Dear Liberals: Your Ideas Don't Work
get you gone!
I know, dear liberals, that it has been a hard week for you, what with the Trump Supreme Court — fronted by a corrupt Uncle Tom — daring to tell the priests and abbots of our sacred universities how to eat their breakfast. The Noive! And then they had the nerve to dial back Biden’s ridiculous college loan forgiveness plan.
Really, I know you musts feel, there is no substitute for packing the Court and sending Trump to jail for the rest of his life. Not to mention tackle the domestic terrorism threatening our nation’s school boards.
But I want to plead with you, dear liberal friends, to cool your jets. Because the more you try to solve the world’s problems with politics the worse it will get.
At the big picture level there is this recent Michael Barone piece about the failed “Nineties Projection” of a glorious future: Barone, I think we can agree, is not exactly a wild-eyed armed insurrectionist. Surveying the world since the Nineties he observes:
In Russia, nothing has changed. The Putin regime is “in the tradition of Josef Stalin, Catherine the Great and Ivan the Terrible.”
In China we have President for Life Xi Jinping, in the “tradition of Mao Zedong and the long-ruling (1735-1796) Qianlong Emperor.”
In Latin America we used to have military dictators and one-party Mexico. Now we lave left-wing governments and going-one-party Mexico.
In the US 20 years ago we saw a healthy economy and “sharply reducing violent crime and welfare dependency.” Then we had the mortgage-fueled Crash of 2008 and now “upsurges in violent crime that followed the Black Lives Matter movements in 2014 and, much more, in 2020.”
In other words, all the educated-class optimism that “liberal democracy” was the wave of the future and that we had everything under control is proving wrong.
Let’s face it: when you guys waffle about “liberal democracy” you mean government of the educated elite and by the educated elite, because you are special. And it’s become pretty obvious over the last couple of decades that government these days is also for the educated elite and their supporters. The peasants of the ordinary middle class need not apply. Because they are deplorable.
Thus Thomas Sowelĺ’s political analysis in The Vision of the Anointed of an America of the Anointed, the Benighted, and the Mascots is exactly right. Benighted, deplorables, bitter-clingers: what’s the difference?
But I think things are worse than Barone’s analysis. I think we are facing the total failure of the grand educated-class vision that grew up in the 19th century, that is best understood in the vision of the Progressive Movement that came to power with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The idea was that America would be governed according to scientific principles by educated, knowledgeable people in administrative agencies a world away from the “spoils system” of mid-to-late 19th century America.
Do you not see, dear liberal friends, that the current regime is a spoils system that makes the 19th century corruption look like a walk in the park?
Item: when a Democrat running for president tells the voters that Republicans will take away their Social Security and Medicare, he is telling seniors that if they don’t vote for Democrats they will lose the spoils they so richly deserve.
Item: when President Biden promises to forgive student loans, he is nakedly operating a spoils system for college graduates.
Item: when Democrats cry to the heavens about the Supreme Court ending Affirmative Action they are complaining that their spoils system for blacks is under threat.
Item: when Michelle Rhee became Chancellor of the DC schools system she found that DC residents weren’t interested in a good education for their kids. They experienced the school system as a jobs program for themselves.
And so on. Do you not see, dear liberal friends, that your regime is nothing more than a spoils system for Thomas Sowell’s “Anointed” and for their “Mascots.”
Do you not see, dear liberal friends that any political system must end up that way? Because:
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the Law.
That remark is attributed to Peruvian president Óscar Benavides, or maybe not. But if you do not understand, dear liberal friends, in a year in which President Biden offered $400 billion in student loan relief to the educated class and sicced the Merrick Garland DOJ on Donald Trump for waving classified documents around, that politics is just about rewarding your friends and knifing your enemies, then you are not as educated and evolved as you think, dear liberal friends.
But my argument goes beyond the sordid details of politics, every politics, that it is always about gifting your friends and knifing your enemies. You may have a glorious vision that you are going to bend the arc of history towards justice with your government programs, but I am here to tell you that, eventually, it all comes down to a spoils system that gifts ruling-class supporters and shafts ruling-class enemies.
And there is another factor. It is Chantrill’s Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. I mean by that to say that when you decide, hey here’s a program that doesn’t work, you dare not zero it out because its supporters will strongly object. The obvious case is Social Security that is going to run out of money in a decade or so. So, it turns out that the scientific, knowledgeable people in the administrative agencies didn’t do their math right and now find that, golly, the revenue for Social Security isn’t as high as they thought, and wow, people are living longer than they thought 20 years ago, they dare not reduce the Social Security payments to account for their error. Because Social Security is not an insurance program. It is a program that makes payments to retired voters. And that is all.
But even Chantrill’s Law is missing the point. The point is that government cannot organize society. Back in the 19th century, government decided to help the workers, giving them the right to strike and to force employers to give them benefits. A century later, the workers were overpaid and their employers were no longer the boldly expanding industrialists of old. So the companies decayed and the workers got screwed. Then there was the liberation of women, so they could enter the public square and earn money and have careers just like men, and be “independent women.” Only now women are miserable, because they are here on this earth to bear and raise children, not be corporate and education DEI administrators, or have to put up with men in the women’s bathroom. Then there were blacks, brought from Africa as slaves and then discriminated against after their release from slavery. But welfare and quotas have continued their subservience, and blacks today are socially and culturally worse off and their children are cursed by fatherlessness. Who knew that fathers were so important? Now we have the LGBT movement that is leading young people into the cultural wilderness. Most people should get married and have children, and society should tell them just that.
Like I say, dear liberal friends: you have Made Things Worse. It is time for you to go, and let others take your place.
For the longer you stay, the worse your rule will get, and the more that people will suffer from your spoils system.
And you don’t want people to suffer, surely…