As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die.

Illiberal Regressives

There in nothing more intolerant in this country than today's mis-named, self-proclaimed 'liberals.' At least some of them have dropped 'liberal' and taken up the old school authoritarian monicker of progressive, but even that is a lie. They are dragging society backwards to the bad old days when dissent was punished by the state or mob violence.

Mark Steyn - The Slow Death of Free Speech

See also:
Progressives are wrong about the Essence of the Constitution
Liberals Attack Female Fighting Misogyny

Liberal Talking Points, and Other Amusements

Privatization can save money, but not how progressives do it...

Last week, the Marxist Merganser quacked:

If you were up on what Landesinspekteur Bloomberg is really up to you'd be debating Matt Taibbi's article on his thought's about privatizing the city's parking meters and how well that worked in Chicago.

This is a prime example of the intellectual flabbiness of the left. Ordinarily smart people like Ducky read something, partially digest it, and run off screaming whatever half-baked propaganda lesson they think they got from it. 

I went to Tabbi the Hissing Cat’s article expecting an anti-libertarian, anti-privatization diatribe. Instead, I read a thoughtful piece on how short-sighted and desperate progressive governments can be.

A New York parking meter deal, like the Chicago deal, would be a perfect example of the deeply cynical short-term thinking of many American politicians these days. These deals involve a sitting executive selling off a valuable piece of city property at a steep discount to private financial interests (often, to friends or campaign contributors), in order to solve a current cash flow problem that, surprise, surprise, will still be there the year after you finish spending the proceeds of your sale.

In Chicago’s case, Mayor Richard Daley sold 75 years of meter revenue – worth an estimated $5 billion – for $1.2 billion. So he gets 20 cents on the dollar for the city’s parking meters in 2008, and then in 2009 the city still has a budget problem that’s now worse, because there’s no parking meter revenue anymore, ever.

[...] In some Chicago neighborhoods, the meter rates went from .25 cents an hour to $1 an hour in the first year of the deal, and then to $1.20 after that. (Taibbi – Rolling Stone)

When cornered, the rats will eat their own children. We should learn a few lessons from that. First, do not put progressives in charge of anything larger than their own lives or their own voluntary collectives. The larger lesson we should learn is to never take at face value anything a lefty says.

The Progressive State is Eating Itself

See, the economic object of something like a parking meter, a gas tax, or a fishing license, is to collect money for an activity from the groups of people that do those activities, like parking, driving on our roads or fishing in government lakes and streams. It makes sense. But the progressive government model has eaten the seed corn, the inheritance is gone, and they’ve got to hock the family china and silver, as well as sell off some of the family businesses, just to maintain their outrageously generous lifestyle.

Privatization makes sense for, say, trash collection, reducing the payroll and getting the city out of the business of maintaining a fleet of trucks. The same could apply to outsourcing parking meter operations to increase efficiency and save taxpayers money. But that’s not why they did it in Chicago, and it’s not why New York is doing it. 

They’re doing it because they are junkies who need cash. Now.  Taibbi is right. They are foolishly forgoing a future revenue stream for cash today, and they are getting pennies on the dollar. This is a sign of desperation; the drunk selling the family car so he can buy more hooch. This is where pie-in-the-sky progressivism ends up. They always end up running out of other people’s money.

Progressives in Retreat

View From the Ridge

The Hopium cloud has dissipated. Only the foul stench of overripe progressivism hangs in the air. Americans having caught pungent nosefuls and are recoiling in horror

Conservatives are now the single largest ideological group in America, according to Gallup.

The Wisconsin Democrats scampering across the state line to Illinois in a futile attempt to dodge reality turned out to be an apt metaphor of the state of American Progressivism. It is in collapse.  On the run.  Reviled, discredited, angry and sullen...

I get the impression that progressives really do believe we should all just fall in line and let the philosopher kings implement Plato's Republic.  I think ordinary Americans sense it as well, and they are repelled. I know I am.

Al Gore as Metaphor:  A Global Collapse

I think progressivism may be facing a global rejection as well. Oh, it will always be around, and could even achieve a new ascendancy thanks to unrepentant global financial predators, but for now it is facing a shameful repudiation, encapsulated nicely in the the discredited "Climate Change/Global Warming" movement.

Gore has the Midas touch in reverse; objects of great value (Nobel prizes, Oscars) turn dull and leaden at his touch. (Walter Russell Mead)

Remember just a few short years ago, before the scandals and the lies, when serious people took the Global Elmer Gantry and his International Climate Change Road Show seriously...

Don't worry children! Reverend Al Gore of the International Church of Gaia will release his chakras! He will sell you carbon credit indulgences so that you may atone for your enviro sins. So throw your trillions and your economies into the volcano so that the earth's temperature will be juuuust riiiight!

The third world kleptocrats volunteering their oppressed masses to play the role of Lazarus in this opera of the absurd, begging for scraps at the table of the rich nations, in order to shame them out of their billions, was a nice filigree.

Here's a hint. Anyone or any organization employing the word "global" or "world" in a serious manner should be avoided. Categorically so when spinning fairy tales about the world being tooooo hot....

Especially when just 20 years ago the cognoscenti told us it was tooooooo cold!

Professor Walter Russell Mead sums up Gore's (and progressivism's) credibility problem:

But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry.

A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents. (The Failure of Al Gore)

Gore's Global theater of high drama has descended into farce, an emblem of the High Church of Progressivism, and Al Gore is its apotheosis.  

Walter Russell Mead - The Death of Global Warming

Walter Russell Mead - The Failure of Al Gore: Part 1

Walter Russell Mead - The Failure of Al Gore Part Deux

We Have a Long Way to Go

Vlad The Impaler Putin, leader of a country where thousands of alcoholics still die each year from drinking antifreeze, had the gall to call America a parasite.

President Obama responded by apologizing, and then he answered an economic question: 

"We've still got a long way to go before we hit bottom. I ain't done changin' it yet. A powerful country like the United States, you can't flush it down the toilet overnight. It takes time... Be patient!"


Hold the Champagne

I know, I was kicking up my heels yesterday at our glorious small government victory (small though it was), but there’s a long road ahead. We have just begun to fight, and the specter of hubristic overreach stalks conservative plans.

GOP lawmakers need to proceed with caution.  The press is the maidservant of Obama, and they know how to churn out the propaganda.  WaPo writer Ruth Marcus would have thrived in Stalin's Soviet Union.  See how she artfully employs the republicans as carjacker trope:

One side wanted the car, had a gun and wasn’t afraid — certainly not afraid enough — to use it. The other had a child in the back seat. (WaPo - Ruth Marcus)

That's what we're up against, and it's powerful stuff.  There really are softheaded people in this country susceptible to such emotional fripperies

Cut too much too fast, and the backlash will be horrific, and rightly so. Even before this deep recession, we had millions of souls dependent on government assistance, more so now. Single mothers struggling to feed their kids, people on medicaid going through cancer treatment, older workers broke and on the cusp of mandatory retirement… Our government has made promises to all of them.  We cannot suddenly yank the rug out from under them, or even appear to.

Also, how can you morally justify slashing the federal workforce when the anemic economy holds no employment alternatives for those thrown out of work?

Whoever would destroy the progressive state and remake it for the 21st century must first present a clearly-defined plan and be able to explain it well.  It will need to be phased in over time.  People have invested money based upon the creaky statist model, and slashing too deep too quickly creates uncertainty that inevitably leads to a bad business climate, which means more unemployment.

It’s like a spider web, all sticky and interconnected. You can’t just rip out one piece without endangering the entire fabric.   George Will explains...

During various liberal ascendancies, the federal spider has woven a web of dependencies. The political purpose has been to produce growing constituencies of voters disposed to vote Democratic. This disposition, a.k.a. the entitlement mentality, is triggered by making the constituencies constantly apprehensive about the security of their status as wards of government. (George Will – WaPo)

The truth is, we are a long way from a libertarian nation

The nanny state has destroyed self-sufficiency and initiative. What would you cut and how would you do it without hurting the truly vulnerable? Progressive statists will be asking this question, and rightly so. We had better have viable answers.

Of Course Government Can Put a Gun to Your Head and Force You to Buy Stuff!

Liberal Arguments for the individual mandate are the greatest argument against it.

Big Government statists in the press are firing back at the charge that the Obamacare individual mandate is unconstitutional.  They take aim specifically at the charge that making everyone buy insurance is an abuse of the commerce clause.  Here's a typical line of attack:

Of course this distinction proves essentially meaningless once you realize that not buying health insurance now means paying out of pocket later. Combined with the fact that states generally require hospitals to treat the uninsured in the case of emergency, to say that the uninsured are making a "free choice" is highly misleading. It's government regulation that makes these choices possible in the first place. (Prospect)

See how this works? Government causes a problem by “requiring hospitals to treat the uninsured,” creating an opening for further regulation, leading us finally to the individual mandate.

To correctly restate the author’s last sentence...

It’s government regulation that makes these problems possible in the first place.

Back in the old days, people without money or insurance were treated, but they signed a contract with the hospital and paid the bill off in monthly installments.

As Thomas Sowell points out, the cries of “Do something!” have started more government-sponsored calamities…

The verbal gymnastics that statists employ to support the federal government forcing you to purchase insurance is amazing:

Widespread problems with access to health care and skyrocketing costs are certainly big enough to plausibly require a federal solution. . (Prospect)

No, the health care “problem” does not “require” a federal solution. That is an unfounded assertion.

Generally, the problem being addressed plausibly requires a federal solution, and the proposed regulation -- even if it does not itself regulate interstate commerce -- is part of a larger regulatory scheme. (Prospect)

This is absurd pedantry. The author is saying that the individual mandate, standing on its own, would be unconstitutional. But because it is “part of a larger regulatory scheme,” it’s OK. The dangling tendentia is reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s thinking:

Homer: "No! Homer Simpson never lies twice on the same form. He never has and he never will."
Marge: "You lied dozens of times on our mortgage application."
Homer: "Yes, but they were all part of a single ball of lies."

Mr. Lemieux’s argument hinges on whether a specific government action is part of a larger “regulatory scheme.” He helpfully cites cases where such an action that was not part of a larger scheme was struck down by the supreme court as not authorized under the commerce clause, thereby drawing his ominous distinction between constitutional and unconstitutional.

“The fact that the mandate is an essential part of a federal regulatory scheme just underscores why the federal government has not exceeded its authority under existing law.”

The Road to Statism

Obamacare’s progressive defenders concede that stand-alone laws that claw freedom from the individual are unconstitutional. However, this is a false concession. They proclaim that government does have such a right if done under the umbrella of a larger regulatory scheme.

The logical result? Create a tentacular, hydra-headed bureaucratic monster, call it a regulatory scheme, and now the federal government can do whatever it wants.

I recommend you go read the entire article. It is a frightening peek into the mind of a progressive statist.

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_individual_mandate_not_a_slippery_slope#